I really think that this ability to doggedly focus, practice, and maintain this level of effort is, itself, a talent.

I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's certainly a talent I wish I had.

When I was a kid, I had difficulty staying on the same task. My daydreams were (and still are) incredibly vivid. I had a lot of physical energy, and I wanted to run around as a kid. And when I can't, being stuck inside studying, I'd have near lucid daydreams of running around outside. Combined with being able to pick up many things up, I become more and more intolerant of my own mistakes and challenging situations. As I entered my early adulthood, my experiences of life started narrowing down as I avoided challenges. And when I try taking on those challenges, I'd run straight into them.

It was later in life that I learned the methods for concentration practice. There are no shortcuts to concentration. There are no clever hacks. Searching for a shortcut is precisely why most people have difficulty concentrating. Your mind does not want to accept what you are doing here and now. So you think you have to "force" yourself to concentrate, and end up burning a lot of energy keeping you on track. This is NOT how you concentrate.

Concentration grows a little bit each time you practice, and the more you practice, the more you learn about how your mind works.

Growing the raw skill of concentration as you learn your primary art is itself the reason other skills take years of practice to master. It is also why, without practice, talent does not blossom into mastery.

Someone asked me to post up a cheatsheet on how to practice concentration; maybe other people here will find it useful: http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sh...

It has interesting framework, divided into two. The first part is what you can do. The second is how you can create an environment that keeps you on track.

1. The Pomodoro Technique. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/get-to-work/

2. Reading The War of Art can help with issues of procrastination if the thing you're having trouble focusing on is a creative endeavor.

I still procrastinate like crazy sometimes though, so I'd add to this small list a book called the power of habit. This is the missing link on how to make your behaviour automatic.

'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin could be a good start for someone who wants to improve in this area.

Of course, one could also learn how to make their study technique more effective so they don't need to spend 10 hours. See 'Your Memory: How It Works and How To Improve It' by Higbee for that.

I bet if you try enough you can add another 5 minutes to those 10 minutes. And then later another 5 minutes, and then later another 5... And so on and some day you will go to 10 hours.

People often ask how somebody can sleep only for 6 hours. Or get up to work at 3 AM in the morning. That's possible only after trying hard enough for weeks a little bit at a time.

"after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are."

So, although you can get used to being sleepy, it's unlikely you're performance isn't being impacted. You could argue that the 2 week study wasn't long enough, but it still seems to show that you can't really judge your own cognitive performance, so any anecdotal evidence to the contrary wouldn't hold much water.

I play a text based online game where activity is extremely important and I often only have 3 or 4 hours of sleep every day, and even that is broken in to chunks so I can be online every 3 hours - and this is for the past 5 and a half years.

Outside of the obvious physical and mental stress it can put you under, you are perfectly right when you say that it takes time to perfect, at first I was tired from having 8 hours of sleep, now I can have 3 hours of sleep per night, wake up and operate at 100%.

I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the line I lost the need for sleep, I don't get tired any more or yawn and even on nights where I can sleep as long as I want, I find myself only wanting 4 or 5 hours anyway.

I'm without a doubt the highest ranked player on the game, fought for through perseverance and a refusal to let my ego take a hit, but was it worth it? I'm not sure.

>>but was it worth it? I'm not sure.

I won't comment on your habits and whats important to you. But speaking objectively. I would say its bad use of time.

If you are in need of entertainment, which demands a lot of engaging activity I would advice you start to learn playing a music instrument. Again not risking your health in the course of it, but music is a liberating experience. Especially if you learn how to play yourself. It can be very joyful.

And its generally a good skill to have and a lot better than fighting for internet points.

You need to cover enough material that reviewing is not quite trivial, but no so much that your mind starts to wonder.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-Hi...

http://www.esquire.com/features/teller-magician-interview-10...

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect"

"You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest."

At the end of the talk he actually breaks down. Its one of my best TED Talks, I watch it almost every week to remind that even the most magical thing is hardly magical when you look at the effort that goes behind it.

The greatest problem with our educational system is to neglect the fact that students begin to forget immediately after graduation. All these years in k-12 education gradually turns to dust until only reading, writing, and some basic agelbra are left, and some career related knowledge.

Trignometry? Biology? Chemistry? These are subjects that all adults once know in their high school years, now all forgotten.

Instead of documentaries assuming we know chemistry, or trignometery, or biology, they introduced "DNA" as if we never been in a biology class. They only skims the top of the scientific knowledge cake because they never assume everybody knows.

Imagine the complexity and increased believablity of fiction and non-fiction if they have to wrestle with an audience that know those things by heart, even if they only took a chemistry class that single semester?

Alas, we forgotten and our educational dollars disappeared in a puff of smoke.

The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.

I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.

The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.

To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.

Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.

Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.

I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.

Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.

The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.

Of course, deep learning is difficult to teach and assess on a large scale, so it is easier to test for knowledge of facts and procedural skills and teach children to perform well on these kind of tests.

This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.

It's possible, if you practice.

I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.

You can't do this, but adults could take some time out of their days to practice what they learned. That way, they will keep retaining what they learned over decades, and the amount of practices should keep going down.

This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.

Those residual knowledge help make practicing and maintenance of our existing knowledge much easier. We could take advantage of it.

Anyway, if you want to retain everything you learned, you should take a look into spaced repetition which is a learning technique that help make knowledge maintenance an efficient process.

All that is left is our educational system to recognize that knowledge maintenance is important.

Well, don't let five years go by without touching the subject. Occasionally practice the things you once learned, integrate them into your larger body of knowledge, and you'll never forget how red-black trees and quickselect work --- even if you never implemented them from scratch.

I was someone who had it easy in HS and almost failed out of college because I simple didn't know how to study. Watching these two taught me the level of effort required to really do well.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is.

I noticed something similar happens when I want to pickup some basic skill I wish I had, like juggling, shuffling decks of cards, or emacs or walking the slackline: first it seems impossible, then I insist for a few days, many hours per day, sleep on it, and then its trivial.

But most people won't go to youtube to learn how to shuffle a deck of cards, and probably consider that very nerdy.

(The crazy tricks I won't even try, because that kind of agility doesn't go well with my body weight/motor coordination - I'm one of those kids who could never do ollies :P)

While I have no doubt that this is a carefully considered evaluation, I think one has to be careful making this kind of remark; just imagine the student who says "The crazy mathematics I won't even try, because that kind of thinking doesn't go well with my mindset --I'm one of those kids who could never do algebra."

Lately, I weave in and out of painting, coding, and studying mathematics. The switch between the fields often has me feeling lost when initially starting back up into one or the other, since I sort of go through these manic cycles of learning rather than something continuous and balanced throughout. When I switch from painting to math or coding, I usually feel very dumb for a while, relearning all of the new terminology I have missed. It is often a significant blow to my ego, and over the years it has required me to develop sort of a thick skin to approaching sets of people who are technically minded, while my mind is still in the la-la land art world, and vice-verse.

But I mean, out of everything I have approached to learn to do or learn about, the one thing I know that is true for all of them is that nothing is actually simple. Doing calculus and memorizing formula to apply to a very specific set of a problems requires a strong memory, which younger people tend have the advantage on (not myself though, 26 and my memory is garbage). But actually understanding the concepts, and being capable of applying them after you take the class, that's different.

I surprised someone, in grad school I think, explaining how to calculate how large a container we would need to clean the espresso machine (it drips water through), based on some simple dimensions of the input container, and the flow rate. That's calculus. I knew a lot of students in engineering who did really well in the class, and are doing really well in their specific sub-field. But to actually understand what one is learning, that is different. Everyone can do it no matter what age, it just requires dedication and actually being able to think about what confuses you. And it is often a person's ego or fear of their ego appearing 'less than' that hinders progress in learning and doing. Or probably, it is always the case that that is why people stop learning and doing.

It is not difficult to ask simple questions. I mean last night I spent about 6 hours thinking about what a point on a number line actually is. Had anyone seen my notes, they would probably look like they came from a 1st grade maths class. But I'm connecting it to many other topics I understand - and that is something those people don't see, the tangential thought process that develops along with my learning and questioning. So when someone asks a simple question that may seem trivial, instead of scoffing at the fact that that person does not know the answer, I prefer to ask myself "Why did they ask that question?", or, "Why is it important that this thing is so clearly defined or understood - what about this thing is necessary or important to understanding of the whole?". And those are my favorite kinds of questions to ask in learning, because it keeps every topic interesting.

The truth is people learn at different rates, and compensating intelligence with effort works a lot of the time.

Practicing violin since before birth is a thing that is just impossible to do for anyone here not to mention not many would really like to play violin. As such, it's hypothetical, abstract situation that can be discussed safely.

On the other hand, putting tremendous amount of work into preparation for Google interview is something everyone here could, but is not doing, and a good deal of people would really like to do (or, at least, they would like to work at Google). As such, it triggers defensive mechanisms, many of which we could see in the linked thread.

It's not funny at all.

Just out of curiosity, how old were you when you took up calculus, and did you go back to college full time?