Generalist Learning

It can be overwhelming to study for exams and technical interviews.

I have started to release myself from being detail-oriented when studying certain concepts. I don’t try to learn individual things, but more general concepts and frameworks. I think part of this comes from an effort to let go of stringent perfectionism, which is the enemy of general knowledge acquisition.

As humans, we cannot keep and store every data point. There is value in forgetting, as I wrote about previously. If an exam requires you to remember notecard knowledge — memorizing data points instead of applying concepts — then that is a terrible exam. And I think I should be ok with not performing well on that. That is a useless type of trivia knowledge — one that a search engine can easily replace.

This is like a sports player on the court trying to memorize and replicate exact movements on the court. There are times or “moves” that are generally good. However, the situation facing you is different every time — nothing is identical. The best sports players are the ones that are fluid in their movement, not trying to rigidly apply what they “memorized” in practice.

I used to be too rigid of a sports player — and I have worked on changing that with my mental fluidity. Now, I don’t try to dive into all the specifics — rigorously structuring and memorizing practice problems. Instead, I must trust myself to perform in the moment, relaxing like a fluid player on the court.