What I can not create, I do not understand

-- Richard Feynman

Learning how to learn

Learning new things is a frightening and lonely experience. To learn means to destroy oneself, and be reborn from the ashes. Do not underestimate the courage and sacrifice it requires.

In order to deeply learn something the most important thing is to be honest and humble. Find out what you don't understand. To be honest with yourself is not as easy as you might think, and in fact, a life spent in understanding yourself is a life well spent.

Every single mind is different, we are actually more different than alike, some people cannot hear their thoughts, some can see them, some can't imagine pictures when they close their eyes, some have internal clocks they can measure time. Some people see sounds as colors and others can taste emotions.

Written text, even though it is the best we have, is reducing one's mind into almost nothing in order for us to communicate. What you will read is not what I will write. When we read, half of what we read is from the book to us, and half is from us into the book.

I can only share my experience and how I learn, but I know it is not the same for you.

First I do not care of names, knowing the name of something does not help you to understand it. Just as my name says almost nothing about me. Knowing the name of the curved triangle (had to google it, its Reuleaux triangle) that can make a square hole, has nothing to do with what it does.

The most important thing for me when learning, is to understand what I do not understand, to feel doubt and confusion, and even fear. It feels as if I am in an endless black sea, drowning. Once I get there, I try to sense what exactly got me there, I can look up and see lightnings, and I can follow them back. It is really hard to get there, it is a frightening place to be, and I unconsciously avoid it.

I can never know, even if you tell me, what you feel when you get there, but my advice is, don't run away from it.

There are five ways that I have found to get close to my boundary of understanding, into the doubt:

  1. DESTROY - destroy a ball pen, take the ink out, take the ball out, look at it under a microscope, examine it. Do not be afraid. Delete all files on your computer, punch a hole through the hard drive, look inside. Since I was a child, I just broke everything, from my walkman to my sister's barbie doll (I was very interested in how they made the knees to work). Destruction has always guided me, into deeper understanding. It drives my curiosity and my curiosity drives my destruction.

  2. CREATE - create a programming language yourself, a computer, a game, or a spoon. To create something will give you the deepest understanding of it, and deepest appreciatiation for its existence.

  3. REDUCE - reduce the thing to its absolute essence and examine it, reduce the computer processor from billions of elements to hundreds. Reduce a polynomial to few symbols. Reduce a multihead transformer to 1 head, remove the layer norms, make it with 2 layers, make it 3 dimensional, with 2 token vocabulary.. keep going until you can do it with pen and paper. Understand the residual flow.

  4. TEACH - explain why the sky is blue in the morning and red in the evening to a 5 year old child, why the moon is not falling on the earth, why can the moon shadow our sun, why the earth is warm and space is cold?

  5. QUESTION - Why is it the way it is? What does it actually do? What happens if I do this? How does it work? Do not be embarrased, from others or from yourself, to ask questions, especially those questions you think are stupid. Sometimes I would sense fear to ask a some question to myself because I feel its stupid, I usually get so angry about that, I write the question down and go into the black sea out of spite.

It's important to pay attention to yourself while you are learning, your attitude is important, your gratitude is important, why you are doing it is important. You are changing yourself. New ideas will come, if you listen. Sometimes you will be more lost than before.

If you were to become a leatherworker, you must appreciate the animals that make it and how they live, the scars it has. You must look at it under a microscope, understand why it is the way it is. You must test it, soak it, shape it, and you must know, with every stitch you do, you will grow. Remember the saddle stitch, where one needle goes out, the other needle goes in. Stitch after stitch. A belt has thousands of stitches, 3 millimeters apart. If you give everything you have in each stitch, it will be a good belt.

If you were to become a chef, you must understand chemistry, and how we feel through our tongues, how our molecular sensors vibrate, and how fats, proteins and sugars are changed with heat. How do parasites live, and how to kill them. As everything eaten is transformed into its eater. Respect what you eat and how you cook it. As the chef says: "Everything you do is a reflection of yourself".

If you were to become a blacksmith, understand what does it mean to strike the hammer, hundreds of thousands of times. Pay attention.

There is always doubt in depth.

MAGNUM OPUS.

I have never written a beautiful program, or made a beautiful backpack. My scrambled eggs are really bad, and my welds are worse than my eggs.

When things are hard, and you are lost, and you only see darkness and doubt, remember that its OK, take your time, and be kind to yourself, pray the Ho'oponopono prayer:

I am sorry
Please forgive me
I forgive you
I thank you
I love you

When doing anything, including understanding yourself, this is the right way. I only know how to teach about computers, but everything is the same in its core. Be curious, kind and patient.

Without further ado, I Welcome you to the Cyberspace.