Learning to Learn

I think there is some conflation in this thread between "learning" and "practice" which are fairly different things.

As an ADHD person, nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge. That's the fun part. But climbing the experience curve much further than that requires some amount of _deliberate_ study and beyond that deliberate _practice_ and experience in order to become something like an expert.

Chasing questions down rabbit-holes is fast and entertaining but only takes you so far. Deliberate practice (studying) is mostly less fun, even when that thing is your life-long passion and/or career. But necessary if you want to be highly skilled in that area.

> nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge.

Man, this describes me to a T. I love that feeling of the "first 75%" (or whatever percentage it is). Then I tend to lose interest in the long tail.

I realized this about myself years ago, but I don't (think I) have ADHD.

I have always been able to learn faster than most people. No clear reason why. It appears I was just born this way.

But if the Pareto Principle holds, and I'm learning twice as fast as average (estimating for the sake of easy math), that means when I'm a beginner learning the 20% of the skill that gives me 80% of the results, I'm learning like 32 times faster than somebody learning at an average rate who's in the 80% of work that produces 20% of the results, even though they're better at what they're doing. I look like an absolute rockstar out of the gate.

Problem is that my ego has been tied up in that since I was little. Early life is all about learning high-leverage things as quickly as possible, and since that's also when you're forming your sense of who you are, it's a sticky trap. I have really struggled to build the patience for the rest of the grind, where even if I'm still learning twice as fast as average at the harder level, any average newbie is learning/improving twice as fast as me.

The end result is that I'm moderately proficient in dozens and dozens of things, but I'm not an expert at anything except obtaining moderate proficiency.

>Then I tend to lose interest in the long tail.

What was your initial goal? Or maybe you didn't have a conscious one to begin with and had an attraction or something like a curiosity for the subject. Once you covered enough ground you satisfied your curiosity and your interest faded. I think this is a very natural outcome and depending how you approach your learning subject you can achieve different outcomes. Try learning in a class setting where there is a set curriculum and where you could approach your learning in regular and consistent chunks. It may be boring at first but it could get much deeper into the topic.