Practice vs Theory: When Do We Learn and When Do We Understand?

This post is a text version of the video: “Practice vs Theory: When Do We Learn and When Do We Understand?” that I published on my YouTube channel (in Portuguese).

Worth watching! 😊

Starting with the differences

When do we understand?

Understanding lives in the realm of ideas and theories.

It happens on an intellectual, rational level. It’s understanding the mechanism, the logic or the reason why things exist or work.

When I publish content, for example, I don’t expect people to learn, I expect people to understand the ideas being presented. And I also hope that this content encourages them to dive deeper into the topics on their own, so that then they can learn.

When do we learn?

Image credit: Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

That’s because learning lives in the realm of experience and practice.

It necessarily involves experimentation and repetition. It’s practicing and repeating a given action many times so our brain records that information and so we can use that learning to connect everything we study with problems or situations that happen in our lives.

You can even learn the process of learning itself.

The more things we learn and the more times we go through the process of learning new skills, the more we improve and optimize the way we study and learn.

You could say we understand theory, but we only truly learn through practice.

Example: Soccer

For example, you can spend a lot of time studying all the theory of a sport like soccer.

You can read thousands of texts, watch talks about the latest soccer trends and even buy some course like:

“Learn soccer in just 7 days and play for the best clubs in the world”

But you still won’t learn. The most you’ll get is understanding the mechanism and the logic of how a soccer match works.

You’ll only learn about soccer in two ways: playing or watching as many games as you can.

That way everything you had understood in theory will make sense in practice, like the rules, tactics and techniques used during the games.

After playing many times or watching thousands of matches, you’ll actually learn and not just understand, and then the whole mechanism around soccer will feel natural to you.

Quer aprender programação em apenas 7 dias, ser disputado pelas melhores empresas e ganhar muito dinheiro rapidamente?

Então não caia nesses anúncios. Só vai ganhar dinheiro rápido quem tá vendendo isso.

Programar exige muita prática e estudo, não tem atalhos ou fórmula mágica.

Another example: My videos

As we move forward in our careers, some non-technical skills like communication become more and more important.

Right now I work as a Tech Lead at Juntos Somos Mais and it’s important that I can communicate with the people on the team as clearly as possible.

I don’t think I communicate badly, but I see plenty of room for improvement. So I could, for example, spend a good amount of time reading several books and looking up information on the Internet about how to communicate better. That would make me understand communication theories, but in practice it wouldn’t help me much.

So what I did was create a YouTube channel, where I have to be as clear as possible in my communication or the people watching the videos simply won’t understand.

As a bonus, I also get interesting feedback from the people who follow the channel, which helps me improve video after video and naturally shows up in my day to day.

This way I can bring this practical learning into my personal and professional life.

Conteúdo em vídeo é um desafio ENORME, não me sinto confortável falando com uma câmera, nem entendo de gravação e edição.

Não importa o tempo de xp, sempre vamos ser iniciantes ou estar inseguros com alguma coisa.

Aceitar isso é o melhor jeito de lidar com essas inseguranças.

One more example: New technologies

I use this same strategy when I want to learn new technologies.

For example, I spent some time studying React frameworks like NextJS and Gatsby, so I was able to understand how these technologies worked and what kind of problems they solved, but I hadn’t really learned how to work with them yet.

So the solution to actually learn was to rebuild my website using Gatsby (and you can read about how that experience went in this article (in Portuguese)).

I also took the chance to learn other technologies I was studying and already understood how they worked, like Styled Components and GraphQL.

That’s why I think it’s very important to look for different ways to practice, and that was my goal when I compiled open company challenges in Front-end Challenges.

And it’s also why I keep hammering on creating personal projects to practice the things you’re studying.

Tô trabalhando no meu site/blog, e mano, preciso repetir uma coisa que sempre falo:

- O melhor jeito de estudar é criando projetos pessoais

Mesmo me desafiando com várias tecnologias novas, tem sido extremamente produtivo e prazeroso.

Praticar é a melhor forma de aprender 😁

Alternating between understanding and learning

Both understanding something new and learning new skills take time, but the time needed to learn something is significantly greater, since, as I said before, learning is only possible with lots of repetition and lots of practice.

Of course I’d like to learn as many things as possible, but unfortunately (or fortunately) our time is finite and limited (in Portuguese).

So a strategy I usually adopt is alternating between understanding and learning.

I try to understand things superficially, keeping as many of them as possible on my radar. I study them, understand how they work and in which situations they could be used.

As new needs come up in my day to day, I check whether any of those things I left on the radar could help me solve these new problems.

Não existe fórmula mágica.

O único jeito de desenvolver novas habilidades, seja programação, seja cozinhar, seja qualquer outra coisa que te interesse, é praticando.

Apenas praticando muito, aprendendo com erros e acertos, é possível ganhar experiência e melhorar cada vez mais.

This way I invest my time only in learning the things that really prove to be most important day to day. On the other hand, I always stay up to date, since I follow the news superficially and try to understand how as many things as possible work.

Making this association of when it’s worth using the latest market novelties in your day to day is only possible when we spend time understanding different subjects that aren’t part of our repertoire yet.

This applies both to things like new languages or frameworks and to non-technical things:

The bigger our repertoire, the more connections we’ll be able to make

If we stay stuck on the same old topics and solutions, we’ll be limited in the possibilities and the number of solutions we can come up with to solve the challenges that show up.

In other words, we stagnate (and get worse).

Não existe estagnação no mundo de desenvolvimento.

Isso porque quando a gente para de estudar e melhorar nossas habilidades técnicas e não técnicas, nós não ficamos estagnados.

- Nós pioramos

The more subjects we’re interested in and try to understand, the broader our range of knowledge will be and the more possibilities we’ll have to go deeper and learn things that can be important for our personal and professional growth 🚀

Cover photo credits: Photo by Darius Soodmand on Unsplash