As you may have guessed from the previous chapters, besides school I also spent another 8 years on education in college and university. Exactly 4 years in each, with the only difference that at university I studied by correspondence, or to be more precise — accelerated correspondence. During that time the thought crossed my mind thousands of times that education was completely unnecessary, and that it was simply a waste of time (and money). And if in college you were always in plain sight of the teachers, since there were no packed lecture halls, then at university the full-time form of study often seemed to me like theatre of the absurd. This thought was only confirmed every time I came to the university and at classes shared with full-time students saw how they sat constantly on their phones, doing anything but studying. Such overlaps were rare but regular, since somewhere there weren't enough teachers to handle both full-time and correspondence at once, somewhere a teacher was sick and classes were merged — in short, there were plenty of reasons. Add to that lecture halls with a hundred students where someone's sleeping, someone's eating, but everyone pretends to be listening. At that I could partly understand those who were completely uninterested in learning. There can be many reasons for that too. For night owls (and students are almost all night owls) it's extremely hard to come to class at 8 a.m., and if it's winter and dark outside, it's the perfect excuse to sleep in. If someone didn't eat properly in the morning, because when you force yourself up at 7 a.m. to go to class you have no appetite, and your breakfast is coffee with a sandwich. But by 10 you're hungry, and your thoughts are more about the break coming sooner so you can grab a bite, not about learning. It's as if everything around says this is an extremely inefficient form of learning and pastime, and it would be great if students could decide for themselves when to study, of course provided they're conscientious. But teachers can't adapt to every student. There's one teacher and many students, so all students have to adapt to the schedule, however inconvenient it may be. Although with the advent of the internet, the ability for teachers to record video lessons that students can watch at their convenience is undoubtedly a big step for student comfort, it's still far from the ideal form of learning. And by the way, student comfort along with interest is one of the main factors in the quality of education.
For a long time I was convinced that education isn't always necessary, especially given that over 8 years, being a fairly conscientious student (who, by the way, never had a single retake), I still came out with a volume of knowledge insufficient for commercial programming. Perhaps this problem exists in other industries too, not just IT. However over time, especially when I took on a managerial role and started conducting interviews, I met all sorts of strange self-taught characters. These were people extremely weak in their professional skills, who as a rule could only do one narrow specialized thing, and who had no breadth of vision at all. Of course there were good self-taught people too, but their percentage was significantly lower. So over time I did start paying attention to education as well.
Alongside this I didn't sit idle but always studied something new, and thus developed the habit of constantly self-educating. The result of this habit was a good theoretical and practical base in my head. And of course it's very important to me not to stop. Education and knowledge in general are transient things, relevant at a certain time (perhaps only in a certain place). Having received some education, whether at institutions or on your own, if you don't use it, maintain it and add to it, we start forgetting it, since it's impossible to keep something in your head forever. After all, what doesn't grow, rusts. Unfortunately our parents, grandparents didn't grasp this very simple truth. None of them improved as specialists. They thought that having finished the technical schools and colleges allotted to their youth, that professional knowledge would last their whole remaining life. We can make allowance for the lack of accessible reference materials — there was no internet then — but I think even with all the knowledge in their field at hand, without changing their beliefs about self-education, they wouldn't have used it.
If you invest in self-education, you become better than many others, and thus can have an advantage over others in the competitive environment for higher-paying positions. What's more, by self-educating you become better than yesterday's yourself. Self-education is the most fail-safe investment. So you're investing in your future, only unlike shares of this or that company your education will bring you due returns in greater volume.
Or will it not? Let's figure it out. Knowledge in itself carries no value. University professors know everything but aren't rich or successful people. Most often they're ordinary people who commute by public transport, wear the same clothes (though Jobs would support them there) and lead a very modest lifestyle overall: don't travel like everyone else, save because the salary isn't very high. Undoubtedly these people are very smart, but they don't use their knowledge to get rich, though perhaps they lack the skills. After all, even if you're the coolest engineer, to profit from your knowledge you'll have to get friendly with economics and finance, taxes, in the end. Maybe rent an office or some space, of course hire staff, since we remember that working in a team is always faster and better. For teamwork you need suitable soft skills. In other words, you can find a hundred reasons why professors from universities with the most valuable knowledge are the most ordinary people in life. Besides narrow specialized skills and knowledge you need a breadth of vision across all adjacent industries touching your potential business. If a person has the most valuable narrow-focused knowledge and is ready to build a business around it, figure out all the adjacent areas — from sales logistics and tax payment to communication with colleagues — then they'll achieve great success. Though we shouldn't discount luck either, whose importance will be discussed in one of the book's chapters.
So, some interim conclusions from the chapter. Your education from institutions isn't the deciding factor, and you can become a professional even as a self-taught person. However, having institutional education, overall in the long run you're in a better position compared to those who just started studying something on their own. We've also learned that you need to keep self-educating, and that getting a diploma isn't the end of self-education but only the beginning. And finally, we've figured out that besides knowledge in a given area, for success you need at least a superficial knowledge of a host of other related disciplines. We've also touched briefly on the importance of teamwork and luck.
At this point we know it's extremely important to learn throughout your life, but we haven't yet talked about how to do it. There probably won't be one right answer to this question, since there's no established science or discipline of "self-education" where mass research of various methods is conducted. So we'll try to work through this on our own. If I've been doing the persistent planning I describe in this book for only about 5–7 years, I've been self-educating for some 12–15 years. So I've accumulated some tips I'll try to share:
- Identify the most absorbable sources of knowledge for yourself. By absorbable I mean those that most effectively put material into your head. These can be YouTube lessons, books, audiobooks and other sources, depending on how you best perceive information: by ear or visually, whether you want to exert yourself more (e.g. reading a book) or less (watching video).
- When studying material, be sure to take notes on everything new you learn. If it's video, write down the new information somewhere; if it's a book, keep a summary. On reading books you can find several articles in my blog about how I read books and reread summaries.
- Perhaps one of the most important points in any endeavour: good structuring of material. New material is hard to remember in principle, and poorly structured material is even worse. Make it so you have to put in as little effort as possible to find information. For help with this you can reread the section on order.
- Our brain, though an extremely amazing organ for learning, is capricious and mostly doesn't want to remember various facts, rules and material. Perhaps this happens because all new information for it fills temporary memory, not permanent. Why it can't put everything in permanent memory right away is another question, not for me. Perhaps if it immediately transferred all events of our life to permanent memory, there'd be so much data that finding what's important in that mess would be hard. So it's extremely important to build a large number of neural connections around new information you want to transfer from temporary to permanent memory.
- To make the brain actually remember something, I know of at least two highly effective methods. The first is associations. When studying something new, you should create associations where this or that material is associated with something you already know well. For example, learning and memorizing foreign words always works better for me when there's something to associate the word with. Unfortunately you can't come up with associations for all new material. In such situations I usually apply the second method: repetition. With each repetition the material stays more and more in your permanent memory in the form of established neural connections. Of course repetition isn't the most efficient method, but I haven't thought of anything better yet. You can certainly try printing the material and putting it under your pillow at night or sweeping it from the book onto your palms with a gesture, then holding them to your head and pouring from your palms onto your head. But be sure to let me know if these methods work for you :)
- You need to develop the habit of constantly self-educating. Try rereading the chapter on habits if you have trouble with this. In particularly difficult cases bring in praise, public contracts, visualization and any other methods that can help you.
- One of the biggest illusions in learning is that you've learned the material when in fact you haven't properly absorbed it yet. For self-check you can use the Richard Feynman method. It consists of explaining your knowledge in the simplest language and examples so that even a child could understand. I think if you've really absorbed the material well, it won't be hard for you to explain it to someone else, even if it's a topic from astrophysics like faster-than-light travel, gravity or gravitational lensing.
Feeling stupid is the best motivation to get better. Don't sit idle and improve your skills. And remember: what doesn't grow, rusts.
