What to Learn by Dan Luu
By Dan Luu
Points from https://danluu.com/learn-what/
Learn things that:
- you have an aptitude for
- you can find an environment conducive to rapid learning
Aptitude
look for things you can't help but do that most other people don't seem to do
if you're having a hard time identifying what those might be, you can ask people who know you very well
Environment
The other major ingredient in what I've tried to learn is finding environments that are conducive to learning things that line up with my skills that make sense for me.
"learn from people" - it's not out there on the internet
Moreover, I don't think I could've learned as quickly on my own or by trying to follow advice from books or the internet. I think that people who are really good at something have too many bits of information in their head about how to do it for that information to really be compressible into a book, let alone a blog post . In sports, good coaches are able to convey that kind of information over time, but I don't know of anything similar for programming, so I think the best thing available for learning rate is to find an environment that's full of experts.
"environments are local" - force close contact
One thing to perhaps note is that the environment, how you spend your day-to-day, is inherently local. My current employer is probably the least data driven of the three large tech companies I've worked for, but my vicinity is a great place to get better at looking at data because I spend a relatively large fraction of my time working with people who are great with data, like Rebecca Isaacs, and a relatively small fraction of the time working with people who don't take data seriously.