We as humans tend to simplify things, we need an order and comfort in a chaotic world, we want an easy framework to reason about life.
You don’t need to know car internals to drive it. You don’t need to know how buildings are built in order to live in one. You don’t need to know how Sun nuclear fusion reactions work in order to enjoy a sunny day at the beach.
And that’s totally fine, as we all have limited resources on what to focus on. However, the stuff we focus on, by time becomes quite predictable. Same people, same places, same type of jobs. From that point people are usually left with 2 options:
To seek discomfort, leaving the order and trying to learn something new
To stay where they are, enjoying the comfort and predictability of the current world
Both options are valuable choices, and both usually go in cycles. You can’t constantly learn new things without some break, and you can’t stay too long in the same place, getting too bored from comfort, so you start seeking some new challenges. There is also the 3rd less popular option, which we don’t think about that much, at least I didn’t, and that is to:
- Relearn the stuff we think we know
This can be a good combination from both worlds. You are not completely lost as you already know the territory, but you still have a lot of room for growth and learning the thing from different angles.
When we talk about growth, in some cases, you may even be surprised to realize that you didn’t even know the thing in the first place. Those that have been to college will probably remember that feeling when you are able to get a good grade at advanced calculus math class, but wouldn’t be able to recall all formulas and intuition of why something is done the way it is. That’s the problem with conventional education, which we continue carrying in real life later. We tend to grasp the concepts on surface level, we are comfortable using various terminologies and tools, it fits our order, but it turns out that we usually lack the basic intuition and building blocks. That’s why children are so curious, they want to truly learn something, they are not trained to grasp it on surface level and move on, they will likely naturally follow the Feynman technique and keep asking “why?”. Unfortunately, most of us as we grow older, keep shrinking that “why” question, until we replace it with something we find good enough to hide the chaos behind the real answer.
How I love to view it (similar to Dunning–Kruger effect)
When you think you know it:
When you know you don’t know it:
The good test I give to myself is a plain whiteboard and marker. If I can build stuff from scratch, I know it, if I can’t, I don’t. It is as simple as that. I always remember the scene when I tried to perform matrix multiplication back in the days, but without any formula, just from pure reasoning. It actually took me more than one hour for a simple multiplication, which you perform under one minute in normal circumstances when you use the formula. However, the intuition and feeling afterwards is totally worth it. The hard part is doing it constantly and acknowledging to yourself that there are way more gaps in knowledge than you thought there were. Yes, it does make learning 10x slower, but that learning will compound over time, so eventually you will start lowering the depth of asking “why?” on new subjects, not because you don’t want to learn the thing in depth, but because you won’t need it as previous knowledge will fill the gaps. Another good test, which is already widely known fact, is to explain stuff to someone else. This is one of the primary reasons why I am starting this blog. I want to challenge my understanding of various concepts I learned so far, and also to publicly share new stuff I am researching. I will always try to cover both “what” and “why” so we don’t miss on intuition and hidden gems behind various concepts.