During my trip last week to San Andres, I read, “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness”.
There wasn’t really anything that stuck out as groundbreaking but it was an overall good reminder of what I was doing with my own life and how I was making decisions.
There was even a point where I turned to my girlfriend, Valerie, and said that I felt confirmed in the way I was living my own life since Naval is someone I look up to and someone I want to model my own life around.
Everything in the wealth-building section was more of a refresher but there was a point in the happiness section that really stood out.
He explained that he wasn’t religious but that he was spiritual. He said that the time most people would take to study religious text as a way to understand the universe or god he studied math and science (especially physics) since it’s essentially studying truth.
He also explains that mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life.
This part really stuck out to me so I kept rereading it and thinking about it.
Quick background.
My mother was a math teacher. I believe she majored in it during grad school. I remember when I was a kid she would keep me busy during her teaching sessions by making me solve basic math worksheets. In elementary school, I thrived in all of my math classes. After her passing, I became a lot less interested in math and I remember as early as 3rd–4th grade starting to be less interested in school altogether.
I think due to a combination of having a turbulent emotional life at home and moving around I became more interested in making friends and trying to get the attention of girls.
Fast forward to middle school, I’m the classic example of “smart but doesn’t try hard”. I was still placed in relatively advanced math and science classes even though my grades were average because teachers kept overestimating my abilities or they were assuming I would do better since I was Korean.
I always did just enough to pass, I was a straight C student. Things didn’t get any better in high school, I did the bare minimum to stay eligible for wrestling and the rest of my time was spent cutting class, trying to impress girls, and sophomore year, as soon as I got my driver’s license, I got a job working at a hotel.
I didn’t really have the desire or a reason to learn or WANT to learn math.
It felt like a waste of time.
I turn 30 this year, it’s been nearly 12 years since I took any math classes, and the only real math since then has been some statistics for calculating conversion rates for digital marketing jobs.
Even when I was learning how to program, I learned with an intention to focus on things that were practical and that I could utilize right away. I learned how to solve some algorithm challenges but even that was to deepen my understanding of Javascript as a tool, not the algorithm itself.
It wasn’t a pursuit of pure knowledge-seeking. It was skill-building to increase my marketability, my value in the market, and earning potential.
I grazed and skimmed over most of everything that was theoretical in nature. Even now, I’d say my most glaring weaknesses as a developer are fundamental and technical things.
Load balancing? I honestly don’t even know what that means.
Strengths:
- UI/UX Design
- Quickly Building MVPs, Concepts, Prototypes
- Front End Development (HTML/SCSS/React)
- Finding / Integrating Existing Packages
- Requirement Gathering
- Feature Planning
- Project Planning
Weaknesses:
- Schema Design
- System Architecture
- DevOps
- Building for Scale
- Debugging (Takes me a long time to find errors)
- Building For Efficiency (Which algorithm is better to use)
I’m really good at doing things that I can “touch”. I’m also very proficient in the areas that leverage my communication and project planning skills because these are skills that I was able to refine in other careers like sales and marketing.
My weaknesses are not as exposed since I work on smaller projects while my strengths are highlighted. In a self-funded startup environment, speed and execution are key. I wouldn’t know where to begin if I got hired to work on something complex that millions of people would use daily. I probably lack the skills to get hired at a big tech company, I wouldn’t make it past the white-board tests.
I can however scrap together an MVP for a small internal tool if there’s an SOP already built out for how a company handles a very particular aspect of their business. I can talk to all of the people who would be involved in the project and create an outline of how it’ll be built and who will manage what aspects of it.
Why is any of this relevant?
What got me here, won’t get me there.
Another book that comes to mind is, “Zero to One” by Blake Masters & Peter Thiel. He highlights how the most successful CEOs of tech companies are not charismatic salespeople but technical engineers who understand their product thoroughly to actually make it better than what’s available in the market.
The competitive edge is knowledge.
All of this has led me to the realization that I now really want to learn math and it now has practical reasons behind it to motivate me to do so besides just “wanting to”.
Practical Reasons:
- I want to become a more technical developer and actually become an engineer and not just a hacker (build CS fundamentals)
- I need to learn calculus and linear algebra to get into machine learning
Non Practical Reasons:
- Learning math can be a spiritual pursuit or truth
- It’ll help me overcome my inferiority complex around my intelligence
I will be keeping a detailed journal of my learning journey to keep myself accountable and track my progress.
The next steps will be determining HOW I’m going to go about learning math.
TLDR;
I’m weak at math and science because I never put in the time when I was in grade school. Mostly due to the lack of interest.
I never really had a reason to pursue learning math as a hobby that was practical.
In my professional programming career, I skipped over the really technical parts but I’m starting to feel those limitations and the consequences of not taking the time to learn the fundamentals.
I now have a newfound interest to pursue math and as an intellectual and spiritual pursuit.
There is no end goal except just to learn and know more, just like how there is no end goal of eating good food except to be healthy.
Math learning milestones:
- Review Khan academy’s grade school math(4th grade — 12th grade)
- Particularly build a solid base of geometry + algebra
- Leverage that base to learn calculus and linear algebra
I’m going to keep track of my progress here.
Has anyone else learned or relearned math as an adult?
Any tips or recommendations would be appreciated.
