Scott H. Young's Blog, page 15

Recent Reading: Creativity, Mastery and the Three Phases of Learning

Here are a few more books I finished over the last few months and some insights I gleaned from each.

1. Beginning to Read by Marilyn Adams

I didn’t expect to find a 500-page book on the science of early reading to be interesting. But I was enthralled—both by the amount of work that has been done on figuring out how people learn to read (and the best way to teach them) and by what it implies for learning other skills.

Fluent readers can comprehend text at a rate of several words per second. Given this, it’s easy to believe that we skim over words, infer the text by its likely context or don’t pay attention to the letters. Fascinatingly, studies show that this isn’t the case: good readers fixate on nearly every word in a sentence and seem to pay attention to nearly every letter in each word.

We manage to do this because the sound-spelling patterns are so thoroughly overlearned that unconscious neural networks, acting simultaneously, perform the cognitive “work” of decoding text.

In light of this, Adams argues that the best way to learn to read is, first, to learn systematically the basic sound-spelling combinations in language (i.e., phonics), and second, to engage in lots and lots of reading where attention is focused on the sequence of letters to identify words. 

I may eventually do a fuller write-up of Adams’s book, as it contains a lot of nuggets for thinking about other skills that haven’t been researched as thoroughly as learning to read.

2. Social Learning Theory by Albert Bandura

In this psychology classic, Albert Bandura introduced the idea of self-efficacy to studies of motivation. 

Many early theories of motivation focused on expected benefits. If I thought the likely outcome of action X would be good for me, I’d feel motivated to do X. In contrast, if X involved risk or harm, I’d feel averse to taking that action. 

Yet these theories seem ill-equipped to explain the diversity of motivation we see in practice. Why do some students study hard for a test while others slack? Moreover, why do we fail to motivate ourselves to do things we readily understand are in our self-interest?

Bandura argued that it wasn’t merely our sense of the presumed benefits of taking an action, but also our beliefs about our ability to take that action, that influenced our motivation. A student who thinks she can’t pass, no matter how hard she studies, won’t be motivated—even if the cost of failure is high. 

We gain self-efficacy for specific actions by seeing them done by others or, better yet, succeeding with them ourselves. Mastery experiences can become a reinforcing cycle, as experiencing success leads to greater self-efficacy and motivation.

3. Visible Learning by John Hattie

What works in education? Unfortunately, the answer is seemingly everything. Every pet theory and learning technique has some supporter, armed with a study showing how well it works. But when everything works, what should you focus on?

One way around this quagmire is through meta-analyses. This technique groups together many studies to find the average effect of an intervention. Hattie’s book goes even further, compiling 800 different meta-analyses in education to see a bird’s-eye view of what works well for learning.

Hattie concludes that feedback plays a central role: not just the feedback of correcting students’ mistakes, but feedback to the teacher on what students are learning and failing to grasp. Mastery learning, direct instruction and reciprocal teaching fare well in Hattie’s analysis.

This was my second time through Hattie’s book, and I’m sure it won’t be my last.

4. The Handbook of Creativity edited by Robert Sternberg

Creativity is one of our most mythologized abilities. It’s also one of the most poorly understood. 

I found this book useful for comparing different perspectives on creativity, including the role of expertise, chance, social environment and personality traits in what results in creative thinking.

The gist I get from reading these different perspectives is that creativity is a combination of:

Individual problem-solving ability. Like routine problem-solving, this is a process of applying previous knowledge to generate new options.Social recognition. Whether something is “creative” is a judgement based on prevailing opinions rather than an intrinsic trait of the thing itself.Risk-taking and randomness. A “creative” vs. “routine” expert might be distinguished by the former’s willingness to bet big on risks. 

Creativity is not a “skill” in this view. It’s not something you can practice or learn how to do. Instead, it’s a by-product of acquired expertise and a willingness to take intellectual risks. 

Thus, the best way to be more creative is to learn a lot and take a lot of swings.

5. Implementing Mastery Learning by Thomas Guskey

Mastery learning is one of the more effective pedagogical techniques for achievement, with powerful effects among weaker students.

The basic idea is simple: students are given lots of interim tests that don’t count for grades. Those who don’t demonstrate mastery of the material are given new explanations and opportunities to succeed. The end goal is that 95% of students should pass the class.

Mastery learning tends to improve outcomes by one-half to one standard deviation, which puts it in Hattie’s zone of desired effect sizes (see #3).

6. Human Performance by Paul Fitts and Michael Posner

This book is a classic for introducing Fitts and Posner’s three stages of skill acquisition:

Cognitive. This is where you learn, explicitly, “how” to perform the skill. Learning in this stage involves trying to apply instructions or explanations in practice.Associative. Here, you’re practicing on your own and trying to eliminate major errors.Automatic. Finally, skills recede from conscious awareness as the mechanism for executing them relies less and less on our working memory systems. 

Automaticity has advantages and disadvantages. 

The advantage is that it frees up resources to do other things. For skills like reading or driving, this can be essential. If you can’t automatically recognize words or manipulate the steering wheel, additional tasks, like analyzing a text or finding your way in a new city, are nearly impossible.

The disadvantage is that, being automated, skills overlearned to this point are very difficult to change or correct. Anders Ericsson proposed that much of becoming a world-class expert was engaging in practice efforts that work to undo some of the effects of this skill automation, using drills that bring awareness of the skill back under effortful control. 

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Are We Losing the Ability to Read Books?

A recent Gallup poll finds that American adults are reading fewer books each year:

Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.

…

The decline is greater among subgroups that tended to be more avid readers, particularly college graduates but also women and older Americans. College graduates read an average of about six fewer books in 2021 than they did between 2002 and 2016, 14.6 versus 21.1.

This is a worrying trend.

It’s possible, of course, to read fewer books and still engage in deep thinking. You can watch university classes on YouTube and read scientific papers online. Wikipedia does more than paper encyclopedias could have ever accomplished.

Yet books still represent the best format for deep, sustained engagement with an idea or story. A decline in reading books does not necessarily mean a loss of depth in every case, but it probably indicates a trend toward more shallow engagement on average.

Why Has Reading Books Declined?

The poll did not analyze the cause of the decline. However, a likely explanation is that this decline closely tracks the rise of social media and smartphones. Reading books is a leisure activity that struggles to compete with the algorithmic engineering underlying most online content.

Anecdotally, this fits with many conversations I have had. Many people who used to pick up a book during their spare time now pick up their phone instead.

Reading books is both a skill and a habit. As an acquired skill, reading is initially effortful but becomes easier as we become fluent, recognizing words and building background knowledge of the matters discussed. As a habit, reading is something we choose to do (or not) in our moments of downtime.

But both skills and habits can atrophy. If you spend less time reading, it takes more effort to work through challenging texts. If you decide to read less often, choosing to read becomes more effortful. Reading books, and the opposite, can both become self-reinforcing actions—readers read more books, while nonreaders find it increasingly hard to do so.

Given this state of affairs, it’s alarming that book reading is waning. Even if articles like this one act as a partial substitute, the skills and habits needed to engage deeply with ideas may still be declining. Curating our media consumption may be necessary if we want to be the exception.

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Life of Focus is Now Open for a New Session

Life of Focus, the three-month training program I co-instruct with Cal Newport (author of Deep Work), is now open for a new session. We will be holding registration until Friday, March 17th, 2023 (midnight, Pacific time).

This course aims to help you achieve greater levels of depth in your work and life. How would it feel to have more time and energy for the things that really matter to you?

We split the course into three, one-month challenges. Each challenge is a guided effort to help you establish and test new routines, alongside specific lessons to deal with issues you might face. Those challenges are:

Month 1: Establishing deep work hours. We all know we could get a lot more done with less stress if we had more time for deep work, but actually achieving this regularly can be tricky. The first month focuses on finding and making the subtle changes you need to get in more deep work—without working overtime.Month 2: Conducting a digital declutter. Technology can be great, but it can also make us miserable. Having endless distraction within arm’s reach, it’s hard to engage in meaningful hobbies and have deeper interactions with our friends and family. This month helps you cultivate a more deliberate attitude to the digital tools in your personal life.Month 3: Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages you in something meaningful. This can be learning something new or actually creating something instead of just passively consuming. Lessons will help you learn how to integrate deep hobbies into your busy life.

Life of Focus may be the most popular course we’ve run—and one in which students have reported some of the strongest results. This is because Life of Focus is action oriented—not just consuming information, but making sure you form lasting changes to your life.

Registration is open now. If you’re interested, click below. Registration is only open until Friday:

www.life-of-focus-course.com

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What Would You Do With More Time?

Suppose you could add an extra two hours to every day: what would you do with your time?

Would you take up a new hobby? Spend more time with friends or your family? Learn a new skill? Or simply give yourself more time to relax?

In imagining how you’d spend an extra two hours, magically grafted onto each day, pay attention to what you don’t add. You probably wouldn’t add another meeting at the office or extra emails to respond to. I doubt you’d add more time spent browsing on your phone.

Yet, for most of us, we already spend far more than two hours per day on activities we wouldn’t add in if more time had been gifted to us. 

We’ve already gone some way to explain this seeming contradiction:

Our attention is under the sway of powerful instincts developed for a different environment than we live in.  We equate productivity with effortful exertion, mistaking the feeling of busyness for actually spending time on things that matter. We don’t know where our time actually goes, so we can lie to ourselves about how much of it is on activities we don’t care about.

Cultivating a life of focus requires creating deliberate systems to turn back some of these forces. Good systems work in the background, silently adjusting your attention to the categories you deem most worthwhile in your life.

Creating these deliberate systems, unfortunately, requires an investment of more than just reading. When creating Life of Focus, Cal Newport and I were motivated to provide structure, accountability and an opportunity to work on building these systems. There is no overnight fix. That’s why the program runs for three months, as we slowly build up new habits.

On Monday, we’ll reopen Life of Focus for a new session. Before we do, however, I’d like to ask you to earnestly consider what you’d do with an extra two hours per day. Write your response in the comments below!

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The Underrated Usefulness of Taking a Time Log

Peter Drucker, the eminent management theorist who coined the term “knowledge worker,” made a compelling case for figuring out where your time goes:

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.

One difficulty of gaining focus is that we rarely know where our attention goes. How much time do we spend on email versus doing our most valuable work? How much time do we spend scrolling social media versus seeing our friends in real life? We feel overwhelmed studying for a big exam, but how many hours went to actual studying, and how many were spent just worrying about it?

For most of us, we don’t know. Without knowing where our time goes, how can we possibly improve it?

Over fifty years ago, Drucker identified the first step: take a detailed log of all your activities, with the start and stop time for each. This will let you know where your time is going.

Complete vs. Cursory Time Logs

The ideal time log would track all activities across your entire day. That way you would have a detailed accounting of how much time you spend watching television, using your phone, playing with your kids, doing household chores and, of course, actually working.

I’ll call this a “complete” time log since it is quite granular in tracking how your attention gets spent. Unfortunately, complete time logs are also tedious to do. There are phone and computer apps that can help automate this tracking, but they often still need some manual intervention. (For instance, is my checking a website research for an article or slacking off?)

However painstaking, everyone would benefit from doing a complete time log for a day or two in their lives occasionally. Even if you’re busy to the point of exhaustion, it’s often surprising how much of your time gets wasted.

Long-term, however, a better tool is to keep what I call a cursory time log. You use this time log to track one or two categories of time spent. In Life of Focus, we encourage students to engage in this kind of time logging by keeping a deep work tally, marking the start and end time of every deep work session they do.

A cursory time log, lacking details, can make analysis harder. You won’t always know the exact reason for changes in your working patterns. But, in some ways, the lack of details is an asset. A deep work tally, for instance, helps you detect at a glance whether the amount of time you are investing in important work is changing.

You can only change something if you’re aware of it. If you want to spend more time on the things that matter to you, the first step is figuring out where your time is actually going.

Next week, Cal Newport and I are starting a new session of our course, Life of Focus. Over the next three months, we’ll work with a group of students dedicated to improving their ability to focus on what matters.

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The Key to Sustainable Productivity

If you’ve been following productivity advice for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced the following cycle:

You find a new tool, system or motivational slogan.You get excited, work hard and get far more done than usual, seemingly proving that the new thing works.A few weeks pass, the new thing becomes old and you lose enthusiasm.Eventually, you revert to your old habits.Why is productivity so difficult to sustain?

I suspect a major cause of the difficulty is that we readily conflate two different ideas of what it means to “be productive.”

The first is a subjective feeling of productivity. This comes when we’re super busy or exerting extra willpower to focus on our work. This feeling is easy to tap into when you’re motivated by a deadline or a new productivity device.

The second is the objective output of productivity. This is the actual amount of important work that gets done. Books read, code written, clients served or products shipped. 

In the short term, the subjective and objective views of productivity often coincide. It usually is the case that when we’re subjectively productive, more work is actually getting done. 

However, in the big picture, subjective and objective views of productivity often have nothing to do with each other. One author might leisurely write ten books over a decade, while another fails to turn in a manuscript despite ardent effort. The top researchers, programmers and entrepreneurs have more professional impact—by orders of magnitude—than their typical peers, but it’s usually not just because they’re just trying really hard.

Sustainable Productivity is Invisible Productivity

Sustainable productivity comes from decoupling the short-term feeling of being busy or exerting effort from the long-term investments that allow you to get more work done whether or not you “feel” particularly productive.

Sustainable productivity comes from a few sources:

Low-effort routines or habits. The things you do without thinking about them, not just on your best days, but on your laziest days. Knowledge and skills. Whether something is a vexing problem or a trivial task depends on the skills and experience you’ve accumulated.Eliminated work and tasks. If tasks can be automated, delegated, deleted or streamlined, removing needless steps or tasks will have a far greater impact than simply trying to do them faster. Doing more important tasks means doing fewer unimportant ones.

But most important is recognizing that in order to become more productive, you have to worry less about feeling productive and more about creating systems that allow you to get more done—without herculean effort.

Next week, Cal Newport and I are opening a new session of our popular program, Life of Focus. There, we’ll guide students in building a foundation for their own sustainable productivity systems and practices. We hope you’ll join us!

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Needing to Pay Attention is a Novel Problem

Cal Newport and I are running a new session of our popular course, Life of Focus, next week. For the next three months, we’ll be working with students to improve their deep work routines, safeguard their personal time and engage in meaningful projects. We hope you’ll join us!

If you’ve read anything about healthy eating, you’ve heard a familiar argument: our bodies weren’t designed for modern diets. 

For centuries, humanity’s challenge was eating too few calories, not too many. Food was perishable, and the average hunter-gatherer might not know when the next meal would arrive. Nature’s solution was to design us to overeat whenever high-calorie foods were available. This hardwiring is ill-suited for a modern environment, though, where food is abundant and tasty.

Increasingly, we’re learning that a similar argument could be applied to our brains: our minds weren’t designed for the attentional demands of modern life.

Like our taste buds, our instincts for what to pay attention to were shaped by millions of years of survival. Social gossip and threats to our personal well-being were highly relevant for most of our species’ history. Life in a small community meant that this information was vital to staying alive.

Except, as with our nutritional surroundings, our attentional environment is now completely different. Our attentional instincts make it easy for us to get sucked into the lives of people we will never meet, feel anxious about news that has no impact on us, and encourages us to scroll long past the point when using our phones is entertaining.

In a previous era, deliberate focus was largely unnecessary because our instincts about what to pay attention to were a good match for our environment. Today, focus has to be cultivated.

How to Cultivate Focus

A life of focus means you pay attention to the things you choose to pay attention to.

Note what a life of focus is not: it is not an effort for monastic self-discipline for the sake of self-discipline, nor is it squeezing ever-more work out of your day while you prevent yourself from indulging in anything remotely enjoyable or entertaining. 

We find the opposite is more often the case. You feel less pressure to work extra hours when you get your work done well, and in a calm, focused manner.  You can feel good, rather than guilty, about your weekends and time off when you cultivate hobbies and activities that you find truly fun and fulfilling. Focus isn’t fundamentally about exertion, but about choice.

But focus is not the default. The mismatch between our ancestral environment and our modern attentional demands means that, without good systems or heroic willpower, we tend to degrade into a distracted, frazzled state.

Over this week, I will be sharing three more brief essays about how you can take steps to better choose what to pay attention to. After that, Cal Newport and I are opening Life of Focus to a select group of dedicated students who are ready to start building their life of focus over the next three months. Stay tuned!

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Creativity is Productivity

Scientists receive fewer citations as they get older. Matt Clancy explains:

Pick any author at random, and on average the papers they publish earlier in their career, whether as first author or last author, will be more highly cited and cited by a more diverse group of fields, than a paper they publish later in their career.

…

And the magnitudes involved here are quite large. In Yu et al. (2022), the papers published when you begin a career earn 50-65% more citations than those published at the end of a career. The effects are even larger for the citations received by patentees.

Does the spark of youthful genius burn out quickly, explaining the mediocrity of researchers in their later years? Interestingly, the answer is no:

The results of the previous section suggest [the chance of producing your most-cited paper] should fall pretty rapidly. At each career stage, your average citations are lower, and it would be natural to assume the best work you can produce will also tend to be lower impact, on average, than it was in earlier career stages.

But this is not what Liu and coauthors find! Instead, they find that any paper written, at any stage in your career, has about an equal probability of being your top cited paper!

This is not a new research finding. Nearly two centuries ago, the French sociologist Adolphe Quetelet observed the impressively tight link between personal productivity and creative success.

More recently, Dean Simonton has analyzed the creative output of individuals across many domains and suggests an “equal-odds” rule best describes it: once a creative individual starts publishing in a field, each piece of work they produce has roughly equal odds of world-breaking impact.

The Surprising Equipotential of Creative Success

When I first encountered this research literature, it surprised me! Consider, for a moment, what this theory rejects:

Accumulating expertise. We might expect steadily improving skills through deliberate practice and a widening knowledge base would lead to increased creative success. Except, this is not what we see outside of the initial preparatory training to enter a career.Youthful genius. Alternatively, we might expect creativity to decline as thinkers become burdened by old ways of doing things. Were this true, we would predict a reduced rate of creative success over time. But this wasn’t observed in Simonton’s research.

Instead, it looks like the most important determinant of creative success is simply how much work you produce.

Creative Success as Randomness

A simple model might capture the essential details of this trend:

Be at a knowledge frontier. You can’t contribute anything new if you’re not at the boundary of knowledge for a discipline. In academia, this usually prevents undergraduates from publishing many papers; in technology, this prevents unskilled inventors from obtaining new patents. Other work suggests painters and composers have similar ramp-up periods where their work is initially unremarkable. Getting to this threshold is non-trivial and takes considerable time and training.Idea generation and public reception are stochastic processes. Once you reach the threshold, further advances have a significant random component. This might be due to the trial-and-error process of finding new advances. Or it might come from the unpredictability of public taste as to what work receives acclaim.

The randomness of creative success favors those who are the most prolific. Price’s Law captures this relationship in scientific output, estimating that half of the research of a given discipline will be produced by the square root of the number of researchers.1 So in a field with 100 contributors, ten will produce half of the published output. If every paper in the field has a roughly equal probability of being cited, these ten highly prolific authors will capture approximately half of all citations in their field.

To Produce Better Work, Increase Your Output

Intuitively, it feels like there ought to be a strong quality-quantity tradeoff in one’s work. You can make a few excellent things, or you can produce a lot of mediocre work. Certainly there are lots of things that increase productivity at the expense of quality. Typing random words on a page and hitting publish would increase my essay count at the cost of my writing quality dropping to zero. However, it’s interesting to note that my most-viewed articles have tended to come from my more prolific writing periods.

We prefer to attach creative success to a combination of innate talent, acquired ability and passionate commitment. Placing such significance on chance appears to cheapen the achievements of great artists, inventors and scientists.

Yet perhaps it’s because we’re so uncomfortable likening creativity to a lottery that this perspective is undervalued. Over a surprisingly wide range of pursuits, creativity is productivity, and we will have more hits if we take more swings.

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An MIT Challenge for Math and Physics? Interview with Diego Vera

In a recent essay, I shared my thoughts ten years after completing the MIT Challenge. This project was an attempt to learn MIT’s entire undergraduate computer science curriculum using their copious, free online materials. In that essay, I admitted my surprise that more people hadn’t taken up similar efforts.

Today, however, I’m happy to share a story of one of the exceptions. A few years ago, Diego Vera decided to take on a similar challenge, but he studied math and physics instead of computer science.

I corresponded with Diego via email to share his story. My questions are bolded, Diego’s responses are in plain text.

Interview with Diego Vera

Scott: Could you briefly introduce your project?

Diego: The basic idea behind the project was quite similar to yours. 

Using mostly the MIT degree charts catalog as well as some other online resources, I tried to piece together what one would learn in a Math and Physics undergrad, excluding general education classes—purely math and physics classes. 

For this project, almost all of the courses were from MIT Open Courseware. The original time constraints I gave myself were 1 year and 6 months. Still, for several reasons, such as getting in more practice, gathering more evidence, and reviewing the courses once more, I ended up finishing it in a little over 2 years 4 months.

Tell me a bit about your life situation at the time. Were you working on the project full-time? What did you do for funds?

The year COVID hit was the most transformative year of my life. I was 15 at the time. A combination of both personal circumstances along with isolation gave me so much clarity—I transformed 180 degrees. During this time, I really got into self-improvement and started working out, meditating, reading, taking cold showers etc. 

I also found your MIT challenge on YouTube—which was a true game changer for me. I watched all of your videos listed in the MIT challenge. I started doing some online courses while still managing school online. I even began doing other projects, such as writing a book. 

Then roughly around July 1st, 2020, I decided to piece together my own kind of challenge—this time geared towards math and physics. 

I originally planned the challenge over a longer time horizon since I meant to do it alongside school. However, as I got further ahead, things took quite a turn. The school I was attending at the time dropped down a lot in terms of quality—even more than before. And given the fact there was also a big hit to my mom’s business (a business surrounding Airbnb rentals), she could no longer afford the school I was attending. Combining this with the fact that I really didn’t like the traditional path and that school would be too much of a financial burden, an international school I was going to while living Cuba, I managed to convince my mom to support me in this challenge. She, fortunately, agreed as she saw me working really hard at it.

How did you evaluate yourself and get practice? I know a lot of the upper-level classes don’t always have full materials.

Many of the beginner-level courses had an abundance of problem sets. However, it definitely was the case that several of the higher-level classes were quite difficult to do, both because of how abstract they were and also because of their lack of materials—especially problems. For these courses, I mostly tried to search through the internet and scrape together as many things as I could. Still, often times this wasn’t good enough, so unfortunately, I had to resort to other methods such as getting a collective firm grasp of the principles and proof techniques as well as an intuitive feel for the different mathematical and physical objects.

What do you feel like you can do now that you couldn’t before the project? Do you think it will be useful for you in your life/career?

There is definitely a much stronger feeling of mastery (of which there was none). More recently, towards the end of the challenge, the principles you learn from physics and math seem to apply naturally to real-life scenarios, which is quite fun. Furthermore, one of the big upsides is that learning new pieces of math and physics is now significantly easier than it was when I was starting out.

How did you study? Walk us through a typical day in the life of the project.

One of the things I found quite useful was to gather resources that spoon-fed me insight in the shortest/most compressed time possible. Although this seems obvious in hindsight, one of the things I found over and over again with the challenge was how I could spend several hours trying to learn something based off of one resource, then turn to a different resource and understand it within minutes. Spending time collecting compressed yet insightful resources, I think, can have a huge impact.

One of the things I found useful here was to get immediate practice once I knew just enough. I think this is one of the reasons project-based learning can be so powerful: you have a problem and research your way into it versus researching your way into it and then seeing what to apply. In this way, the relevance of the necessary ideas or techniques becomes apparent.

[As for the schedule] I’m not so sure how interesting this would be to people, but the schedule I’ve been following for the last 2-3 years since I made the transformation is the one below (although it has slightly changed over time the essence is the same):

3:50-3:55 Wake Up, Wash Face, Go to the Bathroom3:55-4:00 Make Bed4:00-4:20 Meditate4:20-5:50 Study5:50-6:00 Make Breakfast and Listen to podcast6:00-7:05 Study7:05-7:10 Prepare for Workout (Place Mat and put on Audiobook)7:10-8:10 Workout8:10-8:17 Shower and Active Recall8:17-8:23 Put on Clothes and Freshen Up8:23-9:50 Study9:50-10:05 Nap10:05-12:00 Study12:00-12:25 Lunch and Listen to Podcast/Audiobook/Lectures12:25-3:30 Study3:30 – 3:40 Snack and Listen to Podcast/Audiobook3:40-6:50 Study6:50-7:00 Plan the next day7:00 – 7:25 Dinner7:25-8:30/8:50 Study8:30/8:50 – 3:50 Sleep

How close do you think you got to the full education? Are there gaps from your project? Which topics do you feel most/least confident with?

I think that there were enough resources online (with the exception of assignments for the upper-level classes) for math and physics. I feel I got quite close to what I wanted to accomplish, learning what you typically would learn in math and physics undergrad. The exception to this would have been to incorporate more practical experiments into some of the physics courses since I think it would help you get a better grasp on the concepts.

Now, not to say that the other courses were easy by any stretch of the imagination, but these are the courses I felt I struggled with the most by a landslide. As might not be a surprise, they are specific upper-level classes. Here were the hardest ones, I felt: 

Functional AnalysisAtomic and Optical Physics IReal AnalysisIntroduction to computing and programming in Python

Both Analysis courses were insanely difficult, largely due to their abstraction and especially the severe originality and thinking ahead one needs to do to solve the problems. I would often think to myself, “How the hell did someone know that was the way to go with the proof?”

Atomic physics was challenging for two reasons, I entered it thinking that the prerequisite knowledge from 8.05 and 8.06 Quantum mechanics wouldn’t be that much, and I hoped to learn them concurrently. It turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong about this as they assume knowledge from 8.05 and 8.06, as much as higher-level physics or engineering courses assume some kind of fluency in calculus and linear algebra. It was only the third time going through a large part of the lecture series that things started to sink in. Another reason why I found it difficult was the fact that the professor, although super insightful, would often take things for granted and label them trivial—this caused me to spend a lot of time trying to piece together what he was saying. 

Finally the computer programming course I largely found to be difficult as I had a hard time understanding this particular professor (and switched to other resources only towards the end) along with getting used to python syntax. 

What are your plans for the future?

Self-Study projects in Math, Physics, Computer Science and PhilosophyStart doing actual research in those fields and trying to do so via a non-traditional path Entrepreneurship (specifically aligned with the previous two goals)

I want to thank Diego Vera for sharing his story. If you’re interested in learning more about him or his project, you can visit his website .

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A Little Announcement…

My wife and I are happy to welcome our second child, Julia, into the world.

Fortunately, I managed to get some writing done ahead of time, so there shouldn’t be much change in the weekly essays posted to the blog. However, I might be a bit slower with email as I plan to take this month off to stay at home with the little one!

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