Learning to Learn Well
The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths. What do you know to be true that others cannot or will not bring themselves to admit? There is your competitive advantage.
I read a lot of old books and new technical journals. I’m less focused on the contemporaneous and more focused on finding things that are true but that most people don’t know.
Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, learned from a bunch of articles written in the late 1800s about rooming houses. Room sharing was much more popular around 1900 than in 1950. He saw solutions in a sharing economy from a hundred years ago. Then he modernized, transplanted, and used those ideas today. Reading books about societal arrangements at other times and places is a very useful thing.
Technical journals are another source of underappreciated truths. In biomedical papers, you will see that life extension and youth extension for mice is much more advanced than people think. Brain-machine interfaces are also much more advanced than the general public realizes. We have mice telepathically controlling devices. We can do fantastic things with tissue regeneration as well. The technology is here, being held back by the FDA or a lack of distribution.
Technical journals and old books are what I read with intent, as opposed to tech news, which I get in my peripheral vision.
You are what you read.
I was a career academic for the first part of my career. I thought I was going to be a professor. What did I learn as an academic? I learned how to learn quickly.
To learn technical content fast, I just start doing problems. I don’t even read the text until I get stuck on a problem. Especially in technical topics, if you know foundations (differential equations, statistics, or Maxwell’s equations, for example), you often can start calculating and see where you hit a roadblock. Then you realize what, specifically, you don’t know.
Even if you are learning something where there is a known correct answer, it's easier to try and fail than to go and look up the documentation. Reading the documentation front to back is much harder before you start trying. Start, then learn. You have to learn while doing.
You can’t really learn something without using it. One day of immersion in a new language beats weeks of book learning. It's the difference between learning French in school, where you're memorizing abstract sounds, and actually trying to order something at a restaurant. You're trying to put a sentence together for a purpose with an unforgiving French waiter who will sneer at you and say, “Lezz just-a speak English, pleeze.”
One day of trying to build something with a programming language beats weeks of theory too. If you talk to people who teach computer programming, they'll tell you just “learning to code” is hard. You have to learn to do something with code. It could be as simple as taking sales data and creating charts and graphs or renaming a hundred files—anything really simple. Now you have a reason to learn to code.
Learning with intent to use filters down information, and you can snap things into use immediately. That's why I think a purpose-driven life is good. You have a purpose, and you think often about what that purpose is.
