How to Learn stuff quickly?

After spending an unreasonable amount of tinkering on how should one approach his/her learning journey (learning how to learn), I guess i have found the right framework to learn stuff and put things into perspective.

I’m going to start with ancient Greeks. They used to divide everything we do in our daily basis into two categories. techne and episteme. techne is about building stuff and making art while episteme is about understanding and knowledge.

The best way to go about learning stuff in the first category which consists of activities like Engineering, Programming, Cooking, Painting, Singing, Speaking foreign languages and even surgery is to DO (mostly copying) things and maintaining an iterative improvement mechanism. If you look at how children learn their mother language, they start by copying how others speak and constantly maintaining an error-correcting kind of approach. BTW, they don’t give a shit about making mistakes and being laughed at all the time. The exact same rule applies in engineering (civil engineering as a visually interesting example), where you first start by renovating then moving on to build a small, two-story building and then going about developing tougher projects like a multi-story residential building and then mastering the game by building Skyscrapers.

The second category, however, has a slightly different learning framework. First, there is stupendously huge diff between Knowing and Understanding. knowing is what happens in college where you memorize formulas on differential calculus and act as if you know what you are doing. Knowing is what Chatbots are incredibly good at. Understanding is a vey different phenomena. It stems from genuine intellectual curiosity and pondering about stuff. Eventually it becomes engraved in your mind once you RE-DISCOVER the thing that you were looking for. These self-discoveries last. The other very important point on knowledge-based type of learning is that every single subject that you learn has to be connected to other subjects. Mother nature doesn’t like disentanglement and isolation. In some sense Understanding is an emergent property of various interacting subject matters.

Now, do not take this division (like any another division) so seriously. Activities mostly reside in the intersection of the two categories. if just being able to speak a language is techne, Understanding linguistics (very cool topic) is episteme. Another example would be mathematics. while it, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth (episteme) but supreme beauty (techne) like that of sculpture. I guess finding a healthy combination of being a thinker/builder works best and finding the right balance is highly personal.

Thanks for reading my essay.