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.