 Okay, so I want to talk about a question that I've been getting a whole lot. I've been getting every once in a while since I started my YouTube channel, and nowadays I get it all the time. And that is, it's basically, people ask it in different ways, but it's basically, how do I get good? And it's a weird question. I mean people ask it for different things. Usually they ask it about, how do I learn about a Linux system? How do I learn about technology? How do I learn to configure this? How do I learn how to operate this? I want to be a sysadmin. I want to be, you know, I want to do this kind of tech thing or something else. Or lots of times I get questions about the other stuff I put up. How do I learn about linguistics? How do I learn about languages? All these questions that I think can be answered more or less in one video. So in this video I'm going to talk about that. Now I have my own personal idiosyncrasies. Everyone does when they're actually learning about something or they're actually figuring things out. I don't want to talk about my idiosyncrasies because I think that they can vary from person to person. But I'll go ahead and talk in the broadest strokes about what I think the problem is people have when they try and learn something. And that is, it's something that it's sort of everyone has wrong, but I think it's not because it's not your fault. It's something, it's society's fault or something like that. And I'll put it this way. If you want to learn something, well actually let me move back. Let me talk about my, how I got good at whatever I'm doing. And that is, it's a process that well is gradual, but has happened not necessarily by me sitting down and learning, reading from books or even reading the manual or anything else. It comes from ultimately just experience. Not just experience, but the feedback mechanism you get when you have real life tangible experience with something. Now with respect to technology, that means I learned about a Linux system or a Unix systems, not by reading about them in a book, not one of those goofy books with the animals on them or something like that. I didn't learn about it in a class. I've never taken a computer science class. I never did that in undergrad. I've never read a book on programming. I've never read a book on anything in Linux or anything like that. How I learned what I learned is really just an issue of throwing myself in the actual situation and figuring things out gradually. So specifically how I did this for my Linux system, keep in mind I've only been using Linux since I guess late 2015. I mean I think I used Ubuntu or something before that years ago, but never seriously. I started what would become this channel in 2015 when I started playing around with the Linux system and configuring to my liking and how I did it was not going and reading a bunch of books in the library or something. I've got checking out 20 books and going home and leafing through them or something like that. But I just sort of sat myself down and I said these are the tools I know how to use. How can I use them to get what I want? And of course when it comes to, excuse me, when it came to my Linux system, you know of course probably most of you know this from my channel. I wanted to have it configured exactly how I want. I want it to be as efficient as possible. I want it to be as productive as possible on it, down to having every key press being very economical. And with that goal in mind that sounds like something totally arbitrary. In fact I could tell that to some random person. They would say that's totally stupid and useless. Like I mean maybe you're saving a couple seconds, but what does that matter? And maybe even it doesn't matter. I think it definitely does. But in the process of doing that, in the process of being motivated by something else, my desire to do that sublimated into basically me gradually learning everything I need to know to have this channel to put up videos and stuff like that. And the general process of learning is one, real learning is one where you're put in the situation of trying to figure things out. You figure them out and the knowledge you gain is not necessarily just academic knowledge, it's knowledge that makes sense to you in your situation. And that's one of the reasons I don't end up forgetting these things because I've actually done them my experience. Same thing you know for example I never, well in my time here there have been plenty of times where I put up stuff that's a bunch of crap that needs revising, that sometimes even my subscribers will say what are you doing, why are you doing this, you should just do x, y or z or something like that. And that's part of the learning process. You have to grant it in my position it's more a more social thing because what I do is publicly available. But you don't have to do that. I mean it can just be you gradually tinkering with the system to get what you want out of it and you know whatever. So this of course is the context of technology but it applies to basically everything else. I mean for example as I mentioned I get a bunch of questions about linguistics a lot like people ask me like how do I, what books do you recommend about linguistics? So I'll just say that I never really learned, I mean keep in mind that I work in the field now, I read linguistic stuff all the time, articles and books and stuff like that. But when it came to me actually learning the basic knowledge nearly none of that was actually reading through books, especially reading through textbooks. No one has ever learned anything from a textbook or maybe they accidentally learned something but textbooks are written for the people who write textbooks. They're written for institutionalized knowledge, they're not necessarily good tools to learn from. How I learned about linguistics was sort of the same thing. I started, I really just threw myself into learning an individual language and that shows you how languages work generally, why linguistic theory, why linguistic concepts exist, what they're useful for, what they account for. And I should say this, I think there is a divide in people who are in linguistics and I think I've mentioned this in other videos but there's a divide between people like me who have sort of studied languages relatively extensively have a good idea about them and there are other people who just sort of come to the field just because they decide they want to do this academic discipline and they don't really have a good sense of how things work and it's very obvious who is who I'll say in the field and not to downplay it's not to say that those people can be useless but they don't come with the same kind of intuitions, they don't come with the same kind of BS detectors and stuff like that. So my recommendation for you no matter what you're trying to learn is don't be in the mindset of looking for explicit direction. So everyone is used to this mindset and you get it in school, you get it from the concept of the ridiculous concept of going in front of someone who's lecturing and the idea that them just sort of talking at the wall, maybe they're saying interesting stuff but the idea that that will actually help you a. learn something and b. make that learning actually make sense to you. That's not really how it works in the real world and it's always easier to learn something that you have, you're putting yourself actually into experiencing. Now a lot of that you know sometimes people are a little moot like they want to learn about some kind of subject but they don't know how to do it and I think it all comes down to having sort of an axe to grind. It all comes down to you know what do you actually want to accomplish in knowing about this and how do I actually achieve that accomplishment and the the process of going from step a to step b that is the learning process. It's not like you're not just going to sit in your chair and well you might be sitting in a chair as you do this but you're not going to be sitting there and just passively letting knowledge pour over you all over your face. That's not how it works you know you it's a kind of it's a feedback process where you're tinkering with something and you're getting a response like if I'm on the computer and I'm trying to figure something out I'll put in a command I see what happens is there is there an error is there not an error what's going on. It's very different from you know if I were you if I were reading some book about programming in C and I didn't even have a computer you know on my side I could just read that book but it wouldn't mean anything even if I remember all the stuff inside of it doesn't mean anything until you actually play with it until you actually make it real. So again my advice for getting good is really just put yourself in a situation where you get a you get feedback for doing well you you get direct experience there's no you don't have to be a professional at something to start figuring it out in fact there's no other way to figure it out really just sitting around and reading books that's good mind you that's something that I do for my academic work in linguistics but that's something that I think should be done after you have a good sense for what's going on and so that's sort of my advice and this is sort of response to the the many questions I get from people about what books should I read what books should I read about Linux what books should I read about i3 gaps I don't think there's a book about that but I've gotten that question what books should I read about arch Linux what books should I read about linguistics how do I how do I learn this stuff and I'm just saying throw yourself out there you know the learning takes I don't want to call it mental effort because it's not something that's necessarily painful or exhausting but you have to put yourself in that situation where you're actually you're actually doing something with your brain you can't just sit down and plug the wires into your head and expect to learn anything this isn't actually the matrix contrary to popular belief um so that that's about it um that's all I had to say so um I guess I'll see you guys later on