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LifeLearning how to learn

Learning how to learn

I’ve always loved learning, but was a very mediocre student at school. How does this make sense? That is a story for another day. There was a 4-5 year gap between my finishing school and returning to university as an Applied Physics student, during which I completed by Chef Apprenticeship at one of Australia’s best restaurants (voted #1 in Australia and 70-something in the world ) and went to London to be a DJ (quite unsuccesfully), but I had a great time and realized how much I missed the challenge of being totally overwhelmed with difficult technical content. I guess I “found myself”.

I came back to university for the love of learning and acquiring knowledge. I’m now 33 years old, I feel it’s taken me 10 years to get to level 1 in learning how to learn. Though it changes often and I feel like I need to note down exactly what I’m doing and try my hardest to follow my own strategy and adjust accordingly. I do feel I see and hear different ways of doing things and try them out too fast. I’ve settled on a few time tested tools

  • Practice Questions: get cracking straight away and try refer back to these as I “learn”.

  • Feynmann method: I feel this is the most important to get started on a topic that’s hard to understand or something I don’t conceptually understand. Read slowly, try choose 1 source that you read or view a few times. One thing I’d like to remind myself is that there are different levels to learning, many of which I don’t need especially right now. Deciding that or asking for help with that will help me progress faster. For example, I’m now needing to learn probability. I should turn to a computer science book because that will give me the level of probability I need which is likely a subset of the field.

  • Feynmann method +: The above method is only really useful with a larger strategy behind it, I got this from Cal Newport from one of his excellent books on learning. Keeping the stack of sheets on hand with your feynmann-style notes. Go through at intervals, try daily, and keep going until you understand it. Then I’d like to comit it to latex notes to have it handy to review later if needed.

  • Feynmann method ++: A recent and successful addition I found is to write it down, then try write it down again, then try again, in the same session.

  • Anki:

  • AI:

  • Latex Notes:

Someone I’ve referred back to for this is Scott Young who has two great clips on how he works with it.

3/10/2025

I’ve been experimenting with alternating how I sit/lie when learning. Sometimes my body is full of tension, if stressed about something or after a hard workout, sometimes I find lying down and working to be helpful. But most times it’s too relaxed and easy to get stuck doing unimportant work or browsing, a habit I’m constantly working out of, modern web is so addicting and distracting.It’s so hard to sit and do technical work when you have bright shiny social media and youtube distractions. Previously I subscribed to the “perfect-posture means alert mind”. But the more technical the work I did, the more I realised I needed to be relaxed. My work output and ability to problem solve is now the motivating force, not some book I’ve read about perfect posture and the message of discipline and power it sends other people. Mostly, I’m in my computer chair with an old suitcase as a foot rest and partially reclined, often moving a bit back and forth.

Let’s do a test, I feel I’ve been making many mistakes in Math Academy, I’ve been lying down.

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