How to learn

I've spent the last 1yr teaching myself to be technical. I'm no where close to where I want to be but I'm much more technical than I was. Through this process these are of the insights I've had (or stolen). 

Context: This is written from the perspective of trying to learn something to do something. I think learning to learn can be beautiful and much less optimized. I'm writing to improve my ability to articulate my thoughts and I write as if I'm speaking to myself from a while ago. I can be very wrong, and am incredibly willing to change my opinions.

1. Figure out the way you want to learn. Reading a textbook makes me fall asleep, I like building things! I struggled to learn aero theory for the first 6mos because it required reading a textbook, but turning it into a project helped a lot.

2. Optimize for the feedback cycle. You just gotta know that everything is a skill issue and you're going to be wrong, so get over the wrong stuff quickly.

3. You are not optimizing for teaching yourself what you would learn in college. You want to get to a point where you can dive into whatever is needed, as and when it's needed. 

4. Complexity is a mountain you need to climb, but simplicity is the goal. You need to have a sense for all the stuff you're simplifying but unless you're in college or idk Boeing, you want to keep your own technical thinking (math) very simple.

5. You have to judge yourself on your knowledge delta and where you are today. It's not either or. 

6. Early on, your key metric isn't "time to correct answer", or "number of correct answers", but rather "Delta in strength of intuition". If you're lucky enough to have help, try to make the mistakes yourself and not get the right answer directly. This is faster long-term.

7. You need a way to validate what you're doing. Without validation the learning is not yet complete. This can be building something or talking to someone. It is going to be very hard and scary to do this (it was for me), because it's going to show you where you're dumb. For me, the most evident example of this was when I built a depron glider and refused to fly it for weeks, and started working on a fiberglass glider before that ever flew (?!?). 

8. Figure out what "great" looks like. You have no context, get context. Working out of airbound.co's workshop helped me see how real technical work is done. I don't think this is critical, but definitely a very solid unlock.

9. Your learning process is always on the spectrum of "I only fuck around, find out" or "I only sit around doing theory", both are important. I have done both extremes but doing 'either/or' here is very dumb and maybe dangerous. 

Random thoughts on doing hard/great work

Context: I'm very very very very dumb. Do not take this as advice. I write for me and write based on limited experience. This is what I thought of in 1 sitting, and am probably wrong in a lot of places. I am very willing to change my mind on any of these.

  1. Be honest with yourself, not doing so only slows you down and makes you live in fear. Lead with the assumption that you’re lying to yourself.

  2. It’s okay to bitch and moan sometimes, but you just have to love the pain, you can not win here otherwise.

  3. Knowing what advice to listen to and what to ignore is a skill, and not a particularly easy one.

  4. You are not special – ask people to open up their checkbooks and you’ll see. Best case here is that you get humbled, worst case is that you seclude yourself and live in your own bubble-y world. 

  5. Hard problems are going to be hard to solve. Again, ok to feel annoyed sometimes but you can not complain all the time. You chose this. You could’ve started an AI wrapper company, or heck, gone to college and no one would’ve batted an eye. Be existentially kinky. 

  6. Not giving up when things get hard is a moat. 

  7. When stuff gets hard, think about the person that will emerge. Optimize for character building. Without pain, you can not build character. 

  8. It’s okay to have opinions, and proclaim them and not only in private.

  9. No one is strong willed enough, having a set of people who will call you out on your BS is very very important. 

  10. Run towards fear. Avoiding it only causes more fear. 

  11. Starting out ambitious is irrelevant. Anyone can emerge from their bubble at 18 ready to change the world. It’s staying ambitious that counts. Nothing can compare to getting beat up all weak, month, year and still saying you want more. 

  12. If it is humanly possible, it is possible for you to do. The only person you need to convince is yourself. 

  13. Ask yourself, is it really that hard? Am I just tired? Am I just annoyed? Am I exaggerating? If you are stressed about a pitch or something, it’s your fault. Over a decade, failures damp down. Even after a week, things don’t seem as bad. 

  14. Acting serious = serious person, is a dumb as fuck myth. Be silly pls. 

Hi! Who dis?

Welcome! I'm Samay. 

I'm 18, from Mumbai, and a self-taught engineer. 

I founded Alteon Energy - where we're building a cheaper, decentralized way to extract wind energy over the ocean to provide 2-7x cheaper power to offshore oil rigs. 

A TL;DR of my story:

  1. Started trading futures when I was 14 cause I was bored during Covid.
  2. Started selling t-shirts a couple months after that.
  3. From 14 to around 16/17, I tried and failed at building 2 wannabe startups (edtech + freelance marketplace).
  4. Came close to death ~15/16. Had existential crisis. Started craving real large scale impact. Eventually learned what I was working on, was not that. 
  5. Took 3-4mos last year to randomly learn/experiment. Got a small grant to tinker with hardware -- got very hardware pilled. 
  6. Decided not to go to uni, and work on Alteon. I have spent ~1yr now learning and making progress towards the same.

My vibes.

My email is samayATalteon.energy | LinkedIn.