I’m not really good at learning things from teachers. If they are too slow you cant put them on 2x speed, and you cant hit pause and rewind if they say something too quick, or you just dont understand fully. Teachers are also wrong a lot of the time. I’ve tutored kids for a little bit now, and the amount of time I’ve messed up the brain to mouth barrier is likely high. Teachers often have a very big emphasis on getting all of your sources right and making sure you are providing correct information, but if they mess up when saying something, and if nobody is actually paying attention rather than just taking notes, BOOM! you just learned wrong information. Also I’ve come to hate notes less, but not useless copying notes. If all you’re doing is copying what is said, you are essentially playing a little game of telephone while trying to understand, which means you will come away with a notebook full of dubiously somewhat correct information, that you shouldnt learn from or trust. Just use the textbook. Here is where I propose a better way that I learn, and how maybe you can too. Say you have a topic you want to learn about. This can be anything from old car repair, to nuclear fusion reactors, to how to make a website.

  1. Search “Python programming books filetype:pdf”. you might not get exactly what you’re looking for, but it gets you on the right path in reality you can enter anything in the first part, but the important part is the filetype:pdf. This is one of google’s best tools and will let you find information that isnt some bullshit, as quickily as possible <sidenote, get an ad-blocker while you’re here>
  2. Look for forums on the specific topic that you are interested in. Someone has already had your problem or intrest before and have connected with all the people in the same sphere that are interested in it. A few examples are
    • Fusor.net fourms
    • The Samba (a fourm about VWs)
    • General subreddit of thing
    • Discord or IRC channels (Have found IRC channels are a bit eh but still try) These are all good, and the people there are usually helpful to the young whipper snappers that are into the thing they are into.
  3. If you need more resources because the “filetype:pdf” trick doesnt work(also try searching with quotations around specific words for an exact match) there are a few places you can look to get information
    • The sites libgen and arxiv are both great, but dont use the first one, and especially dont search by isbn when not using the first one.
    • MIT Open courseware (check if they have a github if you’re doing some coding stuff)
    • Instructables
    • Hackaday
    • Specific documentation or wiki pages ie. google golang printf documenation,
    • Youtube (upcoming caviat) Youtube is a great place, but more than any other place on the interenet you need to get good at bullshit filtering. They will try to server you so much bullshit that it might not be worth it in some cases. I like books because they are usually as reliable as you can hope for and are easily searchable (dont forget about Ctrl-f), and are plentiful and free.
  4. Reach out to other people directly! Steve jobs talked about calling bill hewlett on the phone asking for spare parts for the thing that he wanted to build, and how most people want to help you if you ask. This is true the majority of the time! I called up this VW shop called buslab, and they were happy to tell me what the best things to do for my old car would be free of charge, because they love when new people show intrest! The only time this hasnt been the case was when I was trying to fix my old typewriter and these sons of bitches at a typewriter place in berkeley tried to charge me $100 for a 5 minute fix of getting gunk of the escapement mechanism. The majority of people are happy to help. When I was trying to learn about the 7th ammendment I just started calling lawfirms asking about it. Usually a good rule of thumb is to start with universities, but after like the 7th law firm, I got on the phone with someone who could talk atleast somewhat to me about it. Never be afraid of calling and “waisting someone’s time”. I called up every single one of the people that work at the MIT DCI just to try to get someone on the phone and couldnt, sent emails too, nothing. Somethimes it doesnt work and thats ok! but still try. Look for people who have done thing thing you want to do and reach out, and see what resources they have shared before. Also, JUST SHOW UP! It’s easy to blow off emails, if you come to someone with intrest and motivation, they will almost always try to help.
  5. Use propper learning practices. I’m not talking about what most people talk about this by saying like “take a break every x minutes for best results” or any of that stuff. I mean dont waste your time on un-nessasary bullshit! The world’s fastest reader had this to say when reading a book. First go through the book and see if it is actually the right book! I know revolutionary stuff. The point is, make sure you know what you are going to learn and have a reason to learn it.

This works for anything you want to know, right now I’ll give a bunch of examples of radically different things that this could apply to.

  • Fungal barcoding
  • How to be good at chess
  • How to start a buisness
  • How to pick locks
  • Learn quantum mechanics
  • How to blacksmith
  • How to design a tesla coil
  • Programming/Machine learning/ anything digital
  • How to take astronomical pictures

A few closing notes. Do not be scared at a lot of information to sift through. Most of it will be the same informaion in different packages. When using google I usually open the top 10 links that have something related to what I want. I sift through them to see what’s good and what’s not till I find something good. Also, do not be afraid of learning new words. A big part of learning something is learning the lingo. Also It’s a big process. Learning something new takes a lot of time. Do not be fooled to think that just because it took you x ammount of time to do something you’re slow because y people could do it faster of some bullshit like that. It took me a month of going through a single golang book till I finished it. I mean finished by, I did every single exercise in that book. I might not have understood all of it at the time, but I tried my best to absorb useful information, and when put into practice I retained the majority of it. That was a month of intense work too. I put in hours in school when doing nothing, hours at home, and more hours whenever I wanted to.

This is the best way I’ve found to learn new things it hopefully will help you