Original link: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2011/08/09/learning-smart-hard-ideas/
Highlights:
After reading Feynman’s memoirs, a different idea struck me. While his intelligence is obvious, what impressed me most was his persistence in learning hard ideas. He would reread physics papers meticulously for hours, and all of their sources, until he understood an idea from the bottom up
Perhaps genius isn’t best defined by raw intellectual ability. Instead, maybe it’s the appetite for hard ideas that makes someone smart.
Intelligence as Endurance
Students who believed smarts were malleable wanted to take on harder challenges, and became smarter than students with more talent but less motivation.
In my own experience working with students, I’ve seen how appetite for hard ideas translates to success. When faced with a concept that they don’t understand, most students simply accept the correct definition and memorize the solution. Top learners don’t do this—they struggle obsessively to figure it out.
Hunger for Hard Ideas
A hunger for hard ideas is a specific subset of curiosity. It’s seeking explanations for things because they are hard to understand. Because, when those ideas are understood, the satisfaction of knowing something difficult to learn is even greater.
People who believe in superstitions lack this hunger. They are curious for explanations, but they prefer naïve explanations that are easily understood. They prefer incorrect explanations, than accepting hard ideas exist.
Developing Your Appetite
If you believe certain domains of knowledge are too difficult for you to understand, then you’ll avoid hard ideas.
People with the right attitude believe no idea is too difficult to understand. The only reason you don’t know everything is that you haven’t spent the time to learn it all yet. Effort is the only barrier, not ability in 99% of all cases.
Feynman was a perfect example of this. He may be renown for physics, but less people know he was also an amateur musician, artist, linguist, engineer and lock picker. There isn’t enough time in one life to become perfect at everything, but that’s a constraint of lifespan, not talent.
Seeking Hard Ideas – Why Aren’t More People Autodidacts?
A question that has bothered me is, why aren’t more people self-educated? With the internet’s immense resources, almost anything can be learned online for free, or for a fraction of the cost of tuition.
Some possible answers are that learning is difficult without instruction, the content is boring, there aren’t good systems for proving knowledge obtained outside of an institution. To a certain extent these are all correct.
However, a bigger culprit is that people simply don’t like hard ideas. The reason millions of people pay billions of dollars to attend university, but only a tiny fraction watches brilliant MIT, Harvard or Stanford lectures online is because most people won’t learn for fun. Without the prospect of a diploma, most people would rather watch television.
Those people, armed with the near-infinite resources of our age and a hunger to learn for the sake of learning, will outrun the prodigies and gifted who shy away from the challenge.
Highlights:
After reading Feynman’s memoirs, a different idea struck me. While his intelligence is obvious, what impressed me most was his persistence in learning hard ideas. He would reread physics papers meticulously for hours, and all of their sources, until he understood an idea from the bottom up
Perhaps genius isn’t best defined by raw intellectual ability. Instead, maybe it’s the appetite for hard ideas that makes someone smart.
Intelligence as Endurance
Students who believed smarts were malleable wanted to take on harder challenges, and became smarter than students with more talent but less motivation.
In my own experience working with students, I’ve seen how appetite for hard ideas translates to success. When faced with a concept that they don’t understand, most students simply accept the correct definition and memorize the solution. Top learners don’t do this—they struggle obsessively to figure it out.
Hunger for Hard Ideas
A hunger for hard ideas is a specific subset of curiosity. It’s seeking explanations for things because they are hard to understand. Because, when those ideas are understood, the satisfaction of knowing something difficult to learn is even greater.
People who believe in superstitions lack this hunger. They are curious for explanations, but they prefer naïve explanations that are easily understood. They prefer incorrect explanations, than accepting hard ideas exist.
Developing Your Appetite
If you believe certain domains of knowledge are too difficult for you to understand, then you’ll avoid hard ideas.
People with the right attitude believe no idea is too difficult to understand. The only reason you don’t know everything is that you haven’t spent the time to learn it all yet. Effort is the only barrier, not ability in 99% of all cases.
Feynman was a perfect example of this. He may be renown for physics, but less people know he was also an amateur musician, artist, linguist, engineer and lock picker. There isn’t enough time in one life to become perfect at everything, but that’s a constraint of lifespan, not talent.
Seeking Hard Ideas – Why Aren’t More People Autodidacts?
A question that has bothered me is, why aren’t more people self-educated? With the internet’s immense resources, almost anything can be learned online for free, or for a fraction of the cost of tuition.
Some possible answers are that learning is difficult without instruction, the content is boring, there aren’t good systems for proving knowledge obtained outside of an institution. To a certain extent these are all correct.
However, a bigger culprit is that people simply don’t like hard ideas. The reason millions of people pay billions of dollars to attend university, but only a tiny fraction watches brilliant MIT, Harvard or Stanford lectures online is because most people won’t learn for fun. Without the prospect of a diploma, most people would rather watch television.
Those people, armed with the near-infinite resources of our age and a hunger to learn for the sake of learning, will outrun the prodigies and gifted who shy away from the challenge.
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