mastery.md

mastery.md

Keys to mastery:

• What leads to mastery? Is it talent? But there are many examples where people are not smart (below average intelligence) when they're young but go on to do great things. What they have differently is a passion, and the bravery to follow it.
• The desire to learn / inclination is good enough to be incredibly good at something. This inclination helps them get over all the adversity in the process.
• Patience, persistence and confidence play a much bigger role than talent.
• Our intuition is to blame externals, and act as if things out of your control are resposible for one's mastery. This helps you justify your actions of being lazy.
• Your actions determine your mental state. You're a motivated person not because of your genetics but because of your previous actions in life that helps you cultivate this motivation.
• This book is a toolkit for you to carve your way to mastery.

Discover your life's calling

• You have an inner force inside of yourself that drives you to do something specific. Learn who you really are, and align yourself with in. That will put you on the path to mastery.
• The small ideas you have about things in the passing, think through them, and pursue them further. These ideas that come from within, are much more powerful than the ideas you get from outside. You'll have much more passion to pursue these ideas.
• Go where these ideas lead you. You will do novel things that no one has ever done before. You will come up with new ways of doing things. It's okay to be slow. Don't worry about the outcome. Just do the thing that the inner force guides you towards.
• Q: what is this force in my case?
  • I have many interests that my mind pushes me towards, let me list them here: implementing cool ML applications, desire to learn new things, read books, make videos explaining complex things simply, create intuitions for various concepts, build things, understanding human suffering, why people disagree, best ways to convince something in arguments, etc.
• When we follow our inclinations, it's easy to get into flow.
• Environment generally pushes us against pursuing this inner force which leads to an unsatisfying life.
• To do work for money, and live our life waiting for non work time is a depressing way to live.
• See this journey as twist and turns, rather than the straight path. Don't start with something ambitious, start with something that you kinda like. And then switch to a related field that you like more. Continue this till the end.
• "Take what you do for others, and make it your own" At some point, you'll have enough mastery to pursue an independent path.

Strategy for finding your life task:

• Return to your origin: what are things that enjoyed more when you were younger? pursue them. also try new things.
• Occupy the perfect niche. It will utimately fit into soemthing that the world wants. This way you don't have to compete with others, and just work at your own pace. You can pursue multiple niches and connect them together.
• Avoid the false path: rebellion strategy. Something we're attracted to for money, fame or attention. It's the external force that's driving you there, not your internal.
• Let go of the past. Keep pursuing the thing you like on the side. Don't be committed to your career or company, be committed to pursue your passion.
• Find your way back.
• Reversal. Some people only find things that they're unsuccessful when they look back. But still do simple things, stick to the process.
• People who learn quick and easily face setbacks later in life: because they don't learn the importance of diligence and focus.

The first transformation:

• Learn the lessons and follow the paths established by the masters. In the process, you'll learn to become an independent thinker.
• Ideas can take years to develop. Let them happen naturally.
• People take 5-10 years to develop quitely, this is not seen from the outside.
• We need to learn from masters (and use them as guidelines for our life).
• "You must choose places of work that offer the greatest possibility for learning" -- this will pay you dividends for decades to come, far more the your current raise in pay. Don't pick the path that's easy and comfortable, because you won't have much leanring.
• In the apprenticeship phase (when you're still learning), there are three steps:
  • observation (passive mode)
  • skills acquisition (practice mode)
  • experimentation (active mode)
• The passive mode: (obersve and analyse)
  • Observe and absorb the reality as deeply as possible (analogous to prediction in RL)
  • Avoid the urge to get attention, impressing people or proving yourself!
  • Only impress people with the seriousness of your desire to learn, not because you want to raise to the top before you're ready.
  • Be like an anthropologist and learn about the work culture, and who's what. Don't try to change anything, you will be killed. You can do that after you become a master.
  • After a lot of observation, start to analyse things. Why are thigns a specific way? Just fit in initially to avoid unneccesary troubles.
  • My takeaways: I have the urge to impress my boss by building cool things quickly. I need to stop that. I need to instead focus on learning and understanding.
• The practice mode:
  • Do endless repetition of the masters. Learn to replicate what the masters do without making mistakes. Spend 10,000 hours doing this. Watch and imitate; rather than hear verbal instruction.
  • Master only one skill at a time. The pain and boredom while doing this toughens our mind just like exercise. Pain is good, don't get distracted or look for shortcuts.
  • We're teaching things to our lizard brain as we do this. This cannot happen if we're moving to different tasks. We need to stick to one for long periods of time.
  • Understand your inadequacies and absorb them fully.
  • Takeaways:
    • Look at good codebases, and understand every line of it. For VSR.
• Active mode:
  • This is the shortest part of the process. Take on new project. To help you gauge the skill gaps in your knowledge.
  • Put the ideas out there, and listen to the criticisms.
  • Try this before you're ready.
  • If you're doing this well, move to a complimentary area to build new skills.
  • The future belongs to those who acquire more skills and have novel ways of combining them.
  • Focus more on building things, than talking high level about ideas. Work with your hands.

Strategies for ideal apprenticeship:

• Let's see what strategies masters of the past used to pursue thier ideal aprenticeship.
• #1: value learning over money
  • See how top authors write and immitate their style. You need to immitate if you want to get good.
  • Just reading a lot of patent can get you to be the top thinker (eg. Albert Einestein), it sharpens your reasoning power.
  • Keep your main career that you do for living (and is not inline with your inner force) to a minimium. Spend minimal possible hours on it, and spend most of the time on your personal development.
  • When you're doing a high paying job, you'll feel the please of impressing your boss that you're worth that pay, instead of acquiring skills. Mistakes are too costly. Eventually, time will catchup with you if you're not learnign.
  • Only pick the job that gives you the most opportunity to learn.
• #2: keep expanding your horizon
  • you can do this by reading books.
  • you can do this by listening to the experts, going to meetings.
  • all of these would come together, when you're building your masterpeice.
  • don't accept your status and limited expose. learn whatever you can get your hands on.
• #3: revert to feeling of inferiority
  • we feel smug / superior when we come across unknown viewpoints. this detriorates the learning process.
  • always feel that others know much more than you, and that you're dependent on them to navigate the world.
• #4: trust the process
  • remember to all the past sitatuation where you amde massive progress by working. trust the process, it works. don't trust the outcome, don't rely on the outcome.
  • put that extra 1% in, take those extra opprtunities to get in your 10,000 hours.
  • a common failing point for people is that they grow frustrated, insecure, bored and give up when they don't seem to make progress.
• #5: Move toward resistance and pain
  • Stick religious to the schedule. Create the schedule based on your own understanding and follow it. If others make it for you, it won't be as motivating.
  • Create your own custom curriculum for skills, and give yourself a certificate on passing it. Deconstruct the skills and create your own training regimens.
  • Keep practicing the skill. If you want to become a better writer, just write anything. Then compare what you've written to what other people have and think about how you can improve.
  • Don't perform the standard exercises accepted by other people. Create your own regimen and justify it for yourself.
  • Give yourself unreasonable deadlines to practice the skill. Work by your own standards, forget how well other people do.
  • Takeaways: In my case, I need to create lots of YouTube videos of poor quality, and critique myself by comparing what I'm doing to what other people are doing. Only by writing these comment will I improve.
• #6: Apprentice yourself in failure
  • Take responsibility. Take projects, and fail. Embarass yourself.
  • Don't worry about disappointing other people, take the opportunity and do your best. If you fail, learn from those mistakes.
  • If you're a visual learner, you do somethings well but not other things. But that okay.
  • Take every opportunity you get. Do not wait.
  • Failing early is much better than failing late.
• #7: Combine how and what
  • Understand the "how" of this (learn on level below) what you're doing. You can get a more rounded knowledge and help you construct something novel.
  • This should be a part of the appretice ship process.
• #8: advance through trial and error
  • learn as many skills as possible, only as long as they're related to your deep interests (directly conflicts the idea of learning just one skill at a time, hmm)
  • if you follow a single path, you'll be bored by the time you're 40.
• Reversal
  • There is no way to avoid the apprenticeship phase. You need lengthly exposure to get new ideas.
  • Just keep pursuing the path without asking too many questions.

Absorb the master's power / The alchemy of knowledge

• Find the proper mentor. Get their knowledge, and keep you goal to surpass them, never remain in their shadow.
• Just write to whoever you can, to find a mentor in life. Do novel things: extensive reports on the research you've done, courses you've taken, etc., as evidence for your interest. Travel with them, be okay with being their assistant to get insights into their minds. Make them dependent on you, by doing their hardest work.
• Create a deep emotional bond with your mentor.
• Have some basic skills by yourself first (eg. discipline) if you want the mentors to be intereste din you.
• Mentors who're generalists are better than experts in specific areas.

Strategies for deepening the dynamic with mentor:

• #1: Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations
  • You pick up the habit patterns of your mentors. (eg. I picked about a lot of things from Blake because I admired him)
  • Do not pick the first mentor or the popular one. Pick the one who suits you the best. You learn from their styles.
• #2: Gaze into the mentor's mirror
  • Mentors need to give you tough love. They need to give you hard challenges and honest feedback.
  • If you're listening to everything they say as deeply as you can: taking notes and thinking, you learn a lot more.
• #3: Transfigure their ideas
  • We should slowly mould their knowledge into our own shape.
• #4: Create a back and forth dynamic:
  • Be the most teachable student.
  • Make them more adaptable to what you say, instead of sticking to their dogma.
• Watch an immitate your master, you'll also learn tricks that the master cannot consciously explain.

Reversal:

• If you don't have mentors, that's okay. Do it yourself.
• Read books. Make them your second order methods.

See people as they are: social intelligence

• We need to learn how to navigate the social environment smoothly. It is not true mastery if we cannot do this.

• It's okay to break principles to fit in, if that let's you achieve your ultimate goal.

• Flatter them, tell them how you find things they do impressive. Ask for help, build trust.

• Be able to accurately judge the people who you work with.

• We view people through a distorted lens. Don't idealize or demonize people. Accept them as they are. Cultivate this early.

• Having tranquil and productive social relations is important to enable spending more time on writing and inventions.

• Stop seeing world in terms of what they have done to you, but see it in terms of what signs you've missed to detect this early. Accept the world for what it truly is.

• Specific knowledge: ability to read individual people.

  • pay more attention to the behavior (tone, body langauage, facial expressions), rather than the words they say
  • get them emotional to know who they truly are.
  • direct your attention outwards, empathize, understand them realistically. you should be able to detact on demand.
  • people's actions say much more about their nature, rather than their words
  • people who portary more in intial meetings, aren't probably as powerful as they seem; they're just playing a social persona.

• General knowledge: abilitiy to read human nature more generally.

  • Just as a matter of numbers, there will be people you will encounter in life who have big negative qualities.
  • Envy:
    • it is our nature to compare ourselves to others. some people deal with it by convincing themselves that they got luckly, or that what they got isn't worth it. some people go the more destructive path of actively sabotaging them.
    • people who are insecure are more likely to be envious.
    • don't appear too perfect as that will be a source of envy. if you're good at something, make sure you show other people your flaws.
    • with insecure people, ask them for advice and attribute most of your success to luck.
    • Have self- depricating humor, never make others feel stupid.
  • Conformism:
    • Always wear a mask, when you're at work. Play by their rules. Be careful about what you say, you don't have to share things honestly.
    • You can reserve your true self to your close ones.
  • Rigidity:
    • People follow procedures just because things were done that way in the past, and don't like questioning.
    • You don't have to fight against people's rigid ways. Accept ridigity, and outwardly display deference for how they do things. You can cultivate better ideas and work on them in private.
  • Self-obsessiveness:
    • Even one cares about themselves. When you ask for help, make sure you appeal to their self-interest in some way.
    • Make the conversation revolve around them and their self-interests.
  • Laziness:
    • Everyone wants to take the shortcut. People will try to get partial credit for your work.
    • Defense: keep the main ideas to yourself, so that it is not possible to steal them.
    • Let your boss steal the credit, that's okay. But do not let it happen with your colleagues.
  • Flightiness:
    • Most of the ideas of people change by their mood.
    • Detach from other people's ephermal feelings, and focus on their actions. Do not take other people's word seriously, and don't be surprised if they change their words.
  • Passive aggression:
    • People are passive aggressive because they fear direct confrontation. So they find an indirect way of conveying these feelings by subtle attacks, keeping you guess, while having control of the situation.
    • If it is harmless, ignore. You could also call people out on their behavior, that works sometimes.
    • Avoid extemely passive aggresive people like a plauge. Or return the passive aggresive attack showing that messing with you will come at a price.
    • Don't get entangled in their drama.

• Social intellegence can also make you productive. Not having social intelligence is to slow down your progress towards mastery. And limit the full range of your creative powers.

Acquiring social intelligence:

• You need to maintain a rational mindset, and not fall into the "naive perspective" of focusing on what other people did to you. You need to keep an outwards focus on what people do specific things.
• Ideas to develop social intelligence:
  • #1: speak through your work
    • bad approach: trying to push back aggresively on the prevailing authority.
    • good approach: when you know your theory is radical, work with the understanding of people's nature. firm up your theory, getting suggestions of people aroudn you before going public. once you're high enough on the food chain, you can put your theories out then.
    • never lose your emotions. listen carefully, and respond rationally. don't assert yourself too hard, or get into petty battles.
  • #2: craft appropriate persona
    • don't talk too much about yourself, just let people guess and stick to the persona that work best in the situation.
  • #3: see yourself as others see you
    • have a third person view and see if you're playing with or playing against human nature of the people around you.
  • #4: suffer fools gladly
    • if you're stuck in a situation with fools, just listen and understand them with curiosity instead of trying to change them. use that to fuel ideas in your creative work.
    • you could also either ignore them, or use them to your own benefit.
• Reversal
  • In a group, politics and ego trump sound decision making. If you don't like to deal, you can try to keep yourself away from it and take other's help to do it.

Awaken the dimensional mind: the second transpormation

• Once you emerge from your appreticeship, become increasingly bold and try new ideas. Actively pushback against your complacency, experiment at lot.
• Mozart improved by replicating other's work and improving on it quite early in his career. It is okay to do the same in your situation to improve your quality of work.
• Mozart had 20-years of appreticeship, which was quite helpful for his later stage of producing work.

Keys to mastery:

• The "original mind" looks at the world in it's more true form (instead of concepts and ideas). We become tighter over time and start to defend specific ideas ("the conventional mind").
• To be a master, you need to retain your "original mind" despiste the pressures of adult life.
• Masters retain the spirit of "original mind" and apply it to their apprenticeship skills to produce highly creative works. "dimensional mind"
• The dimensional mind focuses on creating instead of consuming. THe human mind is naturally creative. You need to let the creativity flow by being flexible. If you're not flexible, you'll become stagnant and replacable.
• Keys to awakenings:
  • #1: choosing the creative task
    • task must be obsessive, you must be emotionally committed to it
    • choose a realistic task (slightly above you), and you have the prerequisite skills
    • let go of the uncertainity of future, and explore
  • #2: opening up the mind
    • sticking to the same method saves us effort, but tightens the mind
    • cultivate negative capability: let go of ego when hearing ideas that challenge your ideas. absorb all types of ideas.
    • allow for serendipity: ideas come when you're relaxing; this can be improved by expanding your mind by reading a lot of things during the research phase of your project. widen your attention.
      • keep a notebook to record any scarp of ideas of drawing that occur to you
    • make continued speculations by writing on paper. and observe to check your speculations. both speculation and observation is the key to good discoveries.
    • alter your perspective: don't be limited by looking at shadows in the cave, try to come up with new perspectives to explain the observations.
      • when something doesn't work, focus on coming up with multiple precise hypothesis.
      • don't rush to generalities without focusing on the details.
      • see everthing in the world as a hologram of reality, and that the exceptions actually reveal the truth, focus on them closely.
      • have an eye on the negative cues to currently accepted hypothesis.
      • based on our current emotional state, we see the world differently. we need to correct for it. (eg. if you encounter a lot of mistakes in your work, see this as productive. understand the limits of being in a state with things working easily, it means that you're not learning much)
    • revert to primal form of intelligence: we're largely dependant on the language, which limits some ways of thinking. think beyond langague: eg. visual thinker like Faraday. using images enables us to have more working memory. draw images, diagrams of models you're building. (idea: I can make youtube videos by converting various ML papers to images, and visualizing them. don't be afraid to make mistakes)
  • #3: creating optimal mental conditions for breakthroughs
    • process for many masters: idea -> excitement -> initial promising work -> road blocks -> frustration -> plough through / give up.
    • continue working on your idea without forcing a solution, explore it with the same level of initial enthusiasm you had. relax into the work.
    • the feeling that we have endless time for our work is often counter productive. you must always work with deadlines: either real of manufactured. make public commitments.
    • emotional pitfalls:
      • complacency: continue to have the "awe" and "wonder" while you're working on something, and ask the same kinds of questions and continue to wonder.
      • conservatism: not trying new ideas, saving your reputation
      • dependency
      • impatience: you lose using extra energy to get great results. always resist the easy way out and have "stubborn rigor"
      • grandiosity: there's always smarter people than you, don't have an ego.
      • inflexibility

Strategies for creative-active phase

• #1: The authentic voice
  • 10 years of appreticeship helps you build vocabulary. then you can explore and change things by combining ideas in unique ways.
• #2: the fact of great yield
  • focus on anamolies. no anamoly is too small, grab it when you find it. speculate on what it would mean.
  • read ideas from various fields (don't stick to a specific one).
• #3: mechanical intelligence (learn by iteration)
  • don't worry about other people having a head start of your modest background
  • read a lot, think closely, tinker a lot, iterate quickly.
• #4: natural powers
  • get better at the tools that you need to iterate quickly (eg. if you're an author, get faster at typing. artist? get faster at drawing. ML researcher? get faster at coding)
  • at the beginning of a project, take time for open ended exploration and wondering.
  • take the process, not try to get to the results quickly. let the project absorb your mental energy.
• #5: the open field
  • we have a lot of dead conventions in the society. this present opportunity for the creative type.
  • use something that comes from within you, and pursue it by violating conventions.
• #6: the high end
  • technical lock: don't lock into the tunnel vision. keep asking the big questions, and thinking big picture.
  • when the project gets boring, start thinking about the big picture again.
• #7: the evolutionary hijack
  • process: you encounter a technology -> you realize the broader implications of this technology -> build a product and make money.
• #8: dimensional thinking
  • have a holistic view of problems to come up with creative solutions.
  • don't narrow the problem down into some stats and spend most energy resolving those stats. continue looking at the big picture and tackle the problem from as many directions as possible
• #9: Alchemical creativity
  • explore ideas that go against the main stream
  • creativity comes from long periods of practice, not drugs.

The third transformation -- Fuse the intuitive with the rational: mastery

• Focus on the quantity of work, and replicating the experts during your apprenticeship.
• Keys to mastery:
  • Masters have "heightends intellectual power" after years of practice to sense what's happening in new ways (eg. new visuals about the phenomena they explore, they feel as intuition).
  • What masters do cannot be reduced to a rational formula. This high level intuition is a complimentary tool to rationality.
  • Once we're masters, we can accurately judge seemingly chaotic phenomena without giving a rational account of how we arrived at that judgement.
  • This happens at 20,000 hours of practice at high levels of focus. We don't coast through the knowledge, but internalize it into ourselves. We reflect on failures and setacks to internalize them.
  • Don't just read books, rigourously tear them apart and actively apply the lessons you learn to your own life. Attack it from all directions. You might not see immediate progress but you're making deep connections that will spring board you in future.
  • When we learn, we build memories of things. When masters think of ideas, their brain is subconsciously searching for millions of connections between these ideas.
  • We want to build tolerence and taste of chaotic situations for dealing with complex problems. In such situations, don't look too far ahead, just maintain your cool and trust the process.
  • Focus on making connections between everything you learn. Don't learn discrete chunks of knowledge.

Strategies for attaining mastery:

• Masters have high self-awareness. They know that the conventional path to the top does not work for them. So they build their own career paths, that suits their internal inclinations. Below are examples of this phenomena.
• #1: connect to your environment
  • Build new systems of understanding your environment, build internal models and create your own interpretations.
• #2: Play to your strengths
  • Einestein gave up experimental physics and took theoritical because that was easier for him to do.
  • Autism scientist who worked hard to build her own viusal intuition about things.

Ideas:

• The first step towards making progress is to immitate your masters. Just immitate for now, you can get better slowly.
• When you're forced to study for an exam that you're not interested in, what would you rather learn? That can give you insights into the life you might want to live.