🔝 2 Learning Strategies You Should Know

Welcome to the fifteenth issue of the Software Mastery newsletter.

In this issue, I want to talk about bottom-up and top-down learning.

Bottom-up learning is what most people are familiar with. To learn X bottom-up, you learn all the prerequisites of X before learning X.

In contrast, top-down learning is the reverse. To learn X top-down, you start learning X, and as you encounter things you don’t know, you learn those things as needed.

For example, if you want to learn web development so that you can build websites, a bottom-up approach might look like this:

1. You read a book, take a course, or follow a roadmap on web fundamentals like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

2. You use what you’ve learned to build websites.

Alternatively, you could learn in a top-down fashion while building websites. A top-down approach might look like this:

1. You decide you want to build a website.

2. You search online for information on how to build websites and learn that websites are built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

3. You search online for how to create a navigation bar and find a code snippet.

4. You don’t understand the code snippet, so you search online to figure out how it works.

5. You repeat steps 3 and 4 until you’ve built a website.

From the example above, bottom-up learning might seem easier, but there are pros and cons to both learning strategies.

Bottom-up learning often leads to a smoother learning experience because you only learn X after learning all the prerequisites. Additionally, this strategy is more comprehensive because you learn more than you need (e.g., you might learn how the video HTML tag works, even though your website doesn’t have any videos). As a result, bottom-up learning requires a bigger time investment and may be less efficient, but leads to better understanding.

Top-down learning, in contrast, is more time-efficient than bottom-up learning because you only focus on what you need to know to get something done. By staying laser-focused on the end goal, learning top-down requires less time but also leads to less understanding.

Choosing to learn bottom-up or top-down depends on two factors:

1. Do I want to learn this subject deeply?

2. Do I have enough time to learn this subject thoroughly?

Sometimes, you have to learn something but it doesn’t interest you. For example, most people don’t care to study how the United States tax system works, so they learn just enough to do their taxes, but nothing more.

Other times, you want to learn something deeply but don’t have time. For example, if you’re trying to meet a project deadline at work, you don’t have time to pick up a book or online course.

In these cases, you’re better off learning top-down. There’s only so much time in the world, so you should spend it wisely.

Your Turn!

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter.

I hope you learned something new about bottom-up and top-down learning.

Do you have a preference for one learning strategy over the other? How do you decide which strategy to use? Reply to this email or comment below to let me know!

Until next time,

Sammy