Truth is, most of the things I know about the world in general and programming in particular is due to procrastination and rabbit-holing. Big chunks of my understanding of physics come from randomly reading stuff on Wikipedia while procrastinating in high school. I discovered HN and learned Lisp when shying away from doing an university project in PHP, which in result got me a job in Erlang and also led to being widely recognized at the university as 'the Lisp guy'. Here I discovered pg's essays and LessWrong, both of which helped me grow, and many other things. I owe much of who I am now to rabbit-holing. And also being a person who always has three solution candidates to any problem in 30 seconds ("you know, there was this startup/library/tool featured on HN last month...") is a result of that random learning.
I do sometimes feel that it's not the optimal way of learning things. I try to find the balance between random-walking and systematized learning, but one thing I'm sure of, it's that the optimum is not on the side of formal education, at least not for me.
After trying, again and again, to force and fit myself into 'the System' of traditional, formalized learning I discovered that it is almost impossible for me, and it always have been. Learning what I'm told to learn for sake of tests and exams just repells me, causing almost physical pain. So I'm not trying to force myself anymore, I decided to do what I have to do with minimum effort, and spend the rest of the time learning what I want, the way I want, and allowing myself time for rabbit-holing and procrastinating.
I feel the same way, and I like to have an approach I call just-in-time-learning. If you focus on formal education methods you often end up with a lot of time spent in knowledge that's not very interesting to you or that doesn't fall within your work/hobby real needs. In a just-in-time-learning methodology, you roll up your sleeves at the first sign of a lacking area in your knowledge that you need to tackle right now.
Of course that isn't without it's own pitfalls. That lacking area might need a bunch of pre-requisite knowledge you also don't have and would do if you had adopted a traditional approach early on. It also may lead you further into the rabbit hole if you don't put a stop to it somewhere along the way and turn back to the original problem.
Right now I feel that you have to be able to mix and match the approaches. Reserve some time for just-in-time and rabbit holes, but also remember to reserve some time for fundamentals too, in order to prepare for future lessons. So it is important to do a bit of studying about the subject in order to understand if that's the right fit or not for you.
Actually, I think the real drive for any kind of learning is about the same for anyone: curiosity.
I think edw519 used to write in length about 'just-in-time-learning', calling it 'pull learning' (as opposed to 'push'). See, for instance, comment 71 in [1].
My rabbit-holing doesn't always resemble your approach; I often end up reading a book on a topic I'm just interested in, without a particular project or feeling of lacking knowledge. However, I try to transition myself into more JIT-learning/pull-learning style, so that I learn things at the same time I try to get something useful&interesting done. This mindshift is probably mostly due to HN (and we're looping back to rabbit-holing :)) - especially the prevailing emphasis on 'shipping the damn thing'.
"Truth is, most of the things I know about the world in general and programming in particular is due to procrastination and rabbit-holing". Excepting hobby areas (where it doesn't matter) I think you're kidding yourself as without a disciplined framework for learning any knowledge you acquire is at best accidental, there will be too many gaps for you to even comprehend what you don't know.
Tests and exams are there to ensure you have done the hard non-fun-stuff as well as the fun-stuff and to "prove" you have understood, not just regurgitating half-comprehended factoids. You are advocating the equivalent of a educational junk food diet, the only thing you'll absorb is the superficially interesting and the crap.
Serendipity has its place but if it is your principal approach then you are delusional.
I'd suggest that not following rabbit holes can lead to a shallow understanding. If you descend into a rabbit hole, it's because you realized there was a gap in your comprehension and decided to look into the matter and fill in that gap. If you successfully resolve the issue and then return to solve the original issue, your end result is a complete working demonstration of your improved end-to-end understanding.
Maybe you're just creative enough to find a way to use the things in recent memory. When your tool is an infinite swiss army knife, the world's problems don't really look like anything they aren't.
I have quit university when I realized that the only difference between reading books on my own and reading books for a uni course was that university is a place where you learn how to work. You are spoon-fed work discipline and research methodology. I already had all of that, and so I quit. At that point it wasn't difficult at all to continue on my own.
I was thinking about quitting university after taking part in Stanford's AI Class and then realizing that they have around 12 courses planned for the next semester. I don't believe that any university in my country could beat the quality level of what's offered now by Stanford, MIT and others. I decided to stay, but I'm not lying to myself anymore about the reasons. I stayed not to get knowledge - which I can get faster and of better quality elsewhere - but because of:
- Master degree (as in, formal title; it may come in handy)
- Access to expensive/difficult to get equipment - for all those
crazy ideas of mine that involve e.g. a piece of custom hardware
- Access to people who know some particular area inside out
- All the smart people who study at the university - there won't be
any other chance to meet so many amazing people and maybe Build
Something Amazing with them, and then keep contact for the future.
- Cheaper tickets for public transport.
But as I said, I'm not there for the knowledge. Not anymore.
I'd argue that you ARE there for knowledge just not the kind that universities tend to say they give you.
Rather it's the kind of knowledge that the University system was supposed to give you before they all turned into job training, especially telling is "Access to people who know some particular area inside out". That's what university is supposed to be about.
I do sometimes feel that it's not the optimal way of learning things. I try to find the balance between random-walking and systematized learning, but one thing I'm sure of, it's that the optimum is not on the side of formal education, at least not for me.
After trying, again and again, to force and fit myself into 'the System' of traditional, formalized learning I discovered that it is almost impossible for me, and it always have been. Learning what I'm told to learn for sake of tests and exams just repells me, causing almost physical pain. So I'm not trying to force myself anymore, I decided to do what I have to do with minimum effort, and spend the rest of the time learning what I want, the way I want, and allowing myself time for rabbit-holing and procrastinating.