Learning to Make Apple Pie Taught Me How to Learn

Many years ago, I set out to learn how to cook. My diet was pretty horrible in general and I needed to not eat frozen pizza for the rest of my life. I had also gotten hooked on watching the show Good Eats and often spent most evenings watching episodes and learning all about the science of making food.

However, simply watching videos was only giving me knowledge, not experience, so I decided to learn how to make one of my favorite desserts from scratch: apple pie.

I learned how to make apple pie from scratch in three steps.

First, I used a premade pie crust and canned filling. This got me used to the feeling of putting the pie together and baking it.

Second, I continued to use premade crust, but I made my own filling from a recipe. I decided that the filling was the easier of the two components to make myself. Just chop up some apples and add a bunch of spices. This also gave me another chance to get familiar with handling crust dough, which can be temperamental.

Finally, I used the apple filling recipe I used the last time, but this time I also made the crust from a recipe. Suddenly, I had made an entire pie from scratch!

So this learning process really isn’t anything new, but breaking the learning process into really manageable chunks really helped me understand each step.

I recently realized that this method could be applied to learning essentially anything. You just need to have the eye for breaking your project down into manageable chunks.

For example, when working with music and trying to learn a new genre it’s entirely possible to work with premade loops or sheet music from existing songs. Over time, you can replace pieces of the song with your own work once you get comfortable.

It’s something that has helped me in the past, especially when it comes to projects that seem too large to manage all at once. This method goes well with my prior post about Setting Deadlines and Getting Things Done and it’s really worth giving a shot.