Ask HN: How do I stay motivated to learn?
There are a lot of great things I want to learn but I often drop the intensive learning process after a few days. How have you found ways to actually learn things through? How do you stay motivated?
The etymology of invention is “to find out, discovery”.
There is your answer.
When your life must necessarily depend on learning the thing, you will learn it.
Convince yourself that your life depends upon it.
Don’t treat it as a trivial thing.
Fully integrate the goal of learning with survival, with maintaining your well being.
Whenever I feel that my life depends on knowing and understanding a thing, I am fully absorbed, engaged, consumed with focused attention.
This takes some psychological work. It requires imagining your death, physical or ego death, imagining the shame, imagining the failure of embarrassment of not knowing this thing.
It takes practice, but once you learn to integrate the goal of learning with this feeling of existential annihilation, you can tap into endless sustained energy for motivated focus.
See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on learning, specifically flow states.
With the right resistance, with the right existential threat, the right challenge, your entire faculties will rise to the occasion and learn the thing.
I want to get into one of the FAANG/Unicorns (financially motivated). I do LC everyday, been doing this for a year for now, still not at FAANG/Unicorns. I'm getting sick of doing just LC but hey, I need the money (have some people I need to support), so here I am slaving over LC lol.
So, there are billions of people who would love to out-compete me and take my job. I need to make sure I'm always ahead of the curve so that the legions of CS grads being pumped out of universities don't replace me.
That's just not true.
First, I keep it recreational -- this means I don't go through an intensive learning process unless I'm enjoying doing so. The minute that it becomes unenjoyable, the intense study comes to an end.
I tend to learn things all the way through by incorporating that learning into a hobby project of some sort. I learn best by doing, so this is very effective for me both in terms of maximizing understanding and in terms of keeping the interest up.
You can look up Pirsig's Brick - if a city is boring, look for a specific building, and write about the building, starting with the top left brick. Reality has a surprising amount of detail: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
Most of those little details are quite interesting. The big picture may be interesting too. It's the stuff in between that's boring. Try to narrow down your scope until you find an interesting thing to start with.
But besides boredom, it could be fear. We have a fight, flight, freeze response. The physiological response is exactly the same; it's the mental response that changes according to the situation. What this means is that we can just mentally swap out the flight response with fight.
If you find yourself procrastinating, fight for your goals! Make that goal important, to yourself, your society, your values. Stand your ground and move forward.
That said, a reliable way to force learning is to be paid/required to learn as a means to complete a job. When your internal motivation is broken, until you can repair it (very mysterious how/when that happens) the only alternative is being in real sink-or-swim situations.
If one feels their job no longer forces them to learn, they should seek a different position within a company or switch companies maybe in a different type of business. However, one could stay at the same job for a long time, and then maintain legacy systems, which can also be quite lucrative.
Find the reason to care.
Sometimes, curiosity itself is motivating enough.
For me, it comes and goes and I find it difficult to get out of the "dips". I hate them. As I grow older, I don't want to be too comfortable in my ways and scornfully ignorant of new things and ideas.
Recently, I started a blog with the goal to eventually get to one post per day. Imposing this discipline upon myself, I then have to learn stuff to write about it.
And, as I write about it and find out how trite and basic my understanding is, it shames me into learning more.
That is only my path, however, and finding yours is on you.
Good luck!
I practically have to learn new things or improve old skills on a daily basis. This has helped me with both speed and motivation.
Learning, growing, training should be a side effect not the goal itself.
If things don’t bring you closer to that goal or distract you. Skip it. Ignore it. Every single day do something that brings you closer. Don’t skip a day. Don’t become lazy. Just do it.
Slow down your learning pace. Try to learn a bit every week on the topic that interests you. Write down notes and see a progress, which should keep you going.
I motivate myself but doing a bit everyday, while I don't do that much daily, monthly it adds up. :)
Hopefully it helps, good luck.
So stop relying on something so unreliable. Depend on your self discipline.
Write down what you need to accomplish and make yourself do it, every day, even if it's for 5-10 minutes. Eventually it will become second nature.
What could you be learning that looks interesting and that you have a strong belief will be useful over the next 25 years?