6 ms·

Maybe you should learn something

479 points by tylerdane 3mo ago

tylerdane 3mo ago
"Learning anything is a long term project, and long term projects are necessary for building a sense of control over your circumstances. Almost nothing can be deliberately and meaningfully changed within the scope of a day, but in months, certainly years, a lot of things can be made to happen."
- atoav 3mo ago
  Nothing is as sad as seeing some young motivated student losing patience if the task doesn't turn out to be a quick, easy win. The saddest however are students so eager for the quick, easy win that throughout their academic career they repeat the pattern and never really dive deep into any topic. I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face. You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    Something I find myself struggling with is the "tutorial trap" You follow a tutorial to do something, feel happy about it. Then you start a new project to put your new skills to good use and... Blank. No idea where to start, no idea how to proceed. It's so important to build stuff, using references is fine, but following tutorials is not the way forward! You have to work on your own without the training wheels.
    - human305893 3mo ago
      why not both. limit yourself to 1 tutorial/book (i prefer books). then build something. For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build.
      - armchairhacker 3mo ago
        > For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build. For me it is. Even in my domain where I’m an expert and it’s fun, it only is if I’m working on something interesting.
        atoav 3mo ago
        What does wonders for me is to go out into nature, a beach, a lake or a park, or even a longer train ride, with nothing but a pen and notebook, while keeping the phone in my bag. When I return usually I have a few pages of ideas. Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.
      - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
        My problem is honestly that I have too much I want to build, but I don't have all of the skills I need. I get stuck into this mentality of "I need to learn and master X, Y and Z before I can even start building my dream" Would be much better served by just building whatever and learning the skill
    - atoav 3mo ago
      Tutorials are fine, especially if you know nothing doing the motion is often better than fooling around. Just like with languages there are passive skilla (your capability to understand a certain thing) and active skills (you capability to use a thing practically when the situation demands it). It is natural to understand more than you can apply. Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails. Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result. When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped. But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc. The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.
    - dofm 3mo ago
      The great lesson here is: have your own thing you want to make or do, and then select tutorials that help you approach it, step by step. Reproduce the tutorial but also bring it to bear on something you want. In my experience most people can do this, if they think about it a bit — identify the thing they want to learn and find a tutorial for it. Which is amazing, really; this sort of meta-knowledge is a remarkable human concept.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- bebe9494i4 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - slekker 3mo ago
    Why the alt account?
  - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
    >especially with modern AI agents Do you people have to mention AI in every single subject.
    - bebe9494i4 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - stavros 3mo ago
        I agree with you, AI agents are fantastic for learning.
  - purpleflashing 3mo ago
    Can you share how AI helps here? I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.
    - xpct 3mo ago
      I don't think we should expect to short-circuit learning for everything. Fumbling in Blender for hours on end is part of the process and what makes you good at it in the long term, much like grinding exercises in math or physics.
    - alfirous 3mo ago
      Curious, what's issues you encounter that LLM or Blender forum can't help? I also still learning Blender though not complex like yours (Product and Architecture), and LLM help me so much, it is save times that I previously will search on forum and YouTube.
dominex 3mo ago
Do you have any interest in trying a new language? If you have, there is a language.
zerobees 3mo ago
I'll get my agent on it right away.
CalRobert 3mo ago
"have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos, then you may want to put this ambition aside for now and deal with that instead" Even older kids... my 6 year old is jumping on the couch as I type this.. I like remote work but when I had to commute it was really nice to have that downtime built in to the day. I learned a lot of Dutch vocabulary on the train.
- hahahaa 3mo ago
  The hobby can be with the kid! E.g. go out on a kayak with them (safety first etc.) or learn to coach sport.
  - HexPhantom 3mo ago
    That's probably the sweet spot
- HexPhantom 3mo ago
  There's something useful about time that is already spoken for. You're on the train, you can't do much else, so learning some Dutch feels easy. At home the same half hour somehow gets fragmented into six different things
- asp_hornet 3mo ago
  Don’t be fooled, the first few years you get spoiled with “the first moments” of things. Then suddenly the “last moments” start creeping in, “the last nappy”, “the last car seat”, at first they seem like a god send but then they accumulate like an avalanche. One day you will pick them up and, and most likely neither of you will know it, but it will be the last time you ever do. Treasure everything, even the insanity.
  - sarchertech 3mo ago
    I plan to keep lifting my kids everyday like Milo. Hopefully I can push off the last time I pick them up till they’re 30 or so.
casey2 3mo ago
Maybe, but unless you are unusually talented I'd advise against it. For every consumer there is a producer and vice versa. Most people are better off as consumers and this give more eyeballs and resources to the few talented producers.
- kruffalon 3mo ago
  Maybe other people, besides you; obviously, like doing, knowing or learning things without the need to be the most efficient at it. Like, in a just having a life kind of way. But what do I know?
- dofm 3mo ago
  This makes me sad. I am very confident it's also wrong; it fundamentally misapprehends what talent is. As well as not particularly being innate or "god-given", talents tend to emerge only when supported by learned ability. And not even just your own learned ability. Talented violinists exist only in a world that had talented violin makers: you perhaps cannot fully know how society could benefit from things you could learn. Two of my mini-talents are things I used to think were not just difficult but actually things I would be specifically bad at, like, worse than most people. (Which may for complex reasons be a sign I would not be) I believe it also misapprehends where the boundary between practice and consumption can sit, too, but that's a longer comment. No matter which side of the equation you sit, try to unlearn this belief you have, and help others unlearn it.
ElProlactin 3mo ago
> While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out. This honestly is a bit of an understatement, it really sucks and depending on the task, odds are you may want to lie down for a bit when you’re done with your first practice session. You’ll also almost certainly perform significantly worse toward the end of the session. All this is your brain and muscles getting tired. It’s a good meta-skill to learn to self-assess and pick up on this. > Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier. This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.
- HexPhantom 3mo ago
  I think there's a middle group too: people who like having learned something, but don't really enjoy those first few sessions. For them, just knowing that the initial frustration is normal can help a lot
mordechai9000 3mo ago
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn. - T.H. White, The Once and Future King
- HexPhantom 3mo ago
  Wanna say that this is a much better argument for learning than productivity or "becoming a more interesting person". Sometimes it is simply a way to keep the mind pointed outward
- globalnode 3mo ago
  that is beautiful, its something i believe as well but never seen it written so eloquenty. when everythings gone to hell and your backed into a corner, learning something interesting is always there for you.
  - jrmg 3mo ago
    “The Once and Future King” is an odd book. I read it recently - as an adult - and I’m not sure I ‘enjoyed’ reading it. It has a lot of ‘childishness’, especially in the first 2/3, of a kind I’ve never really liked in it. Perhaps the kind _adults_ think kids enjoy. But it’s also full of stuff like this at unexpected moments. Wonder at the world; consideration of others; the burden of leadership. I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
    - sanderjd 3mo ago
HexPhantom 3mo ago
One thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet
- spudlyo 3mo ago
  Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them. Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
  - molybd3num 3mo ago
    reminds me of "tutorial hell"
  - cheesecakegood 3mo ago
    I think the book Superlearning just gives the simple rule that you should spend 10% of your budgeted time on meta concerns (what to learn, what order, what strategies to use, etc) and that’s always seemed a sensible, good-enough default that takes away the doubt. Knowing how deep to go is, as you point out, only half the battle unfortunately, but the rule helped me at least.
- aquariusDue 3mo ago
  Also engaging with others learning the same thing within the overall community is also tremendously helpful and accelerates learning. Though you need to get over the fear of asking silly or obvious in hindsight questions in the wrong Discord channel sometimes.
hallucinate 3mo ago
[flagged]
Ugvx 3mo ago
I came to a similar conclusion last weekend. My 20 year old car was having some issues and instead of taking g it to the mechanic to be charged $1,000, thought I would give it a try myself. 3 hours later and the problem was fixed. And I learned a lot in the process.
- bartvk 3mo ago
  I had the same with my motorcycle. Every time I brought it to the dealer, they came up enthusiastically with things to spend money on. Your tires are done! Your break pads are gone! With the help of a friend, I got into doing (very) basic maintenance myself. I just replaced the tires. I fixed a problem with the electrical system. And next will be the chain and sprocket.
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  YouTube has been a godsend for these types of problems. It's like LLM output, you need to validate and cross reference but combined with other sources of information, easy purchase of parts and problems that actually have solutions (vs "buy a new one") I've saved thousands on cars, appliances and home repairs
- culebron21 3mo ago
  That's why I do all DIY myself, incliding plumbing or electrics. Craftsmen cost money and they try to finish in one session, so they do lots of compromises. Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.
yetkin 3mo ago
I cannot deny the value of learning but there is a fact that learning can be a way of procrastination. This happens when the joy of learning overtake and diverge you from a goal. Nothing wrong about it, it is a time well spent. But I think there must be a balance as well
- raincole 3mo ago
  "Sometimes I feel like I'm an athlete who trained all day for years, then before my first professional match, I retired and went off to teach PE."
  - sanderjd 3mo ago
    Is this a quote from something?
- xandrius 3mo ago
  Learning is not just strictly studying. I'd say most of the learning is done by actually doing.
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  Learning can be the goal if you're lucky. Maybe sharing your learning is the next step and that's enough too. You don't need to apply it to something someone defines as "worthy" for validation.
- abalashov 3mo ago
  The only way I ever learned anything or built anything of value (one of those things still accounts for most of my revenue, 10-15 years later) was by blowing off doing what I was supposed to be doing at that moment, in the classic sense described by PG here: https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html (Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.) Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.
ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
As someone who has done “self-directed” learning, for my entire life (high school dropout, with a GED), I can certainly relate. I like to learn new stuff, every day. I have found LLMs to be a godsend, here. Makes it much easier to just barge into unfamiliar territory. Whenever I come across essays like this, I like to post The Gap, by Ira Glass[0]; one of the more encouraging short essays out there. [0] https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  LLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
    Oh yeah, but the same goes for almost any information source (especially these days).
    - abalashov 3mo ago
      Yeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes. They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
      - brookst 3mo ago
        There are plenty of authoritative reference books full of errors. Teachers in every subject can be wrong, convincingly.
        abalashov 3mo ago
        Yes, but human errors are based on genuine and elaborate misconceptions (or propagandistic intent), not squishy, facile "you're right to push back on that, I straight up made that up" type stuff.
Fraterkes 3mo ago
I’ll chime in. I started learning to draw in my early twenties, couple hours a week. What helps a lot is joining a club, I’ve got a group in my town that just goes to a bar one night a week and draws and chats for 3 hours. Great way to ensure that you get at least a few hours of drawing in, even if your week is too busy for “practice”. It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you’ll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions. Seems like a long time, but unless you start in your seventies you’ll have decades left of enjoying being an artist afterwards.
- coffeefirst 3mo ago
  And even if you don’t get all that good or turn it into a lifelong hobby, that just sounds fun.
forgotusername6 3mo ago
There's really a feeling now pushing back against learning in general. The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. When I started learning Chinese a friend just wouldn't stop talking about how the latest airpods will just be able to translate for you. It was really rather demoralising. But there is still something incredibly rewarding about having that knowledge in your own head and not having to go find someone or something to ask. I push on regardless.
- forinti 3mo ago
  I've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se. I've even realised a few things about my own language.
  - abalashov 3mo ago
    Приятно слышать, а то иногда народ говорит, что это мертвый язык...
- bilsbie 3mo ago
  Even if so, once I realized how pointless doomscrolling is I figured I might as well use that time to learn something pointless.
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  I've been learning Spanish and I find a big positive motivator is finding and practicing slang words and vulgar phrases. They usually have cultural roots and are highly contextual, so it requires a deeper understanding than just translation. I only speak them sparingly with my few native speaker friends, who find it hilarious when I inevitably use them incorrectly - or rarely get it exactly right.
- bilsbie 3mo ago
  > The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. Why walk or jog of the car can do it for you?
kruffalon 3mo ago
I really like how the article focuses on rest and not doing the thing as a core part of learning. How learning and doing aren't exactly the same and that you need to get back to it many times rather than doing a lot at once. It's ofc nothing new and the same principle as for example spaced repetition.
ronbenton 3mo ago
One “trick” nowadays is to just do a thing for the sake of doing the thing. I draw. Not to post my drawings to social media, not to try to get income from paid commissions, but rather just to enjoy the act of drawing. It’s very liberating in a world where it feels like almost everything has to be in service of some kind of larger scheme.
- LatencyKills 3mo ago
  I retired a few years ago and now do a slew of things (photography, robotics, 3D printing, etc.) entirely for myself. I'll start a project, have a blast learning/building, then simply move on to the next thing. Learning for the sake of learning is one of my favorite things in life.
  - andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
    Not finishing - or even being able to define the finish line - is a great sign you're doing this right. You're not a tortoise seeking mastery; it's ok to be a distracted hare!
khurs 3mo ago
The education system is to blame. Kids are conditioned to associate learning with a formal course with a tutor culminating in exams. It's also intentional to segregate skills, if schools taught every child basic plumbing or car mechanics for example instead of spending a month teaching something that won't get used in life, there would be less job in those fields.
- sanderjd 3mo ago
  "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  So there's a conspiracy between plumbers, mechanics, and public schools to not teach basic handyman skills to the students? We used to have "shop" (or similarly named) classes for this in junior high/middle school. They have mostly been cut, but more for budgetary reasons. A lot of high schools still have a vocational department for the kids who are not college-bound and not complete wasteoids.
  - khurs 3mo ago
    I'm not in USA, so can't speak for you. But here in UK it is accepted that schools were, and remain, designed to produce well behaved consumers and workers.
frankie_t 3mo ago
It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually: - energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone - correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear. - uninterrupted time I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy. Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.
- Scarblac 3mo ago
  But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It takes up so many hours but you also don't really rest, and it also tends to keep you up too long at night. If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    > But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often. To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere. (OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.) Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby. And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix. I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.
i_am_a_peasant 3mo ago
For me the biggest learning investment outside work I put is learning Chinese and Vietnamese. I tried music but I gave it up after a year. And I can just do it on my commute to work as well. I also like reading about 19 century comparative history. Gives me a lot of relevant talking points in a lot of conversation.
andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
It's great to be an amateur learner, but if you want to get better (or just make learning more effective) I really liked the (very easy read) Little Book of Talent. It focuses on how to get good, but that's really about how we learn and practice. Highly motivational and some interesting counterintuitive ideas: https://danielcoyle.com/the-little-book-of-talent/ https://danielcoyle.com/the-little-book-of-talent/
aguacaterojo 3mo ago
I started playing video games in Spanish about a year ago. I've finished about 20 now. I had a base of course & was doing little courses etc. But I've sunk 100s of hours now focusing on text and voice heavy games and it went from very tiring and looking up the dictionary constantly to fun and fluid. I can finally watch a lot of stuff without subtitles now. Someone catalogues which games have been dubbed (focused on Spanish of Spain) at this site https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/ https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/ the quality of most new dubs I've seen has been very high
absoluteunit1 3mo ago
Learning something new often can take as little 10-15 minutes a day of focused time. If you do it consistently, it becomes easier and easier to maintain, and it starts to require less and less mental capacity to start > You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. shameless plug: if you are interested in learning touch typing, i built a data driven touch typing application: https://typequicker.com https://typequicker.com it started as a side project (combined wanting to learn typing with my desire to build a side business while working at amazon. working on this (almost) full time now
ur-whale 3mo ago
Couldn't find a mention of age in the article. It was probably written by a relatively young person. Nice intent and advice, but in practice, mostly harder and harder to do as time passes by.
- marginalia_nu 3mo ago
  (author) I'm 40. Haven't really had any increase in difficulty learning things yet. Maybe when I'm 60 I'll have different ideas.
cwiz 3mo ago
I learned a lot myself, but lately I just can't make it on stable regime because you don't get much positive feedback you you're learning something yourself. There's no grades, no exams and all of your motivation is internal. In that case you need to work on a motivation and goals. Why would you learn something that doesn't pays off then?
- 9183726518 3mo ago
  To improve your life, circumatances, abilities. To have a larger amount of known concepts to connect to each other. To increase your stability, security, quality of life, and self reliance. To make more money. To decrease your reliance on uncontrollable and unstable factors.
- xpct 3mo ago
  I'm quite fortunate to keep piling on knowledge without extrinsic rewards: the acquisition itself and the rewiring of my brain is what makes it enjoyable for me. I look up to people who are well-read and try to follow their example. Maybe one day I can inspire somebody else.
- hackable_sand 3mo ago
  You are tending a garden
russfink 3mo ago
I’m attempting to learn to use a slide rule. It’s quite a history lesson - we take for granted the large precision we get on calculators. But the learning is taking repeated visits, about 30 minutes at a time. I’m slowly getting it.
jschveibinz 3mo ago
I went back to school in my 50's to learn how to teach. Two of the most important takeaways from that experience were: 1) learning how to learn; and 2) using projects to learn Writing about your experience in learning is also a powerful tool. If you can describe it to your journal (or someone else), you really know it.
- dofm 3mo ago
  What did you study, specifically? This is the life transition I am considering (and at a similar age). Did you do a teaching degree or equivalent, or something a bit more theoretical/philosophical? And who do you now teach?
Go7hic 3mo ago
[dead]
softwaredoug 3mo ago
This is why I don’t get the perverse pleasure people get when they say they don’t look at code anymore It’s not like we’ve created a new abstraction layer with coding agents. It’s a leaky factory where every part up and down can break and/or be improved. The best factories thrive in a learning culture. Where humans grow their knowledge to improve the operation of the factory. From nuts and bolts up to larger systems. How do you do that without reading code? Without writing code? I started even replacing my use of specs with exploratory coding to grow my own knowledge and context https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-specs https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
AFF87 3mo ago
Lifelong learning as the ultimate skill
connerpocket 3mo ago
This resonated with me, although my experience has been a little different. I started playing pool in college around 2017 and, without really intending to, it became something I did at least once a week. I never had a structured practice routine or any goal of getting really good. I just enjoyed playing, and after enough years I realized I'd become a decent player. I never gambled, but we usually played loser-pays, so every session still cost a bit. I'm unemployed right now, so I've stopped going because it just doesn't fit my budget anymore.
Waterluvian 3mo ago
I need a benevolent alien to force me out of my rut when I’m in one. I had no problems as a kid because I had little choice at times, like the weekends where I was going to learn how to put siding on a cottage or plumb a bathroom, even though I wanted to play Zelda more than anything. I hated those summers and now that I’m a homeowner, I am deeply thankful for them. Literally an hour ago my 7 and 9 year olds came to mom and I and said, “thank you for disabling YouTube. We are having so much fun.” I know this sounds like a fake Donald Trump kind of story but I swear to god it just happened.
wavemode 3mo ago
The key is to find something that you enjoy sucking at. I recently picked up quad rollerskating and the process of getting steadier and smoother at it (while just enjoying the vibes, music and community at my local rink) has become an obsession. It's my new third-favorite hobby (after programming and competitive cornhole).
tayo42 3mo ago
The idea overall is fine. Do adults have success learning art? Like actually getting good at it? I've been kind of overwhelmed by how much time is expected of students to learn art to get good. Like its treated like a full time job? I see people online casually throw out spending 8-10 hours a day on things.
noisy_boy 3mo ago
Because this seems like an appropriate topic/place to ask, are there say 20 books on a variety of topics that one can say are very useful to build a foundation of our world, in the physical and metaphorical sense? Literature probably shouldn't be in that list because literature is just a universe of its own and a lot of it is just not that accessible. E.g. I am not knowledgeable enough to be able to read Mahabharata or Odyssey in the original language.
rrgok 3mo ago
I honestly don't feel rewarding learning anymore. I might be depressed, because I feel all human experiences are overrated. And such, learning is such futile exercise in postponing the reality of life.
- jeffreportmill1 3mo ago
  I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.
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threethirtytwo 3mo ago
In the future we will just have our agentic assistant learn it for us.
ubj 3mo ago
> and/or have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos Slightly off topic, but as a parent I found this hilarious and will now be closely watching to see if any of my own screaming logos ever perfectly hit the corner of a room.
gkcnlr 3mo ago
Learning process must be accompanied with enough space for an individual to realistically challenge himself to actually acquire that knowledge with foreseeable success of doing it. A person must believe s/he can really learn something. But in this status quo of AI hypeism (believing that knowing refined set of know-hows would be enough) people gradually begin losing that optimistic "a priori" belief to learn things. But another side effect of this process is if people stop believing in the accrual of the knowledge which will lead them to nowhere (use cases for those information becoming irrelevant by the time you start using it), justifying this mentally exhausting practice becomes really hard. And I don't mean this on learning static information but also on how to define and build a meta-cognitive framework to systemically learn things. I don't quite get the "lifelong learning" approach, since lifelong learning must usually be accompanied with organic evolution of the information space. Employers wont pay you because you are a lifelong learner, they'll pay you to actually fix a problem you provide a solution for. And that solution isn't guaranteed by the knowledge you possess and doesn't usually qualify the marginal cost of being a lifelong learner. One could brain storm on these issues by critiquing the premise of this book: https://www.amazon.com/100-Year-Life-Living-Working-Longevity/dp/1472930150 https://www.amazon.com/100-Year-Life-Living-Working-Longevit...
jdw64 3mo ago
I've been running my own website lately (www.makonea.com), and writing out my knowledge as articles made me realize just how much I was lacking. Running your own website is something I'd recommend trying.
DaveZale 3mo ago
a couple of decades ago there was viral advice going around about "the 1000 hour rule" saying that's how long it would take to master something new. Maybe it's time to refresh that?
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
I like learning new things, and have done so my whole life. But thinking about our AI future, I think that learning as a goal will be greatly diminished, when the reward of learning many things is essentially zero other than your own personal satisfaction. I can see this already to some degree in my kids. I taught my older daughter, when she was young (8~12) how to build websites (html/js), code games (ruby), build 3D models (lightwave), etc. It was a great experience plus she now has a degree from a great college in engineering and has been gainfully employed since college at a good tech company (not using the exact things I taught her but tangentially related). I now have kids that are preteen/teen and I struggle with 1) "why bother", and 2) convincing them how these or similar skills might be of use to them. My teen boy is like "why do I need to learn this when I can just ask Claude" etc. I'm frankly at a bit of a loss.
nonameiguess 3mo ago
I'm not the world's most productive person in terms of getting any kind of tangible economic benefit from my activities, but I probably am the most dedicated learner I've ever known. I'm sure there are people on the Internet who learn even more, but I'm a sponge for information. Every weekend in the late 80s, I rode my bicycle down to the Norwalk branch of the LA public library, spent the entire day reading, then checked out the maximum number of books they allowed, which was 6 as far as I remember. Every week, another 6 books. Never fiction, not biographies or light reading. I was heavily interested in the SDI or "Star Wars" proposals Reagan had and read about particle beams, lasers, satellite communications, all public information about how missile defense worked. I was nationally ranked at NTN in the early 90s and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I came in 2nd in the California state spelling bee at one point. Got a perfect SAT score. I also came in 3rd in a statewide art competition and won my high school district's annual art show 3 of 4 years I was in high school. I've never had even an ounce of focus and master nothing, but get reasonably good at everything. Lettered in four different sports. Ended up with (so far) 4 bachelor's degrees and 3 master's. I'm the last person I know who still never uses an LLM for anything, in part because I don't feel I need to because I have answers and know how to do what I need to do without assistance, but also because I want that to continue to be the case. I'm willing to struggle and practice and devote more time to learning and less time to sleep or anything else because there is nothing in the world that gratifies me more and strokes my egoistic self-image than always having the answer, not because I'm asking the web but because I actually have the answer in my own mind. But I never tout this as some kind of way of being everyone needs to or should try to emulate. As I said at the outset, I can't think of any tangible benefit from doing this. I'm exactly the same upper middle-class, white-collar office worker earning a very good but nowhere near "fuck you" level of money exactly the same as all my peers who are mostly more ordinary people doing ordinary things like watching Love Island and whatever else ordinary people do. This isn't the automatic golden ticket to a good life. I have no social media accounts. I don't even know where my phone is right now and often don't have it with me. I watch no video on it ever. Most of my entertainment comes from listening to music and even then it's active because I usually listen to songs I can sing and sing along while listening. Even then, I'm still practicing and I'm a very good singer. None of this makes me any happier or any better than anyone else. My mental health is not skyrocketing through the roof because I'm unplugged from the 24 hours news cycle and don't feel the scrutiny of my body and lifestyle not matching an Instagram ideal. In fact, I probably do match that. I've managed to lift at least an hour a day far more days in my adult life than not. I still run even in my mid-40s. I can't get a sub-16 minute 5k like I could as a teenager but I'm in shape. I still sometimes hit 80 miles in a week. My BMI hasn't been over 22 and I haven't had double-digit body fat since being bedridden with spine injuries a decade ago. I look like an underwear model for no reason at all because nobody ever sees it and nobody cares. It doesn't matter. It's compulsion. I doubt myself and hate myself just as much as anyone else does. I can't sleep because I feel like nothing I ever do is enough and the slightest disturbance in sleep jolts me instantly awake with my mind racing anxious over all the things I believe I need to do, all the ways I'm not living up to my own potential. All those degrees? Shitty schools. No PhDs. Good job. Okay, but I've never made 7 figures in a year. Someday I will but that won't be enough, either. Even Michael Jordan was angry more often than happy, alienated every person he ever knew, and spent his hall of fame induction insulting people and being mad rather than celebrating his own accomplishments. The only real ticket is satisfaction, being able to say good enough is good enough. Spending too much time doomscrolling and not enough learning a second language? So what? Give yourself some grace. People who speak 19 languages are no happier or better than you are. Learning a 20th is every bit as compulsive and pointless as you watching TikTok. I want more content on the Internet, or anywhere else, telling people all the ways and all the reasons they're already good enough, not constantly pointing out any and all shortcomings of the world and their own personal habits.
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jitbit 3mo ago
I live in Europe, had to get my permanent residence permit and for that - you have to pass the language exam. Boy, that was some experience! I'm in my 40's so learning a new language has activated the brain muscles that were last active when I was... 4? They were so rusty, slow and amost physically refused to cooperate at first. This was tough. Now looking back it was absolutely worth it, best brain workout ever. Best.
B0laj1 3mo ago
Very impressive. In my own experience, starting something new is usually fun, just that sometimes it's like I'm burnt out or hyper focused on it. Let's say for example, I have a YouTube video that is an hour long, I watched the first 30mins the first day, on he second day, I watch the first half of the video again as a preamble but by the time I'm into the second half of the video, I loose focus and need to take a break again. An attention span of 30mins seems too little to me. Any ways to incrementally work on this? Anyone with similar experience?
- nyantaro1 3mo ago
  I don't suggest auto diagnosing, but those could be ADHD symptoms. I have the inattentive subtype and it sounds similar to my experience. Unfortunately, I don't have any advice on this
dirteater_ 3mo ago
> just find some starting point that doesn’t look like a sales funnel this adds to the difficulty in getting started; so many times you start down a path, don't make good progress and hit a paywall or realize the path you started on is just marketing for some (not even valuable) learning resource this is super common with language learning stuff, especially because AI makes it seem so cheap to produce learning content
k9294 3mo ago
What are some cool random things you've learned? // you == the reader of this comment
cui 3mo ago
Post like this is what keeps me on HN.
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
Agreed wholeheartedly! Struggling with what to learn? Learn to write! It’s the ultimate meta-skill.
mysticaltech- 3mo ago
> Practice is when you gather data for the brain to process overnight. Sleep is when improvements happen. This shift is such a game changer for me personally. It reduces how many times I ask myself “am I actually making any progress or just wasting time?” by putting all the pressure on “sleep’s REM phase” instead of me and my ability to learn. I don’t like cooking mostly because of how many dishes you have to wash afterwards. Saying “your sleep will handle the learning part” is like someone saying “feel free to cook the craziest dishes, I will do all the washing afterwards”.
drcongo 3mo ago
This is an article written by a young person.

479 points by tylerdane 3mo ago

"Learning anything is a long term project, and long term projects are necessary for building a sense of control over your circumstances. Almost nothing can be deliberately and meaningfully changed within the scope of a day, but in months, certainly years, a lot of things can be made to happen."

atoav 3mo ago
Nothing is as sad as seeing some young motivated student losing patience if the task doesn't turn out to be a quick, easy win. The saddest however are students so eager for the quick, easy win that throughout their academic career they repeat the pattern and never really dive deep into any topic. I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face. You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  Something I find myself struggling with is the "tutorial trap" You follow a tutorial to do something, feel happy about it. Then you start a new project to put your new skills to good use and... Blank. No idea where to start, no idea how to proceed. It's so important to build stuff, using references is fine, but following tutorials is not the way forward! You have to work on your own without the training wheels.
  - human305893 3mo ago
    why not both. limit yourself to 1 tutorial/book (i prefer books). then build something. For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build.
    - armchairhacker 3mo ago
      > For any creative hobby i think the biggest issue is not having something you want to build. For me it is. Even in my domain where I’m an expert and it’s fun, it only is if I’m working on something interesting.
      - atoav 3mo ago
        What does wonders for me is to go out into nature, a beach, a lake or a park, or even a longer train ride, with nothing but a pen and notebook, while keeping the phone in my bag. When I return usually I have a few pages of ideas. Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.
    - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
      My problem is honestly that I have too much I want to build, but I don't have all of the skills I need. I get stuck into this mentality of "I need to learn and master X, Y and Z before I can even start building my dream" Would be much better served by just building whatever and learning the skill
  - atoav 3mo ago
    Tutorials are fine, especially if you know nothing doing the motion is often better than fooling around. Just like with languages there are passive skilla (your capability to understand a certain thing) and active skills (you capability to use a thing practically when the situation demands it). It is natural to understand more than you can apply. Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails. Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result. When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped. But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc. The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    The great lesson here is: have your own thing you want to make or do, and then select tutorials that help you approach it, step by step. Reproduce the tutorial but also bring it to bear on something you want. In my experience most people can do this, if they think about it a bit — identify the thing they want to learn and find a tutorial for it. Which is amazing, really; this sort of meta-knowledge is a remarkable human concept.
- deleted 3mo ago
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bebe9494i4 3mo ago
[flagged]
- slekker 3mo ago
  Why the alt account?
- tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
  >especially with modern AI agents Do you people have to mention AI in every single subject.
  - bebe9494i4 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - stavros 3mo ago
      I agree with you, AI agents are fantastic for learning.
- purpleflashing 3mo ago
  Can you share how AI helps here? I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.
  - xpct 3mo ago
    I don't think we should expect to short-circuit learning for everything. Fumbling in Blender for hours on end is part of the process and what makes you good at it in the long term, much like grinding exercises in math or physics.
  - alfirous 3mo ago
    Curious, what's issues you encounter that LLM or Blender forum can't help? I also still learning Blender though not complex like yours (Product and Architecture), and LLM help me so much, it is save times that I previously will search on forum and YouTube.

dominex 3mo ago

Do you have any interest in trying a new language? If you have, there is a language.

zerobees 3mo ago

I'll get my agent on it right away.

CalRobert 3mo ago

"have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos, then you may want to put this ambition aside for now and deal with that instead" Even older kids... my 6 year old is jumping on the couch as I type this.. I like remote work but when I had to commute it was really nice to have that downtime built in to the day. I learned a lot of Dutch vocabulary on the train.

hahahaa 3mo ago
The hobby can be with the kid! E.g. go out on a kayak with them (safety first etc.) or learn to coach sport.
- HexPhantom 3mo ago
  That's probably the sweet spot
HexPhantom 3mo ago
There's something useful about time that is already spoken for. You're on the train, you can't do much else, so learning some Dutch feels easy. At home the same half hour somehow gets fragmented into six different things
asp_hornet 3mo ago
Don’t be fooled, the first few years you get spoiled with “the first moments” of things. Then suddenly the “last moments” start creeping in, “the last nappy”, “the last car seat”, at first they seem like a god send but then they accumulate like an avalanche. One day you will pick them up and, and most likely neither of you will know it, but it will be the last time you ever do. Treasure everything, even the insanity.
- sarchertech 3mo ago
  I plan to keep lifting my kids everyday like Milo. Hopefully I can push off the last time I pick them up till they’re 30 or so.

casey2 3mo ago

Maybe, but unless you are unusually talented I'd advise against it. For every consumer there is a producer and vice versa. Most people are better off as consumers and this give more eyeballs and resources to the few talented producers.

kruffalon 3mo ago
Maybe other people, besides you; obviously, like doing, knowing or learning things without the need to be the most efficient at it. Like, in a just having a life kind of way. But what do I know?
dofm 3mo ago
This makes me sad. I am very confident it's also wrong; it fundamentally misapprehends what talent is. As well as not particularly being innate or "god-given", talents tend to emerge only when supported by learned ability. And not even just your own learned ability. Talented violinists exist only in a world that had talented violin makers: you perhaps cannot fully know how society could benefit from things you could learn. Two of my mini-talents are things I used to think were not just difficult but actually things I would be specifically bad at, like, worse than most people. (Which may for complex reasons be a sign I would not be) I believe it also misapprehends where the boundary between practice and consumption can sit, too, but that's a longer comment. No matter which side of the equation you sit, try to unlearn this belief you have, and help others unlearn it.

ElProlactin 3mo ago

> While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out. This honestly is a bit of an understatement, it really sucks and depending on the task, odds are you may want to lie down for a bit when you’re done with your first practice session. You’ll also almost certainly perform significantly worse toward the end of the session. All this is your brain and muscles getting tired. It’s a good meta-skill to learn to self-assess and pick up on this. > Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier. This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.

HexPhantom 3mo ago
I think there's a middle group too: people who like having learned something, but don't really enjoy those first few sessions. For them, just knowing that the initial frustration is normal can help a lot

mordechai9000 3mo ago

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn. - T.H. White, The Once and Future King

HexPhantom 3mo ago
Wanna say that this is a much better argument for learning than productivity or "becoming a more interesting person". Sometimes it is simply a way to keep the mind pointed outward
globalnode 3mo ago
that is beautiful, its something i believe as well but never seen it written so eloquenty. when everythings gone to hell and your backed into a corner, learning something interesting is always there for you.
- jrmg 3mo ago
  “The Once and Future King” is an odd book. I read it recently - as an adult - and I’m not sure I ‘enjoyed’ reading it. It has a lot of ‘childishness’, especially in the first 2/3, of a kind I’ve never really liked in it. Perhaps the kind _adults_ think kids enjoy. But it’s also full of stuff like this at unexpected moments. Wonder at the world; consideration of others; the burden of leadership. I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
  - sanderjd 3mo ago

HexPhantom 3mo ago

One thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet

spudlyo 3mo ago
Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them. Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
- molybd3num 3mo ago
  reminds me of "tutorial hell"
- cheesecakegood 3mo ago
  I think the book Superlearning just gives the simple rule that you should spend 10% of your budgeted time on meta concerns (what to learn, what order, what strategies to use, etc) and that’s always seemed a sensible, good-enough default that takes away the doubt. Knowing how deep to go is, as you point out, only half the battle unfortunately, but the rule helped me at least.
aquariusDue 3mo ago
Also engaging with others learning the same thing within the overall community is also tremendously helpful and accelerates learning. Though you need to get over the fear of asking silly or obvious in hindsight questions in the wrong Discord channel sometimes.

hallucinate 3mo ago

[flagged]

Ugvx 3mo ago

I came to a similar conclusion last weekend. My 20 year old car was having some issues and instead of taking g it to the mechanic to be charged $1,000, thought I would give it a try myself. 3 hours later and the problem was fixed. And I learned a lot in the process.

bartvk 3mo ago
I had the same with my motorcycle. Every time I brought it to the dealer, they came up enthusiastically with things to spend money on. Your tires are done! Your break pads are gone! With the help of a friend, I got into doing (very) basic maintenance myself. I just replaced the tires. I fixed a problem with the electrical system. And next will be the chain and sprocket.
andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
YouTube has been a godsend for these types of problems. It's like LLM output, you need to validate and cross reference but combined with other sources of information, easy purchase of parts and problems that actually have solutions (vs "buy a new one") I've saved thousands on cars, appliances and home repairs
culebron21 3mo ago
That's why I do all DIY myself, incliding plumbing or electrics. Craftsmen cost money and they try to finish in one session, so they do lots of compromises. Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.

yetkin 3mo ago

I cannot deny the value of learning but there is a fact that learning can be a way of procrastination. This happens when the joy of learning overtake and diverge you from a goal. Nothing wrong about it, it is a time well spent. But I think there must be a balance as well

raincole 3mo ago
"Sometimes I feel like I'm an athlete who trained all day for years, then before my first professional match, I retired and went off to teach PE."
- sanderjd 3mo ago
  Is this a quote from something?
xandrius 3mo ago
Learning is not just strictly studying. I'd say most of the learning is done by actually doing.
andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
Learning can be the goal if you're lucky. Maybe sharing your learning is the next step and that's enough too. You don't need to apply it to something someone defines as "worthy" for validation.
abalashov 3mo ago
The only way I ever learned anything or built anything of value (one of those things still accounts for most of my revenue, 10-15 years later) was by blowing off doing what I was supposed to be doing at that moment, in the classic sense described by PG here: https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html (Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.) Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago

As someone who has done “self-directed” learning, for my entire life (high school dropout, with a GED), I can certainly relate. I like to learn new stuff, every day. I have found LLMs to be a godsend, here. Makes it much easier to just barge into unfamiliar territory. Whenever I come across essays like this, I like to post The Gap, by Ira Glass[0]; one of the more encouraging short essays out there. [0] https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589

andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
LLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  Oh yeah, but the same goes for almost any information source (especially these days).
  - abalashov 3mo ago
    Yeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes. They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
    - brookst 3mo ago
      There are plenty of authoritative reference books full of errors. Teachers in every subject can be wrong, convincingly.
      - abalashov 3mo ago
        Yes, but human errors are based on genuine and elaborate misconceptions (or propagandistic intent), not squishy, facile "you're right to push back on that, I straight up made that up" type stuff.

Fraterkes 3mo ago

I’ll chime in. I started learning to draw in my early twenties, couple hours a week. What helps a lot is joining a club, I’ve got a group in my town that just goes to a bar one night a week and draws and chats for 3 hours. Great way to ensure that you get at least a few hours of drawing in, even if your week is too busy for “practice”. It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you’ll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions. Seems like a long time, but unless you start in your seventies you’ll have decades left of enjoying being an artist afterwards.

coffeefirst 3mo ago
And even if you don’t get all that good or turn it into a lifelong hobby, that just sounds fun.

forgotusername6 3mo ago

There's really a feeling now pushing back against learning in general. The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. When I started learning Chinese a friend just wouldn't stop talking about how the latest airpods will just be able to translate for you. It was really rather demoralising. But there is still something incredibly rewarding about having that knowledge in your own head and not having to go find someone or something to ask. I push on regardless.

forinti 3mo ago
I've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se. I've even realised a few things about my own language.
- abalashov 3mo ago
  Приятно слышать, а то иногда народ говорит, что это мертвый язык...
bilsbie 3mo ago
Even if so, once I realized how pointless doomscrolling is I figured I might as well use that time to learn something pointless.
andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
I've been learning Spanish and I find a big positive motivator is finding and practicing slang words and vulgar phrases. They usually have cultural roots and are highly contextual, so it requires a deeper understanding than just translation. I only speak them sparingly with my few native speaker friends, who find it hilarious when I inevitably use them incorrectly - or rarely get it exactly right.
bilsbie 3mo ago
> The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you. Why walk or jog of the car can do it for you?

kruffalon 3mo ago

I really like how the article focuses on rest and not doing the thing as a core part of learning. How learning and doing aren't exactly the same and that you need to get back to it many times rather than doing a lot at once. It's ofc nothing new and the same principle as for example spaced repetition.

ronbenton 3mo ago

One “trick” nowadays is to just do a thing for the sake of doing the thing. I draw. Not to post my drawings to social media, not to try to get income from paid commissions, but rather just to enjoy the act of drawing. It’s very liberating in a world where it feels like almost everything has to be in service of some kind of larger scheme.

LatencyKills 3mo ago
I retired a few years ago and now do a slew of things (photography, robotics, 3D printing, etc.) entirely for myself. I'll start a project, have a blast learning/building, then simply move on to the next thing. Learning for the sake of learning is one of my favorite things in life.
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  Not finishing - or even being able to define the finish line - is a great sign you're doing this right. You're not a tortoise seeking mastery; it's ok to be a distracted hare!

khurs 3mo ago

The education system is to blame. Kids are conditioned to associate learning with a formal course with a tutor culminating in exams. It's also intentional to segregate skills, if schools taught every child basic plumbing or car mechanics for example instead of spending a month teaching something that won't get used in life, there would be less job in those fields.

sanderjd 3mo ago
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
SoftTalker 3mo ago
So there's a conspiracy between plumbers, mechanics, and public schools to not teach basic handyman skills to the students? We used to have "shop" (or similarly named) classes for this in junior high/middle school. They have mostly been cut, but more for budgetary reasons. A lot of high schools still have a vocational department for the kids who are not college-bound and not complete wasteoids.
- khurs 3mo ago
  I'm not in USA, so can't speak for you. But here in UK it is accepted that schools were, and remain, designed to produce well behaved consumers and workers.

frankie_t 3mo ago

It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually: - energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone - correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear. - uninterrupted time I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy. Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.

Scarblac 3mo ago
But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It takes up so many hours but you also don't really rest, and it also tends to keep you up too long at night. If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.
- dofm 3mo ago
  > But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often. To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere. (OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.) Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby. And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix. I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.

i_am_a_peasant 3mo ago

For me the biggest learning investment outside work I put is learning Chinese and Vietnamese. I tried music but I gave it up after a year. And I can just do it on my commute to work as well. I also like reading about 19 century comparative history. Gives me a lot of relevant talking points in a lot of conversation.

andrew_lettuce 3mo ago

It's great to be an amateur learner, but if you want to get better (or just make learning more effective) I really liked the (very easy read) Little Book of Talent. It focuses on how to get good, but that's really about how we learn and practice. Highly motivational and some interesting counterintuitive ideas: https://danielcoyle.com/the-little-book-of-talent/ https://danielcoyle.com/the-little-book-of-talent/

aguacaterojo 3mo ago

I started playing video games in Spanish about a year ago. I've finished about 20 now. I had a base of course & was doing little courses etc. But I've sunk 100s of hours now focusing on text and voice heavy games and it went from very tiring and looking up the dictionary constantly to fun and fluid. I can finally watch a lot of stuff without subtitles now. Someone catalogues which games have been dubbed (focused on Spanish of Spain) at this site https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/ https://www.doblajevideojuegos.es/ the quality of most new dubs I've seen has been very high

absoluteunit1 3mo ago

Learning something new often can take as little 10-15 minutes a day of focused time. If you do it consistently, it becomes easier and easier to maintain, and it starts to require less and less mental capacity to start > You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. shameless plug: if you are interested in learning touch typing, i built a data driven touch typing application: https://typequicker.com https://typequicker.com it started as a side project (combined wanting to learn typing with my desire to build a side business while working at amazon. working on this (almost) full time now

ur-whale 3mo ago

Couldn't find a mention of age in the article. It was probably written by a relatively young person. Nice intent and advice, but in practice, mostly harder and harder to do as time passes by.

marginalia_nu 3mo ago
(author) I'm 40. Haven't really had any increase in difficulty learning things yet. Maybe when I'm 60 I'll have different ideas.

cwiz 3mo ago

I learned a lot myself, but lately I just can't make it on stable regime because you don't get much positive feedback you you're learning something yourself. There's no grades, no exams and all of your motivation is internal. In that case you need to work on a motivation and goals. Why would you learn something that doesn't pays off then?

9183726518 3mo ago
To improve your life, circumatances, abilities. To have a larger amount of known concepts to connect to each other. To increase your stability, security, quality of life, and self reliance. To make more money. To decrease your reliance on uncontrollable and unstable factors.
xpct 3mo ago
I'm quite fortunate to keep piling on knowledge without extrinsic rewards: the acquisition itself and the rewiring of my brain is what makes it enjoyable for me. I look up to people who are well-read and try to follow their example. Maybe one day I can inspire somebody else.
hackable_sand 3mo ago
You are tending a garden

russfink 3mo ago

I’m attempting to learn to use a slide rule. It’s quite a history lesson - we take for granted the large precision we get on calculators. But the learning is taking repeated visits, about 30 minutes at a time. I’m slowly getting it.

jschveibinz 3mo ago

I went back to school in my 50's to learn how to teach. Two of the most important takeaways from that experience were: 1) learning how to learn; and 2) using projects to learn Writing about your experience in learning is also a powerful tool. If you can describe it to your journal (or someone else), you really know it.

dofm 3mo ago
What did you study, specifically? This is the life transition I am considering (and at a similar age). Did you do a teaching degree or equivalent, or something a bit more theoretical/philosophical? And who do you now teach?

Go7hic 3mo ago

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softwaredoug 3mo ago

This is why I don’t get the perverse pleasure people get when they say they don’t look at code anymore It’s not like we’ve created a new abstraction layer with coding agents. It’s a leaky factory where every part up and down can break and/or be improved. The best factories thrive in a learning culture. Where humans grow their knowledge to improve the operation of the factory. From nuts and bolts up to larger systems. How do you do that without reading code? Without writing code? I started even replacing my use of specs with exploratory coding to grow my own knowledge and context https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-specs https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...

AFF87 3mo ago

Lifelong learning as the ultimate skill

connerpocket 3mo ago

This resonated with me, although my experience has been a little different. I started playing pool in college around 2017 and, without really intending to, it became something I did at least once a week. I never had a structured practice routine or any goal of getting really good. I just enjoyed playing, and after enough years I realized I'd become a decent player. I never gambled, but we usually played loser-pays, so every session still cost a bit. I'm unemployed right now, so I've stopped going because it just doesn't fit my budget anymore.

Waterluvian 3mo ago

I need a benevolent alien to force me out of my rut when I’m in one. I had no problems as a kid because I had little choice at times, like the weekends where I was going to learn how to put siding on a cottage or plumb a bathroom, even though I wanted to play Zelda more than anything. I hated those summers and now that I’m a homeowner, I am deeply thankful for them. Literally an hour ago my 7 and 9 year olds came to mom and I and said, “thank you for disabling YouTube. We are having so much fun.” I know this sounds like a fake Donald Trump kind of story but I swear to god it just happened.

wavemode 3mo ago

The key is to find something that you enjoy sucking at. I recently picked up quad rollerskating and the process of getting steadier and smoother at it (while just enjoying the vibes, music and community at my local rink) has become an obsession. It's my new third-favorite hobby (after programming and competitive cornhole).

tayo42 3mo ago

The idea overall is fine. Do adults have success learning art? Like actually getting good at it? I've been kind of overwhelmed by how much time is expected of students to learn art to get good. Like its treated like a full time job? I see people online casually throw out spending 8-10 hours a day on things.

noisy_boy 3mo ago

Because this seems like an appropriate topic/place to ask, are there say 20 books on a variety of topics that one can say are very useful to build a foundation of our world, in the physical and metaphorical sense? Literature probably shouldn't be in that list because literature is just a universe of its own and a lot of it is just not that accessible. E.g. I am not knowledgeable enough to be able to read Mahabharata or Odyssey in the original language.

rrgok 3mo ago

I honestly don't feel rewarding learning anymore. I might be depressed, because I feel all human experiences are overrated. And such, learning is such futile exercise in postponing the reality of life.

jeffreportmill1 3mo ago
I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.

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threethirtytwo 3mo ago

In the future we will just have our agentic assistant learn it for us.

ubj 3mo ago

> and/or have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos Slightly off topic, but as a parent I found this hilarious and will now be closely watching to see if any of my own screaming logos ever perfectly hit the corner of a room.

gkcnlr 3mo ago

Learning process must be accompanied with enough space for an individual to realistically challenge himself to actually acquire that knowledge with foreseeable success of doing it. A person must believe s/he can really learn something. But in this status quo of AI hypeism (believing that knowing refined set of know-hows would be enough) people gradually begin losing that optimistic "a priori" belief to learn things. But another side effect of this process is if people stop believing in the accrual of the knowledge which will lead them to nowhere (use cases for those information becoming irrelevant by the time you start using it), justifying this mentally exhausting practice becomes really hard. And I don't mean this on learning static information but also on how to define and build a meta-cognitive framework to systemically learn things. I don't quite get the "lifelong learning" approach, since lifelong learning must usually be accompanied with organic evolution of the information space. Employers wont pay you because you are a lifelong learner, they'll pay you to actually fix a problem you provide a solution for. And that solution isn't guaranteed by the knowledge you possess and doesn't usually qualify the marginal cost of being a lifelong learner. One could brain storm on these issues by critiquing the premise of this book: https://www.amazon.com/100-Year-Life-Living-Working-Longevity/dp/1472930150 https://www.amazon.com/100-Year-Life-Living-Working-Longevit...

jdw64 3mo ago

I've been running my own website lately (www.makonea.com), and writing out my knowledge as articles made me realize just how much I was lacking. Running your own website is something I'd recommend trying.

DaveZale 3mo ago

a couple of decades ago there was viral advice going around about "the 1000 hour rule" saying that's how long it would take to master something new. Maybe it's time to refresh that?

insane_dreamer 3mo ago

I like learning new things, and have done so my whole life. But thinking about our AI future, I think that learning as a goal will be greatly diminished, when the reward of learning many things is essentially zero other than your own personal satisfaction. I can see this already to some degree in my kids. I taught my older daughter, when she was young (8~12) how to build websites (html/js), code games (ruby), build 3D models (lightwave), etc. It was a great experience plus she now has a degree from a great college in engineering and has been gainfully employed since college at a good tech company (not using the exact things I taught her but tangentially related). I now have kids that are preteen/teen and I struggle with 1) "why bother", and 2) convincing them how these or similar skills might be of use to them. My teen boy is like "why do I need to learn this when I can just ask Claude" etc. I'm frankly at a bit of a loss.

nonameiguess 3mo ago

I'm not the world's most productive person in terms of getting any kind of tangible economic benefit from my activities, but I probably am the most dedicated learner I've ever known. I'm sure there are people on the Internet who learn even more, but I'm a sponge for information. Every weekend in the late 80s, I rode my bicycle down to the Norwalk branch of the LA public library, spent the entire day reading, then checked out the maximum number of books they allowed, which was 6 as far as I remember. Every week, another 6 books. Never fiction, not biographies or light reading. I was heavily interested in the SDI or "Star Wars" proposals Reagan had and read about particle beams, lasers, satellite communications, all public information about how missile defense worked. I was nationally ranked at NTN in the early 90s and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I came in 2nd in the California state spelling bee at one point. Got a perfect SAT score. I also came in 3rd in a statewide art competition and won my high school district's annual art show 3 of 4 years I was in high school. I've never had even an ounce of focus and master nothing, but get reasonably good at everything. Lettered in four different sports. Ended up with (so far) 4 bachelor's degrees and 3 master's. I'm the last person I know who still never uses an LLM for anything, in part because I don't feel I need to because I have answers and know how to do what I need to do without assistance, but also because I want that to continue to be the case. I'm willing to struggle and practice and devote more time to learning and less time to sleep or anything else because there is nothing in the world that gratifies me more and strokes my egoistic self-image than always having the answer, not because I'm asking the web but because I actually have the answer in my own mind. But I never tout this as some kind of way of being everyone needs to or should try to emulate. As I said at the outset, I can't think of any tangible benefit from doing this. I'm exactly the same upper middle-class, white-collar office worker earning a very good but nowhere near "fuck you" level of money exactly the same as all my peers who are mostly more ordinary people doing ordinary things like watching Love Island and whatever else ordinary people do. This isn't the automatic golden ticket to a good life. I have no social media accounts. I don't even know where my phone is right now and often don't have it with me. I watch no video on it ever. Most of my entertainment comes from listening to music and even then it's active because I usually listen to songs I can sing and sing along while listening. Even then, I'm still practicing and I'm a very good singer. None of this makes me any happier or any better than anyone else. My mental health is not skyrocketing through the roof because I'm unplugged from the 24 hours news cycle and don't feel the scrutiny of my body and lifestyle not matching an Instagram ideal. In fact, I probably do match that. I've managed to lift at least an hour a day far more days in my adult life than not. I still run even in my mid-40s. I can't get a sub-16 minute 5k like I could as a teenager but I'm in shape. I still sometimes hit 80 miles in a week. My BMI hasn't been over 22 and I haven't had double-digit body fat since being bedridden with spine injuries a decade ago. I look like an underwear model for no reason at all because nobody ever sees it and nobody cares. It doesn't matter. It's compulsion. I doubt myself and hate myself just as much as anyone else does. I can't sleep because I feel like nothing I ever do is enough and the slightest disturbance in sleep jolts me instantly awake with my mind racing anxious over all the things I believe I need to do, all the ways I'm not living up to my own potential. All those degrees? Shitty schools. No PhDs. Good job. Okay, but I've never made 7 figures in a year. Someday I will but that won't be enough, either. Even Michael Jordan was angry more often than happy, alienated every person he ever knew, and spent his hall of fame induction insulting people and being mad rather than celebrating his own accomplishments. The only real ticket is satisfaction, being able to say good enough is good enough. Spending too much time doomscrolling and not enough learning a second language? So what? Give yourself some grace. People who speak 19 languages are no happier or better than you are. Learning a 20th is every bit as compulsive and pointless as you watching TikTok. I want more content on the Internet, or anywhere else, telling people all the ways and all the reasons they're already good enough, not constantly pointing out any and all shortcomings of the world and their own personal habits.

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jitbit 3mo ago

I live in Europe, had to get my permanent residence permit and for that - you have to pass the language exam. Boy, that was some experience! I'm in my 40's so learning a new language has activated the brain muscles that were last active when I was... 4? They were so rusty, slow and amost physically refused to cooperate at first. This was tough. Now looking back it was absolutely worth it, best brain workout ever. Best.

B0laj1 3mo ago

Very impressive. In my own experience, starting something new is usually fun, just that sometimes it's like I'm burnt out or hyper focused on it. Let's say for example, I have a YouTube video that is an hour long, I watched the first 30mins the first day, on he second day, I watch the first half of the video again as a preamble but by the time I'm into the second half of the video, I loose focus and need to take a break again. An attention span of 30mins seems too little to me. Any ways to incrementally work on this? Anyone with similar experience?

nyantaro1 3mo ago
I don't suggest auto diagnosing, but those could be ADHD symptoms. I have the inattentive subtype and it sounds similar to my experience. Unfortunately, I don't have any advice on this

dirteater_ 3mo ago

> just find some starting point that doesn’t look like a sales funnel this adds to the difficulty in getting started; so many times you start down a path, don't make good progress and hit a paywall or realize the path you started on is just marketing for some (not even valuable) learning resource this is super common with language learning stuff, especially because AI makes it seem so cheap to produce learning content

k9294 3mo ago

What are some cool random things you've learned? // you == the reader of this comment

cui 3mo ago

Post like this is what keeps me on HN.

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

Agreed wholeheartedly! Struggling with what to learn? Learn to write! It’s the ultimate meta-skill.

mysticaltech- 3mo ago

> Practice is when you gather data for the brain to process overnight. Sleep is when improvements happen. This shift is such a game changer for me personally. It reduces how many times I ask myself “am I actually making any progress or just wasting time?” by putting all the pressure on “sleep’s REM phase” instead of me and my ability to learn. I don’t like cooking mostly because of how many dishes you have to wash afterwards. Saying “your sleep will handle the learning part” is like someone saying “feel free to cook the craziest dishes, I will do all the washing afterwards”.

drcongo 3mo ago

This is an article written by a young person.