Rabbit holes: Why being smart hurts your productivity
Truth is, most of the things I know about the world in general and programming in particular is due to procrastination and rabbit-holing. Big chunks of my understanding of physics come from randomly reading stuff on Wikipedia while procrastinating in high school. I discovered HN and learned Lisp when shying away from doing an university project in PHP, which in result got me a job in Erlang and also led to being widely recognized at the university as 'the Lisp guy'. Here I discovered pg's essays and LessWrong, both of which helped me grow, and many other things. I owe much of who I am now to rabbit-holing. And also being a person who always has three solution candidates to any problem in 30 seconds ("you know, there was this startup/library/tool featured on HN last month...") is a result of that random learning.<p>I do sometimes feel that it's not the optimal way of learning things. I try to find the balance between random-walking and systematized learning, but one thing I'm sure of, it's that the optimum is not on the side of formal education, at least not for me.<p>After trying, again and again, to force and fit myself into 'the System' of traditional, formalized learning I discovered that it is almost impossible for me, and it always have been. Learning what I'm told to learn for sake of tests and exams just repells me, causing almost physical pain. So I'm not trying to force myself anymore, I decided to do what I have to do with minimum effort, and spend the rest of the time learning what I want, the way I want, and allowing myself time for rabbit-holing and procrastinating.