[Learn C The Hard Way Pdf 64
Kody Coste
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A few weeks ago I was discussing with a friend who shared a brilliant idea with me. He was confused and not confident enough to make it work. Our conversation was fascinating for me because, for the past couple of years, I had fought strongly inside me to build the mental power to bet on myself and learn the seemingly hard stuff. Anyways!
You want to be nice to yourself. Quit the urge to want to know everything in one short learning sprint. Learn, practice, and take long breaks in which you focus on other things. In learning neuroscience, this is called inter-leaving, which is very good for chunking the knowledge into your brain. Focus on the process and not the results and in a short time, you will be overwhelmed with your results.
The thing is, I know this is just the frustration barrier. I know that once I get past that novice level and start being able to do it (which is going to happen with enough practice), I will start to enjoy it. If I put in enough time, I might even really love salsa dancing.
Ultralearning, in my opinion, often works well because it compresses the frustration barrier to a shorter period of time. Going no-English to learn a language is stressful, but the stress lasts for a couple weeks, rather than a couple years as it can in traditional classrooms.
Even structuring a project that is intense and unusual often avoids this problem. When I was doing the MIT Challenge, I never felt bad about struggling with concepts or ideas because nobody else was doing this self-education thing so there was no expectation of performance.
As you examine it more closely, the feeling of frustration itself becomes a potential space for new experiences. You realize how much your own feelings of inadequacy straitjacket you into a limited view of your life. The pain you feel from doing badly, ironically, becomes a moment of potential liberation because through it you can rewrite the story of who you are.
Learning, and ultralearning, to me represent the cultivation of these amazing, life-affirming moments. When you get good at something that previously felt impossible for you, your world becomes just a little bit bigger. This expansion of possibility, more than just achieving a goal, is the stuff of happiness itself.
I know what the expression "learn by heart" means, but I have just discovered that there's also "learn by hard", and I was wondering if this expression was just misspelled or if it is really used, and if it has the same meaning of "learn by heart".
I believe most who hear this will assume that either they misheard or the speaker misspoke, and that the intended phrase was "learn by heart". Depending on a speaker's accent and tone of voice and the listener's ear, 'hard' and 'heart' may sound extremely similar. 'Heart' is generally pronounced more like 'hart', and a 't' and a 'd' may be difficult to discern at the end of a word.
A Google search for the phrase "learn by hard" finds a few places where someone asks if this is a phrase and are told that "learn by heart" is meant, and a few other hits where it is part of a larger expression, such as "learn by hard work" or "learn by hard experience".
I've spent most of my life being a self-taught learner. As a medical student, a doctor and an entrepreneur I've had to teach myself to learn lots of topics that initially seemed hard or a bit boring like the hundreds of eponymous syndromes in neurology that all seem quite similar.
When you encounter something that you feel is hard or uninteresting, the temptation is to think it's difficult because your ability is lacking and you're not smart enough when actually it's because you don't have a method for teaching yourself hard topics.
Being able to teach myself how to learn hard things is the single most life-changing skill I have taught myself. I'm going to keep this practical and combine my own personal experiences with evidence-based studies on learning and some neuroscience on how our brains form memories.
So for the purposes of showing you in detail today we're going to be learning about Bell's Palsy which is one of those eponymous neurology topics that can seem confusing and hard when you first encounter it. If you're not a medic don't worry as the principles can be applied to lots of other topics too and if you stick around till the end I also have a second example looking at how you can apply this to Maths.
The problem with being told to learn things is that it's kind of thrust upon us. We don't necessarily naturally want to learn certain topics as, at face value, they just don't seem interesting, they are just chapters in a textbook that we've been told we need to learn. While you can force yourself by thinking "I need to learn this for an exam to get a job" that only goes so far to boosting your motivation and your interest.
The reason we find learning these new topics difficult is because we lack context, we're not deeply, emotionally invested enough to push through and figure them out and we often just don't know how to teach ourselves full stop. If you keep coming up against difficult topics or you find things hard to recall you can start to think you're not smart enough. But this isn't the case. If we look at cognitive load theory we can see that if something is uninteresting to us we won't focus our attention on it to move it to our working memory. If the information is too complex or not related to any existing knowledge we have our working memory will get overloaded as it only has a limited capacity, our cognitive load.
In order to learn, when our brains encounter new information the information needs to grab our attention since our brains naturally filter out the tons of irrelevant information which we encounter every day. And we want to try and link that information to things we already know. This is what memory masters do and it's the reason why you can more easily remember things that have strong emotional connections.
So let's take this example of Bell's Palsy which maybe isn't that interesting and make it interesting and anchor it to something we connect with. A great way to do this is to head to Google. In order to encode effectively our brains need to focus our attention and then process small chunks of information which are linked to our existing memories. So I will usually go to google images first to look for any easy to understand diagrams, then I'll head to videos or youtube to see if there are any quick explainers or preferably worked examples and then I'll head to the front page or news tab to look for any interesting stories that grab my attention.
For example, for Bell's Palsy a quick google search shows some quick images of human faces so I can immediately see the signs. As this is an image it visually obvious. Scrolling down I can also see that Angelina Jolie suffered from it and this immediately links a new concept to something you already know, in this case, a famous actress. Now this has grabbed my attention and I'm genuinely intrigued because I didn't realise Angelina Jolie had this condition. If I click through I can see that this article gives a full breakdown of her struggles. And more than that, as this is a personal account it adds emotion and as the article is written as a story it provides context and anchoring way beyond if you just read a paragraph from a textbook or wikipedia.
Now I know what you're thinking. Googling things is pretty basic right? Well that's kind of the point. Textbooks and lecture slides are often written by academics and they can be overly complicated. Consumer-facing articles on the other hand are written by people who are experts at writing copy that is understandable and easy to follow. Remember Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was known as the great explainer for his ability to explain complex topics in simple terms that his students could understand.
By reducing the complexity of new information we are optimising the intrinsic load on the brain which is the burden imposed on our short-term memory by the difficulty of the material. And by linking new information to existing, in this case via a story about Angelina Jolie, we are optimizing our germane load by better organizing the new information prior to encoding.
If it's simple, obvious and makes a hard topic easy it's exactly what you want to give you a good overview before you head to the second step in the process for learning difficult topics which is to dive deeper and get curious.
Now that we've anchored the topic of Bell's Palsy and it's got our attention with some images and a relatable story about Angelina it's time to get curious to stimulate learning. Being curious is an underrated skill. If making things relevant grabs our attention getting curious is what really drives learning and if you can get curious about uninteresting topics you'll be able to learn anything. So sticking with our example;
If the article you found piques your interest start to read around certain areas and ask questions. Why has Angelina Jolie developed a Bell's Palsy? What is the underlying cause? By being curious you begin to peel away the layers around a topic and build understanding.
If we were to just read a textbook or try to rote learn the information from the article that would be pretty superficial learning. We'd just be memorizing facts for the sake of it without much deeper understanding. Memorization of facts is at the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy is a schema guiding your depth of mastery of a topic from simply remembering something to applying knowledge and teaching others at the top.
This is where getting curious comes in. When reading this article or reviewing images or this short video on YouTube about Bell's palsy I'm actively thinking about how it relates to my existing knowledge. I might even google something like what are the causes of Bell's Palsy or what is the history of Bell's palsy. In learning science this is something called elaborative rehearsal where you are not just looking superficially but are meaningfully engaging with the content as it interests you.
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