The most important article on programming you’ll ever read

One of my favorite articles of all time is Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years. I think it's by Peter Norvig, and I'll put the link below and whatever. But the whole synopsis of the article is to learn slower. And you know how you see all those like speed learning or speed reading or do X in, get fit in 6 weeks and all that. Like the modern world loves speed, but speed is a marketing construct. If you, I've been spending spent time on a farm recently, and if you go out into nature, nature has no concept of time, does not care. Everything just has its own pace. And so that's a real beautiful way. If the modern world is used to or loves speed, a real good way to differentiate yourself is to create your own timeline. So to use your biology, to go back to nature, use your biology as a clock. So if you are trying to learn something, and now school does a terrible job of making this, um, making learning feel like you have to learn this, you have to learn this, and it's not hard, you're not doing it right, and you need to be sweating on your brow, and if you're not working hard, you're not going to get that cookie that you, you really want at the end of high school. Oh, but you finished high school, and then, oh wait, there's another cookie, it's at the end of university. Oh, you finished your undergraduate, beautiful, well, we have another cookie for you. If you just did some, uh, postgraduate studies, some master's, you'll get that beautiful cookie. Oh wait, you finished your master's, well, now we have a PhD for you. Just a little more, a little more learning that you have to do, and then you'll you finally feel like you've learned something. I failed my first 2 years of university, so I'm probably not the best one to talk about a concept like this. But what I have noticed is that every time I've learned something because I've had to learn it, as in I've been force-fed it by some curriculum that's overfluffed because, especially in university these days, they kind of have to pack a lot of coursework in that isn't usually 100% necessary, but you have to feel like, because you're paying so much, you have to feel like you're getting your money's And that's why a lot of books these days, 300 pages of fluff around 10 pages of good stuff. What should have been just left as a blog post instead now is turned into a New York Times bestseller. And so the argument, more my argument against like the speed reading, if something is, or speed learning or whatever, doing something fast is of course you have nature as your argument where nature doesn't really care about time. But if something is fun to learn, if something is fun to read, if I'm really enjoying a book, I don't want it to end. I don't want to speed it up. Have you ever been reading a really good book and got to the last 10 chapters and, or the last 10 pages, and you've been prolonging it? You've been prolonging it because you don't want it to finish. Maybe you just start reading one page a night. You've got up in the morning, you're excited. If you're learning something new, you're connecting the dots. I remember learning to ride a bike as a child, or learning almost anything as a child, you would play. You wouldn't try to hurry things up. I don't remember trying to go or asking anyone, "How long will it take?" it take for me to learn to ride a bike? And so I get a lot of questions like, how do I learn coding faster? How do I learn machine learning faster? And I can understand where the questions are coming from because I too used to be of that mindset. But what I've noticed is every time I tried to rush something, as in try to learn something faster than what it could possibly be learned, it's caused a great amount of unhappiness. And maybe that's your style. Maybe you like that. That's your— there's a thousand ways to— the truth depends on how you look at it. If you're asking for the correct orientation of Orion's Belt. It depends on where you're looking at it from. And so maybe that's, that's your motivator. You like that, that grind of, of being unhappy unless you, you sort of just put in the work, put in the effort. But that's not my style. My style is to, if something's worthwhile, I want to enjoy it. I want to take worthwhile learning. I want to enjoy the process of learning it because that is truly the funnest part. The connecting the dots. How good does it feel? The 100 times that you fall over, over when you're learning to ride a bike is what makes that first ride so enjoyable, that, that adventure. So that's, that's what I live for when I'm learning or creating something, is I don't want to speed up the process. I want to magically stumble upon one of those moments where one dot joins to the other and it becomes this beautiful dance. So I'm making this video, it's going to be called Learn Slower or something simple like that, and I wanted to keep it simple, uh, and to of course highlight the, the article Teach Yourself programming in 10 years is what's the rush? If you are looking to, to do something worthwhile, use your biology as a clock. If something doesn't interest you, if something's not fun, well, maybe you should either move to something else or figure out a way to make it fun. So you don't have to adhere. The internet is such a beautiful place is that you don't have to adhere to the traditional style of learning anymore. You can create your own path. You can make it whatever you want. Now, of course, if you do make it whatever you want, rest assured, if you have that freedom, you you now also have the responsibility to take it upon yourself to follow that path or create that path. So in essence, learn slower, have fun with it, keep learning, keep creating, keep moving. I'll see you next time.