The Mental Equivalent of Sweating

Andrej Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and the Director of AI at Tesla 😎

A recent tweet sharing his advice on becoming an expert…

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment.

This is very convenient for everyone involved: the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun).

Learning is not supposed to be fun. The primary feeling should be that of effort.

It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym.

You want the mental equivalent of sweating.

Love that last part 😍

Andrej continues…

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind.

If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn?

And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach?

You’ll go down a different path in each case.

Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

👉 In another tweet, Andrej spells out how to become an expert at something…

1. Iteratively take on concrete projects and accomplish them depth wise, learning “on demand” (ie don’t learn bottom up breadth wise).

2. Teach/summarize everything you learn in your own words.

3. Only compare yourself to younger you, never to others.

#2 is also a good way to build an audience.

You don’t have to be an expert starting out. You can be a curious beginner, teaching and summarizing everything you learn about a topic 💬