I've just finished reading an article by Paul Graham which was originally supposed to be an high school speech. I felt really inspired by it but having passed high school and college I thought it might be a good idea to crystalize my inspiration by adapting the advice to someone that is in my same situation. # Learning to learn again During the day you work your day job and as soon as you're off you're just you. This is what our parents were accustomed to but it's no longer as easy. In the age of instant messaging and your co-workers looking at your Instagram stories the line between when you're in your professional capacity and when you're not got really blurry all of a sudden. In any job where the work could also happen off-site, detaching yourself from it is an active process. This makes it hard for your day job to be just your job. It's easy for me to fall back into my software engineer mindset when I'm out and about and I often have to catch myself from spending the evening working on some problem I was working on during the day. # Why try to learn more Curiosity helps you in all walks of life so that's worthwhile on its own. But the real reason is that I seldom met someone that is completely satisfied with the position they have. It seems that some part of living is looking for some challenges in your day to day. People want to be where they think they belong and to do that it's often a question of studying, either for certifications, for bettering yourself enough to get a promotion or to change job entirely. # Why're you're not learning as you used to When learning was your day job, learning was all you were expected to do. So you did. Nobody that goes through high school or college, however low quality that might have been, comes out having learned nothing. So it wasn't about the spark, it was about discipline. But discipline is hard and you have no time. You're tired from work and learning seems like a struggle. # Learning to find the time to learn If you're over 25 chances are that your agenda is pretty full. 8 hours a day are for work, one or two are for commuting, 8 are for sleeping and the rest is about distractions, resting and other activities. Maybe the house needs cleaning, the closet needs rearranging, your friends want to go out to [[Drink(1)|Drink]] or you want to finish a series you started. The thing is that you do have the time, but anything else takes priority over it. You don't need to sacrifice much to find time to learn. Most people have low hanging fruits in their life that they don't know they need to pick. I'll go first, cleaning my bedroom takes hours if I'm also watching a series, takes 10 minutes if I put a timer and focus on it. What advantage was I gaining by doing both tasks at the same time? # Beware of educational videos online and pulp science Besides some rare examples, learning from a quick, well edited YouTube video that makes you feel smart is not learning at all. If you understand more than 90% of the content the content is probably not worth it at all. Your interests at this point in your life should start to look like this: ![[Pasted image 20240830165448.png]] Lots of knowledge in an handful of domains and the rest the basics to thrive in your environment. You might be a theoretical physicist or a philosopher now, but knowing how to work a stove might still be something you need to care about. # Learning to love the struggle Just as going to the gym to lift weights, learning is supposed to feel a little bad. You're supposed to struggle with it, get your mind going on an hard problem is often the only way to progress. If all you do is lift weights that are too light for you you're not actually building muscle, you're there to distract yourself. So find a topic you want to explore and try to study it until you are actually struggling to progress. Even just arriving there puts you ahead of most other people, even the ones that are working in that field.