You're Not Lazy, You Just Lack a Habit • Don’t have a passion? Go create one. • Make the Habit Easily Repeatable • Don’t Overreact to Bad Days • Aim for Virtuous Cycles • The Importance of Hardcore Skills • Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals • Why Train? • The Magic You’re Looking For is in the Full-Assed Effort You’re Avoiding • At some point...
In the science of learning, there is absolutely no debate: practice techniques that center around retrieving information directly from one's brain produce superior learning outcomes compared to techniques that involve re-ingesting information from an external source.
Some people exploit signaling so their communication gives the impression they’re more capable than they are (false positives).
If you’re not periodically surprised by the capabilities of your own brain, you’re probably training it wrong. Not enough people realize how powerful your memory can become if you just train it using effective techniques.
If you have a New Year’s resolution planned this year, then just start doing it today. The more days you wait until you start, the more practice you’ll get thinking about it and not doing it, which is the exact opposite of the stimulus-response pattern you want.
One of the main reasons why so many people struggle to learn math is that they struggle to climb the hierarchy. Climbing the hierarchy has been a primary focus of our solution approach, so our solution is going to generalize best to subjects that are similarly hierarchical.
Often the biggest motivational hurdle is just starting the (physical or intellectual) workout.
As you exit school and enter the workforce, it’s nobody’s responsibility to continue developing your talent.
Higher-grade math unlocks specialized fields that students normally couldn't access until much later -- and on average, the faster you accelerate your learning, the sooner you get your career started, and the more you accomplish over the course of your career.
What it means for a problem to be sophisticated, not made trivial by foundational knowledge. When is the best time to learn coding, at an early age or after you have some university-level math under your belt? How I learned to write, organize, and debug big-ass SQL queries.
Their behavior just needs to align with the learning process, which can often (not always, but quite often) be made to happen through incentives: e.g., “if you complete all your work this week then we’ll go get ice cream on the weekend,” or “no video games tonight until you complete your work.”
Skating around the rink will get you to a decent level of comfort in your basic skating skills, but being able to land jumps and spins will force a whole new level of robustness and fault-tolerance in those underlying skills. The same applies to knowledge in general.
... is intense physical workouts.
They use low-effort, inefficient study techniques like re-reading and highlighting instead of just sucking it up and engaging in efficient retrieval practice and problem-solving.
If you want to move the needle on a goal, you have to concentrate your efforts directly on that goal.
The way to do this is to develop automaticity on your lower-level skills.
... is to become an academic crank.
Whenever you’re about to look up info that you’ve seen before, do yourself a favor and try your best to recall from memory. Don’t automatically open up the reference.
In math, de-prioritizing talent development leads to major issues.
Tip for junior devs: your primary goal is not to prove you’re smart, it’s to make problems go away.
When grade inflation happens, the learning debt doesn’t come due until students graduate – at which point it’s somebody else’s problem and it’s easier to just change the narrative.
Yes, you can learn some surface-level stuff about a subject by playing around. No, it’s not nearly as efficient as committing to serious, guided, deliberate practice. No, the play did not speed up your learning process.
Comfortable fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning. This perception of learning unreliable – what you perceive is information sitting in your working memory, which is fleeting, not your long-term memory.
Beginners (i.e., students) learn most effectively through direct instruction.
Even Ramanujan self-studied.
Learning the prereqs is the difference between something seeming confusing/inaccessible versus “wait… that’s all it is???”
The permastudent, the wannabe, and the dilettante.
Every time you study, imagine the Grim Reaper is gonna show up at the end of your session to quiz you on what you covered, and if there’s any question you can’t answer correctly, you die.
If you’re not measuring performance and taking actions to improve it then you’re not seriously training, you’re just playing around.
I know it “feels” like learning when you’re following along while reading/skimming a book, but that feeling is completely artificial.
"Understanding Deep Learning" by Simon J. D. Prince
You are a car. You go fast on paved roads and get stuck in mud.
Schooling and talent development are completely different things.
... is interleaving a wide variety of productive work that you enjoy.
(especially in math learning)
Be disciplined, set up a habit, compound compound compound, develop a relationship with it, put in extra time when you’re bored or you need an emotional outlet, trust that it will grow on you and seep into your identity as you spend a lot of time doing it and getting really good at it.
I worked full time in data science during my last 2 years of undergrad and I'm pretty sure the process to pull this off is reproducible.
If you hammer prerequisite concepts/skills into your long-term memory, get it really solid and easy to retrieve, then you can lessen the load on your working memory, keep it below capacity, avoid getting "broken," and keep up with the game.
When it looks like someone progressed so fast they “must” have taken a shortcut, what really happened is they speed-ran the foundations.
Making progress is really enjoyable. People typically find math (and other challenging activities) enjoyable by default and it’s really just the feeling of slow/stagnated progress that makes it unenjoyable, especially when coupled with overwhelm.
Nobody is born cracked.
Why jumping the gun on complexity leads to compounding struggle.
People acquiring impressive skills so quickly that it's mind-bending.
“Schools do not seem to have a great tolerance for students who are out of phase with other students in their learning process.” -Benjamin Bloom, 1985
Lots of people consume. Fewer people actively do. Even fewer people attempt challenging things. And even fewer people than that build up the foundational skills needed to succeed in doing those challenging things.
When someone fails to make decent progress towards their learning or fitness goals and cites lack of time as the issue, they're often wrong.