How to learn stuff you have no business learning
Based on Nicole van der Hoeven's video on YouTube. If you like this content, support the original creators by watching, liking and subscribing to their content.
Treat learning as a motivation problem first; follow interests because joy sustains effort better than productivity hacks.
Briefing
Learning doesn’t hinge on clever study systems or productivity hacks so much as on motivation—and motivation grows when curiosity is treated like a lifestyle rather than a chore. The core prescription is to follow what genuinely interests you, even if it looks “weird” or impractical at the time, because joy and personal investment keep the learning engine running. That approach also changes how people measure progress: it’s okay to stop learning something and feel no shame when fluency fades, since the point isn’t to retain everything forever. Examples include picking up ASL despite having no direct connections to the deaf community, and later using it to communicate with people worldwide; and learning Mandarin to a usable level before letting it recede without treating that as failure.
Motivation also improves when learning is engineered for serendipity—especially by keeping related ideas close enough to collide. Using Obsidian as a personal knowledge workspace, the creator relies on plugins such as ExcaliDraw, ExcaliBrain, and Dataview to pull ideas from different parts of life into one place. Fewer separate “vaults” increases the chance that unrelated domains intersect. One insight came from reading a PKM community tweet and connecting it to software work: coding and writing are converging through markdown and markup languages, pushing writers to learn a bit of code while code increasingly adopts more human-readable syntax. Another crossover emerged from performance engineering habits that resemble strategies for personal and team productivity, with backlinks prompting comparisons between application performance, human work, and even play.
A third lever is to make learning fun by “listening for passion.” When encountering someone deeply committed to a field outside one’s own interests, that enthusiasm can reframe familiar concepts. A conversation with Andy Polaine—a designer and dungeon master—led to reading “The Rules We Break,” importing highlights into Obsidian via Readwise, and then translating design ideas into the creator’s own interests. That chain of notes and connections culminated in linking play to exploratory testing: breaking rules to experiment with software quality.
The motivation strategy flips in a second direction: make learning stressful, but in a controlled way. Deadlines work best when they’re public or at least committed to in front of others. Instead of quietly adding chaos engineering to a future list, the creator applied to speak at a conference three months ahead, packaging the pitch as an honest “new chaos engineer” perspective. The pressure forced a coherent timeline, documentation, and deeper learning. A similar tactic followed after taking Zsolt Viczian’s “Visual Thinking” workshop: when the book “Emergence” wasn’t finished in time, the creator pre-committed to a conference talk titled “Emergent Load Testing,” turning uncertainty into a schedule.
Finally, learning accelerates when it becomes public. Notes are published via Obsidian Publish (with an emphasis on messy, real learning rather than polished essays), highlights from Readwise are shared, and quick “today I learned” posts appear on Mastodon through PKM Social. Livestreams such as K6 Office Hours also function as learning-by-interview, and even YouTube is framed as “learning exhaust”—a visible trail of drafts, assets, and earlier attempts. Public commitments create accountability (like delivering “Obsidian for Everyone” after announcing it) and invite feedback that improves both the learning process and the resulting work. The overall message: treat learning as play, stress it with deadlines, and broadcast the process—because motivation follows what feels alive, connected, and real.
Cornell Notes
Motivation drives learning more than study hacks. Following genuine interests keeps people engaged, and it’s acceptable to let skills fade without shame—learning is not a permanent storage problem. Serendipity matters: consolidating ideas in one Obsidian vault increases “collisions” that produce new insights, such as links between coding and writing through markdown. Deadlines and public commitments add productive stress, turning vague curiosity into concrete outputs like conference talks. Publishing notes, highlights, and drafts (“learning exhaust”) creates accountability and feedback, making the learning process visible and more sustainable.
Why does the approach treat “fun” as a learning strategy rather than a reward after studying?
How does Obsidian increase the odds of useful “connections,” and what’s the practical mechanism?
What does “listening for passion” add to learning when the topic is outside one’s interests?
Why does adding stress via deadlines work better than keeping a “someday” learning list?
What does “learning in public” mean here, and how does it change outcomes?
What is “learning exhaust,” and how is it used to demonstrate progress?
Review Questions
- Which three motivation levers are presented as most important, and how does each one change behavior during learning?
- Give one example of a cross-domain “collision” and explain what note-structure choice made it more likely.
- How do deadlines and public commitments interact with authenticity in the examples of conference talks?
Key Points
- 1
Treat learning as a motivation problem first; follow interests because joy sustains effort better than productivity hacks.
- 2
Allow skills to fade without shame; learning isn’t required to produce permanent mastery of everything.
- 3
Increase serendipity by consolidating ideas in fewer Obsidian vaults and using backlinks to force cross-domain connections.
- 4
Use deadlines—especially public ones—to turn vague curiosity into a concrete timeline and deliverable.
- 5
Package uncertainty with authenticity when asking others to trust your work, such as presenting conference talks from a beginner perspective.
- 6
Publish learning artifacts (notes, highlights, drafts) to create accountability and invite feedback, not just polished final outputs.
- 7
Reframe productivity as learning and play; the byproduct is often better output and more enjoyment.