Maybe you should learn something

Posted by tylerdane 17 hours ago

Maybe you should learn something(www.marginalia.nu)

373 points | 173 commentspage 3

ubj 4 hours ago|

> and/or have infants ricocheting around your home like screaming DVD logos

Slightly off topic, but as a parent I found this hilarious and will now be closely watching to see if any of my own screaming logos ever perfectly hit the corner of a room.

wavemode 5 hours ago||

The key is to find something that you enjoy sucking at. I recently picked up quad rollerskating and the process of getting steadier and smoother at it (while just enjoying the vibes, music and community at my local rink) has become an obsession. It's my new third-favorite hobby (after programming and competitive cornhole).

andrew_lettuce 8 hours ago||

It's great to be an amateur learner, but if you want to get better (or just make learning more effective) I really liked the (very easy read) Little Book of Talent. It focuses on how to get good, but that's really about how we learn and practice. Highly motivational and some interesting counterintuitive ideas:

https://danielcoyle.com/the-little-book-of-talent/

rrgok 5 hours ago||

I honestly don't feel rewarding learning anymore. I might be depressed, because I feel all human experiences are overrated. And such, learning is such futile exercise in postponing the reality of life.

jeffreportmill1 4 hours ago|

I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.

ElProlactin 14 hours ago||

> While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out. This honestly is a bit of an understatement, it really sucks and depending on the task, odds are you may want to lie down for a bit when you’re done with your first practice session. You’ll also almost certainly perform significantly worse toward the end of the session. All this is your brain and muscles getting tired. It’s a good meta-skill to learn to self-assess and pick up on this.

> Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier.

This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.

HexPhantom 13 hours ago|

I think there's a middle group too: people who like having learned something, but don't really enjoy those first few sessions. For them, just knowing that the initial frustration is normal can help a lot

cwiz 7 hours ago||

I learned a lot myself, but lately I just can't make it on stable regime because you don't get much positive feedback you you're learning something yourself. There's no grades, no exams and all of your motivation is internal. In that case you need to work on a motivation and goals. Why would you learn something that doesn't pays off then?

xpct 6 hours ago||

I'm quite fortunate to keep piling on knowledge without extrinsic rewards: the acquisition itself and the rewiring of my brain is what makes it enjoyable for me.

I look up to people who are well-read and try to follow their example. Maybe one day I can inspire somebody else.

9183726518 7 hours ago|||

To improve your life, circumatances, abilities. To have a larger amount of known concepts to connect to each other. To increase your stability, security, quality of life, and self reliance. To make more money. To decrease your reliance on uncontrollable and unstable factors.

hackable_sand 6 hours ago||

You are tending a garden

russfink 6 hours ago||

I’m attempting to learn to use a slide rule. It’s quite a history lesson - we take for granted the large precision we get on calculators. But the learning is taking repeated visits, about 30 minutes at a time. I’m slowly getting it.

zerobees 15 hours ago||

I'll get my agent on it right away.

i_am_a_peasant 9 hours ago|

For me the biggest learning investment outside work I put is learning Chinese and Vietnamese. I tried music but I gave it up after a year. And I can just do it on my commute to work as well. I also like reading about 19 century comparative history. Gives me a lot of relevant talking points in a lot of conversation.

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