With the new technologies coming up daily, how to learn things fast is also become more and more important. The learning mechanism has changed a lot as well. A textbook can help you organize the knowledge you need, with internet out there and all different kind of publications like Medium, it has become easier for people to learn new things. The education system is teaching us how to learn things by yourself, instead of learning strictly from the textbook.
You may learn something from here and there, that also means that the information you are receiving is sometimes all over the place. While knowledge is broke down in pieces because we are always tend to search for the answers without understanding the background. Knowledge become fragments of things as we go, how to organize them and use the pieces of information to help you build a mountain of knowledge or knowledge tree become more and more important.(I do suggest that after you resolve the problem you have on hand, go back and try to understand why it is working this way. That can give you a better understanding and you can remember it in the long haul.) A knowledge tree can not only help you organize the things you learned but also help you retrieve information effectively as well. That’s the whole point of having a database. From time to time, when we build an application, under some situation we do need to have a database so that it is easier for information to be stored and retrieved later. Our brain works similarly.
First: Build on top of what you already know
I love the idea of trees, trees have branches and leaves, it is an extension of stems. If you already have a foundation of knowledge, then you just need to build on top of that. Linking to something you already know can not only make your foundation of your knowledge stronger, but also it will help you remember what you are going to learn better.
When I first started to learn about Salesforce, I already have the knowledge of SAP systems. I tend to use the business process I learned from SAP systems to apply that part of the knowledge in Salesforce. The major 3 cycles of business process can be applied to everything. You will always have Sales, Production, and Procurement. Any business will have those 3 cycle processes, even service type of business. I am using my TERP10 notes here (all credit goes to Tom Wilder, and Chico State).
The business process can be applied to anywhere, that also including Salesforce. Even though Salesforce has been marketing themselves as a CRM solution, and it is used as a CRM solution for a lot of companies, but in my opinion, Salesforce can be used in a lot of other areas as well. The sales process is definitely included in Salesforce already, they have CPQ! The production process is also part of CPQ as well. I only touched CPQ a little bit, I didn’t get a chance to dive deep into CPQ, but I think the major process would be the same as the graph showed above.
The key point is to build upon what you already know, branch out to learn more.
Second: Learn something completely new
What if it is something completely new, you had no encounter of anything like this before? Well, that’s like 80% of our daily life, right? The unforeseen future.
I like to turn to an example. It doesn’t matter what, you need to get it up and running first, and learning from other people’s code or example is the best way to go for it. I was looking into learning a framework, I turned to React.JS. Luckily, there are already tons of those materials out there. React’s documentation is really legit and it has all the examples that you will need, not only that their documentation also explains what it is out there.
I honestly love to read about documentations. All the docs explained
Third: Learn something which is hard to find any materials
There was a need when I was working which back then, it was really hard to find any materials on that topic. The users and the BI teams want to embed Tableau report into Salesforce so that when users click on the Tableau reports, the data can be imported into Salesforce, the users can comment on the record that they want to import into Salesforce or not, and users also have the options to save the data into Salesforce or not. Later on, they even have the options to delete the records.
The BI team and I have searched a lot, on the tableau side, they have Tableau.js which allows the integration between html and Tableau. Also, when you Google “Tableau embed in SFDC”, all they had was the iFrame solution, however, what we needed to accomplish is more than that, we need an interaction happening instead of just put an image type of report in there. The hard part was getting the data from Tableau report, and make it show up on Salesforce. There is no direct API exist between Tableau and Salesforce. After about one week and a half of try and error, we made a little progress. In Salesforce, the “param name” and “assignTo” tag can make that happen!! You also have to incorporate with JS on VFpages in order to make the whole transaction happen. With JS on the VFpages, it is really not stable, that was because the <script></script> section was placed on top of VFpages, from the documentation on VFpages to optimize it (Remember I said that how much I love documentation?), the script section would be better if you move it to the bottom of the VFpages, please refer to the official documentation for more details.
Now I mentioned a method I used here, try and error. I am a really hands on person when it comes to learning, after multiple tries and errors, you are eliminating all the ways that’s not going to work. It is hard to write a program and it would run perfectly on the first try, right? Also, after all those practices, you are definitely going to solve the problem better in the future. Learn from your mistakes at all times.
One of my favorite Youtubers is Mark Rober, he use to work for NASA and Apple, now he is making engineering type of videos on Youtube with Science. Rober had a TED talk on learning, which is really interesting, “The Super Mario Effect — Tricking Your Brain into Learning More”, link is included in here. I loved this video, and he is right, “Focus on the cool end goal, would take the fear of failure off the table”.
Happy Learning Everyday!
What is your learning mechanism? How are you learning new materials or new skills? Feel free to share you opinion with me!
