When Autodidacts Flourish

When I was in high school, there was no programming expertise anywhere in my social circle, but I managed to teach myself. I hopped around reading documentation for C++ and Java for a while and installed some IDEs that I played around with a bit, but I never managed to produce anything. The breakthrough was when I learned about Python. It didn't have any weird brackets or strange symbols, so it was easier for me to read. The other breakthrough was discovering the website CodeAcademy, which gave me some rudimentary lessons in an environment I did not have to set up myself. After only a few lessons I was able to make some simple games myself.

When I started taking formal instruction in programming in college, I had a separate challenge. It was my first time living alone and I had never bothered to learn much about cooking with my family besides wanting to crack the eggs in the brownie batter when I was a kid, but I had a basic idea of what was required to cook. I started with some boxed dinners, but rapidly progressed to my own soups. The first semester on my own was rough. I threw multiple dishes out and went hungry or forced myself to eat some subpar leftovers for a while. I think that was the first time in my life I ever consistently lost weight. But I kept going and now consider myself a master of flavor.

I hear many stories of programmers teaching themselves to do things. Often these are creative endeavors like music or painting that you wouldn't expect the more logical programmers to be good at. Some people might wax about how programming is a deeply creative field and so naturally programmers will be good at creative hobbies, but you don't see programmers teach themselves at the same rate other fields of engineering or more physical tasks, and I sometimes wonder why that is.

Another example, though less socially respected, is video games. Many, many programmers have a history of being very good with video games. Many got into programming specifically because of their love of video games.

What do programming, cooking, music, painting, and video games all have in common?

All of these things are subject to immediate feedback. Every product of your efforts is consumed as soon as you produce it. The program succeeds or it doesn't. The food is tasty or disgusting. The music is harmonious or discordant. And so on.

And the immediate feedback is not just binary. There are many ways to directly investigate what went wrong with the failed attempt if you have any taste. The calculated result might be too low. The food might be too salty. The music might be too slow. And so on.

When the feedback loop is tight and someone has any taste at all for what they are producing, they can easily try again. They improve rapidly, and this kind of rapid improvement is crack for autodidacts who love learning on their own. Every new success is a burst of encouragement to keep going and keep succeeding.

How do you get better? It's right in front of you! You already know!

Another thing worth mentioning is that each individual attempt at any of these things is cheap. Once you have a computer, software is free. Food is cheap. Paint is cheap. Once you have an instrument, you can use it as many times as you want.

Cheap attempts means many attempts and lots of immediate feedback. These are the most important conditions for autodidacts to succeed.

If ever you want to learn anything, especially if you want to learn it on your own, take heed of what is required. Find a way to engineer a situations of cheap and immediate feedback.