Do the Hard Thing: Why Struggle Is How You Truly Learn
In a world of easy-button solutions and AI generated content, be the type of person who intentionally chooses to do the hard thing. This is how you prevent your mind from slipping away and stand out from the crowd.
If all we do is take the shortest path, the one of least resistance, to solve our problems - we will never truly grow.
Sure, you can learn a little this way, but in the long run, you are going to be far less likely to have reached your potential than if you had simply chosen to struggle with the material or problem solving to begin with.
Honestly, what sets us apart from AI today is the ability to reason and think systematically. AI doesn’t have this ability, at least not today. AI models are trained on a specific dataset and then produced answers based on the data they have ingested - with a delivery method to make you feel good about your inquiry.
They are very good at certain tasks, no doubt, but shouldn’t be your primary source of truth by any means.
Thus, leaning into the struggle now will pay off in the end. It’s how we truly learn concepts. Everything you know now was foreign to you at some point and had to be learned by wrestling with the material (unless you’re super blessed).
So next time you want to just Google the answer or ask your favorite LLM, step back and struggle a bit. Try to figure it out on your own. Use other resources.
This is the whole idea of the Bad Website Club, which I have zero affiliation with, but heard about on a Free Code Camp Podcast this weekend. The founder started the learning project to help inject a little friction into learning to code and to truly cement the information in the minds of those who do so.
What can you do today to inject a little friction into your own process? 💭