Embrace the Challenge of Learning: Insights from Andrej Karpathy

Recently, I came across a quote from Andrej Karpathy, whose videos and teaching style on YouTube I greatly admire. His words resonated deeply with me, serving as a powerful reminder that genuine learning and progress are supposed to be challenging.

In it he outlines three steps to mastering a subject:

• Depth Over Breadth: Focus on completing concrete projects and learning what you need as you go, rather than trying to cover everything superficially.
• Teach What You Learn: Summarize and teach the material in your own words to reinforce your understanding.
• Personal Progress: Measure your progress against your past self, not others.

Here’s the full quote:

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun).

Learning is not supposed to be fun. The primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You’ll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of “Learn XYZ in 10 minutes”. Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don’t just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

How to become an expert at a thing:

1. Iteratively take on concrete projects and accomplish them depth wise, learning “on demand” (ie don’t learn bottom up breadth wise).
2. Teach/summarize everything you learn in your own words.
3. Only compare yourself to younger you, never to others.

Kaizen Principle

Kaizen is a Japanese term for “continuous improvement”, the Kaizen principle is the idea that small, continuous changes can lead to significant improvements.

I’m often reminded of this quote by one of my heroes Joe Armstrong, who phrased it as follows:

Make it work, then make it beautiful. Then, if you really, really have to, make it fast. 90 percent of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast. So, really, just make it beautiful!

3, 2, 1... Sleep

I would always deprioritize sleep, stay up late, wake up early. And honestly, it was one of the most stupid things I did.

These days I make sure to get at least 7 hours of sleep. So that’s for the duration of sleep, doesn’t say much on the quality though.

So for quality I have this simple 3, 2, 1 rule:

• 3 hours before sleep: no food.
• 2 hours before sleep: no drinks.
• 1 hour before sleep: no screens.

I’ve been doing this for a while now and it significantly improved my sleep quality. I wake up more rested and I’m more productive during the day.

Do not get to shame

The code I’m still ashamed of is an excellent read, reminding us of our responsibility as software developers.

It also reminded me of an experience we had with Bread & Pepper, the web agency we ran from 2009-2013. A government agency approached us to build an iPhone app where you could overlay your face on Einstein. We could have used the money but decided to be frank and tell them that the idea was ridiculous and a waste of public funds.

After a few weeks, we received the response that we were the only ones who told them the truth and picked us to continue the conversation on how to achieve their goals. We got rewarded for our honesty that day.

I tend to pay attention to the feeling of shame, its trying to tell me that I did something against my morals.

Reminder that shame is a strong indicator that you messed up. Be morally strong and avoid that feeling of shame.