My Broken Learning Cycle

The Pattern

There's a problem I've been trapped by for many years, where I set an earnest intention to learn or make something, only to abandon that effort in a matter of a few weeks. I'll pick a topic to learn - say, cybersecurity - and I'll excitedly start watching tutorial videos and doing practice exercises. It often goes well enough at the beginning, but then something happens and I end up switching to a new interest or hobby. I'll do the next hobby for a while, and then jump ship again. Sometimes there's an interlude of disappointment or self-loathing in between periods of interest, where I can tell I'm caught in the trap again. Other times I'm like a fish happily swimming toward the next shiny thing, blissfully unaware of the hook I'm getting lured by.

In any case, I might as well have my own zodiac cycle of transient learning endeavors, that spans:

1. Cybersecurity
2. Game development
3. Computer science fundamentals
4. Mathematics
5. Physics
6. Organic chemistry
7. Chemistry lab
8. Electronics
9. Artificial Intelligence
10. Philosophy
11. Some startup idea
12. Some miscellaneous, embarrassingly grandiose science project

So this is the pattern. I go from thing to thing, project to project, in my own personal wheel of samsara. It's a very unsatisfying pattern in the long-run, because I don't gain any real depth in any of the topics I learn. It's bit like trying to start a fire by frantically rubbing two sticks together for a minute, then jumping to a new pair of sticks for 10 seconds, and then another pair, and so on and so forth. Sometimes, the half-life of my interest is as short as a few days, or even a few hours, if I'm feeling particularly disregulated.

But recently, I've really been trying to watch this carefully. What's behind this cycle?

Under the Hood

I've been reflecting a lot on this self-inflicted curse, and here's what I've noticed. In the end, the pattern isn't that complicated. I typically seek out an endeavor, because I'm enticed by a sense of possibility, inquiry, or challenge. "Oh, if I learn physics, then I could try to work on protein engineering!". "This video game idea is super cool!" "I'm totally gonna learn radare2 and take apart some binaries".

So I begin working on the idea for a while, and eventually run into something challenging. It could be a difficult problem I don't know how to solve, or a setback in a programming project I wasn't anticipating. Whatever the source of the challenge is, though, I relate to it as a threat. I'm overwhelmed by it, and so to avoid it, I just stop doing what I was doing and either 1) spend sometime despairing or 2) jump immediately into the next project. That's it.

In short, the pattern is: Start an interesting project --> encounter challenge --> react with distress --> stop working on the project. Rinse and repeat. In its wake, this little pattern has created The Cursed Chasm of Abandoned Projects.

The good news is that I have some thoughts on how to work with this pattern.

In Search of Antidotes

Since the primary impediment to my own learning process is emotional regulation, I've been pondering how I might incline myself toward better emotional habits over time. While I don't have a totally clear sense of how to go about this ("Therapists *hate* him because of this one simple trick"), here are the general themes I want to explore in the coming weeks and months.

Reckoning with Uncertainty and Discomfort

One of the key habits I need to develop is persistence in the face of challenge. A big part of challenge is uncertainty -- not knowing what the author is saying, not knowing if I'm solving this problem correctly, etc. Since I relate uncertainty as a threat, I think persistence will require

1. Finding a way to relate to uncertainty with more openness and ease, so that discomfort is reduced
2. Building a greater capacity for being with discomfort, since discomfort is inevitable

Aligning Expectations With Reality

My expectations for myself tend to be entirely unrealistic, both in terms of scope ("revolutionize XYZ") and timeline (by tomorrow, obviously). I want to find a way to have high aspirations that are still grounded. This also means that I need to accept that doing difficult things is...difficult. That's ok! I was reassured by a quote I recently came across that said, "Confusion is the sweat of learning".

Upon reflection, this feels surprisingly actionable. In terms of learning, using an existing syllabus of the content I want to learn seems like a great way to calibrate my expectations. And in terms of projects, I hope to establish healthier expectations by gathering iterative feedback. It requires a bit of courage, since the feedback could be "yeah, this won't work, don't do this". But that's legitimately valuable information.

Not over-pathologizing

One personal shift in progress is that I'm working toward not viewing my initial excitement for as project as a problem, per se. Like, it's a good thing to desire interesting, challenging projects or learning goals. So rather than feeling naive or useless when beginning yet another cycle of interest and endeavor, I'm trying to change my relationship to this process so that I understand that there are good parts of it.

Watching for ill-will as motivator

Feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred are powerful motivators, but they aren't very sustainable. There's a lot of fuel to burn, but boy is it toxic.

Looking forward

So that's the gist of it. We'll see how things unfold, but I feel more empowered having at least recognized and named this pattern. I don't expect to change overnight, but my aspiration is to practice persistence and to gain confidence in my ability to accomplish what I set out to do.