The more you learn, the faster you can learn
“I left an important part out of the process above - how do you actually find the best resource. I don’t know.<p>That said, I’ve gotten “lucky” enough times that I think I know how to optimize for finding it.”<p>Pro tip: No, you don’t.<p>I’m game to explain it over coffee to the author, who seems to be in the Bay Area, but this writing reads a lot like someone who just started to scratch the surface on abstract learning and metacognition while thinking that it’s a wildly new discovery.<p>It’s hard to hear/read the reenforcing recitations of new-to-the-(speaker/author) concepts and not see it as a slow-motion replay of a common thought process, akin to sitting in Dolores park listening to musings on democracy and governance in the age of automation... thirty minutes after a batch of pot truffles has sold out...<p>As a generalist/multi-whatever, let me say this: expert engineers <i>hate</i> the knows-enough-to-be-dangerous guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to learning that can just walk in and be conversant after reading one book.  That guy is a pain in the ass know-it-all that spoils conversations, derails projects, and digs bottomless pits of technical debt.<p>How do I know?  I was that guy when I was younger, and I’m sure I drove people nuts.<p>No doubt there are times when I’m still that guy, but I try to hold my tongue more now until I’m confident in what I know and openly disclose where I think I fall short.<p>If you can’t take that mechanism for learning and flex it down to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or if you always fall back onto the crutch of relating a complex topic to a comfortable imperfect analogue, you’re aiming to be the engineer that gets handed non-critical work or the manager that nobody wants in a meeting... Or maybe a successful founder of some kick-ass mega unicorn...  sigh... whatever.<p>In the big companies (and Silicon Valley) I hear/see this type of thinking and self-congratulation <i>all</i> the time among engineers with 1-4 years of professional experience.  On occasion, those engineers have the horsepower to back it up, but it’s rare.  Some of that write-up resonates with how I’ve learned/worked over time, but I’d never write something so stridently confident.<p>Me 20 years ago?