There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.)

I learned a similar lesson in college. My university had a little-known program called the Bachelor of University Studies. Given that you could get a faculty advisor and independent committee to sign off on it, you could patch together your own degree from the courses offered in any of the colleges. The idea was to encourage students to create an inter-disciplinary course. They took care not let anyone who'd just changed majors 10 times to graduate with a BUS.

By combining courses from the Architecture, Film, and CS departments, I created a 'Digital Media' degree which doubled my salary in the graphic design department I was working in at the time. (My responsibilities stayed exactly the same). Since then no potential employer has asked about it, but it set the precedent for paying me more money.

Lessons learned: 1) You don't have to follow the same path as everyone else. 2) For plenty of places, the fact that you have the paper means more that what's printed on it.

This is inspiring, and it reminds me of an incident in my life. I went to Union Station with a friend to catch trains home for Christmas during my freshman year in college. He was going to Iowa, I was going out west. His train was six hours before mine, so I went along, as the school was pretty much closed down by that point anyway. I took a book along that was the text for the second quarter--Introduction to FORTRAN (yes, all caps those days). I think it was by McCracken. By the time the train had left, I had consumed the entire book and was ready to program. My career has never looked back from that time.

That is what I like about this community as well. There are no artificial barriers to learning or to getting anything done. You don't need credentials or permission. It is in your hands.

Isn't that how people get through college? Three all nighters per semester + three months of doing nothing. Just remove the part where you're doing nothing, and suddenly you can get so much more done in life :)

When I was younger, I used to look down on musicians. I saw what they were doing as not being on the same level as being an engineer, because engineers were more clever than them. I figured they were born with some talent, and all they had to do is play their instrument.

Now, I realise that they practise more than I do. It's even tougher for them, because there is no easy way to judge how much better they have become. And they have to do all that they do with people constantly judging them.

Engineers, scientists, mathematicians - we have it real easy. Our talent is an easy one to develop, it's an easy to make money from, and it's easy to get good. Artists & Musicians who manage to be successful have achieved a lot more than engineers who manage to become successful.

YES!

That's really all I can say. I agree with this so much. (Wow, I'm articulate!) I just wish it were easier to do.

Personal story: I'm in high school right now. Many of the courses I'm taking are very... high-school-y. Low on content and high on busy-work and hand-waving. Some, though, I find are actually well taught; namely, my Statistics course and my Multivariable Calculus/DiffEq course. The teacher for the Stat course posted all the homework he plans to assign (all out of the book) online; while the teacher for Multivariable hasn't done that, he assigns the same homework every year, so I managed to get his homework from previous students. Currently, I'm done with my statistics course and 3/4 through the multivariable course, where both of them should be full-year courses. It just feels amazing to be learning at my own pace - the class speed in high school (and, I guess, college, and perhaps life) is catering to the lowest denominator. I know that I, and many of my classmates, could easily double or in some cases triple that speed.

My reaction seems to be less enthusiastic than most people's. I think that if you can graduate in two years, you should have gone to a school that was more challenging to you.

This is probably a result of my own college experiences. I coasted through high school pretty easily (eg, doing tomorrow's calculus homework in class while it was still being explained). Then I went to a pretty good college, with a bunch of other people who were skilled enough to coast through college.

I got my ass handed to me. We all got our collective ass handed to us. It was humbling. It was also glorious. A year-long back-of-the-room calculus class was turned into a very engaging first 2/3 of a half-semester calculus class. Then, a year's worth of math at that pace was compressed again into six weeks of summer school thick enough to kill a man. I didn't put in extra effort learning beyond my classes, because the classes themselves kept me up til four in the morning.[1]

So, in short, I agree with the title of the post, you should be learning/acting at your level, not below it. However, I disagree with the main corollary of the post, which is that school is insufficient to reach that level, and you should buck the system because it's not good enough. There are schools good enough. I think it's better to find the appropriate system than to buck a normal one, because you have a much more support.[2] Slamming through four math courses in a month is a lot easier when you have four professors and a dozen peers who are all on the same page as you. You also happen to learn a lot about teamwork and collaboration that you might not by going solo.

[1] Which is not to say that every waking second was spent working; I covered 6 seasons of Deep Space Nine and 4 seasons of Babylon 5 in a year. Rest is more important than sleep.

[2] The better support is also self-reinforcing of the quality of the peers. If there are students performing below the bar, a school that can raise those students up doesn't have as great a need to lower the bar for them.

Maybe someone as a musician can enlighten me, but I always have so much trouble doing rote scale at every guitar fret position, arpeggio, memorize-these-chords exercises.

I always hear two sides of the argument that a) a la Mr.Sivers, oh you need to learn how to play fast, memorize all of these scale/chord patterns, and every single guitar-player style from Blues to Jazz to Folk to Pop, or b) you shouldn't worry too much about playing or learning too fast, but concentrate on the music; enjoy yourself, find your own style and get in the zone and slowly you'll understand how to improvise, compose and tab by immersion rather than memorizing patterns. (Because if you try to learn or play too fast, you get frustrated quickly that you aren't doing well and concentrate too much on the mechanics of note perfection that it affects your performance). Some books I read recommend daily practice sessions of only 20 minutes per day, but consistent daily practice.

I'm sure I'm painting a totally false dilemma but curious as to how some of the pro musicians out there takes are.

EDIT: Since we are on a programming forum and I assume that the advice is geared towards developing for startups, IMO, the best way to learn how to program is to learn by working on your own project and ruthlessly plagiarizing off of other people's open-source code base. Because you are motivated to finish the project because it's something that motivates you and you are forced to look deep down into the stacks because you almost always have to customize/hack 3rd party code to do something your way.

Heh. This reminds me of my real analysis course.

The first day of class he handed out our coursework for the semester. I asked if it was OK to hand in homework early. He said it was. The next class I handed in the first 3 days of homework. The following I handed in 3 more. The third class I said there didn't seem to be much point in my being there, did he mind if I just handed in the homework?

A few weeks later when I walked into another course I was taking with a lot of the same people a lot of them started congratulating me. I was puzzled. They explained that one had asked whether I was dropping the class since I hadn't been going and so they heard that I was actually taking the final exam that day.

I did the follow-up course the following month. :-)

Another time I taught my brother the basics of differential calculus in about half an hour or so. Well enough that he was able to go into a course that had that as a prerequisite and he managed to ace that course.

So yes, the difference between what we are asked to do and what we can do is pretty large.

Reminds me of Mike Cassidy's: Speed as THE primary business strategy http://venturehacks.com/articles/speed

I think it's not just pace that is important. Sure we have brilliant people who could do good by going faster, but with the advent of the internet and libraries, there's not much stopping them. Let's not forget about the majority of regular people who aren't getting a good value from the school system.

I would argue that most high school students find their studies meaningless, but not because they are bored by the triviality. They think it's meaningless because they don't comprehend the practicality of it all. They get stuff just to get it done, to avoid getting spanked for bad grades, or to satisfy their ego. So our school system shoves these topics down the students, with the hope that shoving hard enough and enough times will do the trick. But from personal experience, I've found that when I revisit something that I once learned, I usually look it up in reference either from the internet or from a book. The interesting difference is that this time, when I truly comprehend the importance or relevance of it all, I learn it in much less time.

Teaching kids what they aren't ready to learn yet is inefficient. Standardized pace, rigid curriculum impede students from learning what they want, and at their own pace (which will probably always be faster than the standard pace if the student is interested).

This problem extends into university education. I think all students should learn like that, at their own pace, and take some evaluation, not necessarily a test (I have ADHD, so I'm biased against tests), at the end. Then we can have quantifiable knowledge without forcing students to go through a rigid curriculum at a set pace. This hopefully would also mean no more banking on getting into good universities, rejections, and entrance exams determining education worthiness. Education would truly be open and accessible to all.

Derek Sivers has single handedly changed my opinion about musicians. Not that I know many musicians. As an engineer, I was under the impression that musicians are lazy bunch leading not so responsible life styles. But reading couple of blog posts of Derek changed it all.My respect to Derek.

I have zero interest in being an (over)achiever, driven, etc. And I think that's fine / there's nothing wrong with me. I also don't think there's anything wrong with people who are (over)achievers unless they feel achieving is "better" and view themselves (and others) as failures unless they have (over)achieved.

Spending 2.5 years finishing college and 1.5 years doing something else is no better/worse then spending 4 years finishing college. It only matters that you lived a good life during those four years. I believe "There's no speed limit" is bad general advice. It's good for the driven overachiever types, which I believe are a niche. But for most people it focuses them excessively on future payoffs and makes them miserable when the don't/can't overachieve.

It's the difference between working all the time so one day you can own your very own rosegarden(and likely never do) and taking the time to stop and smell the roses today.

Agree with this 100%. People will often rise to the level of expectations of people around them.

This is very useful when it comes to management, and a great way to encourage someone to grow and develop : expect a lot from someone, and find a way to communicate that you're completely confident they can achieve those expectations.

I think you could take the lessons outlined in this post even further. For some people, college itself is an unnecessary step. Nearly everyone I know has been groomed to pass high-school then pass college then get-a-job. I think that skipping any step that isn't necessary to your own goals will help you get where you want to be a lot quicker. The fewer distractions the better.

I learned and somehow forgot this lesson in my journey through the public school system. And that is not an indictment of the system per se, but the effect I allowed it to have on my development.

Any one seeking to master any field should go through the litmus test that experience provided him as early and often as possible. No parallel to learning at the hand of an accomplished practitioner.

What about those of us incapable of the speed?

I also got through college in 2 years and graduated from Georgia Tech when I was 20. Sometimes, however, I wonder whether I would have retained more of what I learned had I kept a slower pace.

Sort of sounds like New School of Florida, as described to me by an alumni. People design their own coursework for the semester and regularly meet with an adviser.

Great story. It's also interesting that most popular music is made by people who don't know squat about music theory.

What a perfect thing to read while on a break from work!

> Kimo's high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” - that the system is designed so anyone can keep up.

If your IQ is off the charts, maybe. Try studying chemistry sometime. There the standard pace is to weed as many as you out in the first few semesters as they can. The women are the first to go.