Learning

Learning has always been a topic that's been very close to my heart. Primarily because I struggled a lot in school.

I guess before college it was a combination of factors, primarily the language barrier of being from an English-speaking family and trying to settle into Chinese-language schools from kindergarten till just before entering college. It really didn't help that I hated the way the education system emphasised teaching by the book, instead of a discussion mode. I have a strong dislike of being told what to do.

It was different in college, when the language was English and the subject was computer science, which I did enjoy. However that didn't really translate to real-world competency. I still had many mental models that I needed to resolve and discover myself, over the course of the next twenty years.

Ever since the end of 2024 and ChatGPT burst into the scene and went mainstream, knowledge has been free flowing, if you know how to correctly tap it.

Even for me, there were many scenarios where I like to learn things in my own way, but when I get stuck, I do like a little help getting unstuck. This is where AI chatbots have really helped me. Whether it's programming, business theories, or economics, I can ask the AI chatbot to simplify the concept for me, or even go through the problem and solution with me, sentence by sentence. This allows me to easily shift between the different layers of abstraction, fine tuning the knowledge gaps I have, bringing me closer to the bigger picture that I want to be able to see and understand.

Even now, as I'm working on increasing my competency in Ruby, I get to take little bite-sized lessons whenever I want, and go in-depth when I want to understand more, and get help when I'm stuck.

In terms of knowledge acquisition, now is truly a great time to be alive. We're totally spoiled by the amount of knowledge that we have on tap, and we should use that to increase our skill set as quickly as we can.