You're Not “Learning,” You're Procrastinating: How to Actually Learn (the Learning Loop)

Fear has many faces. Procrastination disguised as learning is one of the biggest traps holding smart, capable people back. If you’ve been bingeing courses, reading books, and calling it “growth”...but not taking action, this episode breaks down exactly why you’re stuck and how to get out.

I’m sharing my story of how I left my job at Amazon to start a photography business… and then spent two years doing everything except building that business. I was completely paralyzed by imposter syndrome always telling myself I just needed one more class, one more tutorial, one more certification.

Here’s what I get into:

• The difference between what most of us call learning and the real learning loop
• How perfectionism and fear turn learning into procrastination
• Why endless prep feels productive — but keeps you stuck
• What finally snapped me out of the cycle (and what might help you too)
• A mindset shift that helps you move from theory to action, even when it’s uncomfortable

If you’ve been putting in the work but still not making progress, or if you're tired of the illusion of productivity, listen to this episode.

This is a production of Jule Kim, © 2026.

Transcript

Something I’ve been observing, especially at the beginning of every year: people will set new goals. So they decide they want to learn. They read more. They watch more videos. They sign up for new classes and new programs. They’re journaling, and they’re doing all the reflections.

And yet, despite all of this effort, so many of us stay stuck doing the same things we’ve always done. And this was definitely me. I have repeated so many unhealthy, unproductive behaviors in my life over and over. And probably the worst period was right after I quit my full-time job at Amazon to launch my photography business. Only I spent the first two or three years in heavy imposter syndrome and didn’t make any money.

I’ve talked about this on social media lots of times, where I’ll say that I wasted two years of my life and lost $100,000. And the really sad part is that it’s not like I didn’t know I was doing it. I knew. But I kept doing it anyway.

So if any of this sounds like you, I’m going to share what I figured out over the long haul, the hard way. And it’s something that I honestly still have to remind myself of, because every now and then it keeps creeping back up on me.

You’re listening to This Is How You Think, the show that remodels your mindset. I’m your host, Jule Kim. Let’s dive in.

So a million years ago, here’s what happened. I left Amazon, and not on very good terms. And if I’m being super honest, I probably burned a lot of bridges. It’s not something that I’m proud of. I really don’t know if I could ever get a job there again. That’s how bad it was.

And the thing is, I left on these bad terms because I got chewed up and spit out by the Amazon machine. But at the end of the day, a lot of that was on me. I didn’t have proper boundaries, and I was still putting all of my self-worth into the work I did and how much money I was making.

So it’s a recipe for disaster. It was never going to work out.

The thing that I remember is that when I announced that I was leaving, of course everybody’s first question was, “Where are you going?” They assumed I had landed an offer somewhere else. But I wasn’t leaving Amazon to go work for another company. I was leaving because I was so angry and completely burned out. But I couldn’t exactly say that.

And I was also embarrassed telling people that I wasn’t going anywhere. You know, I’m going home. So instead, I told them I was leaving to start my photography business. Which wasn’t a full-on lie, but it kind of was a little bit, because I had planned to start that business maybe six months down the road, not right then.

But to cover my butt, I said that starting this business was the reason I was following my passions. And now I had said it. And it was out there.

Well, unfortunately, there was a huge, big, fat problem. Did I know how to run a business? No, I did not. Had I thought about how I was actually going to get clients? Also no.

And because I didn’t know how to solve the client problem, I did what a lot of us do. I focused all of my energy on learning the skills of the trade instead of the skills of the business. Classic mistake.

And the thing is, I had already started watching photography classes online while I was still at Amazon. I was already working 70 to 80 hours a week. But in my last six months there, I was also taking these courses on the side. And I think that was really the only thing keeping me sane from all of the heavy workload at Amazon.

So it started from a good place in the beginning. But then over time, the courses became a crutch.

So on the one hand, I thought becoming a photographer was super exciting. But on the other hand, I felt like I couldn’t have a photography business because I couldn’t even call myself a photographer. I felt like a complete fraud. That’s how bad the imposter syndrome was.

You see, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, you have no business calling yourself a photographer. You didn’t go to school for this. You don’t know what you’re doing.

And it really showed up whenever I met people at parties or networking events. And of course, what’s the first question everybody always asks you? What do you do?

And I, for the life of me, could not just say, photographer. I literally stuttered on the word photographer for almost an entire year.

If you think about it, if you’re someone like me and you’re not calling yourself a photographer, you’re not marketing yourself, you’re not putting up your website anywhere, you’re not meeting people, you’re not putting yourself out there, you’re not telling anyone you do photography, then how on earth is anybody ever going to hire you for photos? Make it make sense, right?

But meanwhile, I’m over here watching more and more classes on CreativeLive like it’s my full-time job. I was telling myself that I couldn’t call myself a photographer until I know everything there is to know about photography. So I just kept taking more classes.

And it’s not like I never took photos. I did some practice shoots, where I did what every new photographer does. You know, I pestered the heck out of my friends. I asked my coworkers if they wanted photos. I did model calls.

But I wasn’t advertising myself as someone you could actually pay to give them photos. Eventually, I had a website, but I wasn’t doing anything to drive traffic to it.

And this is the ultra-ridiculous part. Okay. Because for most business owners out there, they have a pretty good excuse. They don’t actually know anything about marketing. They don’t know how to market themselves.

But in my corporate life, my background is actually in content marketing and SEO. So I didn’t even have that excuse of not knowing how this works.

Was I applying any of that to my own business? No, of course not.

I keep going like this for the next two and a half years, until one day my husband, my dear husband, I love him to death so much. He had tried to be patient with me. He tried to be supportive. But eventually he gets fed up, right? Like, who wouldn’t?

We’re at lunch, and he asks me, when are you going to start taking photos? And I was like, ouch, man, that really hurts.

I tell him I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know enough. He says, you know, you probably know more than 95% of the photographers out there, right? Like, on the technical dimension, how the camera works and all that stuff with photography. You know more than most photographers.

And I was like, but do I though? I think I need more classes.

This is when he’s like, oh my god, I can’t take this anymore. I cannot.

So he tells me the story about a photography professor at the University of Florida named Jerry Uelsmann. I’m sorry, I’m probably butchering his last name. I have no idea how to say it.

Professor Jerry, on the first day of his film photography class, he divides his students into two groups. One side of the room is the quantity group, as in they’ll be graded purely on how many photos they turn in. One hundred photos gets you an A. Ninety photos gets you a B. Eighty photos gets you a C, and so on.

The other side of the room is the quality group. They only have to turn in one photo the entire semester, but it has to be nearly perfect to get an A.

I don’t know if I’m the only one who got this wrong, but it turns out, at the end of the semester, the best photos all came from the quantity group. While the quality group had spent the semester theorizing about the perfect shot, the quantity group was out there experimenting, playing with lighting, testing compositions, and learning from their mistakes. They got better by doing.

When my husband told me this, I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over me.

So on the one hand, I felt really liberated and inspired, like, oh, maybe this could be me too. But on the other hand, I realized that the one thing I really didn’t want to go do, which is go take photos and put myself out there and have someone really hate my work and demand a refund. There was no way around it. I was going to have to do the thing that I was most afraid of.

Also, I didn’t even have the words for what I was feeling back then. I didn’t know it was called imposter syndrome. I just knew I was really terrified.

Now later on, I learned that I fit the classic expert type of imposter syndrome. And this tends to be really common for women, immigrants, people of color, where we retreat into knowledge as our defense or our refuge. We’re the ones who want to research everything, get all the information, feel completely prepared before we act.

But the problem is that this refuge becomes a crutch. And you just keep staying inside of the warm, loving embrace of the comfort zone, like I did, for two whole years, making zero dollars.

And it was all because the thing under all of it, the deepest fear I had, was that I would never learn. And that was the fear that kept me buying courses and more courses instead of booking clients.

I think in the first year alone, I probably bought over 100 classes on photography. And I was calling that learning.

It’s interesting now that I think about it, because in some ways I was right to fear that I wasn’t learning. I kind of had to learn what learning actually is. And what I was doing was definitely not learning. That was emotional self-soothing.

I think this is a much wider problem in our culture. It happens to a lot of people, and we never really discuss it. Plus, we use the word learning really loosely.

I don’t know about you, but I remember coming to dinner every night and my parents were always like, what did you learn today? And I would tell them some random fact about dinosaurs or history or something. But is that really learning?

And I think what I’ve come to understand is that what we call learning is actually just information collection, which is good up to a limit, but it’s only step one of the learning process.

Real learning is when you take that information and you make different choices because of it. And I’m not even saying that you have to make the right choice. You just have to make a different choice.

And I think that’s one of the key pieces of what learning actually is, which is also why it tends to be a cycle, because you’re usually not going to get it right the first time or even the second time.

So when I look back at those years when I was stuck in massive imposter syndrome and I was watching courses instead of marketing my business, I knew what I was doing. I knew I was avoiding. And yet I still wasn’t taking the steps that I knew were necessary.

So was I actually learning? Of course not. And I think I knew that deep down, which is why I was so terrified when I finally got my ass moving with my marketing and my website started to rank on Google. I even landed on the first page of Google for Seattle photographer at number one. Okay, on the number one spot. And people started calling me for photo sessions.

I realized something else. Every now and then on social media, I will see people debating, is it quantity or is it quality? And every time I see that, I’m like, oh my god, no, you don’t get it. Quality comes through quantity. There is no other way but quantity.

Can’t just be doing the same thing over and over again. That’s what I had to learn as well. See, you can’t just have reps. You have to have informed reps.

It’s like when you start working out and you have a personal trainer and they say they want to watch you do the weightlifting exercises. They want to watch your form because they have to make sure that you don’t develop bad habits. So they’re going to watch you and correct you until you do it right. And every so often they’ll do another form check.

When I zoom out, I think that mentality really applies to everything. So whatever it is you’re doing, you try something, and then you have to look at whether you’re doing it in a way that’s moving you closer or further away from what you want. And then you adjust. And you keep adjusting. You keep iterating.

So it’s not just collecting information, which is where I think most of us get stuck, just like I did. And it’s not just get your reps in. That’s the next stage where I see many of my friends and my clients stuck. They’ll often put in their reps just to feel like they’re making progress and they’re doing something.

But the truth is, they’re not making different choices even when they’re presented with new information.

So the full learning cycle is more like you get your information, then you get your reps in, you evaluate and adjust, and you have to hit all of these stages.

Maybe you think this is all really simple and I’m just beating a dead horse. But it’s a really weird thing, because I watch so many of us refusing to go through this cycle because we don’t like feeling bad about stuff. We don’t like the emotional turmoil. We don’t like feeling stupid and just really bad at things.

And the deepest fear for me and a lot of us is that somehow we’ll never get any better, that we’re beyond hope. But that is exactly where the work is. You cannot have learning if you can’t get over this hump, that fear about who you are and that maybe you’re not good enough and that you’ll never be good enough.

I had to teach myself this mindset shift. Of course, I’m good enough by default. I’m good enough because I’m already here and I exist. There is no other alternative.

And even if I’m in a moment where I feel like I’m not good enough, it doesn’t matter, because I know I have everything I need inside of me to get better, because now I know how to learn.

Ever since I came face to face with this within myself, it’s been one of the most pivotal shifts in my life.

So whenever I feel stuck and I see that I’m not moving forward with something the way I want to, I always come back to asking myself, am I actually learning or am I just collecting information? Am I making different choices, or do I just keep doing the same things over and over?

And it’s okay if the answer is no. You know, the truth is, sometimes it does take us a while. But at least now I know what I’m doing and where exactly I’m breaking down in the process.

This framework has been really useful for helping me stay accountable to myself and inflict less self-sabotage. So maybe it’ll help you too.

Let me know if it does. That’s it for today. I’d love to hear from you. Did any of this resonate? Text the link in the show notes. It’s the link under the episode description that says, “Text Jule.” I really do read these messages.

Thank you so much for listening. And as always, I believe in you. See you next time.