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If you have ambitious goals you’ll probably need to learn a lot to accomplish them. Here are some tactics I’ve found to be helpful in guiding my own learning.
Learn from projects.
I love textbooks and other concentrations of knowledge, but there are downsides to bottom-up learning. Mainly it’s just not nearly as fun as top-down learning! Top-down learning is where you start with a goal - something that you can feel motivated to accomplish, then learn what you need depth-wise as you make progress towards your goal. Reading a textbook from cover to cover is a form of bottom-up learning because you are starting with raw content and making absorption of that content the objective. The learning process in that case is directed by someone else (the author of the book) and for many people will be harder to sustain over long periods of time. For me it has been most productive to learn top-down with projects, and to read from textbooks/papers selectively in the service of my goals.
Embrace active recall and spaced repetition.
Reading or hearing something for the first time is only the first step on the path of learning. After you’ve encountered an important new concept you should try to explain from scratch or re-derive it yourself. If it’s a really important concept then you should make reviewing it periodically a priority. The best way to do that is to use a system such as Anki to automatically and efficiently schedule your reviews. Learning to use Anki well can be a super-power because it makes memory of any specific concept a choice (over the long-term) instead of something that happens haphazardly. Remember that you only understand something if you can re-create the concept in its entirety from scratch, i.e. you have a complete generative model of that concept in your mind.
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