👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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Q: When learning something new, what is a good way to get started?
I’ve recently taken a bit of interest in eating healthy. To get started I was searching for “the best book on nutrition” when suddenly I realised that I had fallen into that same old clichéd trap.
This is one of the most common practices when people are getting started with a new skill or a new body of knowledge. You hunt for the best book, the best blog post, the best video, the best tutorial, the best online class before you begin. This method is very common but extremely flawed.
When you start to learn a new language, you don’t necessarily start with the dictionary, so why do it this way for everything else? This process follows the school system. Before giving exams or getting into practicals children are taught a lot of structured theory. But if you see how kids learn to speak or walk, they do it devoid of any books of curriculum. They imitate, take a step of two, fall down, make mistakes, and press on. Kids learn through thrills and pleasure, and it’s time we adults learn to do the same as well.
I believe that it doesn’t matter where you begin, as long as you put things into practice sooner than later. Before starting my first company, I was under the impression that I’ll have to read all the popular startup books before getting any real work done. I devoured all the books I could find. Most of them were good, with practical advice, but none of them, none of them came close to doing real work.
Watching others talk and walk doesn’t make an infant learn to walk and talk. Reading about cricket doesn’t make a kid learn to play. Learning happens when we follow our curiosity. And curiosity usually follows a similar path: pick something, learn a bit about it, then try some, fail some, get stuck, and go back to the source. Then try some more, fail some more, get stuck, and then go back to the source once more. This cycle continues.
If your curiosity is short-lived then even the world’s most structured course will not be able to help you. On the other hand, if you follow your curiosity, then learning a few rough ideas from a okayish blog post is enough to give you a head start.
Back in college, a professor of mine used to say, “Never start a book from the beginning.” A book starts to become interesting in the middle. Always start a book from the middle, never at the start. This way, you’ll only be reading the interesting things, and whenever you get stuck you can always go back to refer the definitions. If you think about it, this is the actual essence of learning — making it practical and fun from the beginning, and always circling back to the source material when stuck.
Learning is not a linear process. It’s a spiralling process. In a linear process, you learn and you implement — there’s a fixed start and end. While the spiralling process gives you the opportunity to gradually add new ideas, make connections between the ideas, see what fits, and reject what doesn’t. This goes on and on. It doesn’t matter where you start.
Tetris is an excellent metaphor of how real learning happens. What do you do when the tiles start to fall? You rotate them to see what fits — it involves a lot of trial and error. This activity of continuous rotating and seeing what fits isn’t wasted effort. Solving a maze also leads to a lot of trial and error, and you often hit a lot of dead ends. These are all essential elements for deeper understanding of a subject.
After I started my first business, and even after I was well into my second business, I always had to circle back to Zero to One and The Hard Thing About Hard Things no matter how many times I had read them already. What I’m trying to say is, even if you spend a lot of time delving into theory, you are going to go back to them at a later time anyway, so there’s no point in trying to master everything before taking the first step. This way you’ll save a lot of time in procrastination as well.
When I did street photography, it was just me and my camera out in the streets. It was after I took a bunch of ugly shots that I started reading upon how to get better at it. It was only after I realised how intimidating it can be that I read photographer Thomas Leuthard and Eric Kim’s best practices and tips on street etiquettes.
I started guitar with a few easy chords and the most common songs. Then I went to the YouTube channel Justin Guitar to improve my craft.
I started iOS development by trying to build an app. When I got stuck, I went to Stack Overflow or a friend. A decade back, I started to learn design in the very same manner.
The best way to get fit is to start by exercising and getting rid of sugary food. If it’s a thick domain (for e.g. investment and nutrition), you might have to learn the fundamentals — a fraction of it — and start putting it into practice in bits and pieces.
When you get stuck or want to up your game, simply circle back to books and other resources.
Timeless Wisdom
Never change yourself for somebody else, no matter who that person is. You would regret it later.
Change yourself only for yourself—perhaps with the help of somebody else.
From the Internet
How Pandemics End — “An infectious outbreak can conclude in more ways than one, historians say. But for whom does it end, and who gets to decide?”
Patio11’s Law — “It’s not surprising. Of the 3,000+ software companies acquired over the last three years, only 7% got TechCrunch, Recode, HN, or other mainstream tech coverage.”
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage — “I had just read about their $400 million Series F and it was among the WeWorkian class of companies that, for me, represented everything wrong about startup evolution through the 2010s. Raise a ton of money, lose a ton of money, and just obliterate the basic economics of an industry.”
When “Grin and Bear It” Isn't the Right Answer — “When the First Round Review team asked me to write something about staying healthy in the time of COVID-19, I spent a sleepless night on a post about how to create behaviour change during this stressful season. You can’t really blame me — I’ve been a behavioural scientist for more than 15 years and like everyone, when pressed, I default to what I know.”
The Passion Economy and the Future of Work — “The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month.”
Today I Learnt
I’m reading Why We Sleep and I was surprised to find that some people are genetically hardwired to be night owls (people who sleep late and wakeup late) and morning larks (the opposite).
For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,” and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness.
From an evolutionary context, this definitely makes a lot of sense. Having different wakeful hours would make people go to sleep at different times. This effectively increased our chances of survival back in the days when we were living in the African savanna.
Honestly I was a bit surprised after learning about it. All this time I thought it was a lifestyle choice. I mean, I’ve been both a morning lark and a night owl. I do believe that going to bed late comes more naturally to me, but I should also mention that my morning lark days have been much more productive.
I like having a morning ritual. It’s simple: wake up, do some light exercise, take a shower, write something, or read a few pages with a cup of tea. (I used to be a coffee person but my girlfriend loves tea, and these days I’m in charge of breakfast, so I’ve kind of shifted towards tea.)
Waking up late ruins this morning ritual completely. I believe that conquering your morning gives you a lot of energy. It’s a small win, and you get off to a great start for the day. As much as I love this practice, I haven’t been able to maintain it on a regular basis, especially during the lockdown.
What I’m Watching
Vectors, What Even Are They? — My friend Noel shared this video with me. Do you know that scalar refers to scaling? This video teaches you how to specifically think about vectors in the context of linear algebra.
The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory — If you don’t know it already I’m a huge huge fan of Daniel Kahneman. His very ideas got me so much interested in human behaviour. In fact, my first ever article is titled Thinking, Fast And Slow.
In this talk, “Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our ‘experiencing selves’ and our ‘remembering selves’ perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy—and our own self-awareness.”
The Surprising Science of Happiness — Dan Gilbert is another psychologist I adore. “Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our ‘psychological immune system’ lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.”
Knowing vs. Understanding — Richard Feynman, another favourite of mine, on the differences of merely knowing how to reason mathematically and understanding how and why things are physically analysed in the way they are. It’s so much fun to watch Feynman explain. He always seems to be having a lot of fun.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Skin in the Game — Since I’ve been posting favourites, why not another one! Here he talks about his then latest book, Skin in The Game. You need to read/listen to Taleb once in a while, even if you don’t agree with all of what he says. He is the necessary alarm to jolt you up if you are sleepwalking through life.
What I’m Reading
“We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favour, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.”
— Maria Konnikova, Mastermind
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋