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. Learn By Using In school, I was not attentive in English class, or any other class. But unlike the other classes, I always had good grades in English. Why? Because outside of class, I was **doing things in English**. I ***used*** the English language. I grew up playing a lot of video games: Pokémon, League of Legends, Tibia. Every instruction, every bit of dialogue in the games I played was in English. If I didn’t understand what a word or sentence meant, I would get stuck in-game and had to look it up or translate it just to move forward. I didn't realize it at the time but I was learning English not from worksheets or grammar drills but from **needing English** to solve real problems. >**Project:** [[One Terminal, Countless Constraints - When a $30,000 Tool Goes Unused]] --- #### 2. Know How To Use What You Learn To Make It Enjoyable 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 like a business thinks about its finances, I could manage my own money better, make better choices, and plan for the future. Accounting and finance became tools I could use instead of just numbers on a page. Something similar happened when I was at Georgetown. I wanted to build AI applications, and the [Advanced Python class](https://www.coursicle.com/georgetown/courses/DSAN/5400/) I wanted to register for required a working understanding of Python, which was something I didn’t know. So, I lied and told the professor I already knew Python so I could enroll. Once accepted, I learned Python by taking [David Malan’s CS50](https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/). I finished the online course in two weeks, and at the end of the course, I had an A in my Georgetown class. Because I knew that I could use Python to build AI applications, learning was enjoyable. I never had to create time to learn Python. Learning never felt like a chore. --- #### 3. Everything You Learn Will Be Useful In school, I thought most of what was being taught was useless and boring, and was of the opinion that schools should only teach students what students want to learn. I remember learning HTML in school and thought it would never be useful, but today I use it almost every day when I'm designing courses on Canvas or creating this website. This pattern repeats everywhere. Almost everything I learned has found its way back into my life in some form. Whenever I learn something, I become a better learner. Lifting taught me discipline, which made me a better runner, 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