When I look back at my years of education, I don’t remember myself as a great *traditional* learner. Through most of school, I was slightly below average. I never really cared for learning, and I never really thought of myself as studious. But somewhere around high school, I started studying and my grades improved. It wasn’t because I suddenly became smarter. It was because I began to see learning differently. I realized three things: --- ### 1. I learned more by doing I never paid much attention in English class, or any class. And yet, I always had good grades in English. Why? Because outside of class, I was **doing things in English**. I grew up playing a lot of video games: Pokémon, League of Legends, Tibia. Every instruction, every bit of dialogue was in English. If I didn’t understand what a word or sentence meant, I had to look it up or translate it just to move forward in the game. Without realizing it, I was learning English not from worksheets or grammar drills, but from **needing English** to solve problems in the real world—well, the digital world, at least. - **Project:** [[One Terminal, Countless Constraints - When a $30,000 Tool Goes Unused]] --- ### 2. Learning was enjoyable when I saw how I could use what was being taught High school gave me my first taste of practical learning. I signed up for accounting and finance, a completely new subject at the time. Almost immediately, I could see how useful it was: if I thought of my personal finances as a business, I could manage money better, make better choices, and plan for the future. Suddenly, it wasn’t just numbers on a page. It was a tool I could use. A similar thing happened later at Georgetown. I wanted to build AI applications, and the course I wanted to register for required a working understanding of Python, which was something I didn’t know. So, I lied. I told the professor I already knew Python so I could enroll. Once accepted, I taught myself Python by taking [David Malan’s CS50](https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/). I finished the online course in two weeks, and by the end of the semester, I had an A in my Georgetown class. It wasn’t grades that motivated me. It was the fact that I could **use** what I was learning to build something real. --- ### 3. Everything I learn will someday be useful In school, I thought most of what was being taught was useless and boring. I learned HTML in school and thought the same, but today I use it almost every day either when I'm working on Canvas or when I'm writing for this website using Markdown. This pattern repeats everywhere. Almost everything I learned has found its way back into my life in some form. Running taught me discipline, which made me a better lifter, a better rock climber, and a better learner. Chess taught me patience and pattern recognition, which made me a better coder and problem solver. **It’s a reinforcing cycle:** every time I learn something new, it becomes easier to learn everything else. > *"Everything in the world is exactly the same."* > **~ Ye** fka Kanye West