The Rule of Adjacency

In What Should I Learn to Get a Job, I said that early-career developers trying to answer the question “What should I learn next?” is answered best with “whatever is adjacent to what you already know.”

I want to expand on that a bit more.

In that article I mentioned that our brains try to attach new ideas onto old ideas, like a spider that adds to its web by extending the web it’s got, not by building separate pieces of a web and somehow trying to connect them together. It starts with a small web and continually build upon it.

Our brains do this partly because context is very important. We understand things in the context of something else.

If I say, “The Yankees won their final two games of the season and have momentum heading into the playoffs!”, the word momentum means something different than it does in the sentence “Each particle has its own momentum that can be calculated from its mass and velocity.”

Context matters.

Learning something new that’s adjacent to your current context is much, much easier than learning something for which you have little context.

Suppose you’re a JavaScript developer and you know how to define functions in JavaScript. That means you’ll have an easier time learning how to define functions in Python, because you already have some notion of what a function is.

If you’re a JavaScript developer who hasn’t learned anything about Python functions, and you decide to start learning Python by reading about Decorators or Coroutines, you’re probably going to have a harder time understanding.

The fastest way to learn is to expand your current knowledge - like the spider’s web - by finding the next adjacent thing to learn based on what you already know.