Learning = Sweating. Otherwise it's entertainment.
This post by Andrej Karpathy stuck with me.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
Read the full post.
The idea echoes whenever I hear influencers tutoring something. It forces me to ask myself, "Are you really learning, or just having fun?"
Books, in contrast, are sweaty. They require hours of effort. Only then do we "see" those concepts all around us.
I look forward to sweating more this year and doing some hard things:
- Write more blog posts to practice writing
- Read more books to learn new ways of thinking
- Study more stocks to be a better investor
- Delegate more work to get better at team work
- Run or play more sports to be healthier
Wish you all a Happy 2025.