What I wish I had known about learning

Note: every birthday I try to do or change one thing in my life. This time, since I have some time to do it, I’m going to try my hand at some writing. This is the first of a series of essays, taking a light-hearted approach to sharing what I wish I had known when I was younger, by writing to myself in the past. The first one is addressed to yours truly in 1995, and talks about learning.

I hope you enjoy it and maybe even find it useful, so my only birthday wish this year is for you, dear reader, to share this essay if you think your friends would find it interesting. Enjoy!

To be received on June 18th, 1995

Dear Kirill,

You won’t believe this, but I’m you in the future. I’ll use this opportunity to tell you about things I wish I had known when I was your age.

Today I’m going to start with telling you about the least obvious thing to you today that will make you happy in the future — learning. How to learn and get smarter most effectively both in school and out of it. And by the way, don’t confuse school and learning — I’m not going to talk to you today about all the other (fun, for example!) things you should do at school or university — I’ll leave that for another letter.

Hopefully you’ll read this to the end and have lots of questions and things you’ll want me to tell you more about. If so, then let me know! And we’ll talk about them in the future. So here goes — an overview of how I wish I had approached learning and getting smarter when I was you.

Memory is king

The most important thing to know about school is that the way you’re taught and tested there doesn’t work very well right now. For example, school tests favor kids with good memory and those that think quickly over those who don’t but are good at other things. So a good hack to get good grades at school is to spend time improving your memory every day. Start by memorizing things that will be useful to you in the future like geographical facts, historic events and foreign phrases (start with Chinese or Spanish).

By the way, mum isn’t explaining very well to you why you should learn and memorize Russian, but trust me, it’ll be worth it. Knowing a language well that others don’t is an example of something called optionality — which you’ll learn over time to be very powerful.

Are your friends smarter than you?

Nearly all textbooks that you get given at school are badly written, because the people that write them are paid very little and if they were exceptional at teaching, they would almost certainly be doing something else. Read the textbooks and try to understand them, but a better way to learn for your tests is to persuade the smartest kids in your class to teach you everything you need to know. For example, if you’re stuck on your science homework, don’t just ignore it — ask those smartest kids to explain how they solved them, in a way you understand. This is more effective at passing all your tests since the smart kids will teach you only the important stuff, and it’s also good practice for figuring out how to persuade people to help you with things. This will be really useful for you in the future for a lot of things.

If you’re already that smartest kid in your class, ask your parents why you’re not at a better school, and make friends with the smartest kids in the classes above you. You’ll later realize that this is always true — the best way to learn and become smarter is to be around and working with people smarter than you. Later in life you’ll realize that the biggest thing that makes you unhappy is if you don’t feel that you’re continuously getting smarter — so get into the habit of not tolerating it now.

So what?

Another way school works badly is that your teachers will tell you a lot of ‘theories’ and things to remember, without telling you why they are useful to you in the real world, now or in the future. This is especially true of maths and probability which are very useful to understand in your day to day life outside of school, and yet are usually explained in the least applicable way imaginable. In general, try to always ask your teachers and parents why what you’re learning is useful, and if they describe this well, suddenly you’ll start to find some of your classes interesting. This is useful because then you won’t be bored in class, it’ll be easier to pass your tests, and you’re less likely to fight with your parents about doing your (often seemingly pointless) homework.

Reading sharpens your learning

Read as many books and newspaper articles as you can get your hands on. Why? Because it helps with almost everything that I talk about in this letter. I know that it’s difficult, but try to get in the habit of reading a book a week. Start with any books you like, but over time lean towards older books — after all, the longer they have stayed relevant, the more you should learn about them. You’ll also prefer books that talk about what happened before in the world, the things that make it work today (like physics, economics and history) and things that help you understand how people think and feel (like texts on psychology, and most good novels). Reading these books will make you more interesting to other people, and you’ll become more curious as to why and how things work. Within a few years you should be trying to read a book every 3 days.

But one note of caution: many lies or half-truths are said in the news (seemingly innocent people and countries are more influenced by money than you think). So make sure you read all types of newspapers (and ideally from different countries) so that you form your own opinion.

Knowing the past is a superpower

You’ll realize later that a big benefit of understanding history is to help you predict the future, and you’ll only start caring about this in 8 years’ time when you start your first company. (But within a few letters I’ll persuade you to start one sooner!). Maths, physics and computers are the subjects worth knowing most and understanding too. Nearly all companies that might give you a job in the future will prefer you if you understand those things to someone who doesn’t. And remember what I said about history? They won’t teach it to you at school, but read as much as you can about the history of computers and physics. You’ll soon try to write your own history — and it’ll be much easier to do this if you know the mistakes that everyone has made before, so you don’t repeat them yourself.

Music and code

Here are two more great ways to improve your memory and speed of thought that I wrote about earlier. The first is to learn an instrument. This is also really worth doing because you don’t have to become a professional to create a really positive impression. Playing music, even on a relatively basic level but well, has a certain magic quality to it that everyone loves — and this will be very useful to you in the future. But make sure you get someone to teach you whom you really like and will be willing to practice a lot with. Otherwise it will be a waste of time.

The second is something which you may become interested in while reading about the history of computers, which is to see if you can write a program to make a computer do what you want it to do. This is called writing code and you’ll realize in several years’ time that you had wished you understood a lot more about this. Include in your reading list books about how computing programs have been written, and try to write some (any!) computer programs yourself over the next few years.

Learning the non-serious

Apart from being more interesting, the other thing that you’ll realize makes people like you more is how much you make them laugh and whether can put them in a positive mood in any situation. And so one of the other things that are useful to try to learn and memorize are good jokes and fun stories whenever you hear or read them.

If you start being good at your tests and start doing ‘uncool’ things like music and writing code, you’re probably going to get some kids who don’t understand those things say shitty things about you. For this it helps to have that sense of humor I talked about just now, since the best way to stop someone saying shitty things about you is not to get upset and angry, but show them that what they said has actually improved your mood. The best revenge on a bully is to persuade them that you’re OK with it. Hopefully you get good at this, because later in life you’ll realize that the more you become successful, all that changes is that the age and IQ of the people saying shitty things about you increases.

How and why?

It’s not just your teachers, but also your parents you should ask questions as to why things work and how outside of school. For example, how the kettle works, where money or rain comes from (you’ll hear the phrase ‘make it rain’ a few times in the future — so the combination is important), or even why you see people killing each other on the news. By the way, you’ll know you’ve got to an advanced level of this questions game when you and your parents have different answers to a question, but there’s no good explanation for which one of you is right. If your parents don’t like to answer your questions, it doesn’t mean that you’re asking stupid questions, it just means they didn’t play this game when they were your age, and don’t know enough. Go find out the answers yourself from that smartest kid in your school, or look it up in a library or online.

Over time you’ll realize that the more you know and the more you challenge things said to you, the better. This is because people’s respect for you comes from how much they feel they can learn from you, as well as how much they feel you can understand them. Gaining other people’s respect will be the biggest reason for your success in the future, and one of the main reasons for why you will get what you want in life.

OK, kid — I think this is enough for you to take in right now. Until next time, and don’t forget to tell me what I should explain better.

Thanks to Paul Sonne, Harjeet Taggar, Tracy Doree, Ben Coffer and Kulveer Taggar for reading drafts of this. And to all others who have provided me with the inspiration or knowledge to help me learn as effectively as possible over the last 29 years, in particular: Bob Goodson, Serge Faguet, Rachael Botteri, Naval Ravikant, Kevin Freedman, Max Levchin, Hugh Crean and of course my parents, to whom I am eternally indebted to on this subject in particular.