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Comment by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA | Hacker News Reader

Enthusiasm can be contagious.

Yes, my brother, then 17 explained to me, then 10, the principles of calculus because he was so excited by it. He did it in pictures (little slices etc) and I got the basic idea, though I had no use for it. I just caught his enthusiasm.

You'd be surprised just how significant that prompting was to your future learning.

The most valuable learning you can get from a book is reading the table of contents, then the preface & foreword, then leaving it alone for 5 days.

In the interim, the table of contents seeps into your brain. You will be BRILLIANTLY prepared for the content.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll try this next book I read :)

If you're reading a math or other computational or textbook, I'd also suggest to read through the exercises in the back of the chapter before diving in. It primes you with keywords from the questions and helps you to think of how you can use what you've just read.

Yes, but so poor is my memory that when I eventually sat my exams I had to do most of it by those first principles instead of the known formulas!

I can see how that sucks during the exam, but knowing how to do it from first principles will stick with you for much longer. When I told my students that I went into mathematics because my memory is so bad, they never believed me. But it is the truth (at least somewhat).

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