10 ms·

How to Learn Stuff Quickly

413 points by joshwcomeau 5y ago

shoto_io 5y ago
That guy coming in from the side at 50% or so is really creepy...
- roadbeats 5y ago
  I found it a fun way to ask for email and actually signed up myself.
- edo9k 5y ago
  Yeah! I can't remember when was the previous time a web page startled me like that. But it was effective, you have to recognize that.
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    Yeah it was! I agree
- allenu 5y ago
  I think the fact that it slides in slowly is what it makes it creepy. I was scrolling/skimming the article and all of a sudden I saw movement to the side and it freaked me out.
supernovae 5y ago
Just practice things. That's it. "Quick" is hindsight, learning is the activity.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  There’s no transferable guidance on how to practice?
- lawn 5y ago
  You can practice things more or less efficiently. There's absolutely more than "just put in the time to practice".
vmh1928 5y ago
I thought this was going to be about how the brain functions, as in how new neuron connections are created and then reinforced. Although the author talks about his approach to using guided and unguided/independent learning it it could be reduced to 1.) use guided learning to establish the initial connections in the brain and 2.) do things independently as a way of recall which strengthens the connections and causes new ones to form. A third option would be to teach others; nothing like having to explain something to someone to trigger the recall of material and exercise those neuron connections.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  The third option is actually an extension of the second.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deltron3030 5y ago
Immersion into the topic and developing my opinions and taste first is what makes learning things quicker for me. I can be my own guide if I know the territory and have my preferences, and if I know what to do before I learn how to do it. Key for me is to spend enough time exploring a topic and getting passionate about it.
siliconc0w 5y ago
Diversity of learning also helps for me, if you're 'thrashing' on a problem without making progress, take a break to focus on something else - even another skill entirely you're learning in parallel like cooking, writing, or something physical. It's almost like background processing - you need to load up the context and let your brain chew on the problem a bit and when you return to the problem a solution will usually present itself.
the_arun 5y ago
I think learning is a personal thing. It will definitely differ from person to person based on their passion. Off topic - I like the template/theme used in this site. Initially thought it could be like Hugo or Jekyll theme, then couldn't find more details. After some time using it felt this is custom made site with all animations and all.
- honie 5y ago
  > Off topic - I like the template/theme used in this site. Initially thought it could be like Hugo or Jekyll theme, then couldn't find more details. After some time using it felt this is custom made site with all animations and all. The site is indeed custom built on top of Next.js. You may be interested in this the "How I Built My Blog"[^1] article on the same site. [^1] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog
devnull255 5y ago
Incorporating the "learning x the hard way approach", which is about typing the code, rather than just copying and pasting the code, also aids with learning quickly and giving more lasting power to the lesson. The best part of this is the mistakes you're more likely to make by typing, which forces you to look more closely at the original code so you can retype it correctly. I remember much more that way. Even more than that, making such mistakes may draw more attention to the object in error and consequently learn more about that object and how it fits into what you're trying to do.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Came here to mention typing vs. copy/pasting. When going through a tutorial, don't copy and paste. Type out the code. I turn off code-completion in my editor as well.
ncfausti 5y ago
Obligatory nod to a course that changed my life: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
- mandeepj 5y ago
  Can you please share more details on how it changed your life? Are you a fast learner now? Can you also draw the contrast between your earlier and current learning approach?
- BossingAround 5y ago
  And an obligatory counterpoint that the course is incredibly shallow. 1. Pomodoro 2. Test often 3. Just start learning, you'll start liking it There. You've just taken the course. Of course this comment is reductionist. But the course, to me, could be a medium-length article with the same effectiveness (but much less feel-good, "you can do it" content).
milross 5y ago
I do think that all of us have a different take on how we should learn stuff quickly. Some of us learn through visualization; some of us learn by doing the stuff itself. It's just a matter of finding the best method for you to learn different things.
ddelt 5y ago
The author has definitely read “Ultralearning”; I highly recommend this to anyone interested in this sort of topic on metalearning.
nickjj 5y ago
I've never found anything that worked as well as: 1. Become aware that something I'm interested in learning exists 2. Watch and skim a bunch of videos at 2x speed around the idea of the thing (usually keynotes or videos created by the author) to get hyped up 3. Go through the documentation's getting started guide while following along 4. Immediately start building something with the new thing Treat everything beyond this as question driven development[0] or basically JIT (just in time) learning. For context the first 3 steps are usually no more than a weekend or a few days. I do this loop all the time and it hasn't really failed yet for learning all sorts of things (5+ programming languages, a bunch of stuff about Linux, Ansible, Docker, Vim, Terraform, Kubernetes, video production, and the list goes on). These are learning things very quickly at a level where you can comfortably bill out freelance work or get employed. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/learning-a-new-web-framework-with-question-driven-development https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/learning-a-new-web-framework-...
- ozarkerD 5y ago
  Question driven development is a great name for it.
- Jarwain 5y ago
  Any advice for dealing with tool choice paralysis? I've been interested in getting into video editing and music production, among other things, but I tend to get stuck trying to decide between different tooling and it saps my drive. I get the idea that I should just pick one and run with it, but get stuck on trying to pick the "best". Which I guess I tend to define nebulously, since some tools might be easier to learn but others are more powerful/featureful, etc.
  - umvi 5y ago
    My rule of thumb is: if it's free choose the most popular one, if it's paid pick the perceived second best one (usually better value for your money). Version control system? Git (most popular) Linux Distro? Ubuntu (most popular) CPU? AMD (perceived second best) Rideshare? Lyft (perceived second best) DAW? FL Studio (perceived second best) This system has generally worked out well for me. Note that the popular choice is just to get me started because it usually has the best troubleshooting/community resources, years later when I'm more experienced sometimes I'll switch to something less popular (for example I no longer use Ubuntu in favor of openSUSE Tumbleweed).
id_ris 5y ago
One idea I've been using recently is to start writing unit tests around a piece of code or functionality as I'm trying to use it. That technique narrows the scope to a single thing, and I'm forced to be explicit about what I expect. That and reading the source code are my gotos.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> If you only follow guided resources, you'll wind up in tutorial hell. I disagree very strongly here. You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts. My "career superpower" is that I'm always working my way through one textbook or another. You get serious depth this way and avoid getting stuck with a surface level understanding. Plus, with depth you can end up with really strong fundamentals, which make learning the next thing that much easier. I know a lot of people who read tons of blog posts on topics but never crack open a textbook, or people who watch youtubers explain academic papers yet never open up the actual paper. Maybe my "learn stuff quickly" trick is... don't. Spend a decade accumulating deep knowledge slowly, and it'll add up. The road to "tutorial hell" is paved with blogposts and missing fundamentals. (I like the rest of the post)
- Lordarminius 5y ago
  > You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts. This.
  - honie 5y ago
    Absolutely this. It feels like everyone either hasn't read the rest of the article, or conveniently ignored the "Mixing guided and unguided learning" section, then went on to cherry-pick quotes to trash the article. The irony...
- maaand 5y ago
  two thumbs up for this comment ^ May I ask you some text books you've read and on your reading list?
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Oh man, it's tough to answer this one well. I just counted up the books I've worked through on my shelf. After college, I've gone through about 15 completely, and partially worked through another 15 or so. Plus a couple reference texts that have been handy. Plus a huge number of papers. They take up nearly twice the space my old college texts do, which is kind of wild to look back on! Are you curious about anything in particular? Or if you're just wondering what kind of books I'm talking about, highlights include CLRS, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, and Characters & Viewpoint. Next up on my list are more creative writing books and a couple theoretical stats books (I'm working towards a book on semiparametrics, but first need a better foundation to follow a book I've been recommended).
emsign 5y ago
Your site freezes my browser (Vivaldi). Just wanna let you know.
- mynameismon 5y ago
  Works fine on my machine (Vivaldi). What version are you on?
zuhayeer 5y ago
"With software development, though, mistakes are free! If we make a mistake, we can tab back to our editor, change the code, and try again. We even have helpful error messages that can (sometimes) point us in the right direction. This is an incredible luxury, and not one that we take advantage of enough." This is definitely very underrated and partly why I think computer science education is still sort of broken in some universities. Trial and error should be embraced as a a part of the process of building things. But instead, many curriculums in universities use exams to test your knowledge without any sort of debugger or console. You just have to go off of what you know, getting things as close to correct as you can in the first pass. All evaluations in CS should surround some type of project based work, it's a huge luxury other fields don't have. Students studying architecture or mechanical engineering, for example, simply can't build a functioning bridge as a test due to the cost of raw materials and how fatal an error may be (that would be really cool though). It's an advantage that we literally can build the bridge equivalent as a project in the CS world.
- bdamm 5y ago
  No debugger is going to help you understand most of the concepts in a good CS curriculum. It isn’t coding school, it’s learning how computers work at the most fundamental levels.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Noone has linked to this yet? OK, I will: Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years - Peter Norvig https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  >Why is everyone in such a rush? because most people are desperate to get a job that provides them a decent standard of living
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    I agree, but the concern is that desperation is not a good guide. I appreciate that not everyone has the privilege of sitting comfortably for a few years immersing themselves in the knowledge of a deep subject, but I fear that without that the goal of earning a decent standard of living will not be quite achieved. What I mean is that I've had programming jobs that didn't need a lot of deep knowledge on my part and they weren't jobs I wanted to keep. I wanted to keep the jobs where I was valued for knowledge and skills that I had worked hard to get. Those jobs gave me a decent standard of living, including the improvement to quality of life gained by the appreciation of one's value by one's colleagues, and the self-esteem and confidence that this provides.
- throwamon 5y ago
  Because programming languages are not the only thing I want to learn. In fact, I know that the time required to really learn all the things I'd like to learn far exceed my lifetime. So if I could learn about a bunch of them quickly and then decide on which ones to focus later on, that would be awesome.
rohitpaulk 5y ago
When it comes to software, one approach that has worked really well for me is "Build your own X". Re-implement a tool from scratch (minimal feature set, not production-quality code) and learn how it works under the hood. I've done this myself for Git, Docker, Redis, SQLite, Shell and more - it requires patience, but I've found the approach very effective. There's a GitHub repository with a huge list of similar tutorials that you can follow: https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x. I'm building a programming challenges platform based on this format, if you'd like to check it out: https://codecrafters.io/ https://codecrafters.io/.
- dfreire 5y ago
  CodeCrafters looks great, I'm looking forward to use it.
  - rohitpaulk 5y ago
    Just sent you an invite! (Should be in your inbox in 10 minutes)
hizxy 5y ago
Nothing beats directed learning with a group of like-minded individuals. We think we can be “self-taught” but it’s extremely rare.
justfortechnews 5y ago
I struggle with learning new domains or skills where I don't know what to focus on and start. Example: I've always been fascinated by 'space' and have been determined to invest more time into this hobby by learning more. However, with such a giant array of disciplines (astronomy, cosmology, physics, astrobiology), I don't know where to focus, read a bunch of random information, and feel like I don't retain 90% of it. It's easier, in my opinion, to learn a skill that has more of a practical application (like the author's Blender 3D modeling education).

413 points by joshwcomeau 5y ago

shoto_io 5y ago

That guy coming in from the side at 50% or so is really creepy...

roadbeats 5y ago
I found it a fun way to ask for email and actually signed up myself.
edo9k 5y ago
Yeah! I can't remember when was the previous time a web page startled me like that. But it was effective, you have to recognize that.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Yeah it was! I agree
allenu 5y ago
I think the fact that it slides in slowly is what it makes it creepy. I was scrolling/skimming the article and all of a sudden I saw movement to the side and it freaked me out.

supernovae 5y ago

Just practice things. That's it. "Quick" is hindsight, learning is the activity.

nuclearnice1 5y ago
There’s no transferable guidance on how to practice?
lawn 5y ago
You can practice things more or less efficiently. There's absolutely more than "just put in the time to practice".

vmh1928 5y ago

I thought this was going to be about how the brain functions, as in how new neuron connections are created and then reinforced. Although the author talks about his approach to using guided and unguided/independent learning it it could be reduced to 1.) use guided learning to establish the initial connections in the brain and 2.) do things independently as a way of recall which strengthens the connections and causes new ones to form. A third option would be to teach others; nothing like having to explain something to someone to trigger the recall of material and exercise those neuron connections.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
The third option is actually an extension of the second.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

deltron3030 5y ago

Immersion into the topic and developing my opinions and taste first is what makes learning things quicker for me. I can be my own guide if I know the territory and have my preferences, and if I know what to do before I learn how to do it. Key for me is to spend enough time exploring a topic and getting passionate about it.

siliconc0w 5y ago

Diversity of learning also helps for me, if you're 'thrashing' on a problem without making progress, take a break to focus on something else - even another skill entirely you're learning in parallel like cooking, writing, or something physical. It's almost like background processing - you need to load up the context and let your brain chew on the problem a bit and when you return to the problem a solution will usually present itself.

the_arun 5y ago

I think learning is a personal thing. It will definitely differ from person to person based on their passion. Off topic - I like the template/theme used in this site. Initially thought it could be like Hugo or Jekyll theme, then couldn't find more details. After some time using it felt this is custom made site with all animations and all.

honie 5y ago
> Off topic - I like the template/theme used in this site. Initially thought it could be like Hugo or Jekyll theme, then couldn't find more details. After some time using it felt this is custom made site with all animations and all. The site is indeed custom built on top of Next.js. You may be interested in this the "How I Built My Blog"[^1] article on the same site. [^1] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-i-built-my-blog

devnull255 5y ago

Incorporating the "learning x the hard way approach", which is about typing the code, rather than just copying and pasting the code, also aids with learning quickly and giving more lasting power to the lesson. The best part of this is the mistakes you're more likely to make by typing, which forces you to look more closely at the original code so you can retype it correctly. I remember much more that way. Even more than that, making such mistakes may draw more attention to the object in error and consequently learn more about that object and how it fits into what you're trying to do.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Came here to mention typing vs. copy/pasting. When going through a tutorial, don't copy and paste. Type out the code. I turn off code-completion in my editor as well.

ncfausti 5y ago

Obligatory nod to a course that changed my life: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

mandeepj 5y ago
Can you please share more details on how it changed your life? Are you a fast learner now? Can you also draw the contrast between your earlier and current learning approach?
BossingAround 5y ago
And an obligatory counterpoint that the course is incredibly shallow. 1. Pomodoro 2. Test often 3. Just start learning, you'll start liking it There. You've just taken the course. Of course this comment is reductionist. But the course, to me, could be a medium-length article with the same effectiveness (but much less feel-good, "you can do it" content).

milross 5y ago

I do think that all of us have a different take on how we should learn stuff quickly. Some of us learn through visualization; some of us learn by doing the stuff itself. It's just a matter of finding the best method for you to learn different things.

ddelt 5y ago

The author has definitely read “Ultralearning”; I highly recommend this to anyone interested in this sort of topic on metalearning.

nickjj 5y ago

I've never found anything that worked as well as: 1. Become aware that something I'm interested in learning exists 2. Watch and skim a bunch of videos at 2x speed around the idea of the thing (usually keynotes or videos created by the author) to get hyped up 3. Go through the documentation's getting started guide while following along 4. Immediately start building something with the new thing Treat everything beyond this as question driven development[0] or basically JIT (just in time) learning. For context the first 3 steps are usually no more than a weekend or a few days. I do this loop all the time and it hasn't really failed yet for learning all sorts of things (5+ programming languages, a bunch of stuff about Linux, Ansible, Docker, Vim, Terraform, Kubernetes, video production, and the list goes on). These are learning things very quickly at a level where you can comfortably bill out freelance work or get employed. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/learning-a-new-web-framework-with-question-driven-development https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/learning-a-new-web-framework-...

ozarkerD 5y ago
Question driven development is a great name for it.
Jarwain 5y ago
Any advice for dealing with tool choice paralysis? I've been interested in getting into video editing and music production, among other things, but I tend to get stuck trying to decide between different tooling and it saps my drive. I get the idea that I should just pick one and run with it, but get stuck on trying to pick the "best". Which I guess I tend to define nebulously, since some tools might be easier to learn but others are more powerful/featureful, etc.
- umvi 5y ago
  My rule of thumb is: if it's free choose the most popular one, if it's paid pick the perceived second best one (usually better value for your money). Version control system? Git (most popular) Linux Distro? Ubuntu (most popular) CPU? AMD (perceived second best) Rideshare? Lyft (perceived second best) DAW? FL Studio (perceived second best) This system has generally worked out well for me. Note that the popular choice is just to get me started because it usually has the best troubleshooting/community resources, years later when I'm more experienced sometimes I'll switch to something less popular (for example I no longer use Ubuntu in favor of openSUSE Tumbleweed).

id_ris 5y ago

One idea I've been using recently is to start writing unit tests around a piece of code or functionality as I'm trying to use it. That technique narrows the scope to a single thing, and I'm forced to be explicit about what I expect. That and reading the source code are my gotos.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> If you only follow guided resources, you'll wind up in tutorial hell. I disagree very strongly here. You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts. My "career superpower" is that I'm always working my way through one textbook or another. You get serious depth this way and avoid getting stuck with a surface level understanding. Plus, with depth you can end up with really strong fundamentals, which make learning the next thing that much easier. I know a lot of people who read tons of blog posts on topics but never crack open a textbook, or people who watch youtubers explain academic papers yet never open up the actual paper. Maybe my "learn stuff quickly" trick is... don't. Spend a decade accumulating deep knowledge slowly, and it'll add up. The road to "tutorial hell" is paved with blogposts and missing fundamentals. (I like the rest of the post)

Lordarminius 5y ago
> You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts. This.
- honie 5y ago
  Absolutely this. It feels like everyone either hasn't read the rest of the article, or conveniently ignored the "Mixing guided and unguided learning" section, then went on to cherry-pick quotes to trash the article. The irony...
maaand 5y ago
two thumbs up for this comment ^ May I ask you some text books you've read and on your reading list?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Oh man, it's tough to answer this one well. I just counted up the books I've worked through on my shelf. After college, I've gone through about 15 completely, and partially worked through another 15 or so. Plus a couple reference texts that have been handy. Plus a huge number of papers. They take up nearly twice the space my old college texts do, which is kind of wild to look back on! Are you curious about anything in particular? Or if you're just wondering what kind of books I'm talking about, highlights include CLRS, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, and Characters & Viewpoint. Next up on my list are more creative writing books and a couple theoretical stats books (I'm working towards a book on semiparametrics, but first need a better foundation to follow a book I've been recommended).

emsign 5y ago

Your site freezes my browser (Vivaldi). Just wanna let you know.

mynameismon 5y ago
Works fine on my machine (Vivaldi). What version are you on?

zuhayeer 5y ago

"With software development, though, mistakes are free! If we make a mistake, we can tab back to our editor, change the code, and try again. We even have helpful error messages that can (sometimes) point us in the right direction. This is an incredible luxury, and not one that we take advantage of enough." This is definitely very underrated and partly why I think computer science education is still sort of broken in some universities. Trial and error should be embraced as a a part of the process of building things. But instead, many curriculums in universities use exams to test your knowledge without any sort of debugger or console. You just have to go off of what you know, getting things as close to correct as you can in the first pass. All evaluations in CS should surround some type of project based work, it's a huge luxury other fields don't have. Students studying architecture or mechanical engineering, for example, simply can't build a functioning bridge as a test due to the cost of raw materials and how fatal an error may be (that would be really cool though). It's an advantage that we literally can build the bridge equivalent as a project in the CS world.

bdamm 5y ago
No debugger is going to help you understand most of the concepts in a good CS curriculum. It isn’t coding school, it’s learning how computers work at the most fundamental levels.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

Noone has linked to this yet? OK, I will: Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years - Peter Norvig https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."

ren_engineer 5y ago
>Why is everyone in such a rush? because most people are desperate to get a job that provides them a decent standard of living
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  I agree, but the concern is that desperation is not a good guide. I appreciate that not everyone has the privilege of sitting comfortably for a few years immersing themselves in the knowledge of a deep subject, but I fear that without that the goal of earning a decent standard of living will not be quite achieved. What I mean is that I've had programming jobs that didn't need a lot of deep knowledge on my part and they weren't jobs I wanted to keep. I wanted to keep the jobs where I was valued for knowledge and skills that I had worked hard to get. Those jobs gave me a decent standard of living, including the improvement to quality of life gained by the appreciation of one's value by one's colleagues, and the self-esteem and confidence that this provides.
throwamon 5y ago
Because programming languages are not the only thing I want to learn. In fact, I know that the time required to really learn all the things I'd like to learn far exceed my lifetime. So if I could learn about a bunch of them quickly and then decide on which ones to focus later on, that would be awesome.

rohitpaulk 5y ago

When it comes to software, one approach that has worked really well for me is "Build your own X". Re-implement a tool from scratch (minimal feature set, not production-quality code) and learn how it works under the hood. I've done this myself for Git, Docker, Redis, SQLite, Shell and more - it requires patience, but I've found the approach very effective. There's a GitHub repository with a huge list of similar tutorials that you can follow: https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x. I'm building a programming challenges platform based on this format, if you'd like to check it out: https://codecrafters.io/ https://codecrafters.io/.

dfreire 5y ago
CodeCrafters looks great, I'm looking forward to use it.
- rohitpaulk 5y ago
  Just sent you an invite! (Should be in your inbox in 10 minutes)

hizxy 5y ago

Nothing beats directed learning with a group of like-minded individuals. We think we can be “self-taught” but it’s extremely rare.

justfortechnews 5y ago

I struggle with learning new domains or skills where I don't know what to focus on and start. Example: I've always been fascinated by 'space' and have been determined to invest more time into this hobby by learning more. However, with such a giant array of disciplines (astronomy, cosmology, physics, astrobiology), I don't know where to focus, read a bunch of random information, and feel like I don't retain 90% of it. It's easier, in my opinion, to learn a skill that has more of a practical application (like the author's Blender 3D modeling education).