Thread by @ManishEarth

A thing I've come to appreciate about self-driven learning processes is that it's completely devoid of a particular kind of frustration where you're learning something you don't see the point of, or don't really *want* to

This mostly only works if your goal is learning for fun and not "learning to use it for something" but I think this is something super important that folks don't realize as much.

I'm almost completely an autodidact in programming. There is not an aspect of the field I have learned that I hated learning. Usually there's always a topic that an individual will go "yeah I HATED learning that" but I don't have those.

I first I thought it was because I was weird and liked programming too much, but I've learned it's basically due to the flexibility of being able to set what I learn. I selection-biased my way out of hating my learning process!

See, I didn't learn programming for a job. I learned it because it was fun, and if an aspect of it stopped being fun, I'd stop doing it. So I learned things "out of order", but it was fine, I still learned them, and was able to appreciate certain things much better.

For example, I didn't really pick up data structures and algorithms as a subject in its own right until after a lot of other more advance topics. It was fine, I could write code, maybe slow but it didn't matter since it was fun.

When I started looking at data structures I'd already seen them in the wild and had a better grasp of how they fit in with everything, and since i had built up a lot of the intuition over time a lot of the tricky things were kinda obvious to me.

So I started looking at them at a point where I could *see* where they were necessary, and *appreciate* them much more. This ordering may not work for everyone but it worked for me and that's important.

But it's not just for programming! For example, I've been slowly picking up Mandarin over the years (with a long hiatus). A major complaint from learners is that writing and stroke order is hard to learn.

When I started I saw how hard it was and decided i would just avoid it

After all, I was learning for fun. I'm sure the language will be useful to me, but my goal is "languages are cool" and I wanted to pick up an interesting one. The writing system is interesting, and I enjoyed learning to read, but at the time I found writing hard. Why bother?

A few months ago for a different reason* I got a little motivation to write hanzi. I had *some* idea of stroke order at that point but had never practiced.

I found writing to be intuitive, fascinating, and super fun.

Basically, I had gotten to the point of learning the writing system that I'd begun to understand how it breaks down, begun to see the reason stroke order exists as a concept, and overall was way *happier* practicing to write.

Where earlier I would struggle to write anything other than a super simple word now I can write down around half of my vocabulary from memory, without having had to practice much if at all.

And the important thing is, being able to choose when I learned this made this an extremely pleasant an fun experience. Instead of being grumpy about it, I'm really beginning to understand the beauty of it.

And this has been my experience with 90% of the topics that people feel grumpy about their learning experience on. I invariably had a great time because I learned it when I wanted to, and my reaction was more of a "wow I see the beauty of this subject"

*the different reason is, a couple linguistics-y friends of mine took a Cantonese class and invited me; and I joined because it sounded fun. We didn't need to learn to write honzi/hanzi but had the option to do so in our homework, and I decided to try because it wasn't much.

(it is perhaps a dumb idea to simultaneously learn two similar languages, but it's still fun, and finding the parallels is very interesting to me. I think it helps as much as it hurts -- I do get confused some times but on the other hand i can lean on intuition)

anyway, I do think this is a super underrated thing about self-driven learning.

and i'll note that self-driven learning doesn't work for everyone, but if it does work, being able to tailor the order of learning to what makes *you* happy and fulfilled is really a huge win