Make building your mind a habit.
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Make building your mind a habit.
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I was destined to be a statistic.
Born with an iPad in my hand, I was wired from the start to take the path of least resistance.
Food was eaten in order of taste.
Movies were watched based on how flashy they were.
Homework and sleep were skipped because it was simply less exciting than video games.
My path was predictable: I'd aspire to waste my time in some low-paying, unfulfilling job just so I could continue to waste my time at home.
I was motivated by ego, however. To say I was smarter than my classmates, I taught myself Algebra 2 online.
That's when everything changed.
I'd gotten a taste of learning for the sake of learning.
Behind the bureaucracy of school hid the joy of discovery, and I had just uncovered a glimmer of it.
I wasn't advanced in school. Like many, I rightfully didn't see the point of it.
My parents would get calls from my math teacher about how I was missing dozens of homework assignments. I even became the class clown because of boredom.
When I got that taste of learning math for fun and truly understanding, I became obsessed.
Well, you can call what followed obsession, but it could be better categorized as addiction.
Education became my entertainment.
I had finished one year of math in two weeks.
The next class was done in a month.
The entire next year of school finished over summer break.
Halfway through ninth grade, I was taking college math, English, and
computer science classes.
From being at a normal level to being able to drop out of high school for college in a handful of months.
This wasn't motivation.
This wasn't discipline or hard work.
This wasn't because I hated school (even though I did).
This was because I replaced a couple of hours of mindless entertainment with mindful learning.
When I stripped away my addictions and the desires programmed into me by others, I realized all I wanted was to learn, explore, and solve problems.
I didn't just teach myself math, even though that's how I began my self-education journey.
I dove deep into the sciences, self-improvement, languages, fitness, and even music. That's incredible coming from the kid who would flex the fact he didn't listen to music just to be different.
It's important to note that this wasn't some drastic change at all. When I started teaching myself I still played video games, ate junk food, and was scared of exercise.
I just slowly replaced those things with learning. The lets-play YouTube videos of people playing video games changed to those of people solving integrals, "Meme Compilation #21" became "The Top 10 Bicep Exercises," and so on.
The more I got a taste of how it felt to become better as a direct result of my actions, the more I replaced bad habits with learning.
(Soon enough I discovered bodybuilding, but that's another story.)
The main point is this: I realized that learning makes delayed gratification addicting.
Usually, the things that are good for you in the future are boring now, but not with learning. Done correctly, the feedback loop can be so quick that it becomes thrilling.
That's powerful knowledge to have. Done the right way, you can master any discipline and not even realize it was hard work.
Like me, you could transcend out of the constraining environment of school and become a software engineer. Or, you could become an expert in your interests and post about it on social media. You can even finally become interesting enough to get a girlfriend!
The material benefits are honestly limitless – learning is how you gain leverage in a world where we've replaced physical pain with mental plight.
But more important than material benefits is fulfillment.
We were given this brain to make sense of the noise around us. To find patterns, and learn how to break them.
My hope in life is for everyone to experience the joy of understanding – the excitement between going from a lower state of awareness to one above, where you can't believe you've lived your whole life not knowing what you just learned.
From the "when will I ever use the quadratic formula" excuses and the "I don't have time" lies, schools have ruined the reputation of learning.
I hope to show you, however, that the learning you do in school isn't the learning I'm talking about.
In school, you "learn" to
I'm talking about learning to
Perhaps the school board is conspiring to keep us stupid and agreeable, or perhaps it's impossible to teach in a useful way to so many people at once.
I believe that you can learn properly in school, but you're never taught how to and are heavily incentivized to take shortcuts.
Either way, it's up to us to educate ourselves now, because what we were taught to do wasn't learning.
Learning is a skill that you can only learn by doing it.
By the time you graduate college, you should be excellent at learning the way school wants you to learn, but this is different.
After 5 years of refining the process of teaching myself, here are my principles for learning.
I realized that it's okay to learn things that won't make you more money.
The point of making money is so you can always learn whatever you want. Don't lose sight of that.
It's much better to learn the things you're interested in and start drawing connections between those topics.
Then, you can use those connections to create a business or at the very least gain a massive edge in the workplace.
Paradoxically, those who learn for fun end up being the ones able to keep going when the hard times come, so it ends up being an advantage over your competition in the long term.
That being said, here's my 5-second review of some of the subjects I've learned:
Math – This is the skill that teaches you how to find patterns in seemingly unrelated things, and then make those patterns useful. If this sounds familiar, that's because this is how you create value in business. 9/10 highly recommend.
Programming – Similar to math, except even more practical. Unlike math, however, it's very hard to understand how everything works from the ground up (But if you do, you'll be set career-wise).
Fitness and nutrition – Oh no, the food you're eating is killing you! But for real, this one is non-negotiable.
Writing – This is huge, albeit I'm much newer to it. With the internet, writing makes your other skills monetizable. This gives a massive return on investment, especially paired with something like fitness or programming.
Marketing and sales – I'm not an expert in any regard, but I've heard good things, as it has similar benefits to writing.
I'm teaching my younger sister math. I asked her to simplify expressions using exponent rules, and she either got some very quickly or did something so wrong it was impressive.
For the questions she got quickly, I asked her to explain what she was doing, so she tells me about the rules.
"So, \(\sqrt{x}\) is just \(x\) to the \(\frac12\) power." (Which is correct.)
"Why?" I asked.
"I don't know, the teacher told me?"
No, no, no, no, no! That's not how you learn. The point of learning math is to learn why the logical steps are logical at all, so you can apply that thinking to more useful things.
It was clear why she got some questions quickly and some not at all. She was learning to apply some God-given rules to a certain structure of question and not the question itself. When the structure didn't match the rule, she couldn't use the rule.
Had she questioned her teacher and seen why it had to be the case that \(\sqrt{x}\) is \(x^{1/2}\) (using principles like exponentiation is repeated multiplication) the structure of the questions wouldn't matter as long as she applied those same principles.
I want you to adopt the following mindset:
They could be lying to you.
The teachers, the scientists, your parents, and the reputable organizations.
The facts they're giving you could be wrong and it's up to you to understand why they're right.
This is much harder than taking their word for it, but their word and their facts are useless.
What's useful is the ability to come up with facts using first principles. This is the skill you need to discover new things, enjoy what you're learning, and not get replaced by AI.
To learn something new, choose an idea, put yourself in the shoes of the first person to discover it, then reinvent it.
If you're stuck, that's fine, you still learn. Sparingly see how others reinvented that same idea and use a small part of their process as a hint.
For math, take a peek at the proof.
For software, look at the source code for a related project.
For writing, read something similar by an author.
The main point is, however, you need to be able to explain incredibly well why a certain thing is done or you didn't truly understand how it's done.
If you can't go back in time and rediscover something, then you don't understand it.
As long as you use that as your litmus test for understanding, you'll enjoy learning, become more interesting as a result, and perhaps even make some money.
Deep down, your purpose includes increasing your awareness of the world.
Make it into your entertainment, and success is inevitable.
You must peel back the years of conditioning from school that tells you learning needs to be useful, must be tested for, or is most optimally done by memorization.
No, for learning is reinventing.
See you soon.
Lawrence Qupty