What to Learn

I recently read a blog post by Dan Luu titled What to Learn. As a life-long learner, the simple title piqued my interest. I don’t tend to take recommendations about what other people find interesting, but I’m glad I decided to at least see what it said.

The advice Dan gives is not concrete or cheap, but the type of advice that incites self reflection and personal growth. He advises to focus on amplifying your strengths, as opposed to minimizing your weaknesses. Maybe this is obvious to most people, but I had not thought of learning in this way. It’s much more appealing to me to learn something completely new than to push the boundary in an area I am more than competent in, so hearing this made me think (more on this later).

Dan’s second piece of advice is to choose interests that you have a relative aptitude for (compared to your other interests) that you also have a good environment in which to learn. This somewhat vague advice is putting into practice his first piece of advice. By choosing something you are already good at and are in a healthy learning environment, then you will amplify your strength. There’s nothing revolutionary here, but I like the inclusion of the environment. Learning doesn’t happen in isolation. The people and resources around you will either help or hinder you.

Reflecting on Dan’s advice, I think it’s quite good, though unique for each person. For me, I love learning about all the fascinating fields of computing, but that doesn’t mean I need or want to become an expert in those areas. I simply enjoy being a generalist. However, I do see the value in gaining deep knowledge and skills by focusing on one subject.

As an example, in the past few months I have been very interested in programming language development. I participated in [LangJam]({% post_url 2021-09-07-langjam %}) completely new to the subject, and now I plan to write a more complex compiler. I wouldn’t say I’m more skilled at designing programming languages than my other interests (though after my efforts perhaps I will), but there is a great community of language developers in the Rust Discord that have aided me tremendously in my journey. On the other hand, I have been interested in security for about five years, and while I pick up skills here and there, I haven’t made tremendous strides in that area. I have a greater interest in security than language development, but I haven’t found a suitable environment for me to effectively learn. As such, my focus is currently on language development.

To conclude, while I like Dan’s advice for inciting self reflection, I don’t 100% agree with it. Of course no advice applies to everyone, so for me I find it best to learn things I am interested in regardless of my proclivity, as long as the environment is conducive to learning. As Richard Feynman said,

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

– Richard Feynman