Chapter 38 Exercises: What to Learn Next

Exercise 1: The Current Portfolio Audit

Time required: 30 minutes Materials: Paper or journal; honest self-assessment

Map your current learning portfolio using the three-category framework from this chapter.

Step 1: List everything you're actively learning right now, or have been learning in the past three months. Include formal courses, books, podcasts, practice, on-the-job learning — everything.

Step 2: Categorize each item: - Core (directly serves your primary career goals and current obligations) - Adjacent (near your core — builds on it, extends it, or connects to it) - Exploratory (genuinely different — cognitive diversity, curiosity-driven, no immediate application)

Step 3: Estimate what percentage of your actual learning time goes to each category.

Step 4: Compare your actual allocation to the 60-70% / 20-30% / 10-15% framework. What's the gap?

Reflection: Most people discover they've been almost entirely in Core mode — exploitation without any exploration. Or, conversely, they've been bouncing between exploratory interests without building depth. What does your audit reveal?

There's no correct answer here — the framework is a tool for awareness, not a prescription. But if you've had zero exploratory learning in the past year, or if everything you've tried has been exploratory with no depth anywhere, the audit has told you something worth acting on.

Exercise 2: The One-Year Specific Goal

Time required: 45 minutes Materials: Journal; one hour of research time if needed

This is the most important exercise in the chapter. Write a one-year learning goal that meets all the following requirements:

Specificity test: Can you evaluate success by observing a specific behavior or performance — not by asking "do I feel like I've learned this"?

Observable test: Could another person confirm you've reached this goal by watching you do something, reading something you've written, or hearing you explain something?

Achievable test: Given your current knowledge and available time, is this goal plausible in 12 months with consistent effort? Not easy — plausible.

Examples of goals that pass the test: - "I will be able to build, train, and evaluate a classification model in Python, from raw data through deployed predictions, without looking up the core steps." - "I will be able to hold a 10-minute conversation with a native Japanese speaker about daily life, with frequent errors but full comprehension by both parties." - "I will be able to analyze a company's financial statements and identify the three most significant indicators of financial health or risk, explaining my reasoning to a non-financial colleague."

Examples of goals that fail the test: - "I will become a better data scientist." (Not specific or observable) - "I will learn Python." (What does 'learn' mean? What counts as done?) - "I will have a deeper understanding of finance." (Deeper than what? How would you know?)

Write your goal. Then test it against all three criteria. Revise until it passes all three.

Exercise 3: The Four-Phase Breakdown

Time required: 30 minutes Materials: Your one-year goal from Exercise 2

Break your one-year goal into four three-month phases. Each phase must have a specific milestone — a state you can evaluate as achieved or not achieved.

For each phase, identify: 1. The milestone (what does "done with this phase" look like?) 2. The primary resource (what book, course, or practice structure will you use?) 3. One potential obstacle (what is most likely to slow you down or stop you?) 4. Your response to that obstacle (if [obstacle] happens, I will [response])

The last point is the implementation intention from Chapter 37. Research on goal-setting shows that specifically anticipating obstacles and pre-planning your response dramatically increases follow-through.

When you're done, you should have a document with: - A specific 12-month goal - Four milestones at months 3, 6, 9, and 12 - Four primary resources - Four obstacle/response pairs

This is your roadmap. It will change — plans always change — but it gives you something to navigate from.

Exercise 4: The First Action

Time required: 5 minutes (plus whatever time the action takes) Materials: Your roadmap from Exercise 3

Identify one action you can take today — not this week, today — that begins your roadmap.

The action should be completable in under 30 minutes. Some examples: - Download an app - Order a book from the library - Complete the first lesson of a course - Sign up for an account on a learning platform - Book the first session with a tutor - Write the first 15 Anki cards for vocabulary in the new domain

The purpose of this exercise is to close the gap between intention and action. Every day between "I have a plan" and "I have started" increases the probability that the plan never happens. Starting today — even if the action is small — is not symbolic. It creates the momentum that makes tomorrow's action more likely.

Write down your first action. Then do it.

Exercise 5: The Learning Resource Evaluation

Time required: 20 minutes per resource evaluated Materials: Two or three learning resources you're considering using

Take any learning resource you're currently using or considering — a course, a book, a practice system — and evaluate it against the quality checklist from this chapter.

For each resource, answer:

Retrieval is built in: Does this resource require you to produce output — practice problems, exercises, self-tests — or is it primarily consumption-oriented?

Spaced review is supported: Is this resource designed to be returned to, or is it a linear completion experience?

Feedback mechanisms exist: How will you know whether your understanding is correct? Answer keys? Worked examples? Community feedback? Automated grading?

Evidence of quality: Does this resource draw on credible sources? Can you trace its claims to reputable evidence?

No red flags: Does this resource avoid the traps of pure consumption, no spaced review, entertainment-first framing, or promises of effortless learning?

Based on this evaluation: is this a high-quality resource for your specific goal? If not, what's the best alternative?

This exercise is particularly useful if you find yourself drawn to resources that feel good — engaging, entertaining, easy — but don't produce the results the quality checklist would predict.

Exercise 6: The Explore/Exploit Self-Interview

Time required: 20 minutes Materials: Journal; honest reflection

Answer the following questions in writing:

  1. What is your current primary area of deep expertise — the domain where you have the most accumulated knowledge and skill?

  2. How long have you been building depth in that domain? Are you still growing there, or are you in maintenance mode?

  3. When did you last seriously explore a domain outside your current expertise? What was it? What came of it?

  4. Are there any unexpected connections you've noticed between your exploratory interests and your core domain? (Examples: a history-reading software engineer who finds organizational patterns in historical events; a statistics-focused analyst who finds philosophy of probability directly relevant to daily work)

  5. If you were to add 10% exploratory learning time to your current learning portfolio, what would you explore? What has been calling to you that you've been too busy to seriously pursue?

The purpose of this exercise is not to prescribe exploration — it's to surface what you're already curious about and give yourself permission to pursue it as part of a learning portfolio, not just as a guilty pleasure.

Exercise 7: The DataField.Dev Path Mapper

Time required: 30 minutes Materials: Your one-year goal from Exercise 2; familiarity with the DataField.Dev catalog

If your learning goal involves data, programming, databases, or statistics, map your goal to the relevant books in the DataField.Dev catalog.

Answer the following:

  1. Which books in the catalog are most directly relevant to your goal? (You may not need all of them — identify the ones specifically relevant to where you're headed.)

  2. What order do they need to be read in? (Some have logical prerequisites; identify which concepts you need before which others.)

  3. What specific techniques from How to Learn Anything will you apply to each book? (Not a generic answer — be specific. For a statistics book: Feynman technique for conceptual understanding + Anki for vocabulary + practice problems done before looking at solutions. For a programming book: write code from scratch before checking worked examples + build a real project alongside the course.)

  4. What is the realistic timeline? Given your available learning time and the scope of each book, when do you expect to complete each one?

This exercise produces an integrated learning plan — not just "I will read these books" but "I will read these books in this order, using these specific techniques, in this timeline."

Exercise 8: The Letter to Your Next-Year Self

Time required: 30 minutes Materials: Paper or document

Write a letter to yourself, to be opened one year from today. Include:

Where you are now: What you know, what you don't know, what you're uncertain about, what you hope for.

The specific commitments you're making: The goal. The roadmap. The first action. The allocation of learning time. The resources you've chosen.

What you're most worried about: The specific obstacles most likely to derail you. The excuses you're most likely to make. The places where past you has given up before.

A message to your future self about those worries: If you're reading this and [specific worry] happened, here's what past-you wants you to know.

What success looks like: Specifically. Not just the goal achieved, but how you want to feel about your learning, your growth, your capabilities, at the end of this year.

Seal the letter. Put a reminder in your calendar for one year from today. When you open it, read it as an honest accounting of a commitment you made — and evaluate how you did, with as much compassion and honesty as you can manage.

Reflection: The Full Circle

This is the last exercise in the book. It asks one question:

What, specifically, are you going to learn next?

Not "what are your aspirations" or "what would you like to know someday" — but what, specifically, given everything you've learned about how learning actually works, are you going to do differently starting today?

Write it down. Not a long answer — a short, specific answer.

The test is: someone reading what you've written could tell you, one year from now, whether you did it.

That's the whole book, condensed into one question. Answer it, and act on the answer.