My approach to learning VBA last year was pretty much a combination of persistence and experimentation. I'd come up with some cool thing that I wanted to do, have an initial go at coding it, run it and find that it had an error, read some more, try again and iterate until eventually I got it to work. In the process I picked up some of the subtleties of the language. And I was totally focussed while doing it as well as totally confident that I would find a solution
Basically, I saw the thing I was learning (VBA) as a means to a desired purpose (the latest cool thing I wanted to do) and because I kept this ultimate goal in mind, I was able to persist through repeated trials and errors and relearning until the goal was achieved, building my expertise in the process.
Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Michelle about her learning process. Michelle has a powerful learning orientation and has taught herself aspects of VBA as well as how to do complex mail merges with conditional fields in Word. She agreed that for her the motivation for learning these things was that she had very specific objectives that she wanted to achieve and as a result she was able to persist despite the difficulties. And we both agreed that without a reason to learn and something specific to achieve, learning can be difficult, it can be hard to stay motivated or to see the point of learning at all.
The lesson to learn from this is that for anything you want to learn, you need to be clear about why you want to learn it and to see how each step you take is bringing you closer to that goal. Unmotivated learning is just a recipe for boredom and for struggle with yourself rather than struggling with whatever difficulties inhere in what you are trying to learn.
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