Learning Is Hard...

Foreword

Why did I write this article?

I come across many people who say they respect me for learning so many things and really admire my journey. I find it heartwarming that people get something out of it. But in reality, it’s a whole lot of pain and suffering to get to the points I’ve reached. I want to depict what it really is like in my brain as I’m learning something from the bottom of the barrel, whether it is crypto, investing, solo travelling, or now math and AI. Maybe this even acts as a reference to myself as a reminder, who knows. Changing careers is extremely tough and only those that persist will reach Valhalla. It simply depends on how bad do you want it?

I assume my thinking won’t change as I age which is why I want to document it now as I’m quite young, in both my age and my career. Hopefully, you get some value out of this, anon-kun! Enjoy :)

Tolerance

It’s all pain. They stare at symbols for hours on end of god knows what. It doesn’t matter though. We are optimised from billions of years of evolution to adapt. It’s in our DNA to learn. This small-minded thinking is artificially injected into your brain but it’s not who you are at all, genetically. Do you know what happened to people that didn’t adapt to survive? Die. So adapt. But not to survive. To be the apex predator of the modern age.

To have a strong body one must have a strong mind. You cannot torture yourself 5-7 days a week for months/years on end without having a strong mental fortitude. And if you want to get scientific, it’s a positive recursive loop. Mentally get yourself to go work out -> working out makes you mentally clearer and ambitious -> apply to Intellectual studies and then back to the gym to repeat. There are also studies on it improving neural connections and strength! Go gym, anon-kun.

Manifestation

It’s hilarious to me when someone develops a superiority complex, becoming oblivious to the fact that anyone can get to their level, and beyond if they actively try to. It’s the people who never quit, and persist with a hungry flame in their heart that cannot be extinguished, that is exceptional. For nothing stands in the way of them and their goals. Fear and risk don’t apply to them. Being overly optimistic outweighs being pessimistic in all circumstances when it comes to learning. There’s no reason not to see the good in everything. What does being negative get you? Sadness, depression, burnout, doubt, not fulfilling your dreams, the list goes on. The body will follow wherever the mind goes.

The only thing that you control is your thoughts. Our brains are seeking machines. When we think of something we go on a filtered search to find the thing. We can apply this feeling to locking onto success. If you think about it every day you’re already there mentally, the physical realm is just a bit delayed, you must consistently be “winning” mentally and eventually, with time, physicality will reach equilibrium. The mental form of winning is a manifestation that increases the probability of the physical happening, as long as you do something, anything, each day.

In fact, personally, I think about my wants literally all day. I’ve never thought of wanting to be world-class at AI and math. It consumes me. This is the kind of fire I try to describe. Something that yearns to become a reality. Not even alcohol or substances make me forget to think about it. It’s truly fascinating.

Compound Effect

If you literally did a 1% gain each day for 365 days would have become 44% better than you were at the start of the year. And this is the minimum. It doesn’t even account for becoming so fired up from progress that you go on kill sprees of making leaps of progress instead of steps.

$$a_{n+1} = a_n(1.001), a_1 = 1$$

If you spent 1hr doing the thing each year, that’s 365hrs you’ve invested in the thing. 2hrs? 730. Full time w/ 8hrs a day? 2_920hrs. And don’t forget exponential progress occurs during this time. Once you get the fundamentals down and start to build that mental map you start traveling across the knowledge globe incredibly fast. Imagine how you can be spending 8hrs a day doing math, physics, sports, anything. You’d be incredible! And you would still have 8hrs remaining to do anything else! Sounds too good to be true…

Eventually you break the barrier where painful effort is replaced by joyful automated habit

Would you expect someone with 1_000 hours in something to be better than someone with 100 hours? What about 10 hours? Who would you trust more? It’s quite simple, the person with more experience. All the failures they would have had to tolerate make up for their understanding. Each failure mends a crack in your mental model of the thing.

Failure is irrelevant unless it’s catastrophic. Therefore, optimising for learning is quite simple. How much input can you give yourself?

$$\text{success} = \text{challenge seeking} * n(\text{failures tolerated})$$

Failure Maxx

How can you get the most feedback that tells you when you fail? This is how you actually learn the fastest. This is why you must actually do the thing to learn. Because without the feedback of failure, you’ll never know whether you’re right and thus assume you are. Your entire knowledge base is formed off false assumptions and then crumbles when met with reality — hopefully you can adjust but if it’s so far apart from the truth then you’d need to respawn. It’s like training a muscle only to realise it’s not the correct one for your injury.

But how do you seek pain every day? Have a strong enough why? Why do you actually want to do this? What will happen if you don’t do this? Then decide which path to take, anon-kun. Do you want to be a lil bitch that doesn’t know x and therefore can’t do y or would you rather be able to do y? Everything in life has a cost. The cost of a better life costs pain via effort.

The only way to truly get yourself to seek pain is to have the why. Without it, in dire times, you only have that why to refer to. And if it doesn’t exist you detour to the path of least resistance to avoid the pain. But then the long-term avoidance causes more pain. It’s like delayed not-gratification but only your conscious can direct your body for so long which is why it needs to become a habit! Then your subconscious can take over and it becomes automatic and your tolerance for pain skyrockets. It’s like going to the gym. I love destroying my body. It makes me feel fantastic with no downside. But I’ve been doing it for so long that I actively find joy in seeking the tearing of my muscles

Overcoming Challenges

It’s not all pain forever too, anon-kun. There’s an exponential learning curve. It starts steep as fuck and you want to die every day but you absolutely need to push through the pain to break the barrier into enjoyment. This is why so many people set out goals and never stick with them. It’s this steep slope that people tumble their asses down bc they’re not fit (mentally and/or physically) enough to climb it.

Whenever I’m hammering my workouts I think about my relatives who aren’t alive and make that a reason to push through the pain for them and that I won’t be healthy enough down the line to experience the pain again. For mental learning, I reject the reality of not understanding math and doing AI. I won’t let that be my reality bc I would absolutely hate life and end up turning off myself (in GTA).

A personal example, in math, it took me 6:20hrs yesterday to achieve what I did in 2 hours when I first started because I’m challenging myself! But it’s okay, I’m traversing up the exponential curve every day and it hit me…when I fully understood the concept of the left side must equal the right no matter what and applying all tricks to abide by that rule: multiplying to remove a division on one side then applying the same multiplication to the other side, reciprocals to flip a fraction and move it to the other side, the concept of $i^0 = 1$, and it goes on. The foundations really are the most important thing.

Without the foundations how can you build the tower of knowledge? You would never get a good enough scaffold to build and it’ll be some shitty Minecraft dirt hut waiting to collapse when the pain pours. The hard questions that test your knowledge, by someone or something, are the things that tell you “Oh shit, do I really know this?” and if you can’t answer you now know what to look more thoroughly into. It’s these moments that make you want to learn. This can be a public or private embarrassment. But nonetheless, you need to remember that feeling and cultivate a hunger to eat the world.

Glimpse Into Future You

You need to stare down the barrel of what you know you should do to get to where you want to go and accept you have to do the difficult thing. What’s the alternative? Do not do the thing and live a life of regret telling stories to your family and friends about how you didn’t chase your dreams and watching them chase theirs only to be constantly reminded of what you could have been.

When you’re talked about behind closed doors, how do you think people speak about you?

Matter of fact, how would you describe yourself? I want you to be as brutally honest as possible. It’s the confrontation of reality that will either spark you into overdrive into becoming a better person with trauma or you will sit there are accept your choice of being a disposable NPC for the lives of those who chose the past of least resistance. A stepping stone side-quest for shits and gigs.

RPG Of Life

Level up the correct stats and you’ll have a much better time than not leveling up. How can you enjoy the fun dungeons if you aren’t strong enough to face them?

Humans are late-game characters. Life gets better as we age, if we do well in the laning phase. Some people obviously get an early few kills, but we can scale just as well by farming. Then we can capitalise on all that knowledge we have and go on a kill spree, snowballing out of control from merely farming. Some people go AFK for a while and come back in mid-game but it’s okay. There is always a possibility for a comeback, you just need to play more strategically, calculating how to catch up for the lost time. If you die, respawn. Try buying a different item. Swap roles, characters, jungle paths, it doesn’t matter just keep trying. We only get better from trial and error.

To make the game easier you can add friends that you encounter while playing the game. Having good friends that do the things you do and think alike makes the game so much more fun. It’s like playing solo player vs co-op, it’s simply better and the replayability is infinite! Memories are formed so quickly (oh I miss the old days…). This is the best way to immerse yourself in learning and is a big component of why you see mathematicians speak with other mathematicians and befriend each other, athletes doing the same, etc. Make frens, be open and enjoy the journey with your frens. Also the competitive aspect of “oh shit he did some work today now I have to” is a very positive thing if you can mentally make it to be.

Be Curious

Where does your curiousity wander off to? Got something? Okay great, go follow that curiousity. And if you’re doing split screen, with a job, make a way to explore your curiousity. Don’t opt for golden cuffs. There’s a fog of war around you where your happiest self lies. You just need to walk into the fog. I’ve met so many people who live lives better than fantasy (doing good, positive work). Any “purpose” stems from curiousity. If you don’t have an innate want to see how or why things are or what is possible then you will either employ artificial motivation speech tactics or burn out.

And guess what?!

If you don’t know what you’re curious towards, go try random shit that is related to what you’re interested in? Not interested in anything? You’re probably depressed or burnt out — go to the gym and lift some weight for a few weeks and see how depressed you actually are after that. What’s the worst that can happen, you die? You wanted to die anyway, what’s to lose? It’s like when you troll in a game bc you’re going to lose anyway and so you just fuck around. Life is exactly the same. We’re all going to die, just fuck around and do shit.

End

I want to leave you with this, imagine the person you’ll be when you overcome the challenge. The perception you’ll have of the world and everything in it. Maybe even about the stars and beyond. Doesn’t that sound…nice?

I hope that I’ve inspired you in some way and you find yourself, anon-kun. I want to hear from future successful you, in any variation. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for those you cherish that cannot. Make yourself proud. Until then, godspeed…