For a long time, I thought I was struggling with tech.
HTML felt manageable.
CSS eventually made sense.
JavaScript, however, felt unnecessarily hard.
At first, I blamed myself.
I assumed I am stuck in my root-Arts…Literature and later Political science and Public administration.
Or that I had started too late.
Or that maybe this kind of learning just wasn’t for people like me- Those who dread maths.
But with time — and reflection — I realized something deeper:
I wasn’t struggling with technology.
I was struggling with how I had been taught to learn.
Like many in my era, I grew up learning in a very traditional way.
You sit in a classroom.
A teacher explains.
You take notes.
You memorize.
You repeat.
Progress is visible because:
- the teacher controls the pace,
- the curriculum is fixed,
- and success is measured by exams and grades.
You are rarely asked to decide what to learn next, how and when.
You are rarely asked to diagnose your own confusion. The liberty of thereof is missing.
And you are almost never taught how to learn independently. Sitting behind some machine, taking tutorials from YouTube or scavenging websites for facts took time to deepen.
The old traditional system works — until it doesn’t.
When I moved into online learning, I carried those same expectations with me.
I expected:
- clear instructions,
- linear progression,
- someone to tell me when I was “ready” to move on.
But online learning doesn’t work that way.
There is no teacher watching.
No classroom structure.
No one checking your understanding.
You are the pace-setter.
You are the problem-solver.
You are the feedback system.
And that shift is not small.
What made things harder was that I didn’t recognise this gap immediately. No Exams at the end of a session to determine if you go further. No validation, no permission. Only you and the freedom to explore the infinite body of knowledge that internet placed on your fingers.
So when tutorials didn’t flow, I thought the problem was the material.
When concepts didn’t stick, I thought the problem was me. The baggage of the traditional way of learning and the modern way that beckons became a sort of internal conflict. How do I appropriate the freedom that modernity provides. That independence is where the confusion rests.
I kept consuming content — videos, articles, explanations — believing that more input would lead to clarity.
It rarely did.
What I was missing wasn’t information.
It was learning autonomy.
Online learning demands something traditional education rarely trains you for:
- deciding what matters,
- pausing when confused,
- experimenting without permission,
- and accepting that progress may feel invisible for a while.
That was uncomfortable.
It felt like learning without guardrails.
The turning point came when I stopped forcing myself to learn the way I was taught in school.
I stopped waiting to be “taught.”
I started allowing myself to explore.
Small projects.
Simple experiments.
Trial and error without judgment.
That’s when things began to change.
I began to realize that learning online isn’t about following instructions perfectly.
It’s about:
- building intuition,
- asking better questions,
- and noticing patterns over time.
It’s messy.
It’s nonlinear.
And it requires patience with yourself.
Once I accepted that, the pressure eased.
Looking back now, I see that unlearning how I was taught to learn was harder than learning tech itself.
But it was also freeing.
It allowed me to:
- slow down without guilt,
- take responsibility for my progress,
- and trust that understanding would come — even if it took longer than expected.
The old is sluggish to change but the mind is never old. That is where dream resides; where conjectures and imaginations forms. If you can reach anything there, you can achieve it. So if you are learning tech as an adult and feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or quietly frustrated, it may not be because you are incapable. You may simply need to guide your mind and the next step may just be the learning model.
You may simply be using the wrong learning model.
And once that realization clicks, everything changes.
This post is part of my ongoing learning archive.
→ My Tech Learning Journey — One Step at a Time
I am not an expert. I am a student learning, building, and documenting the process as it unfolds. everything you see here is part of that journey.
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