This is one thing school gets wrong. School focuses a lot on what will never be used. You will be taught many names and dates that you won’t need to know to do your job. For example, any time the book discusses who came up with or discovered a thing. Take the discovery of DNA by Friedrich Miescher. How does that help you use how DNA works?
(A side note. I understand that being given this credit is how they advance in Academia. If you are in academia you need to know this. For them it is important. For the rest of us…not so much.)
The trap many people fall into is thinking that all knowledge is equally important. It is not. Most learning people do is almost pointless. Just by cutting out the learning that does not matter you will save more time than you know what to do with. This alone makes it worth to cut it out of your learning.
Also, as your learning become more focused you get more repetitions with what matters. This greatly speeds up how fast you retain the information that you are learning. Having said, this is the least important reason to focus on what you will use.
The most important reason to do this is the improvement it brings your life. A common expression is “knowledge is power.” This is false. Applications is power. Until someone does something with the knowledge it means nothing. If I gave you a map to a million dollars, are you a millionaire? No! Not until you go and get the million dollars are you a millionaire.
Why?
Because after you use the map you get the million dollars. Not before.
Many lifelong learners seem to forget this. They just want as much knowledge as they can get, not the skill that comes with it. People need to change their goal to the skill. Without the skill the knowledge is worthless.
It might sound like I am repeating myself a lot. That’s because I have seen so many people surround themselves with books and online courses but get nothing out of them. It’s such a waist. If they would have taken just 1/10 the classes but gotten the skills form them, they could have made millions. Others had the ability to cure their own sickness but choose to get the head knowledge instead. It’s sad really.
It’s also worth noting that this goes nicely with the next Law of Learning. In fact, you could say the next law is perhaps the most important of all the laws. Oh hell, I’m too exited let’s get to the next law already.