Fall of the giants by Jacob Jordaens

Be undisciplined when you learn something new. That’s what I have to remind myself from time to time. When I try to learn something new, I tend to treat it like a study routine. I will lay out a best-laid plan for my learning process with means, ends and all. Everyday when I wake up, I will keep saying myself that I will sit down tonight to study about such and such topic. And all day long, I will be stressing about the task of sitting down and studying. It seems like as the day goes by, the task of sitting down and studying becomes bigger and bigger and at the end of the day when the time comes, the task has grown into a giant and I can no longer defeat. That is because I try so hard to be disciplined and I’m afraid of going off track from my perfectly laid out routine. And when I miss just one day to sit down and study, the guilt creeps in and stresses me out. It seems like perfectionism is the enemy of learning.

That is because I tend to treat learning as studying. I hate studying but I love learning. Being disciplined makes learning feel so serious. Being disciplined makes learning feel like defeating a giant. Learning something shouldn’t feel like defeating a giant. It should feel like playing with your pet. That’s why I have to remind myself time and time again to relax my plan and be undisciplined.

“It seems to me that there is some chance that you may be successful since you say you have not studied physics in a disciplined fashion. So much the better, but study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
-Richard Feynman, in his personal letter to J. M. Szabados.

We, as programmers and engineers, should be having fun breaking things, making things work, making things stop working, feel stuck, find workarounds, being messy and most importantly, diving deep into fundamentals. That’s what makes the learning process fun. That’s how we should be learning and exploring new things. By being insanely undisciplined.