Misunderstanding Confusion

Learning a new concept often feels painful and confusing. This is where most people quit. The problem here is mistaking the confusion amidst the pain to a verdict on self saying you are stupid.

Learning involves forming new neural pathways in brain. And to register those patterns it does take time. But during the time where the patterns are yet to form. This feels like total confusion. You experiencing confusion doesn’t mean you are stupid.

It is absolutely true that your ability to learn is limited by your beliefs. If you ever had the slightest doubt that its not possible for you. Your brain is an excellent rationalization machine and it splits out judgements like “Ohh, I am not a Math person”.

Learn Like a Child

Slightly altering the mental frame (no matter what the external stakes are) to being curious makes you learn amazingly fast. You just have to be playful, curious and attentive just like a child. A child learns things surprisingly fast cause he never thinks that he couldn’t learn walking. Ever see a frustrated child who can’t walk? No. He tries, he fails he tries again and again until he can finally walk.

Carrying the same approach you try to break a concept, isolate the sub-concepts try them recursively till you break it down to its fundamentals. Don’t fear to hypothesize and being wrong - infact this is the fastest and effective way to learn. Every time your assumption breaks look at what knowledge or understanding did you assume or lack. So you try to learn, form hypothesis, test your understanding and iterate until you are solid.

Floating Ideas

When you encounter an axiom, you have to hold it abstractly until later concepts attach to it. This could also feel painful - This feels like drifting - an idea with nothing to hold onto. Think of sin, cos, tan taught to you without ever being told why engineering needs them. Just symbols floating around. That’s cause primitives are mostly tools to be used later. They don’t make sense until you actually use them for something. So if a foundational idea feels hollow right now, don’t sit there trying to force meaning into it. Move ahead, explore the concepts that use it as a building block. The meaning comes later.

After a certain time, your understanding compounds even across domains.

So next time you think “Ohh, I am not physics guy” or “I am not a coder” - realize that its only a limit you are putting on yourself. If you are not afraid to tackle a new concept anymore you need to practice deliberately.

Deliberate Training:

Here how learning looks like in practice.

Understand → Attempt → Get feedback → Identify error → Correct → Repeat

Deliberate training isn’t just repetition — it’s repetition with a target. You isolate a specific weak point, push right past your comfort zone on that one piece, and use immediate feedback to correct before the next rep.

Some tips here:

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. - When you slow down and pay attention to the technique or logic underneath, you make fewer errors. Once the pattern becomes automatic, speed comes naturally. Your connections are strengthened and you’d be surprised to see how fast you are.

Honest feedback - Be honest with where you are at. Be humble while learning. Take the feedback signal and improve your understanding.

Patience is a virtue - The kid learning to walk doesn’t get up on the first try, or the tenth. He just keeps going till he can walk. You have to give yourself that same runway.

Focus - Give the concept enough uninterrupted attention to break it apart and reconnect its pieces. You cannot build a mental model when distracted.

Do not compare yourself with others. Everyone has their own journey of learning. Do not underestimate the human potential in you and Go Learn anything you want…