Skipping ahead to the problems
Balaji's simple technique for highly effective self-teaching
Quick note: my family and I will be in the US for June, July and August. Here’s our rough itinerary. Please let me know if you’d like to catch up or have me visit your company. If your a Bradfield alum, we’ll have a get together on June 1st at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, RSVP here. I’ll also likely do an informal live class in SF on June 27th, details TBD.
I worked briefly at Counsyl, a genetic testing company founded by Ramji and Balaji Srinivasan. I was burnt out before starting so mostly wasted the opportunity to learn from these immensely capable brothers, but I did pick up a thing or two worth sharing.
From Ramji, I learnt “list, rank, iterate” the world’s most effective operational strategy that hardly anyone uses. Balaji explains it in this Conversation with Tyler.
I also observed a master CEO at work: somehow Ramji could identify the company’s biggest problem, rebuild himself into just the leader who could solve it, then do it again every 6 months until he sold the company to Myriad Genetics for $375 million.
You can’t build a biotech company through operational effectiveness alone, though. You also need a mad scientist! Thankfully there was one in the family: Counsyl started thanks to a genetic testing technique invented by Balaji combining his expertise in genomics, chemical and electrical engineering, software and statistics.
I had assumed he’d been taught what he knew, at Stanford, a place he talks of very fondly. I figured he’d encourage others to do the same. Coming into a genomics company with little background in science, I proposed to him that I might attend his alma mater in the evenings to fill some gaps and maybe pursue a masters degree.
He told me that would be a colossal waste of time. Why not just teach myself? I was surprised to learn that this is what he’d done himself from a young age, achieving mastery of multiple challenging fields, and that he loved Stanford for the ethos more than the education. From Balaji, I learnt how much it is possible to teach oneself.
This is how he suggested I go about things: get a textbook and open it up to the problems. Do them. You might be surprised, he said, how much you can figure out yourself. Only when I got stuck should I consider reading the prose. Keep solving the problems maniacally, and one set of techniques will unlock another.
I was too distracted to fully heed his advice at the time, but I’ve carried it with me, and it’s the primary way I approach self-teaching now. I seek out textbooks with thoughtful problems, or that directly help me solve one that’s been bugging me. I ignore any unsolicited explanatory material, like a MOOC that “looks interesting” or a book on a topic I “should learn”. If I encounter a problem set, challenge, project idea or just a juicy question, I will file it away for later.
Balaji was particularly fond of a series of books Schaum’s Outlines. This surprised me, as they’re basically cram books marketed at overwhelmed college students. Their authors are qualified but not particularly distinguished, and the prose is generally uninspired, but each has hundreds of worked problems! If you agree that learning organic chemistry, say, is ultimately about being able to solve problems involving organic chemistry, then this kind of practice is surely more effective than watching a lecture.
I can’t vouch for the quality of any given Schaum’s book. In fact, the corresponding Schaum for any given topic is unlikely to be the absolute best book: One Thousand Exercises in Probability is probably better than the Schaum’s equivalent. But the Schaum’s books are cheap, easy to find, and often a fast track to competency. Perhaps they will work as well for you as they did for Balaji.
Yes, skipping to the problems is certainly consistent with what I read and hear about how the brain learns and retains information and effective learning. It's when we recall and use the information that we are learning, not when it goes in. I've also heard that having a strong emotion with the content is highly correlated with retention. There's nothing like an "aha!" moment or the joy of solving a problem to cement your knowledge.
I've been coming around more to the problems first approach. When I did LeetCode for a few months, I realized that you could get further with basic algorithms and data structures knowledge than people think. So many online posts would complain that a problem required a specific technique, when really it was just a slight variation on the basics. I always preferred to struggle with the problem for a few hours, or even days, rather than look at the solution to learn that 'technique'.
I don't know that I would *just* do problems though. For example, when I learned linear algebra in school I learned how to do things like multiply a matrix and a vector. But I didn't understand it conceptually as a linear combination of the columns of the matrix until I read Strang's linear algebra textbook after college. Maybe that was a symptom of doing rote exercises which don't fully test understanding. But I do see value in a textbook's prose beyond just using it to get unstuck while doing problems.
I think many people realize that the real learning is in doing the homework. I was certainly told that when I was young. The big issue is that we like what feels easy. Watching a YouTube video or skimming a blog post is fun, quick, and easy, but still feels like learning. And the torrent of novel information on the internet is addictive. Even reading a textbook is easier than struggling with a problem for 3 hours. So it's no surprise that we fool ourselves into not learning effectively. I still do it despite knowing better.