1/19/2026

quick note on learning

 in my opinion, learning a skill is a relatively simple process.  note that this applies strictly to skills and not to knowledge.  anyway, here are the four very basic steps, followed by a few additional notes.

1. Try.  If it works, great!  If it does not work, try to understand the error, and use that to inform your next try.

2. Repeat the above process a few times.

while emotions will inevitably arise, it's probably best to not get too angry or frustrated.  if you find yourself becoming ashamed by failure or lack of success then you should definitely step away because shame, like anxiety, is a kind of poisonous, radiating emotional noise that will swamp and impede everything else.

so, if you find that the repetition of the process is frustrating you, or you don't seem to be making progress, 

3. Take a break.  A short break of 15 minutes, or a long break of a day or two.

this gives the stuff below your consciousness time to process and internalize the drastic errors, minor errors, near-successes and inadvertent actual successes.  a night of sleep or two away from the thing you're trying to learn can work wonders for actually learning it!

4. A successful "try" usually requires some small insight that will get everything to "click."

tries, repetition of tries, and breaks, will all maximize your likelihood of attaining that small insight.  it's likely that in the course of your tries you'll have a few accidental successes amidst a bunch of errors—whatever the necessary insight you need is, it'll be contained inside those successes.  the break will hopefully give your brain time to process what it did to produce a success, and so enable you to replicate it.

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when people say that "everybody learns differently," what they really mean, even if they don't realize it, is that everybody is making a different error for different reasons, and so requires different insights.  even a from-the-outside identical error can be made for a different "reason," given two different brains.  these errors, these reasons, and these insights frequently aren't going to be easy to verbalize.  it may not even be possible to do so.

some brains are better at attempting to understand their errors than others.  obviously this ability is also contingent on other factors, it's not going to be steady or consistent from day to day.  if you find yourself getting overwhelmed by frustration or shame, it's probably worth stepping back and considering that separately from what you're trying to learn because neither is inherent to the skill.

it's probably worthwhile to seek out many different explanations of the skill and to see it done by multiple people.  even if many of them are doing it "the same" way, there's subtle differences unique to the individual and the way they explain it will be unique.  this is another way of increasing your chances of achieving the Insight that makes the skill Click.  

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