Learning things is like meeting a new person

Recently a thought crossed my mind, on how learning new things is like meeting a new person.

For the last couple of days, I've been reading about design patterns in C#. I've red through a couple of articles, listened to a few podcasts and watched some videos.

I really felt like I understood the idea and I knew about them quite a lot, but I came to a conclusion that unless I apply and use those patterns in real life scenarios, I won't really know on when It's best to use and how they will affect the structure and behaviour of my code. Whether they will make the code simpler to understand and edit, or whether they will overcomplicate the code and actually make it harder to work with. I didn't know how these patterns will behave in certain situations.

I thought about this as about meeting a new person or someone that you know a lot about, but have never met them in real life. Sometimes you may read a lot about someone, or read a lot of opinions about a person, which influence on how you think that person will be, behave or act in some situations. But only after you meet the person in real life and spend some time with them, you begin to know them, understand and learn on how they will actually behave and what their strong sides are and how to utilise them.

I feel it's similar with learning new things and I try to get a hands-on exeprience and implement them myself when reading about concepts, patterns or ideas about writing code.

What are your thoughts on this?