7 Tips for Successful Self-Learning

7 Tips for Successful Self-Learning

Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:02AM

No matter what, you're going to have to learn most everything on your own anyway.

Self-learning is hard.  Regardless of where, when or how you learn - being a good self-learner will maximize your potential.

In this post, Hamilton Ulmer (an almost-done Stanford stats masters student) and I, will explore seven ways to become a great self-learner.

[ photo: flickr commons ]

1.  The longest path is the shortest and the shortest path is the longest

The shortest route to learning the craft of a field is the one that, at first glance, appears the longest.  To really learn something, you must understand the basic concepts of your field.  If you try to skip, you may end up spending more time figuring out concepts than if you had started with learning basics.

Have you ever wanted to take up a new subject, bought a book, only to make a failed attempt at the first few chapters before submitting to a lack of foundation for the material?

Starting at the beginning might seem daunting, but trying to skip to the goal directly is likely to fail.  If you are studying and unsure that you have the background for something, just stop when you don't understand something and go back to acquire that background.

2.  Avoid isolation

In school you have many effective feedback loops.  If you are confused, you can ask the lecturer for a clarification.  Your homework assignments and exams motivate you to internalize the content of the class, whether you want to or not.

Peers can help you smooth over small rough spots in your understanding.

A decent self-learner must find others who are familiar with the material.  Naturally one prefers to find an expert, but discussing the material with a peer can also go a long way.

Having a community is vital.  Often, a byproduct of finding or building a community is finding a mentor.  The one element of graduate school that is hardest to replicate is the advisor-advisee relationship.  They help guide you, smoothing out the uncertainties you have about certain topics, and help you make your own learning more efficient.

As a self-learner, you do not have the convenience of scheduled class time and required problem sets.  You must be aggressive about finding people to help you.

3.  Avoid multitasking

Another reason school is great for learning is that you plan your day around your classes.  There are distractions, of course, but if you're concerned with learning at school, you prioritize your classes over other things.

You don't have to be in a classroom or library to study, but notice the relative isolation and focus those environments afford over reading a book with your laptop on while writing emails and checking facebook or twitter with the TV on.

Remove the distractions and allocate large blocks of time.  You might find that for more difficult material, you need larger blocks of time to study because it takes longer to shift into the context of harder problems.

4.  You don't read textbooks, you work through them

Imagine taking a 12 hour flight with two books, Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Shilov's "Elementary Functional Analysis."  It would be typical to finish the 100 pages of Machiavelli in two hours or so, and spent the rest of the time working through 10 pages of a Shilov's "Elementary Functional Analysis," minus some breaks for napping and eating undesirable airplane food.

Reading a technical book is nothing like reading a novel.  You have to slow down and work carefully if you want to understand the material.  Have you ever found yourself 10 pages further in a book and having forgotten what you've just read?

Successful self-learners don't read, they toil.  If there are proofs, walk them through, and try proving results on your own.  Work through exercises, and make up your own examples.  Draw various diagrams and invent visualisations to help you develop an intuition.  If there is a real-world application for the work, try it out.  If there are algorithms, implement them with your favorite programming language.  If something remains unclear, hunt down someone who's smarter than you and get them to explain.  Sometimes you just need to put the material down, step away, relax, and think deeply to develop an intuition.

5.  Build Eigencourses
Great self learners spend a lot of time to find the best resources for learning.  You can find all the text books, papers and other resources you need on the Internet.  Many of the course materials from among the world's best universities are available for free online.  Check out the great lists of links to video courses on this Data Wrangling post.

You can pick and choose the best "eigencourse" with lecture slides, video lectures, textbooks, and other materials.  The best way  to find these materials is on Google.  You will often only need to pay for the book, and sometimes even the book is free at the course website in pdf form.

Take the time to triangulate on the right material.  Find the greats in the field, see what they use and recommend.  Find other students and read the reviews on Amazon.  Google is your friend

6.  What to do when you don't understand

Learning is all about abstractions.  We build up abstractions on top of other abstractions.  If you do not know the abstractions you are reading about that are being composed into new higher level abstractions, then you aren't going to understand the new abstraction.  If you get stuck, the way to get un-stuck is to follow the I'm stuck decision tree below.

The "I'm stuck" decision tree

• you are familiar with the abstractions you are seeing but...
  • you can't understand how they are being composed to form a new abstraction. 
    
    • what you are reading is a poor treatment of the material -> find a better treatment
    • you are rusty with the abstractions -> go review and come back
    • you are fine with the abstractions and the treatment seems clear -> work through it to develop an intuition.

• you are unfamiliar with the abstractions you are seeing
  • you know the field, but not this particular concept -> learn the concept and review other parts of the field on demand
  • you are unfamiliar with the concepts, terminology, and symbols; you don't even know what field this is part of -> you will have to step back from your current studies, find out what field you are in, and go learn a foundation in that field. (keep in mind that you often just need to build a general foundation in the field, or mastery of some subset of a field - you don't have to master the entire field.)

7.  There is nothing so practical as a good theory. -Kurt Lewin

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

Sometimes you are several hops away from something you can code up and apply to a problem directly.  Not all textbooks can be read with application in mind, despite that they serve as the theoretical foundation for applied work.  This is why you must have a deep sense of patience and commitment - which is why a prolonged curiosity and passion for a topic are so valuable.

Understanding analysis (particularly sets, measures, and spaces) will serve as your foundation for a deep understanding of probability theory, and both will then serve as your foundation for understating inference, and a deep understanding of inference is a mainstay of achieving high quality results on applied problems.

Avoid the dualistic mistakes of technical execution without intuition, and intuition without technical execution.