If I could send some advice back in time, to myself when I was 20 years old, this is a lot of what I would say. I think almost all of this is very idiosyncratic to me, and the errors that I, personally, am inclined towards. I don’t think that most 20 year olds that are not me should take these points particularly seriously, unless they recognize themselves in it.
[See also First conclusions from reflections on my life]
- Order your learning
You want to learn all skills, or at least all the awesome and useful ones. This is completely legitimate. Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t aim for that (including with words like “specialization” or “comparative advantage”.)
But because of this, every time you encounter something awesome, you respond by planning to make the practice of it part of your life in the short term. This is a mistake. Learning most things will require either intense bouts of focusing on only that one thing for (at least small numbers of) days at a time, or consistent effort over weeks or months.
If every time you encounter some skill that seems awesome or important, you resolve to learn it, this dilutes your focus, which ends up with you not learning very much at all. Putting a surge of effort into something and then not coming back to it for some weeks is almost a total waste of that effort—you’ll learn almost nothing permanent from that.
The name of the game is efficiency. You should think of it like this:
Your skill and knowledge, at any given time, represents a small volume in a high dimensional space. Ultimately you want to expand in all or almost all directions. There’s no skill that you don’t want, eventually. But the space is very high dimensional and infinite, so trying to learn everything that crosses your path won’t serve you that well. You want to order your learning.
Your goal should be to plot a path, a series of expansions in this high dimensional space, that results in expanding the volume as quickly as possible. Focus on learning the things that will make it easier and faster to continue to expand, along the other dimensions, instead of focusing on whatever seems cool or salient in the moment.
[added:] More specifically, you should be willing to focus on doing one thing at a time (or one main thing, with a one or at most, two side projects). Be willing to take on a project, ideally but not necessarily involving other people, and make it your full time job for at a month. You’ll learn more and make more progress when you’re not dividing your efforts. You won’t loose nearly as much time in the switching costs, because you won’t have to decide what to do next: there will be a clear default. And if you’re focusing on one project at a time, it’s much easier to see if you’re making progress. You’ll be able to tell much faster if you’re spinning your wheels doing something that feels productive, but isn’t actually building anything. Being able to tell that you failed at a timeboxed goal means that you can notice and adapt.
A month might feel like a long time, to put aside all the other things you want to learn, but it’s not very long in the grand scheme of things. There have been many months since I was 20, and I would be stronger now, if I had spent more of them pushing hard on some specific goal, instead of trying to do many good things and scattering my focus.
You want to be a polymath; but the way to polymathy is not trying to do everything all at once: it’s mostly going intensely, on several different things, in sequence.
- Learn technical skills
In particular, prioritize technical skills. They’re easier to learn earlier in life, and I wish I had a stronger grounding in them now.
First and foremost, learn to program. Being able to automate processes, and build simple software tools for yourself is a superpower. And it is a really great source of money.
Then, learn calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, microeconomics, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, information theory, and basic physics. [Note that I’ve so far only learned some of these myself, so I am guessing at their utility].
It would be a good use of your time if you dropped everything else and made your only priority in the first quarter of college to do well in IBL calculus. This would be hard, but I think you would make substantial steps towards mathematical maturity if you did that.
In general, don’t bother with anything else in college, except learning technical subjects. I didn’t find much in the way of friends or connections there, and you’ll learn the non-technical stuff fine on your own.
The best way to learn these is to get a tutor, and walk through the material with the tutor on as regular a basis as you can afford.
- Prioritize money
You’re not that interested in money. You feel that you don’t need much in the way of “stuff” to have an awesome life. You’re correct about that. Much more than most of the people around you, you don’t want or need “nice things”. You’re right to devalue that sort of thing. You’ll be inclined to live frugally, and that has served me very well.
However, you’re missing that money can be converted into learning. Having tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is extraordinarily helpful for learning pretty much anything you care to learn. If nothing else, most subjects can be learned much faster by talking with a tutor. When you have money, if there’s anything you want to learn, you can just hire someone who knows it to teach you how to do it, or to do it with you. This is an overpowered strategy.
It is a priority for you to get to the point that you’re making (or have saved) enough money that you feel comfortable spending hundreds of dollars on a learning project.
…
Combining 1, 2, 3, the thing that I recommend that you do now is drop almost everything and learn to become a good programmer. Your only goal for the next few months should be 1) to have enough money for rent and food, and 2) to become a good enough programmer that you can get hired for it, as quickly as you can. Possibly the best way to do this is to do a coding boot camp, instead of self-teaching. You should be willing to put aside other cool things that you want to do and learn, for only a couple of months, to do this.
Then get a job as a software engineer. You should be able to earn small hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with a job like that, while still having time to do other stuff you care about in your off hours. If you live frugally, you can work for 2.5 years and come away with a small, but large enough (eg >100k) nest egg for funding all the other skills that you want to learn.
(If you’re still in college, staying to do IBL first, and then focusing on learning programing isn’t a bad idea. It might be harder to get mathematical maturity, in particular, outside of college.)
- Make things / always have a deliverable
I’ve gained much much more skill over the course of projects where I was just trying to do something, than from the sum of all my explicit learning projects. Mostly you learn skills as a side effect of doing things. This just works better than explicit learning projects.
This also means that you end up learning real skills, instead of the skills that seem abstractly useful or cool from the outside, many of which turn out to have not much relevance to real problems. Which is fine; you can pursue things because they’re cool. But very often, what is most useful and relevant are pieces that are too mundane to come to mind, and doing real things reveals them. Don’t trust your abstract model of what elements are useful or relevant or important or powerful, too much. Better to let your learning be shaped to the territory directly, in the course of trying to do specific things.
The best way to learn is to just try to do something that you’re invested in, for other reasons, and learn what you need to know to succeed along the way. Find some software that you wish existed, that you think would be useful to you, and just try and build it. Run a conference. Take some work project that seems interesting and knock it out of the park.
Try to learn as much as you can this way.
In contrast, I’ve spent a huge amount of time thinking over the years that didn’t create any value at all. If I learned something at the time, I soon forgot it, and it is completely lost ot me now. This is a massive waste.
So your projects should always have deliverables. Don’t let yourself finish or drop a project, especially a learning project, until you have produced some kind of deliverable.
A youtube video of yourself explaining some new math concept. A lecture for two friends. Using a therapy technique with a real client.
A blog post jotting down what you learned, or summarizing your thoughts on a domain is the minimum viable deliverable. If nothing else, write a blog post for everything that you spend time on, to capture the the value of your thinking for others, and for yourself later.
Don’t wait to create a full product at the end. Ship early, ship often. Create intermediate deliverables, capturing your intermediate progress, at least once a day. Write / present about your current thoughts and understanding, including your open confusions. (I’ve often gotten more clarity about something in the process of writing up my confusions in a blog post).
The deliverable can be very rough. But it shouldn’t be just your personal notes. If you’re writing a rough blog post, write it as if for an audience beyond yourself. That will force you to clarify your thoughts and clearly articulate the context much more than writing a personal journal entry. In my experience, the blog posts that I write like this are usually more helpful for my future self than the personal journal entries are.
The rule should be that someone other than you, in principle, could get value from it. A blog post or a recorded lecture, that no one reads, but someone could read and find interesting counts. The same thing, but on a private google drive, doesn’t count. (Even better, though, is if you find just one person who actually gets value out of it. Make things that provide value to someone else.)
Relatedly, when you have an idea for a post or an essay, write it up immediately, while the ideas are alive and energizing. If you wait, they’ll go stale and it is often very hard to get them back. There are lots of thoughts and ideas that I’ve had, which are lost forever because I opted to wait a bit on writing them down. This post is itself the result of some thoughts that I had while listening to a podcast, which I made a point to right up while the thoughts were alive in me.
- Do the simple thing first
You’re going to have many clever ideas for how to do things better than the default. I absolutely do not want to discourage you in that.
But it will behoove you to start, by doing the mundane, simple thing. Try the default first, then do optimizations and experiments on top of that, and feel free to deviate from the default, when you find something better.
If you have some fancy idea for how to use spaced repetition systems to improve your study efficiency, absolutely try that. But start by doing the simple thing of sitting down, reading the textbook, and doing the exercises, and then apply your fancy idea on top of that.
You want to get a baseline to compare against. And oftentimes, clever tricks are less important than just putting in the hours doing the work, and so you want to make sure to get started doing the work as soon as possible, instead of postponing it until after you’ve developed a clever system. Even if your system is legitimately clever, if the most important thing is doing the hard work, you’ll wish you started earlier.
You’re sometimes going to be more ambitious than the structures around you expect of you. That’s valid. But start with the smaller goals that they offer, and exceed them, instead of trying to exceed them in one fell swoop.
When you were taking Hebrew in high school, you were unimpressed by the standards of the class and held yourself higher than them. For the first assignment, you were to learn the first list of vocabulary words from the book, for the next week. But you felt that you were better than that, and resolved to study all the vocab in the whole book (or at least a lot of it) in that period, instead.
But that was biting off more than you could easily chew, and (if I remember correctly), when you came back the next week, you had not actually mastered the first vocab list. You would have done better to study that list first, and then move on to the rest, even if you were going to study more than was required.
I’ve fallen into this trap more than once. “Optimizing” my “productivity” with a bunch of clever hacks, or ambitious targets, which ultimately mask the fact that my output is underperforming very mundane work habits, for instance.
You might want to work more and harder than most people, but start by sticking to a regular workday schedule, with a weekend, and then you can adjust it, or work more than that, from there.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the simple thing that everyone else is doing is beneath you, since you’re doing a harder or bigger thing than that. Do the simple thing first, and then do more or better.
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I’m sure there’s more to say, but this is what I was pressing on me last night in particular.
musings and rough drafts 