
The more you learn, the faster you can learn - pranaygp
http://pranay.gp/how-to-learn-things-at-1000x-the-speed
======
civicsquid
Some of the examples listed when the author speaks about why they are such a
good learner felt a bit forced to me. I understand that authority is being
established here, but a good number of the early examples seem to be what I
would expect from a successful college student who has done an internship or
two (e.g. what is recursion, building reusable UI components for a large
company).

I also clicked through to some of the projects to find that they were team
efforts, not independent projects that the author miraculously completed due
to their own precociousness alone. This felt a bit misrepresented to me,
although I understand the intent was probably just to show the breadth of
involvement.

All in all I was happy to read the author's advice about learning but
something about the intro rubbed me the wrong way. The author clearly has had
quite a good number of experiences and I'm glad they're publishing these
thoughts on those experiences. I just wonder if the post could do without the
early hints of (forgive me) vaingloriousness? It felt quite academic and
intriguing past the intro for me.

As the author may see this: please don't take this as anything other than a
single individual's thoughts. I mean in no way to discourage you.

~~~
gingabriska
If you are in industry and you've some experience, highly likely you are
already doing what the author claims to be his fast learning secrets. There
are actually no deep secrets I find in his post, all of those things atleast I
instictively do. Even my friends use same approach, so I thought it's so
common that I don't have to write a blog post about it.

~~~
civicsquid
Maybe the technique in this post is common, but I personally believe that
putting yourself and your thoughts out there is a good thing for engineers and
critical thinkers in general. It allows us to get feedback and involve others
on a wider scale, even if that means writing about things that have been
discussed or thought about a number of times before.

------
meuk
I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in
practice I haven't learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the
idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I
spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don't
expect so.

I feel like since I am working, I am just getting dumber. I miss the time in
uni where I was learning new things every week. I'm thinking of taking a year
off just to learn new things.

~~~
usgroup
Unfortunately you probably are getting dumber, look to folks who had the same
trajectory as you but are further ahead for confirmation.

If your work doesn’t get more interesting you’ll adapt to fight the boredom by
becoming dumber. You have to fight that somehow if you value your mind.

~~~
snak
Fighting boredom by becoming dumber, couldn't have said it better myself.

If you feel like this is happening, it is time for a change.

~~~
Aromasin
Anecdotally I felt that the 'become dumb to fight the boredom' mentality
spills quite easily into life outside of work if you let it too. If I had a
challenging day, I'd go home and study or build something - I'd keep the
productive 'train' going. If I had a dull day, which was most days after the
first 3 months getting to grips with the job, I'd go home and blank out
watching a TV show or playing a video game. I couldn't break out of the 'dumb'
mind-set after spending 8 hours in it.

Regretfully I've lost weeks and months to this mindless monotony over the last
year. Thankfully Friday is my last day, and I start a post-graduate course in
October which should be a splash of cold water for my brain. In short, I'm
very much in support of your second point.

------
NHQ
This describes me pretty well. I'm a dedicated learner, and I think it's what
I do best. I don't master topics. Even the information about the thing can be
a distraction. It's about synthesizing info into your working knowledge.
Everything is reference.

CSS is a great example. Do I know everything about it, even after 10 years?
Nope. But I know it well enough that a quick reference is all I need for any
problem.

Programming in general, too. Took me a minute to grok fundamental things (data
types, functions, etc). I don't care what language I use, it's all one, plus
syntax. I want to use other languages, for fun and synthesis.

~~~
stan_rogers
"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language."
\- Ed Post, _Real Programmers Don 't Use Pascal_, 1982.

There is a hell of a lot more difference between the various programming
languages than their syntax. Natural languages as well - you can render
idiomatic English in any language, and if you don't care very much about
getting your intended meaning across (and your listeners are both patient and
fond of puzzles), you may well choose to do so. It may get you food and
lodgings for the night. But the computing equivalent of getting by in a pidgin
isn't quite the same thing as programming in the language you're using.

~~~
lacampbell
Eh... once you know a handful of languages, it's fairly easy to adjust to a
new one. If I have experience in C++, C#, Ruby and Javascript, do you really
think Java is going to blow my mind? Or I won't be able to write decent
Python? I'm sure I'd pick up a few tricks and my code would get idiomatic but
I am going to be 90% there from day one.

~~~
samvher
I'm pretty sure Erlang, Prolog and Forth would blow your mind.

~~~
omeid2
Prolog blows my mind ever time I come back to it.

~~~
bobowzki
Yes, it's an amazing invention!

------
danenania
I couldn’t agree more about finding the best resources. As with many other
things in life, there are power law effects in how intelligent and
knowledgeable experts are in their fields, and more importantly, how skilled
they are at communicating what they know. The very best are orders of
magnitude better than the average expert, and you will learn exponentially
faster and better if you can find these people. This means being _very_
discriminating—if you don’t find yourself highly enthusiastic to
read/watch/listen to more of someone, you are much better off moving on
quickly than trudging through without being truly inspired. It’s better to
search broadly at first, then zero in when you feel that ‘click’.

Unfortunately, most schools and universities take the exact opposite approach.
While you can eventually get very deeply and thoroughly educated about a
specific field via academia, it’s an _incredibly_ inefficient way to learn.

------
kylek
>> , scaled a botnet of over 2,000 bots that made money from a popular trivia
game,

Did this make anyone else flinch?

edit: I do want to comment on the Feynman Technique linked in the article.
I've never actually written concepts down as explained, but it's very close to
how I _actually_ learn (or at least, feel confident in my knowledge). If I
can't explain something in plain language, there's a good chance I've gaps.
The steps listed are pretty succinct - going to have to give it a try!

~~~
downandout
I wouldn't say it made me flinch, but that is not a throwaway line. It
deserves some additional, I'm sure quite interesting, explanation. But I
believe he is referring to HQ, and there have been other write-ups on HN about
how to automate beating it.

~~~
pranaygp
I love telling this story, but that wasn't the point of the post

~~~
samvher
At the end you mention you may have found a good resource to improve your
writing. Which resource is that? It's something I want to get better at as
well.

------
aur09
Relying on fast estimations is one of the most powerful aspects of the way our
brains work. But applying the skill of finding and applying fast estimations
exclusively to every topic--like reading SparkNotes over an original piece--is
a good way to eventually know very little.

Suppose any rate of decay in the things you retain. If your starting point is
already small, losing any of it comes at a high cost. At least when pursuing
mastery of a subject, you are repeatedly faced with new ways of understanding
the basics, to the point that they are innate and automatic. You might forget
small specifics which you can later find in your known references, but without
mastery you might instead forget the basics--and relying on a reference for
those basics means it's much less clear when they are aptly applied.

I would hazard a guess that that's why people have always tended to master
only one or a couple skills, but people congregate and work in complement with
others who have mastery over other skills. The community is the entity with
knowledge over many domains--not the individual who learns tons of surface
material. And simultaneously, everyone does learn a little bit about a lot of
topics from time to time. But that balance is important--so I wouldn't
personally weight so heavily the cursory synthesis portion of it as OP did.

\--

Also, a little advice to OP. Drop some of the grandiose introduction. 100% of
the links I clicked in the first paragraph were more disappointing than their
descriptions led me to anticipate.

------
surelyyoujest
Basically, Pranay needed to boast his CV to the world and wrote a clickbaity
article where half the paragraphs are mentions of his accomplishments and the
rest is common sense which can be described as "learn enough to ask good
questions and practice."

~~~
richard23132
The first paragraph in which he boasts his achievements is what made me very
interested in the article and led to focus reading carefully. I see the
boasting is a by product of providing evidence, i don't see boasting alone in
the post. It doesn't matter it's useful stuff.

~~~
jsf01
If you clicked on any of the project links you’d see that most of them are
exaggerated or misrepresented in the intro. A lot of team efforts for which he
gave no credit to the others involved. I can understand the desire to
establish authority from a writing perspective, but the author is embellishing
his achievements here in a disingenuous way.

------
aronowb14
Interesting post! It's almost exactly what I've found that has worked well for
me. Putting in the three or four hours at the beginning of the process of
learning something to find the best resources is essential.

That being said, I do think the importance of mastering one or two things
should not be overstated, and was kind of ignored in your post. Let me
elaborate: for me my deepest skill has been 3D modeling and rendering: it's
been about six years of pretty consistent practice, doing motion graphics,
general modeling, animation, color theory, and really just trying to absorb
all the knowledge I can about this specific passion. This process has been
super useful for a couple reasons, and kind of worked to snap me out of the
"generalist" learning mindset. For example, I've found the learning curve over
time for 3D modeling is pretty generalizable to other skills I learn: because
I've sunk so much time into it, and have had to push through plateaus, and
grind over hills, and realize when I'm just coasting, whenever I am learning
other things, I recognize the emotion swing and know roughly where in the
learning process I am. Similarly, the fluency I have with my 3D modeling tools
(pretty much all the hotkeys burned into muscle memory) gives me something to
strive for when learning other tools and skills. I know what fluency feels
like now, and I know when I'm lacking in it.

For me though, the most important thing about pursuing mastery of one or two
things instead of full generalization, is that it teaches you patience.
Genuine patience. Something I feel is becoming a lost art in our modern time.
Seeing how far you've come after six years of working at something, and then
looking at your inspirations and seeing how far you still have to go, is a
feeling that can either break you, and make you give up, (if you are
impatient), or can help you, as you have the choice to just keep grinding away
and choosing to be patient. 3D modeling and animation is a ten year (minimum)
goal for me, and it's served as a wonderful learning experience for me in
many, unforseeable ways.

To tie it back to your post, I take this "ten years" mentality to almost
everything I choose to learn nowadays: I try to stay away from the fancy new
frameworks and toys, and try to learn fundamental things that I can spend ten
years learning and still have space to grow.

~~~
beautifulfreak
That is how I felt about mastering Photoshop. "Muscle memory," exactly. And
patience, yes, it took time and a lot of practice. I learned to accept
intermediate stages as paths to mastery, knowing I'd get better if I just kept
trying. Since then, that's how I approach all learning. I know that whatever
else I try to master, I will get there, and what seems hard at first will
become easier. I mean, that realization is like muscle memory too. It's
ingrained in me now.

~~~
kamfc
I still haven't found the patience to master Gimp the way you have mastered
Photoshop :\

------
whatshisface
Of course, some of these steps (like finding the best learning resource), can
only be done once you're already an expert who knows what all of the resources
are! There are also a lot of situational things, for example although you may
have a preference between videos, documentation and example code, the best to
learn from is usually whatever medium the best teacher decided to use.

~~~
pranaygp
Experts usually know some great resources, but are often themselves your best
resource if you have access to one. I definitely forgot to mention them, the
people I worked with at Facebook and ZEIT are on that list.

But when I wasn't working somewhere, I had to find my own resources and trust
my own instincts. I didn't know who the best teachers were, so I had to decide
for myself, what the best resource for me would be. Often, I got it wrong, but
I got better and finding the diamonds in the rough.

------
chaboud
“I left an important part out of the process above - how do you actually find
the best resource. I don’t know.

That said, I’ve gotten “lucky” enough times that I think I know how to
optimize for finding it.”

Pro tip: No, you don’t.

I’m game to explain it over coffee to the author, who seems to be in the Bay
Area, but this writing reads a lot like someone who just started to scratch
the surface on abstract learning and metacognition while thinking that it’s a
wildly new discovery.

It’s hard to hear/read the reenforcing recitations of new-to-
the-(speaker/author) concepts and not see it as a slow-motion replay of a
common thought process, akin to sitting in Dolores park listening to musings
on democracy and governance in the age of automation... thirty minutes after a
batch of pot truffles has sold out...

As a generalist/multi-whatever, let me say this: expert engineers _hate_ the
knows-enough-to-be-dangerous guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to learning that
can just walk in and be conversant after reading one book. That guy is a pain
in the ass know-it-all that spoils conversations, derails projects, and digs
bottomless pits of technical debt.

How do I know? I was that guy when I was younger, and I’m sure I drove people
nuts.

No doubt there are times when I’m still that guy, but I try to hold my tongue
more now until I’m confident in what I know and openly disclose where I think
I fall short.

If you can’t take that mechanism for learning and flex it down to the bottom
of the rabbit hole, or if you always fall back onto the crutch of relating a
complex topic to a comfortable imperfect analogue, you’re aiming to be the
engineer that gets handed non-critical work or the manager that nobody wants
in a meeting... Or maybe a successful founder of some kick-ass mega unicorn...
sigh... whatever.

In the big companies (and Silicon Valley) I hear/see this type of thinking and
self-congratulation _all_ the time among engineers with 1-4 years of
professional experience. On occasion, those engineers have the horsepower to
back it up, but it’s rare. Some of that write-up resonates with how I’ve
learned/worked over time, but I’d never write something so stridently
confident.

Me 20 years ago?

~~~
linza
I feel your tone is slightly too condescending, but I have to agree with the
general statement.

I'm responsible for hiring in my small department, and the OPs blog post would
be a red flag.

We appreciate if candidates show they can learn quickly, but it's not useful
to us in isolation. You already need to have a good base set of skills (CS,
physics) but more importantly the humility to accept that with 5 years of
experience you probably don't really know the thing you claim to know.

Some bay area tech companies like to hire more riskily, so it might be a good
strategy after all though.

~~~
chaboud
Ha! I wouldn’t be surprised if you found it _altogether_ too condescending...

I generally find myself being a little more brutal with people who sound/read
like me 18-20 years ago, partly because I think that being hit over the head
can actually do some good. It certainly helped me, and I’d have done better to
listen more quickly rather than having the echoes of those much wiser than me
take decades to sink in.

I strongly favor raw learning ability over knowledge when hiring for most
positions. It’s incredibly valuable to be able to transition from one space to
another over the span of 3-12 months (depending on the domain). Some badges
are harder to earn (e.g. mathematics, physics, hardware, distributed design),
but I generally feel okay taking someone who is an expert in one space and
pointing them at another space that relies on the same fundamentals if they
seem like they can learn.

I do, however, prioritize two things above learning proficiency when hiring:

1\. Accurate self-assessment. If you can’t understand where you are, you’re
going to be a constant headache. 2\. Not an asshole. An asshole can destroy a
team, even if they’re brilliant.

I want someone to be able to learn deeply quickly, though. Generally, if they
have that ability, they’ll have real depth in areas of prior learning. For
candidates at the Senior Engineer levels and above, I’ll spend at least an
hour or two before the interview reading their publications or digging in on
their areas of stated expertise so I can ask questions probing to their edge
(or mine). Sadly, I hit the candidate edge first for roughly 80% of
candidates, and it strongly correlates to no-hires.

------
betocmn
It's a clear flywheel. Desire/Curiosity -> Risk-taking -> Delayed
Gratification -> Self-Confidence -> "Give me more".

------
mettamage
This post could be expanded with what learning resources you found really
awesome and why.

I use HN to find the best programming and math resources by using their search
function, looking at the most upvoted learning resources or by scouring the
comments and finding a consensus in a more qualitative manner.

On the top of my head: it led me to places such as Gilbert Strang for linear
algebra or Eloquent JavaScript for a good introductory textbook and JavaScript
The Good Parts for a more advanced textbook. 3Blue1Brown was a good channel
for mathematics. And it is also thanks to HN that I discovered vimtutor. There
are also a lot of references made her to Coursera course Learning how to
Learn.

~~~
pranaygp
Definitely, I listed a few examples of great resources to make a point on the
article. Another resource that seems like it might be great that I'm currently
reading is Julian Shapiro's growth marketing guide -
[https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro](https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro)

It is long form text, which is an automatic -1 for me, and I dismissed this
for a while, but over time it's seemed to come out as one of those "great"
resources in a different domain that I muse read. After starting, I noticed

1\. It reads more like vimtutor than an article; i.e. you pick your own
adventure, which I can bite

2\. Many people I look up to as experts have directly recommended this to me

3\. It's relevant to me now - I'm working on a startup

I still dismissed the guide for a long time and wasn't convinced it was the
best resource out there - but it's starting to seem like it's atleast a local
maxima for me.

I hope that made sense into how I think about resources when learning. I don't
yet have a coherent system in place to determine how valuable a resource is to
me. I usually only know months or years later

------
oxplot
I wrote about something similar in the past:
[https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-
learning/](https://blog.oxplot.com/transient-ideas-and-learning/)

------
jsf01
There comes a point in the learning process for any subject where you get so
excited about the fact that you understand something new that you feel you
need to tell everyone about it. This feels like one of those posts—the author
has very limited experience, but he has formalized a coherent (albeit
unoriginal) idea and because of that exciting feeling he now wants to shout it
to the world. It’s good to write as an exercise to help you grow or solidify
your ideas, and a post like this, with all its self-congratulatory language,
probably would have ended up better if it were written for OP himself rather
than for the world. Instead, by publishing it, the author has the need to
establish (and, it feels, compensate for) “why I’m qualified to talk about
this”. It’s premature to have shared this underdeveloped idea, just as it’s
premature for the author to be boasting his achievements.

~~~
pranaygp
Bingo! I am an author with very limited experience and this was an exercise in
growing and solidifying my own ideas. To that end, I chose to write about an
underdeveloped idea and share it with the world. If you look me up, you'll
find a string of unfinished and incomplete projects and ideas. I'm usually not
scared about sharing underdeveloped ideas prematurely - I think it helps me
grow (I wouldn't have gotten as much feedback on this post if I never shared
it)

------
akhilcacharya
I agree with the BFS strategy but I’ve never gotten good enough at anything to
gain the respect of an SME.

~~~
pranaygp
SME?

~~~
chaboud
Subject-matter expert.

One critical way to become a better learner on a team (that is, a far less
annoying learner) is to recognize when to ask a question of someone else and
when to just Google/Portal/XPlore/etc it. Interactive mentors will be far more
welcoming when they feel like you’ve earned the roadblock that you’re up
against.

~~~
pranaygp
Great point! I've been called out for aggressively soliciting help

------
proverbialbunny
I made a hobby out of exploring how learning works. The author is spot on.
However, there are some tweaks worth considering:

1) The author proposes learning _everything_ under the sun, so that one has
enough dependencies to learn new topics. This is like downloading most of the
packages in aptitude to speed up builds.

However, I prefer to go about it in a different way. I focus on patience and
normalizing myself to long and deep build chains. Learning a light topic in a
new domain can take hours, if not days, to understand it deep enough to
successfully use it to learn other concepts.

When there is something I need or want to know, but when I pull up Wikipedia
and see a bunch of foreign vocabulary, I will create a dependency list of
vocabulary, and learn everything I need to know to read that article and
flawlessly understand it. If it is a new topic it can sometimes take a week of
slow learning to quickly learn. It seems painfully slow, but it's learning a
large chunk of a new domain in a week. This could be something a college class
takes months to go over, so the rate is quite accelerated even if at the time
it doesn't seem like it. Slow and steady really does win the race.

2) >I keep trying while following a breadth-first-search approach to domains
and resources as described above.

and

>Stop. This is counter-intuitive, but unless you want to become a master at
something (besides learning), you really just want to know everything at an
intermediate level.

When recursively learning prerequisite concepts, usually understanding 100% of
every prerequisite concept is necessary. There are no short cuts. In this
scenario a depth first search is ideal, finding the root and starting there.

Likewise, a dependency chain of concepts is a chain of abstraction. When
learning a prerequisite concept, no matter how abstract it is, it must be
thought of as concrete. It must be understood as if it is concrete. This is
the minimum bar to using a concept to build up other concepts. This is can be
thought of as an intermediate level of understanding, but I suspect for most
people this means mastery. Don't stop short.

3) What is learned will be forgotten within a couple of weeks, unless it a)
has been pondered about a minimum of 6 seconds, usually by making up a story
to describe it to yourself. The 6 second rule is a neurological limitation
that is required to move the memory from short term to long term storage. And
b) It is strongly beneficial for what is learned to leave the mind and come
back into it on one way or another. This can happen by doing something with
your hands, talking out loud about it to someone else, or note taking. This is
important and without it details will be lost. I write in a condensed mind-map
list like format for this reason. Likewise if I forget something or remember
something wrong, I can go back with a ctrl+f and figure out what I did wrong.

4) Etymology is massively important when it comes to learning. The history of
why the concept is called what it is called, as well as understanding why it
was invented or how it was discovered. I try to visualize what the world was
like before the thing I am learning existed and how things used to be done.
This teaches me of it's power and when and why to use it. When etymology is
done right, the mind will record the concept into spacial awareness which is
the strongest and longest lasting kind of memory we have.

There is a lot I could say, but by understanding where people are coming from,
you can apply what technique is ideal for that specific task. Learning is no
different. One can master it, and from that the gains are innumerable.

~~~
petra
Really Insightful comment.

You seem to know a lot about doing rapid learning well.

Any recommendations on what to read if I want to understand more about how
learning works ?

~~~
proverbialbunny
Unfortunately, I do not have a recommendation.

I learned everything about learning by reviewing my notes. I take notes in a
condense and highly abstract format that is quick to write, yet simultaneously
gives something close to a one-to-one map of my mind. This way when I review I
can learn better ways to study.

How I learned my technique:

I do Data Science / Data Analytics. When it comes to programming a Data
Scientist can get by not knowing how to write a function. Many are horrid
coders, and that's okay because they specialize in research and analytics, not
writing code. However, if a DS' day to day is writing code, and it's the most
painful part of the day, then would my life be better if I knew how to program
flawlessly?

In response to this question I took a job as a Software Engineer for a while,
doing hard core C++14 at the time. (The company gave me the hardest project
they had to incentivize me to go back to doing DS for them.) I had learned C
many years ago but when it came to C++ I struggled with making a class. I
struggled at knowing what the difference between a copy and a move was. I
struggled with multiple inheritance. I struggled with smart pointers. I even
struggled with reference collapsing rules. It was painful!

In response, I developed the learning technique mentioned above, and decided
to learn C++ at an accelerated rate. I learned over 250 concepts in less than
a half a year, while being productive in a code base, and not just 250
concepts, but I learned the etymology of every concept. I learned how, why,
and when to use them. I became a master at C++ and now it is my favorite
language. C++ was a great use of this learning technique, because when I
learned something it would come up again maybe weeks or months later. I wanted
to know C++ so well I never had to google for anything ever again.

Long story short, C++ is a great candidate for meta-learning. That's how I
learned what I know.

Also, the article mentions how subjects cross domains. This is a key aspect of
my learning too. Inspired by Hofstadter, isomorphisms between domains has been
a hobby of mine too, and I find both Data Science and Discrete Mathematics to
be useful when it comes to the study of intelligence and the study of
communication. I highly recommend doing the same. It's not only fun, but it
can change your life.

------
esseeayen
Hi OP I am wondering if you ever did the corsera course "Learning how to
learn" and what your thoughts were on it and if the you consciously or
unconsciously employed the methods described to help you learn new topics.

~~~
pranaygp
OP here, I haven't actually, but just looked it up and it looks like it talks
more about test prep than the type of learning I talk about. Most of my coding
skills come from self-learning things online the way I talked about it, at my
own pace, without exams to reinforce that.

However, for test prep, through school and college I have read and tried a lot
of guides on learning including simple index cards, the Leitner System
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system)),
coming up with mnemonics, transcribing content from a source medium to some
other medium, the Feynman technique, etc.

What I learnt about myself was that any technique involving writing didn't
work for me. I would never go back to read something I wrote. I hated writing.
I often walked into lectures without a notebook and just listened instead.
Don't memorize. Listen. Understand. I have friends who were brilliant "test
takers" \- which to me meant they could quickly memorize a lot just before an
exam. That's something I'm bad at, so I took tests primarily based on what I'd
understood over lectures, or follow up discussions I had with professors or
classmates.

This also means I wouldn't practice math questions or work out physics
problems before a test - I'd sorta just read over solved problems and make
sure I understood them.

In retrospect, I actually think this isn't a great way to study for an exam
and I always got very nervous just before a test because I feel grossly
underprepared, but I saw passing them as a formality and usually just worked
on other things I found fun (for instance, I built CSS Peek during finals week
of sophomore year).

------
allenleein
Instead of reading 'Learn You a Haskell', I would say go 'Haskell Programming
From First Principle.

------
supr_strudl
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.

------
samplatt
Work's firewall is coming up saying this site is malware :S

~~~
leonidasv
You can read it using a "focused reader" service like Outline:
[https://outline.com/cvHmpU](https://outline.com/cvHmpU)

