[sabbatic13]

This is quite true.

The best thing I ever did to preserve and improve my brain was find things, really hard things, about which I was passionate. It's not so much about studying as it is about finding subjects and venues of learning that just kick your ass. If you don't have the experience of getting your intellectual butt kicked, and if you don't have the ability to learn from the experience, you can only grow so much.

The easy stuff shouldn't be avoided; you should just expect yourself to pick it up as necessary. If you are not getting challenged, if you don't encounter people who are way ahead of you in some subjects, then you are doing it wrong. The feedback is key. Getting stopped in your tracks, just when you thought you were running along at a good clip is invaluable.

Not that I ever achieved greatness, and I do sometimes ask myself why, even in my private life, I always pick the really hard to study (and have for decades now). I'm sure masochism is involved, but the good stuff is just hard, and you have to be willing to be someone's idiot some of the time to learn.

[muraiki]

Thanks for posting this. I've taken up studying statistics and machine learning lately after having never faced any challenging quantitative classes in college (I studied a liberal art). Lately I have been struggling with linear algebra and started to wonder if perhaps I'm just intellectually mediocre and not able to accomplish my dream of working in machine learning, even though I really enjoy learning about it. You've given me something to think about.

Also, stepping back and reflecting upon what I've learned even in just the past few months has helped put things in perspective; the stuff that I'm learning now would have been completely unintelligible to me then. Suffering from the "curse of the gifted" I never really learned how to study and often get easily discouraged, but I see now that I just need to keep focused and not give up so easily.

[selimthegrim]

And in grad school, you can salt this with wondering where your next meal is coming from and camping out under your office desk!

[sabbatic13]

Ah yes, I jumped into a PhD program after the college experience. That's a great butt-kicking too, because suddenly you are responsible for justifying anything and everything you might say or write about something.

At least I learned how to live on far less than 20K a year. I mean, it was the 90's, and it was in new Jersey, but that still wasn't a fortune (and I had a bad book buying habit).