from Hacker News

How to Make Yourself into a Learning Machine (2020)

by gozzoo on 1/16/23, 9:16 PM with 14 comments

• by surfsvammel on 1/16/23, 11:18 PM

  I’ve spent the better part of my adult life trying to become more productive, more efficient, to retain everything I read, to gain one up on life. I’ve used flash cards, different note taking techniques, meditation, lucid dreaming, bullet journaling, inbox zero. I’ve woken up early, listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed while working out, I’ve used the best notebooks, the best pens. I have practiced speed reading, in various forms. Different keyboard layouts to maximise typing speed. You name it.

  I’m not sure that any of it improved me nor my life. Maybe it did and I just don’t realise it. But, honestly, if anything, it probably made everything less enjoyable. More of a chore.

  Nowadays, I read what I find interesting, maybe I’ll remember it, maybe I won’t. I’ll work on what I find interesting, maybe it will be helpful for my career, maybe it won’t.

  Altogether life has just become much more enjoyable when I am not trying to squeeze as much as possible out of it.

• by angarg12 on 1/16/23, 10:43 PM

  > You’re an 18 year old with just a high school degree. You immigrate to a new country that speaks a different language, and start work with some of the brightest engineers in the world. Soon after, you’re thrust into management. Now, you’re leading teams of people who are 10 or 20 years older than you, working on one of the fastest growing internet companies of the last decade.

  I stopped reading after this. This is so unrelatable that I could be reading about an alien life form.

  Actually I skimmed through the rest of the article. There are a couple of good points there, but being the very atypical experience of a single person, I can't help but feel it has a good dose of survivorship bias. Someone became successful and attribute it to "this one weird trick".

• by blackshaw on 1/16/23, 11:04 PM

  "Read a lot, highlight the things you find interesting, take notes, and if you really want to remember something then use a spaced repetition system like Anki."

  There, now you don't have to read the article.

• by belval on 1/16/23, 10:42 PM

  I think this blog falls into a common issue of conflating natural talent/skills with what the person does to cultivate that talent.

  In other words, Simon is an anomaly and it's not clear that what he does makes him exceptional so much as he is exceptional AND he does all that stuff. You don't end up principal infrastructure engineer at Shopify at 26 years old after immigrating at 18 years old without being something special. He's probably fun to be around, but take the average human and put him through what he described and I'm pretty sure you just get an exhausted person without the amazing part.