How I learn things that I never know before
In the context of learning, I really love when I don't know what I don't know. A moment when I can’t see where this door may lead me to. Kinda scared with the learning curve but the result of knowledge is everything.
When I try to understand a domain of knowledge, I tend to make a map before doing the actual thing. This map contains many buzz words, how to do things, what causes things to happen, etc. You maybe imagine it as a mind map, but in my mind, it is more like a geographical map, where there is a path to go somewhere, and there is a lot of braches that can lead to different destinations. Since while we learning, there is a “destination” to reach and while doing that, we found another “door” to be open.
For example, I want to understand neural networks, I usually start by reading a bunch of random articles on medium about things tagged as “Neural Network”. Then, I found a bunch of “door” such as “Tensorflow” “Backpropagation” and “Long Short Term Memory”.
For each random word that I read, I try to spend 2–3 minutes googling it and understand the idea of the buzz words, in order to have a grasp of what the article talking about, and then continuing reading about the subject until I found the “aha” moment.
I try to come back and visit every “door” that I found and by doing this repeatedly, I created a bunch of connections between words which makes a graph of words.
This graph of word act as a map when I want to do the actual machine learning stuff. So when next time I want to do something with a neural network, I understand the theory of how it works, which makes it easier for me to decide which activation function to use or which neural network architecture works best for the case that I currently do. Having this sense of “understand whats working behind the scene” makes me confident to decide, even though maybe I have no experience practice on that topic before.
I believe that the best way to learn something is random learning, you learn something bit by bit until you understand the whole big picture. This way, you can learn multi topics at the same time, and by doing this, you can see the bigger picture for each topic in a shorter time. I think it's less boring and easier to understand since you only learn things in a small circle.
I also think this method is more “natural” because, in real life, you did not take one class only and learn how to do things until you are an expert in that particular topic. You can learn cooking, knitting, swimming in parallel and in small bits and random order.
To summarize, “Learn” is only part one of understanding, “Practice” is the next level to conquer. So, that's what I'm trying to do when I'm learning a new domain of knowledge, good luck to yours!
