As adults with full-time responsibilities, learning can be hard. The inefficient 10 hour days at the library or long gym sessions that may have gotten us through our youths are no longer options for us, and it feels like there’s never enough time to learn anything new or do anything well. But, we can help ourselves out by adjusting our approach to learning and our expectations for ourselves. Personally, since starting my family, I’ve found it difficult to find the time to cultivate new skills or explore new passions. But, in the past 5 years, I’ve managed to achieve at least some of my goals, such as learning a new language and transitioning into a new career. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

Focus on Process, not Product

In today’s world, we tend to be very “results oriented”. Unfortunately, reaching goals takes time. Making a New Year’s resolution or sharing a goal with friends (“I’m going to learn Chinese!”) may make you feel good and give you a little bit of a dopamine boost when your friends and family predictably congratulate you on undertaking such a positive effort, but unfortunately real learning is more difficult to quantify than our world of convenient milestones and personal plans would like. 6 months into studying a new language, or learning computer programming, and you will likely not have much more to show for yourself than when you began. That dopamine rush will be long gone, and you will suddenly feel embarrassed to bring your new initiative up to family and friends again.

But here’s the thing – learning takes time, and that’s OK. Learning is not about generating quick results, but rather, learning is about committing to a process that eventually leads to personal transformation. When it comes to learning something new, I wouldn’t bother setting goals that revolve around results. Instead, I’d set a goal around committing to a certain process. “I’ll jog for 30 minutes three times per week” is better than “I’ll complete my first marathon by March.” “I’ll make a deliberate effort to study Japanese for 20 minutes per day, every night after dinner” is better than “I’ll pass the first level Japanese Language Proficiency Test by the end of the year”.

Beware of Habit Trackers

I really dislike a lot of the popular online habit trackers that provide users with data analytics around their various goals and other hobbies. Why? Well, because unless we know why we want to see this data, it’s only bound to confuse us. Sites like StoryGraph and their ilk can be fun, but at the end of the day, we need to be deliberate about our goals and what it means to achieve them. Should anyone burden themselves with the goal of “reading more”? I don’t think so. I love to read, but quality reading is more important than quantity. A goal to read Anna Karenina is probably more worthwhile than a goal to read 501 trashy romance novels in 2025, an “improvement” over a mere 500 in 2024. I guess my point here is, if we are going to track our habits, we should have some kind of plan in response to the results we see. On a related note: aggressively time-tracking for a week or three can be a good way to learn where your time is going, but keeping up with it can become a burden all its own. If you’ve learned that there’s something you really want to track – for example, hours of exercise per week, or time spend doing math problems – fine, track that. Don’t track everything. It’s just not worth it to be so stressed out over all of your time. To bring it back to StoryGraph – maybe I do read too many crappy novels, but if that’s how I relax, and I’m still working towards my goals, who cares? What’s the point of quantifying this data?

Be Reasonable and Acknowledge Limits

I truly believe that we can have everything that we want, within reason. This is where it helps to have done some soul searching, and to not let your goals become objects of ego. Instead, be as sure as possible about what things you want to achieve. As an adult with a full range of responsibilities, you might be able to take a music lesson or pass a science class, but you’re not going to do both while also staying fit and becoming a grand master at chess – and there’s no reason to feel bad about this! Imagine how unfair it would be to all the people who are great at something if you were such a gifted and talented person that you could just be as good as they are at said thing while juggling 5 other spinning plates. Unfortunately, as much as we’d all like to believe that we could be jack-of-all-trades who are perhaps masters at some, that’s not how the real world works, and surely, it’d be pretty boring to do anything if it were really that easy. When thinking about getting serious about learning something new or achieving a new goal, ask yourself: “Why am I doing this? Am I really interested in it, or is it just about my ego?”

Learning gets harder as we get older, but it can also be fun without adding unnecessary pressure to our lives. By being honest about our limits, not getting caught up in out-of-the-box solutions, and emphasizing the learning process over results-oriented goal-setting, we too can enjoy learning and the enrichment in brings to our lives.