This post is a departure from your usually scheduled content. The purpose of this post is mostly to imprint forever on memory the rough path I seek to tread in learning adventures. Contrary to Matthew’s counsel, in these adventures, he who seeks does not always find. When I stray from the good path detailed below, learning becomes inefficient. I stray too frequently :). Thus, this post, this map, needs be always ready to hand!
Full attributions below, but an old Scott Young post inspired much of this journal entry.
Get in This State of Flow
The flow chart above provides the essential steps to adopt when learning/encountering new material. Let’s cover each bit in detail.
- First Exposure
- Typically comes via a lecture, a textbook, a video, a book, a blog post, etc.
- If possible, make some “statement of intent” before beginning (equivalent to a “pre-reading”)
- Generate Feedback Via Practice
- The essential note here is that feedback must be rapid. As SY highlights on Cal Newport’s blog, practice with delayed feedback is far less effective than practice with rapid feedback. Rapid baby, rapid!
- Wise operational steps here involve identifying a bank of practice problems with answers and stepping through them, reviewing each answer as you go
- Develop Intuition
- The final boss for learning is intuition. Cal Newport makes the point in ’08 when he observes that intuition is what powers original application of learned ideas. Unless your aspire to be a parrot, intuition is what you are after.
- Best of all, intuition is much stickier than memorized facts/formulae. The price is the effort.
- Feynman’s Technique, with special emphasis on the explanation on a blank page, is a good exercise to both test and build the intuition you seek.
- Iteration here is inevitable. Rinse and repeat practice problems and efforts to “prove” your intuition.
Slow Learner, Tho
Your author has wasted 100s of hours DuckDuckGo-ing my way into solutions I had already once DDG-ed. Another point of highlighting this learning flow is to remind myself that I’m spending plenty of time on new material, I am just spending that time inefficiently in cases where I stray from this method. This method plays and it pays.
Now all I need are spark plugs to reliably kickstart my heart when I sit to learn.
Other useful posts along these lines:
- Ian Tay has a wonderful applied version of this line of thinking
- The inimitable Christopher Cooper wrote this lovely essay which muses on similar issues describe here on page 8-9