A letter to my hungry students
Hi everyone,
I’ve spotted a recurring theme lately, usually amongst those of you who’re trying your absolute hardest to get things right. Whenever we kick off a new topic, there’s an almost immediate rush to grab the formal definitions, the gritty equations or the most complex piece of machinery you can get your hands on.
I completely get why you do it, because wanting that level of detail usually means you actually care about the subject, and it often stems from a perfectly reasonable worry that if you don’t dive into the deep end straight away, you’re somehow failing to understand it. I’m not knocking your motivation here, but I do think we need to have a chat about your timing.
Think of it like this: diving into technicalities without any context is rather like wandering into a restaurant and ordering your meal before you’ve even glanced at the menu. You might end up with something tasty, and you might even convince yourself it’s the best thing on the list, but you’ve essentially made that choice while wearing a blindfold. You’ve no idea what else was on offer, what the ‘vibe’ of the place is or whether you actually wanted a heavy three-course meal or just a light snack—and nobody wants to end up with a bowl of tripe when they were actually in the mood for a fruit salad.
For some bizarre reason, we seem to accept this behaviour when it comes to learning. When you’re clamouring for a specific formula before you’ve grasped what kind of thing we’re even discussing, you aren’t actually being more rigorous; you’re just ordering blind. The maths feels solid, so it feels safe, but let’s be clear—safety isn’t the same thing as actual comprehension.
Take probability distributions as an example. If you haven’t got a rough sense of what a distribution is for, which problems it’s trying to solve and how it links to other ways of describing uncertainty, then staring at a specific equation won’t help you find your feet. You can push the symbols around the page, sure, but you won’t know when to use it, when to bin it or why anyone bothered to come up with it in the first place.
That’s why I keep harping on about ‘zooming out’ first. It’s not because I’ve got a secret love for being vague or think that intuition can somehow replace precision, but because zooming out is how you get your bearings. It’s how you spot what’s vital and what’s just an optional extra, and it stops you from mistaking a single tool for the entire workshop.
Most people don’t actually know what they’ll find interesting or useful until they’ve seen the full spread. You find that out by browsing the menu and getting a feel for the landscape before you commit to one narrow, potentially very dusty path.
I know some of you feel somewhat twitchy doing that, as sitting at the overview level can feel uncomfortable and slightly ‘fuzzy’, like you’re not doing ‘real work’ yet. You rush into the details because they feel concrete and reassuring, which isn’t a character flaw—it’s just a very human response to the fact that uncertainty is, frankly, rather unpleasant.
But here’s the kicker: diving deep too early doesn’t actually get rid of that uncertainty; it just papers over the cracks. You might become an expert on one tiny patch of grass while remaining completely lost as to which country that patch of grass is actually in.
Learning usually works much better when you do it the other way round. First, you work out where on earth you are, and then you decide where it makes sense to go deep. Sometimes the right move is to master every tiny detail, and other times it’s enough to understand the gist and move on. Both are perfectly fine, provided you’re making an informed choice.
So, when I try to slow things down or hold back on the full technical machinery, it’s not because I think you’re not up to it. It’s because I want you to choose what you’re investing your brainpower in with your eyes wide open. Have a look at the menu first; the depth will still be there once you’ve decided what you’re actually hungry for.