Learn how to learn

I'm not sure if I came up with this saying myself or if I heard it from someone. It's probably out there somewhere anyway.

This is something that I drilled into myself in highschool so that I could keep ahead in my grades. At the time, I was aiming to be an exemplar academic, and maybe I'll tell you why I think that may have been a mistake in another post.

But anyway, this post is going to be about my adventure in understanding what this quote actually means to me...

In highschool it was hard to realize any clear strategies for learning, it was kind of a "do your own thing" sorta deal which I kinda liked. We had resources: teacher, textbook, laptop, curriculum, and each other of course.

A lot of people just drifted along, occasionally looking at the textbook, but mostly winging it and cruising through most of high school (spoiler alert: most actually did ok on exams!). A few were persistent on the textbook and then a few went above and beyond like doing tutoring or after-school classes.

(I know this is kinda boring, just bear with me!)

I thought that I isolated a pretty neat strategy. Now that I look back on it, I was trying to get the quickest feedback loop possible between me and the answer. Basically I'd write my answer, do my best to be as concise as possible, and then look up the answer or get feedback as quickly as possible. Then move onto the next question. I seriously hated textbooks that didn't have answers to some sets of questions because then there's no point, how can you figure out if you are objectively wrong and then learn why?

I also looked briefly into the curriculum. This was an important step because I found that (at least at my school) the key to winning over the person marking your exam is to write a response that makes sense to them, not you. So I tend to do a bit of translation work between my brain and that of someone who is pedantic on the curriculum definitions of the questions. It's kind of like giving the teacher a whole bunch of puzzle pieces you made and then trying to get them to put it together in their head. If the puzzle pieces are clearly defined and have clear shapes and holes for other pieces, then it's really easy to put together.

In the end, I scored pretty well and I was happy with my results.

So you're probably like: ok, congrats... But now what?

Yeah I know, boring as fuck, but I guess I just had the engineering knack ever since I was a kid, always trying to solve problems, then solve them better, and make the system work for myself. (I had a social life! I swear! 😭)

There was a problem with all of this tho.

A lot of the problems I was working on were binary problems, yes or no answers. This means that you can't really be creative.

The areas that were not binary were constrained to the curriculum and clamped your creativity anyway. (There are some exceptions here for intentionally creative subjects like art and music.)

This kinda drilled into me that I need to jump through the right hoops to get to the answer rather than letting it naturally be delivered from my thoughts.

This led to me doing something that plagues a lot of my life: algorithm-ifying things.

Sometimes it's good, but sometimes it's bad.

Put simply, when doing something, I almost turn it into a computer program in my head. Then every time I do the thing again, I make a small modification to the program to try and make it better. This works well for mundane things I do often, like chores, but doesn't work well for social or creative things. At the time, I didn't give myself many opportunities for creativity, so later on in life, I learned that people like it better if you do something your way and it turns out terrible compared to something higher quality but conducted by some sort of process someone else made.

After all this, I learned to learn - but only for things that relate to high school and academia.

Let's take a bit of a detour and talk about stubbornness.

I'm sure you might have seen a couple Gordon Ramsay videos, especially his hell's kitchen ones.

Amy's baking company was (I think) the series' best rated episodes.

For those that don't know, I'll give a quick TLDR:

One good example is when Gordon tastes the pizza that Amy made. He claimed it was a bit raw in the middle because the dough still hadn't cooked properly.

He talked to Amy about it and she said something along the lines of "that's how I've always made it and customers like it, so I'm going to keep doing it that way".

Assuming Gordon was right and customers have given that feedback, there are probably a few ways you can interpret this, here's what I reckon:

  1. She hasn't been getting the feedback from the customers directly and it's been modified or lost in transit.
  2. She knows that she's bad and doesn't want to admit it (you'd probably do the same if you're on TV too, right?)
  3. She doesn't trust Gordon's advice (I can imagine that it's pretty hard not to trust him)
  4. She's just crazy...

Let's say the answer is #2. This is one manifestation of stubbornness that I refer to as "deflective behaviour".

You are missing out on valuable information that can improve yourself or your life, and instead you are lying to yourself and probably have to make up some pretty bullshit excuses. What I learned from this is that reality talks, so if you do decide to pull these excuses out and they're baseless, then you're going to look like even more of an idiot than if you just accepted that you were wrong in the first place.

You can kinda see a death spiral forming, right?

You fuck up something -> don't want to admit it -> you make an excuse -> they prove it wrong -> you find another excuse for that excuse -> ...

I hate to say it, but I fell into something similar, all because of the fear of failing. As you could probably guess from how I talked about my high school life, I didn't really have a problem with exams or marks - and that's the entire problem...

Another manifestation of this stubbornness is what I call "solutioning".

Let me tell you a bit about my life after graduating from university.

After university, I wanted one of two things:

  1. A job at a place that works on really interesting tech (like quantum computers)
  2. To make my own startup and maybe knock on silicon valley's front door (I know, cheesy right? 😂)

So I decided to go with number 2 and start something with my mates because I found it more interesting and it would be easier than finding a graduate role somewhere.

At the time, crypto was growing in popularity and I knew a decent amount about it and wanted to apply my knowledge by making a cryptocurrency exchange.

The collective thought between my mates and I was that this could essentially create a "money printer" where we could just sit back and let the money roll in as people make trades and we wouldn't have to lift a finger.

It turns out that it's a little more harder than it seems... 😅

If you want to see the end product, you can probably find yora.tech on archive.org.

Eventually we pivoted and started doing some random tech work for people we were lucky enough to share some hot-desks with. That turned into consultancy work and led us to a new business where we were making some money called Western Sydney software.

Unfortunately, although that was making some cash, it wasn't sustainable and it required us all to do tons of work with no anticipated reduction or automation of it (this was before the AI boom btw). We did make some pretty cool things tho, like a digital paging system.

In the end, we decided to close up shop and just divvy up the remaining cash between ourselves and the ATO. Most of us had full time jobs at that point and we're making way more money.

There are some good things, some bad and some straight up embarrassing things that happened along the way in this whole story, but most of that doesn't really matter anymore since it's in the past now. However, I learned a lot during this experience.

At the time I didn't know anything about startup culture or the best way to get one up off the ground, but I did know how to set up a business structure in Australia along with a python flask backend working with a job processing daemon!

University didn't adequately teach agile to us in my opinion, so what I was left with was a vague recollection of the studies I did in IPT in high school and some random pieces of knowledge spread about in there. If someone had told me that agile was all about minimizing time to value, then I think a lot of things would have gone differently 😅.

Essentially we almost treated this like a waterfall project. Took about two years and a bit to get some sort of MVP (half of which was in university). Not only that but we decided to get registered with AUSTRAC (the regulator for crypto exchanges and banks) which I believe was the first major mistake. Really we didn't need this until we started turning over decent cash.

All this time I was assuming that when we build this, we will get customers, but I was so wrong 😂. I was also assuming that our systems had to be state-of-the-art. I've heard so many eye-gouging stories of tech catastrophes or just terrible software and I knew this product couldn't be like that. Looking back on it now, it was far from state-of-the-art. I had this vision in my head that what we had as the MVP was impeccable and I checked it thoroughly for bugs so it shouldn't have any errors. This perception led me to sell it as such to other people with no existing basis other than my word. It also leads to a perfectionist mindset, which is toxic to both yourself and the product.

I would go on to continue to justify this product by continuously making it better because it had to be, not because customers wanted it to be, and I would keep coming up with solutions to try and make it better.

If you were in this situation you might ask yourself: "how long do we go without customers before we call it a day?". You'll be pleased to know that we did say this to ourselves and we decided that a year was enough.

By this time I could feel myself getting uncomfortable with my idea, itching myself because I could feel something was wrong but I didn't want to listen to it. I just wanted to create a solution that fits my imaginary mould! Everything will just fall into place after that, right?

I'm glad that I had the guts to cut it off before I made a bigger fool out of myself. That mould is something that I created in my head to give me value. It was a fallacy which would ultimately lead nowhere. And it was later in my career that I realized human connections are what's needed to accomplish amazing things that aim to help others.

I do however wish that someone would ask me why I'm doing it, and not just at face value, but to dig deeper. I didn't really have anyone that was skeptical of what I did in my life, either because they didn't care, or because they were scared of how I'd react (and I'm not sure why they would be 🤔 ).

I guess this now brings us back to the solutioning style of stubbornness...

One thing I understand well is forming algorithms, one of which is the scientific method (you have a hypothesis, you test it, you test it again and then analyze your results).

What the scientific method does in my eyes is it accepts that we all have biases and thoughts about the way things work (hypotheses). But gives us the tools to be able to accept that we are wrong and move on to progress our knowledge.

When I started Yora, my hypothesis was that this would become a money making machine that would launch me into silicon valley. I didn't really treat it as a hypothesis tho, I treated it as scripture. A set of made up rules to follow, an algorithm that I devised which I thought would get me somewhere so long as I never change them. But really I wasn't rolling with it because I wanted the money, I just wanted to work on interesting problems that no one has ever worked on before, and I thought somehow that it would evolve to be that way.

Why did I do this to myself? I'm not sure, maybe it's just the way I was. Or it might be the natural human need to have faith in something, because if you don't have anything you believe in for the future, then how do you keep yourself going?

I guess my key take-aways from this story are:

  1. You are no better than the guy next to you
  2. Fail as fast as you can
  3. Encourage failures with low risk
  4. Actually read a book on what you are about to do before you do it 😂

But there is one take-away that I think is genuinely important, and it's figuring out whether or not you're doing something because you actually want to. The best things in the world are made with passion.

The passion I'm talking about is that natural feeling to relentlessly continue what you are doing because the world is less fun without it. It's that feeling that you get when you stay up working until 4am on that personal project you have going. It's that feeling of being proud of what you made and being able to share it with others.

For me, that passion lies in computers.

You'll hear me often say things like "if you were to trap me in the wilderness without internet, I'll get so bored that I'll just figure out how to make it again".

I've had times where I was attending church service (I don't practice, I just have a religious family) and began drafting search algorithms for something I was working on earlier on the back of the leaflet for the mass.

And even if there are people who you might think do it better than you, or tell you you're bad at it or something, you don't just give it up, you keep doing it because there's some force pulling you back in. That's passion. And you can tell when someone isn't passionate about something if they stop doing something because of all that (happened to me plenty of times). Even if it's a small remark from a friend or full blown bullying, true passion will persevere.

In a sense, the passion for the thing you like is the hypothesis and sharing it's fruits with others is the test. It's a constant experiment to see how passionate you actually are about it.

I hope this article reminds you that you need to find your passion, cherish it, and hone it. Don't ever let who you are vanish.

Signed 25th Feb 2025.