đ Hey, Abhishek here! Welcome to The Sunday Wisdom. Each week I tackle fundamental questions about decision making, clear thinking, and anything else thatâs stressing you out in the business of life. If youâre seeing this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing.
Q: How do you go about learning something new?
Metalearning is the process of figuring out how to learn a particular subject based on how knowledge is structured and organised so that it can be easily acquired. If learning was a building, metalearning helps you figure out how to reach the top floorâwhether to take the stairs, or the elevator, or scale the walls like Spider-Man.
Metalearning creates a map of the territory we are about to venture into, and is thus an essential step before actual learning happens. Unfortunately, most of us plunge right into the ocean without understanding the waves. Metalearning is the most crucial step that most of us either donât know or completely ignore.
Letâs take an excerpt from Scott H Youngâs phenomenal book Ultralearning where he explains what metalearning is:
If youâre learning Chinese characters, you will learn that ç« means âfire.â Thatâs regular learning. You may also learn that Chinese characters are often organized by something called radicals, which indicate what kind of thing the character describes. The character ç¶, for example which means âstove,â has a ç« on the left-hand side to indicate that it has some relationship to fire. Learning this property of Chinese characters is metalearningânot learning about the object of your inquiry itself, in this case words and phrases, but learning about how knowledge is structured and acquired within this subject; in other words, learning how to learn it.
A good way to metalearn (yeah thatâs the word) a subject is to make a list of the concepts, facts, and procedures related to it.
Concepts are ideas you need to understand that form the core of the subject you are learning. For example, force and gravity are concepts without which learning physics wouldnât make much sense.
Facts are, as the name suggest, what you have to memorise by heart to be able to recall them in the right situation. For example, if you are learning a language, vocabulary and pronunciation are facts that youâll have to memorise. In maths and physics, youâll have to memorise formulae and constants.
Procedures are actions that need to be practised. For example, riding a bicycle is a procedure. Singing a song or playing a guitar is a procedure. Learning to speak fluently is a procedure. Procedures are actions that need to be performed over and over again, with or without much conscious thinking.
Once you have figured out the concepts, facts, and procedures, the next step is to figure out the strategies you are going to use to tackle the âtricky partsâ. Letâs call them bottlenecks. For example, if the subject is concept-heavy (such as investing), grasping the fundamentals is a bottleneck, and youâll have to spend considerable amount of time understanding and explaining them in plain simple words so that the fundamentals are absolutely clear. If the subject is fact-heavy (such as law), memorisation is a bottleneck, and youâll have to use something like a spaced-repetition method system to make sure you remember all the important laws and their definitions. If the subject is procedure-heavy (such as painting), the bottleneck is quality. Lots and lots of practice is the only way to improve your quality. Identifying bottlenecks helps you identify where you would have to spend most of your time.
When I started my portrait-drawing challenge, for instance, I knew that success would depend highly on how accurately I could size and place facial features. Most people canât draw realistic faces because if those attributes are off even slightly (such as making a face too wide or the eyes too high), they will instantly look wrong to our sophisticated ability to recognise faces. Therefore, I got the idea of doing lots and lots of sketches and comparing them by overlaying the reference photos. That way I could quickly diagnose what kinds of errors I was making without having to guess.â
But if you canât make these kinds of predictions and come up with appropriate strategies just yet, donât stress it. These would eventually come to you more naturally as you do more projects. Make sure not to let it stop you from pursuing projects.
If you donât have a learning strategy just yet, the best way to get started is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject. Searching YouTube is bound to give you tonnes of resources. If you are trying to learn something that is taught in schools, say computer science, neurology, you can refer a school curriculum. This helps you design a good enough default strategy as a starting point without losing your sleep.
You are more than welcome to tweak it and make modifications as you see fit. For example, if you want to build an app, your focus would be on the inner workings of app development rather than theories of computer science. If you want to learn a bit of French before you visit Paris in a month, your goal would be the ability to speak common phrases in shops and restaurants, rather than being able to spell correctly. Unlike schools, thatâs one of the major benefits of a personal learning project. You can tweak things according to your learning goals.
Now, metalearning isnât a one-time activity. You should continue doing research as you learn. Obstacles and opportunities are never clear before you start something, so reassessing is a necessary step of the learning process.
A good indicator is when you start seeing marginal improvement in your progress. For example, despite knowing how to code, I didnât know enough to build production-ready apps. Progress was slow and there were lots of hiccups doing simple things. This led me to do more research to figure out how to learn to handle large codebases. Friends (who are developers) and YouTube tutorials were of immense help.
However at some point in your learning, you would start to see that no matter how much research you do, your learning output has diminishing returns. This is a good indicator that you are very close to the ideal learning process. At this point you can safely focus only on learning since doing more research will be less and less valuable.
Each project you do will improve your general metalearning. Every project will teach you new learning methods, new ways to gather resources, better time management, and improved skills for managing your motivation.
The real benefits of metalearning arenât short term but long term. They donât reside in a particular project but influence your overall strengths as a learner.
Success in one project will give you confidence to execute your next one with boldness and without self-doubt. Ultimately, this effect will far outweigh the effect of doing a specific project. Metalearning is a lifelong process, and it compounds with time.
Reality is Grey
As a child, the world for us was something to be explored. Our views werenât fixed. But as we got older, our thinking started to get rigid. Instead of questions and explorations, we fell in love with conclusions; rigid conclusions. Socialism is good. Socialism is bad. College is indispensable. College is useless. War is good. War is bad. And so on.
These black and white absolute conclusions are easy to form and effortless to digest, and often become substitutes to actual understanding. At the end, they replace the act of thinking in many people.
But the fact is, the reality is grey. All of it. There are very few black and white answers. This fundamental truth is easy to comprehend, but very hard to practice.
Grey Thinking is understanding the simple fact that nearly all things are OK in some dose but not OK in another dose. Some level of socialism actually works well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism doesnât tend to work. College works for some and not for others. War must be avoided, but as history has shown, sometimes war is necessary. And so on.
There is no one right answer. There isnât supposed to be. Life and world we live in is far more complex than the simplistic conclusions we jump into every now and then.
Does any of these ruffle your feathers? Great! The first step towards structured thinking is realizing that you carry many of your cherished positions too strongly. Most of practical reality lies outside the realm of mathematical certainty. Reality is grey!
My Daily Morning Routine
This is how we read. We come across a nice idea and say to ourselves, âHuh! Thatâs a neat thought,â and then forget about it completely. Once in a while, we highlight some text, but never return to it ever again.Â
The fundamental problem is that we consume a lot of information, but never convert them into actionable ideas, whereas thatâs the main purpose of reading.
Like everybody, even I used to read the same way. And then I started to notice that despite reading so much everyday Iâm not able to recall ideas when I need to. The time and effort I put into my intellectual development isnât going anywhere. But with a lot of tinkering Iâve upgraded this process a while back, and in this video Iâll tell you all about it.
Donât Jump to Conclusions
Being smart means thinking things through. It means trying to find the real answer, not the easiest answer.
Being stupid means avoiding thinking by jumping to conclusions. Jumping to a conclusion is like quitting a game. You lose by default.
Thatâs why saying âI donât knowâ is usually smart â because itâs refusing to jump to a conclusion.
â Smart People Donât Think Others are Stupid
Few Life Lessons
Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
Do what makes you fulfilled. Donât let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.
Pick the right thing to do, develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard.
Figure out your own productivity systemâdonât waste time being unorganised, working at suboptimal times, etc.
Work very hard, but not so hard that the rest of your life passes you by. Keep your personal burn rate low.
Donât be afraid to take some career risks, especially early on. Most people pick their career fairly randomlyâreally think hard about what you like, what fields are going to be successful, and try to talk to people in those fields.
Money may or may not buy happiness, but it can buy freedom. Make money because lack of money is very stressful.
Making money is often more fun than spending it.
Most people waste most of their time, especially in business.
Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.
Donât be afraid to do something slightly reckless.
As valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it.
Spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown.
Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you donât like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.
Donât worry so much. Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem.
Ask for what you want.
Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didnât do than things they did do. If you think youâre going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it.
Existential angst is part of life. It affects all smart, ambitious people; you arenât alone.
Donât hate other peopleâs success. Some people will hate your success, and you have to learn to ignore it.
The days are long but the decades are short.
â The Days are Long But the Decades are Short
The Gift of Silence
By the age 45, Beethoven was completely deaf, but this is when he became more original and brilliant as a compose in inverse proportion to his ability to hear.
His previous works were heavily influenced by his instructor, but his later works where spectacularly original. Beethoven didnât have the soundtrack of the society to refer to any more. Deafness freed him.
Sometimes itâs an advantage of remove the societyâs soundtrack from your ears. Sometimes, the sound of others become more noise than inspiration. To be able to hear yourself, sometimes you have to be deaf to others.
â On Beethoven and the Gifts of Silence
Before You GoâŠ
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ