Being a C-B student takes pretty little effort.
One needs just enough concern to figure out the hacks for studying and passing tests, while never getting interested enough to learn how to learn and form ideas. That energy should be reserved for video games, goofing off with your friends, and learning how to make people laugh.
I chose the C-B route. Although it was stressful the day or two leading up to a test and during final exams, the route as a whole allowed for mostly stress-free time. I did indeed cash that in on video games, goofing off with my friends, and learning how to make people laugh.
Humans are quite good at optimizing for the day they have, not the theoretical future they want.
I optimized for the easiest path in school so that I could maximize for things that were objectively more fun than Chemistry: like watch sneaking off to Step Brothers.
Aside from outlier periods where that made Algebra II a nightmare, that optimization for the short term worked. I had the best friendships, played a ton of soccer, and thought about school exactly this much over the summer: 0.
I was solid at the short term. But, I think I optimized so well for the short term that I never learned how to learn.
Seven and a half hours inside under the glow of LEDs was never going to make me fall in love with school or learning, but it also had its opportunities that I never searched for either. I loved all of my history classes. It came the most naturally to me, which helped.
Still, those classes were always personified by reading Chapter 4-8 in an American History textbook which is where they lost me. It was school and not the story. I didn't know George Catlin. Didn't know about the Commanches. Didn't read Slaughterhouse-Five to learn or learn how it deeply troubled Churchill.
Can you imagine instead "homework" being listening to Dwarkesh Patel interview Sarah C. Paine on world history? I think it would've moved my needle.
And stack enough of that kind of content and I can see a world where I'm forming mental models and learning how to learn, instead of optimizing for passing tests.
First instance of a new model
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started ultramarathon running. The YouTube algorithm smiled on me and started recommending these beautiful films about ultra-trail running, so I watched dozens. It got ideas in my head that I'd like doing that and made me believe I could do my own version. It was exciting because it was much bigger than I was used to running being: 5k/10k/half-marathon races with thousands of people in big cities where everyone wears the finest athletic materials and goes for a PR.
The films showed people running in forests and mountains (I happened to live in those) while eating food like snickers and burritos and pushing the edges of what their bodies and minds were willing to do. That was way more interesting to me than 6am starting guns, waiting in a "corral" while listening to Celebration by Kook and the Gang on repeat.
I'd run cross country, ran hundreds of miles playing soccer all those years, and had even raced a marathon in my adult life, but ultramarathoning gave me a new model that worked for me. I'm now beginning to see that there's a new model for learning that works for me, too. And it's quite different from
Learning how to learn
I'm 30. I've realized that what I missed getting out of school wasn't better grades, but learning how to learn.
Since "Speech II" was a class I spent playing hockey with a duct tape puck on the school theatre stage with my friends, I never built a base level of understanding, or "mental models", or "first principles", that can then be applied across a range of interests.
The interests are there now. I'm fascinated by AI, our return to space, electric bikes, philosophy, how we live and why we chose (or accept) the things we do, and a bunch of other things I don't know how to articulate. The more blogs/essays and podcasts I listen to that open my mind, the more I see how having a model of learning how to learn is valuable.
Shaving seconds vs. giant leaps
Jim Walmsley is one of the U.S.'s best ultra-runners. He's the first U.S. male to win UTMB, which is the basically the
Super Bowl of ultras. He debuted in 2017 and finished 5th. In 2018 he didn't finish. Neither did he finish in 2021. It's an insane race: 106 miles, 32,000 feet of elevation
gain. He permanently moved from Flagstaff, AZ to the French alps in order to train the way Europeans do. In 2023, it paid off.
So much has to go right in this sport to finish a race like this. It's entirely possible, maybe even likely, that in 2024 he won't finish again.
Were he one of our best half-marathon runners, it would be less of a question of, "Can he do it?" and more of a question of, "Will he run a 1:06:45 or a 1:05:58 this year?"
Both are, no doubt, very impressive. But the variables are fewer and the scale of necessary willpower lower.
Ultramarathoning has stuck with me because each attempt is a self-assessment. Every time you try, you submit yourself to the conditions in and out of your control and see what you're willing to take.
This is how I am now approaching learning this go around: Ultralearning vs. microlearning. Giant leaps over shaving seconds.
I haven't systematized things yet. Even though ultramarathon training and racing is more dynamic than regular marathoning, one still needs to train. This is my basic approach to learning and building mental models right now. I'm consistently listening to and reading good things though I'm not yet at the point of sitting down as the podcast interviewee who can connect the dots across of range of subjects and ideas.
If a race or big running project is where you flex that muscle, writing is the venue where you flex the muscle of learning to learn.
Directness
Scott H. Young's books Ultralearning speaks well about how to learn in a system that's fine playing with all of the knick-knacks surrounding learning. This particular quote is one I'm thinking about right now. I'm making my way through the book and considering what subject or object I want to learn and go very direct at, like I have with ultramarathoning.
"... many of us are building the wrong portfolio of skills for the kinds of career and personal achievements we want to create. We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs, but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing."
This is, to use a loaded religious term, convicting me right now. I have vague senses of things I'd like to do, professionally and otherwise, but rather than spending some concentrated hours thinking about it, so as to articulate them and then be obligated to either choose to pursue them or not, I'm finding lots of knick-knacks to play with.
To be clear. The portfolio of skills I'd like to build, and the interests I have are:
Technology, optimism, working on great things, forming first-principles/operating philosophy, garden-farming, running, being a good father, and following an interesting path with my family.
The difficult and uncomfortable work is to create repeatable practices and skills around these things are directly impact how I spend my time in a day so that in one year, a decade, and a lifetime, I am aware that I am doing it.
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