Tutorial hell

We all know it, we all fear it. When you want to learn something new, no matter what it is (painting, programming, photography, music, writing...), you obviously might have to suffer through some guides, tutorials, quick-starts and so on, to get to grips with the subject. Although, some people might have the unlucky predicament of getting stuck in the process of repeating whatever is in these tutorials, feeling as if they lack the knowledge to work on their craft with no external aide.

Why do people tend to fall into this trap? There might be several factors at play here - I will give you three reasons.

Reason one

The main reason, I'm guessing, is lack of confidence. When repeating what someone much more experienced that you is doing, the final result will look a lot more impressive than what you could do on your own, and this is good for ones confidence. But let's look at this from another perspective - how come children from a very young age learn how to speak, count, sing and paint? Are they learning at such a quick pace because they're scared of messing up? Of course not! Children mess up all the time! Children are essentially human sponges; unapologetically absorbing all of the information around them. And as adult humans, we need to do the same thing.

Reason two

The second reason could perhaps be that humans naturally want to "act smart" and find the quickest solution to any problem they have (this is also one of the reasons for the vibe-coding epidemic). Sure, the quickest solution will get you to an end-result sooner - but are you actually having fun? What's the point of painting, coding or learning a musical instrument if you're not engaging yourself in the act of play?

Reason three

Call me a fearmonger or whatever you want, but I have grown increasingly cynical these last two to five years, believing that the novelties of AI and social media have truly made the human race more braindead. But don't misunderstand - I do not believe that AI (large language models, to be more specific) is inherently bad; it is a powerful tool, and one would be stupid to not make use of AI as it's available for free, especially taking into account how it now seems like AI is moving from the cloud into self-hosting which is sounding very promising!

No, the tools and programs we use are not issue, but the human mind is. Using AI and other such tools is great for when you want to work fast, but it should not be used when your goal is to learn! Using AI to learn your craft is no better than using youtube tutorials.

RTFM = Read the fucking manual

Intro

Ok, so I've explained some causes for why people are not learning efficiently, now what? I want to share with you my strategy for learning literally anything! And it's called "not being a lazy potato".

Instead of giving you a generic approach to how I learn new things (since it might grow convoluted), I will instead provide you with some concrete examples. Try to see the patterns between all these examples - what am I consistently doing to reach my goal?

Example 1: Photography

I recently got back into photography. I did some research on Reddit, as well as various photography forums to find the camera best suited to me, which ended up being a Sony A6700. Once my new camera arrived in the mail, I watched a quick-start video on Youtube to get a grasp of the general functions. After that, I just started photographing right away, and every time I got stuck, I consulted the manual.

Example 2: Audio production

Around autumn of 2025 I bought a new audio interface - I had previously used the Audient iD44 a couple years prior and had really enjoyed it, and so I decided on buying the Audient iD48 since it was the next upgrade in the Audient line of products. Before the interface arrived in the mail, I read its manual front-to-back three times and installed the necessary firmware in advance, and by the time my new interface arrived I was already familiar with all its features and could start using it right away.

Example 3: Programming

This past month or so I decided that I was going to learn the Odin programming language. I installed the Odin compiler, as well as the ols LSP server, and got started by reading the docs page on Odin's website. Before starting to code, I read through the Getting Started section of the docs page from start to finish. Then I programmed a snake game in Odin, using Raylib, and each time I got stuck I either visited Odin's Overview page that listed everything related to Odin, or I checked out the Raylib source-code and documentation.

Summary

What could you gather from these three examples? I did not watch three hours of Youtube videos and I did not ask an AI for help.

My main issue with watching long Youtube tutorials to learn is that it's way too much information to absorb all at once, most of which you might not even make that much use of in your daily work. Instead, I am simply letting my naivety take a stranglehold of me - there is no "learning period", I just start attempting "serious work" right away, and only look for help whenever I get stuck. While this method can grow frustrating at times (as opposed to getting all your answers handed to you on a silver spoon through an AI prompt or a Youtube video), you are learning a lot more quickly since you're forcing yourself to tackle problems head-on (like a child learning to speak for the first time!).

The uncomfortable truth I wish to accentuate here is that most people don't have a knowledge problem - they have an action problem. You may spend months preparing to start instead of simply starting. No tutorial, AI model, or productivity system can do the learning for you. At some point, you have to close the video, close the chat window, open the manual, and get your hands dirty.