Hayder Hussein
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

Once I heard a podcast interview with Andrew Ng, he mentioned his advice to students is to adopt a task or a project that you feel only 70% eligible to do it with your knowledge. And then fill the 30% gap like crazy.

And he said his early supervision at Stanford was not well, because he was directing his students to do projects on important topics, rather than directing them to work on projects solving important and meaningful problems. He could not stress this enough. So I think he is almost having the same idea on how to learn efficiently like exactly what conclusion that you and me reached to.

Also he mentioned that reproducing important papers by yourself is an important way to learn and validate your results and to be sure you got the same results of the paper. Perhaps this is also in agreement with my 2nd point in how to learn efficiently in my below comment in your brilliant article. (pick courses that uses top down approach and those courses who have examples that you can clone and run to reproduce state of the art projects, and then try to modify it for deeper understanding and in a way that is going toward solving your main project).

Feynman once said in how to be genius is to pick a really hard problem, and then everytime you hear or see an idea in a conference or anywhere even for a distantly related topic, try to rub that idea with your problem and see whether you can use it. And someday you will get the opportunity to use an idea from a very far topic to your project and everybody will think you are genius! How could you come up with this idea?!

I LOVED your article, since learning online courses is my passion, just like you, and looking always in productivity approaches to enhance learning efficiency.

Hayder Hussein

Written by

Electronic Design, Machine Learning, A.I. and Deep Learning

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