Connect the dots

Learning to sing is learning Javascript is learning to speak French.

Because this is how our brains work:

Pattern recognition + relationships = learning

Think about music: at first, you just see random notes on a page.

And then soon, you see scales (patterns).

Then you see relationships horizontally (melody) and vertically (harmony) and then simultaneously (a piece of music) and then simultaneously across movements and instruments (symphonic).

Everything is patterns and relationships.

Instead of looking for single data points, look for patterns, templates, for fractals, for meaning. Are you going to have a better chance understanding 100 disjunct pieces of information? Or a singular pattern, that overlays those 100 pieces of information, and makes them all make sense in relationship to one another?

Patterns connect the dots.

One day, many years ago as a fledgling nerd, I was working on a JavaScript course and I realized that…all programming languages are fundamentally similar. And I could recognize those patterns, I could learn any new language extremely quickly.

For the same reason that once you’ve learned English, and then a second language, the third and fourth come MUCH faster because you can now recognize the patterns of human language!

German took me 3 years. French 2 years. Italian 1.

I also completely wasted many years of my life trying to brute force learning! I wish I’d learned how to learn at a younger age, of course, but learning it in my early 20s was good enough to change my life, so I’ll take it!

View the world as patterns and you can decode everything so much faster.