Readit News“If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.”
- Yogi Bhajan
My technique involves reading the technical book and then writing down the most important parts of what I've learned. This is useful for reference later, if I need a quick refresher.
Another useful technique is the third part of this quote, finding some way to teach and explain the concepts you are using. Often times the best audience is a smart but non-technical person. Can you find a way to explain the concept you are learning in a way so that your audience understands?
Typically this involves a lot of simplifying and I think this simplification can frustrate the engineer part of our brains that cries out "But it isn't simple!" Try to fight this urge to reject simplification because it can become easier to work with concepts as simple discrete components. Think of Newtonian mechanics, it was a nice simple explanatory framework for how things work (good enough) until we needed to add electromagnetism and quantum mechanics to explain natural phenomena that didn't abide by the framework.
Edit: Oh and lastly, and most people have already mentioned this, build something useful with the concepts you are learning.
Great teamwork and culture, tons of smart and friendly people, interesting technical problems (I think computer networking is interesting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), opportunities for growth, and good work-life balance.
One thing to note is that much of this might be because I got lucky and joined the team that was part of the OpenDNS acquisition.
I interpret your response to suggest that taking risks comes with consequences and that most of the time those consequences are negative.
My question was meant to ask (in a round-about way) why collectively we don't subsidize risk-taking (especially when the risk-takers have a track record of producing neat things)?
Here are a few things I stopped to ponder about:
1. How important are visual representations for understanding reality? What about beautiful visual representations?
2. Why are so many pioneering minds left by society to struggle with mountains(ha) of debt?
(EDIT: Formatting)
I read Pollan's essay as part of a discussion about wilderness ethics and it has stuck with me for years. It can be found in his book, Second Nature.
If you are still reading this comment, I would also recommend Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. It takes a more irascible approach to some of the ideas of wilderness ethics, but is is a damn-good, swashbuckling time.
But seriously, I think we can all agree that among the literary arts, poetry is the most likely to be accidentally uninterpretable. Due to its cultural context it is also the area where uninterpretability is the most likely to be accepted. This creates an environment where you run a serious risk of developing a culture of meaninglessness.
Some poetry is made to make you laugh like Billy Collins' Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun in the House.
Some poetry is purposefully inscrutable and difficult because the author wants you to work to understand them. A good example of this might be r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by E.E. Cummings.
Each of these examples is meaningful in its own different way. I think trying to decide what has meaning is hard because you might automatically discard a work of art that is "just for fun". Isn't play meaningful?
Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', I doubt its richness of detail, and evocation of place and time, etc can ever be captured in a film or even a miniseries, and on top of it is choc-full of tid-bits of information.
Poetry is play and learning to play with language can open up new worlds. Here is a favorite of mine.
Again by Ross Gay
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92019/again-586e779b0...
This book[1] compares poetry to music. There are many genres and styles of music, and it is likely that you don't like all genres. Enjoying poetry is about trying to find the "genre" of poetry that moves you.
[1] Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems - Stephanie Burt
It permanently changed the way I write, perhaps for the worse
I recently read A.R. Ammons Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965) and it is composed in much the same way (although it is a little more polished ;p).
- *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins
- *The Righteous Mind* by Jonathan Haidt
- *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman
- *The Art of Not Being Governed* by James C. Scott
- *The Unwinding* by George Packer
- *People's History of the United States* by Howard Zinn
- *East of Eden* by John Steinbeck
- *Sometimes a Great Notion* by Ken Kesey
- *The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoyevsky