Keep Developing the Scars of Experience
No Struggle, No Learning
Struggling is crucial for learning.
A simple statement with profound and unexpected implications. Especially in the age of AI.
You cannot underestimate the power of struggling on something and the effect it has on your learning. A good example to illustrate this is the famous Monty Hall Problem.
The Monty Hall Problem
As a teenager, my mathematics teacher explained the Monty Hall problem to us. He told us it’s a simple problem that people frequently get wrong. I was immediately intrigued and tried to solve it.
I only remember this, because I struggled and worked out the solution during class. I vividly remember arguing with other classmates who had arrived at a different conclusion than I did.
The Monty Hall problem in a nutshell:
You’re a participant in a game show. There are three doors. A car is behind one of the doors and there are goats behind the two other doors. You must pick one of the three doors. If you pick the right door with the car behind it, then you win it as a prize.
After picking one of the three doors, the host opens one of the other doors with a goat behind it. You have two options:
Stick with your original choice.
Switch doors.
What is the best course of action? Should you stick with your original choice or switch?
This is the essence of the Monty Hall problem.
The Monty Hall problem is famous because many people misunderstand it. Even professors and people with PhDs often get it wrong. Marilyn Vos Savant explained the solution in her column. She received nearly 1000 angry letters why she was wrong.
I’m not going to give you the answer to the Monty Hall problem. If you want the answer, grab a pen and paper and try to come up with the solution, like I did more than 25 years ago.
If you struggle on the solution, there’s a good chance you’ll remember it.
If you use AI to look up the solution, there is a good chance you won’t remember. You’re making a shortcut to the answer without any of the struggle. Even if you get it, there’s a good chance you won’t remember it more than 25 years later, like I do now.
Think about anything you remember and deeply understand. I’ll guarantee there’s a good chance it didn’t come easy. You spent a lot of time on it and you’ve got the scars of experience to show for it.
Why Struggling Matters
When I started writing on my blog around ten years ago I was struggling.
Every single article I published took weeks of blood, sweat and tears. It was extremely challenging and I thought about quitting many times. Most people who publish an article stop after 1 or 2 articles (which is basically what happens with me when I try to start running again).
The weekly struggle made me a better writer. Every article I pondered over questions like:
What is the best hook to start the article?
This sentence sucks, how do I make it flow better?
What title will get people to read my piece and do it justice at the same time?
Because of this struggle I can write something in a few hours and quickly give tips to inexperienced writers what they can do to make their writing stronger. The only reason I can do this is because I spent so much time struggling. I can easily tap into my scars of experience to understand what you can do to make something better.
The problem is that today we have powerful tools at our disposal that allow us to shortcut the struggle. If you don’t need to get better at something, by all means, please use AI.
Keep Struggling and Develop the Scars of Experience
I’m writing this to tell you: don’t use AI to get rid of the struggle. There is tremendous value in the struggle because the gold nuggets of possibility are buried in the struggle.
If you don’t struggle, you won’t develop expertise.
If you don’t develop expertise, you won’t have a solid taste or judgement for what’s good.
Without expertise, taste and judgement, you will never be able to tell whether AI gives any good answers.
The struggle is what gives us the unexpected answers nobody has seen before.
Six pack abs in six minutes is appealing, but it’s a lie.
If you’re early in your career, use AI wisely as it can effectively hinder your growth.
Sure, you might have the illusion of a quick gain, but if your bottleneck is the quality of the AI then basically everyone who does that is operating on the same playing field.
And that playing field isn’t good enough to stand out in the long-term.
Struggle with AI. Ask good questions. Use AI to navigate toward the real source of expertise which is never AI. Diligently study that and learn from it.
Don’t believe the lie, nothing will replace the struggle.
At least not yet, and the struggle will most definitely never be replaced by a LLM that doesn’t even understand what the world struggle means.
Here’s to the crazy ones who keep struggling and learning. Compounding gains will always beat lazy shortcuts in the long run.
AI ain’t at our level yet, and I suspect it will take a long time before it will get there. We’re going to have level 5 autonomous driving cars first, because it’s a much easier problem to solve. And that’s still going to take many years.