Why learning is a never ending journey
Plus experiments, power-ups, and more
Hello again my friend.
Last week I didn’t send the newsletter because I was visiting my older brother, far from my pc and I totally forgot about it.
And I know it’s not an excuse so I’m taking measures to not let that happen again.
I think to make up for it, I can share with you a case study of how to learn something as complex as deep learning in a week, in 2 hours a day, without internet.
Let me know if you’d find that interesting.
Now, moving on to this week’s topic…
It’s a little meta.
So let’s just go ahead, shall we?
Main quest 🛡
The gist of this week is that learning is not a “one and done” activity, even when it’s normal to think so.
You know, the classical “I finished high-school and college so I’m done with learning, I can now just work at my day job“. Which was very common a few years ago (thank God that notion started to change after the pandemic).
Even though one of the fastest ways of picking up a new skill is “goal based learning” (which includes having a concrete start and end point).
Learning on itself is a continuous activity.
And we can talk about “stages” or “groups” when it comes to it.
Learning through completing goals or projects can be:
Within one main subject (e.g. music - playing songs with most popular chords/practicing a different strumming technique/emulating famous solos/etc)
Within related subjects (e.g. marketing - social media copy/google ads/VSL’s)
Within different subjects (e.g. web development, chess, cooking)
We can go meta and talk about learning itself (e.g. current learning process)
Here is a visual of how I see it:
So you could be learning something because…
You want to advance at your day job.
Get a different role (or a new job entirely).
Improve at a recurrent task you have.
Get better at an activity you do with friends/peers.
Stimulate your brain / explore curiosities.
Be prepared when opportunities in your field come.
And many more reasons.
And if you zoom out of all these reasons…
You’ll realize that learning is something you do daily in different scenarios and contexts. And you do it whether you realize it or not.
Now, the next important thing to think about is…
If you’re doing it so frequently, how well are you doing it?
If you’re anything like I was, you’re using the same process you had back in college.
But of course, that’s not you.
You’re better than that.
You’ve been reading these newsletter issues from some time, so it’s safe to say that you’re now better than most people out there (who have never even thought about it)
And as you know, we gotta keep on improving every day not only our learning process but ourselves as well.
Because it’s like they say.
“If you’re not growing, you’re dying.“
Experiments 🧪
This week…
It’s an unexpected & unplanned experiment related to sleep.
If you’ve been around here for a while, you know I’ve done a couple of them already.
This time I didn’t have in mind to do another one. But to give you some context…
Last weekend I was with my older brother and I went to train with him at the gym (that even rhymes 😆)
Normally one gets the muscle soreness the 2nd day. In this case I started being sore on Sunday noon. But nothing that a good night sleep can’t fix right?
That was exactly the problem.
I didn’t get a good sleep.
In fact…
I have almost no sleep at all (considering that I went to bed at like 5:10 am)
I fell into a rabbit hole and a freaking online game hosted on a website found a way to hack my psyche to stay glued to the screen the entire night.
On Tuesday I was not only very tired but very sore. What’s interesting is that combo would usually get me exhausted and at the mercy of any virus.
But I didn’t catch any. I didn’t fall ill. And after repaying the sleep debt, my schedule got shifted. My body found a way to compensate and adjust to the lack of sleep.
The following days I tried to went to bed early at my “usual” time but I couldn’t.
I was tired in the afternoons but then at night past 7pm I became awake and couldn’t go to sleep until past 11pm.
Safe to say that this is an ongoing experiment. But what’s interesting is that from Thursday onwards I haven’t feel tired or sick during the day (as I’d think I should).
Well keep tabs on it and report back next weekend. 🫡
Power-ups ✨
Since I didn’t send anything last week. This week I bring not 1 but 2 very cool tools that I hope you find useful.
The 1st one is a different kind of AI-powered search engine that summarizes results and cites the sources in the answer.
It’s called Yaddle AI and it’s not only an alternative to Perplexity but a different approach at the “AI search because Google now is full of ads and it sucks”.
And the 2nd one…
It’s this very cool app (and Chrome extension) called Scribe which gives you organized YouTube transcripts of any video.
It outperforms other alternatives because it gives you a summary at the start, highlights what the current speaker is saying, uses headings to break up the sections, has playback controls, and even a freaking table of contents!
Crazy stuff to say the least.
From the vault 🏛️
Speaking of “goal based learning”.
Here’s where I broke down that process in more detail.
Hope it’s useful. 👍
That’s it for this week.
Thanks for reading.
Catch you next weekend with some more learning goodness.
Take care and get a head start on this week.
Cheers,
Juan.