Edouardo Honig
Published: 13 Jan 2025. Last updated: 11 Feb 2025.
Do you feel like your education didn't prepare you enough for real life situations, such as getting a job or filing taxes? What about the importance of other things, like how to build relationships or invest?
Such thoughts regarding knowledge gaps appear to be common amongst many people online. But anyone can complain, and its usefulness is limited. How can one fill in these gaps?
My solution is absolutely the most simple: we must study.
The purported goal of any student is to learn things. Many instructors before and during college will often spend time lecturing, as well as assigning material for self-review/teaching. A common theme in the most difficult undergraduate physics coursework at UCLA was that those who didn't attend lectures often performed the best on exams. This is not to say lectures were useless, but to emphasize that the strongest students excelled through studying outside of the classroom.
Later on, when teaching courses myself, I found a similar phenomenon: my best students skipped lectures but came to me for clarification. Of course, the pacing of lectures was deliberately slower to accommadate more students, but that is a subject for a separate blog post.
Hopefully it is clear that being able to study solely from resources is useful for students.
Despite it being obvious to learn material for coursework, my observations imply that it isn't immediately apparent to most that one can apply this ability to non-academic endeavours.
For example, imagine a person that wants to improve at a game. There are many options available: playing the game more frequently, finding a tutor, searching for advice, and analyzing the game. The vast majority of players I've met have just tried the first two. Almost all the experts I've encountered have all spent hours practicing, reviewing, and thinking about optimizing their play and that of others.
If you want to learn or improve at something, then you should study it.
Perhaps a more poignant example can be found in a personal anecdote. Upon entering university, I hadn't previously interacted much with men outside of my friends, not to mention women in general. Although I was eager to meet new people, my early attempts at forming social and romantic relationships often felt awkward or fell flat.
So at some point I decided to take a seemingly radical approach: I scoured the internet for information on how to socialize and learned from the instructions and records of other people's experiences.
Yes: I studied how to talk to people and make friends. And I'm all the better for it.
Do you have literally anything you would like to improve at? If so, you really should be studying.
This post may as well be titled "You should just learn things" or "How to approach a foreign subject".
If you enjoyed it, feel free to check out my other writing or reach out to me via Twitter.