Learning in Thresholds

Learning requires a diverse toolkit to be effective. Beyond these tools, it's important to have some checkpoints along the way, where we can close a full learning experience. This doesn't mean knowing everything about a topic, but rather achieving a certain threshold of knowledge on a topic, that most certainly will have deeper levels of granularities.

As an analogy, let's imagine that a topic that you want to learn is all in a book. A threshold might be a summary of each chapter — it is not having only the first chapter.

Having a basic understanding of what each chapter of the book contains, allows you to have some sort of mental scaffolding, which makes your knowledge much stickier.

Defining thresholds is part of learning

After picking a topic to learn, the next step is not to get reading straight away, but trying to infer what the chapters of the book might be — this will allow you to have a broad overview of everything you need to learn, create checkpoints on your learning journey, and even make it much easier to test your learning (i.e. create effective active recall tactics).

Inspired by: Paul Graham, Superlinear returns