I’m no physician, so I’m not sure if a brain is a muscle (probably not) but I’m getting increasingly more suspicious of its true identity.

“Thank you for using Webflow!”

I received a receipt email from Webflow recently confirming that it has been a year since our relationship has started. It has not been a smooth ride as I expected it to be. For a starter, I had no idea what was being explained at Webflow University. They were not lying about the fact that you don’t need to have coding experience to build a website but still the learning curve has been steep. It was geared toward designers but I didn’t have much design experience either so that didn’t help. Instead of my rough guestimation of 1 week, it took me a full month (or two?) to somehow piece together my first site.

Fast-forward to today. Now I get paid to build a site and just turned down a lowball offer to build a personal blog for a friend.

Surely, I’m going to keep building on my Webflow skills but, I guess a better question to ask is, how can I learn something new on top of that, better?

You see, there is something new that I want to learn. It’s something adjacent to my current skill but it nevertheless is a completely new field for me. I’m not writing what I’m learning because the so-called “learn in public” thing does not mean “fail in public.” For some reason, everyone who is doing the “learn in public” tends to be pretty good at what they are learning. They are multi-talented human beings for sure. But they still are humans. They have to be failing at something but I never hear them fail. It’s about time that I learn how to package my failings better. So, taking their cue, I won’t start sharing until I’m moderately successful as a beginner. But I digress.

One of the most difficult enemies for me, when I’m learning something new, is sleepiness. When I was watching Webflow University at first, I got so sleepy after 10-15 minutes of instruction. I’m not saying that they were bad. The instruction videos were actually very well made. It’s just me. Be it a foreign language, biology, or anything, I got sleepy when they were difficult. Maybe I was bored. True, but I got sleepy at first on a subject like a web design that I am interested in too.

I did take some countermeasures like getting a full 8+ hours of sleep. It didn’t help. And I can’t stay in my bed all day whenever I have to learn a new thing. Drinking more cups of coffee didn’t work either. Maybe I should’ve read things aloud and moved my hands along with the instruction. No, they didn’t help either.

Right now, I’m trying something new and my early result from last week’s trial run has been generally positive. It’s coming from adapting “athlete’s mindset.” That’s for me is to treat my brain like a muscle. I’m applying the methodology used in my physical workout. Let me explain.

Let’s say my current limit is 2 sets of 10 pushups. Then when I work out today, I aim to do 2 sets of 11 pushups. I don’t try to do the same workout the very next day. That’s too much in too little time. Since I’ve pushed over my limit, my arms and shoulders should be hurting like hell. I won’t be back to do that same until the next week. Even if I’m really pushing myself, I need to give myself at least 3 days of rest. When I’m pushing my limit, I need to give myself time to recover. Otherwise, I’ll hurt myself. Wussy and lazy? Maybe, but I’m still in the game. I haven’t given up yet and I’m getting better because I’ve not given up yet.

I’m feeling like this is what’s happening to my brain. Instead of sore muscles, I’m suffering from the sleepy brain phenomenon. Learning something completely new is like forcing my brain to do the cruel and unusual heavy lifting. It begins to shut down and my brain tells me to stop by making me feel sleepy. That’s the moment equivalent to my both arms shaking in agony. At that point, I need to stop. As soon as I feel my eyelids are getting slightly heavy and my eyes began to skip some words on the computer screen, I need to stop. It’s time for me to downshift and do something easier for my brain. It could be something like reading fun newsletters or writing a blog. Or it could be like getting up and doing a choir. The point is to disengage my brain from the 9000 rpm activity and do something it can do in autopilot.

Depending on the difficulty of the new subject, my “red zone” learning time could go from 5-15 minutes. If I go longer, I start yawning and nothing gets processed. I can sit still and keep on reading but if I let my brain go “overheat,” it takes even longer to come back to my normal mode.

It seems super inefficient at first. I mean, if I had 60 minutes, I’m guessing my actual learning time is only about 15-20 minutes. The rest is doing something else. It looks like I’m not working hard enough. Looks like I’m constantly distracted. Sure, but can you keep doing pushups until 100 if your current limit is 10? Even if you somehow manage to do 100 pushups in 60 minutes, what would happen to you the next day?

This is where the power of consistency comes in and avoid the trap of shortsightedness. So yeah, I’m learning a new skill quite slowly with enough rest and repetition. So far, so good. The introductory portion of the new material began to sink into my brain after a couple of weeks and I’m beginning to feel like I’m ready to step up. A little bit. Since it’s a completely new field to me, I’m taking it really slow. But I know how far I was able to come with Webflow. I think I could do something similar with this new attempt as well.

Let’s see where this “no-brainer” experiment takes me.

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