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Advice on Upskilling
This book is a working draft, updated Feb 2026.From summer 2024-25 I wrote numerous scattered pieces on upskilling while answering questions and engaging in general discussion about The Math Academy Way. Eventually I found myself repeating common themes, analogies, and punch-lines, and I compiled them into this short book.
If you want to improve (or initiate) your upskilling regimen, then this book would be a good place to start. It's short, easy reading, addresses the big ideas, and gets you in the right mindset. If you want a complete, comprehensive, academic understanding of everything down to the nuts and bolts, then I would highly recommend to go on and read The Math Academy Way afterwards.
This draft has been put to print at the request of readers who would like a physical copy of the current version. It will be continually updated in the future. A digital copy is freely available online at
CONTENTS
1. CONSISTENCY • You’re Not Lazy, You Just Lack a Habit • Don’t Have a Passion? Go Create One. • Make the Habit Easily Repeatable • The Hardest Part is Just Getting Started • A Little Extra Consistency × A Little Extra Time = A Massive Increase in Volume and Progress • Don’t Overreact to Bad Days • Aim for Virtuous Cycles
2. SKILLS • The Importance of Hardcore Skills • The “Alien-Level Skills” Hack • The Importance of Having Your Prerequisites In Place • Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals • Your Missing Foundations Will Wait For You • Actively Doing is the Key to Alpha • Everything Matters
3. DISCIPLINE • Why Train? • The Magic You’re Looking For is in the Full-Assed Effort You’re Avoiding • At Some Point Doing the Hard Thing Becomes Easier Than Making the Hard Thing Easier • How to Cultivate Discipline • Keep Your Hands On The Boulder
4. THE GRIND • Upskilling is Hard and That’s a Good Thing • The Most Superior Form of Training • Just Do The F*cking Work • Outsized Success Requires Outsized Work • Transformation Is Discomforting • Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optimization • Ability is Built, Not Unlocked • What Max-Efficiency Training Feels Like • The Necessity of Grinding Through Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction • Be Willing to Do Tedious Work • Don’t Undervalue Turning Up the Dial on Your Grind, but Don’t Overvalue the Last Turn • Failure Is NOT the Key to Success • The Problem with Overly Difficult Problems • Focus Less on Feelings and More on Measurable Progress
5. THE JOURNEY • The 3 Stages of Talent Development • There Are No Shortcuts in Talent Development • If You’re Making Silly Mistakes Then You Need More Practice • No Train, No Gain • Why You Should Push Yourself • What to Do When You Hit a Ceiling • Get Yourself In A Position Where You Can Eat Risk • How to Allocate Your Bandwidth While Searching for Your Mission
6. THE TEAM • If You’re Asking Someone to Be Your Mentor then You’re Doing it Wrong • Put Pressure on Your Boss to Come Up with More Work For You • Get On the Right Team • Competition as a Means of Collaboration • Your Goal is NOT to Prove You’re Smart, it’s to Make Problems Go Away
7. THE MISSION • Selecting a Good Problem to Work On • The “Progress Equals Pressure” Formula • Love What You Do • Be a Builder, Not Just a Fighter
8. MOTIVATION • Why Extrinsic Motivation Matters • How to Become a Super-Producer • Overcoming the Paradox of Serious Training • How Taxing Work Becomes Fun
9. LEARNING • The Greatest Educational Life Learning Ahead of Time • When Does the Learning Happen? • There is No Such Thing as Low-Effort Learning • The Greatest Breakthrough in the Science of Learning Over the Last Century • “Following Along” Versus Learning • The Vicious Cycle of Forgetting • The Vicious Cycle of Context Overload
and more... (hit char limit)
If you want to improve (or initiate) your upskilling regimen, then this book would be a good place to start. It's short, easy reading, addresses the big ideas, and gets you in the right mindset. If you want a complete, comprehensive, academic understanding of everything down to the nuts and bolts, then I would highly recommend to go on and read The Math Academy Way afterwards.
This draft has been put to print at the request of readers who would like a physical copy of the current version. It will be continually updated in the future. A digital copy is freely available online at
CONTENTS
1. CONSISTENCY • You’re Not Lazy, You Just Lack a Habit • Don’t Have a Passion? Go Create One. • Make the Habit Easily Repeatable • The Hardest Part is Just Getting Started • A Little Extra Consistency × A Little Extra Time = A Massive Increase in Volume and Progress • Don’t Overreact to Bad Days • Aim for Virtuous Cycles
2. SKILLS • The Importance of Hardcore Skills • The “Alien-Level Skills” Hack • The Importance of Having Your Prerequisites In Place • Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals • Your Missing Foundations Will Wait For You • Actively Doing is the Key to Alpha • Everything Matters
3. DISCIPLINE • Why Train? • The Magic You’re Looking For is in the Full-Assed Effort You’re Avoiding • At Some Point Doing the Hard Thing Becomes Easier Than Making the Hard Thing Easier • How to Cultivate Discipline • Keep Your Hands On The Boulder
4. THE GRIND • Upskilling is Hard and That’s a Good Thing • The Most Superior Form of Training • Just Do The F*cking Work • Outsized Success Requires Outsized Work • Transformation Is Discomforting • Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optimization • Ability is Built, Not Unlocked • What Max-Efficiency Training Feels Like • The Necessity of Grinding Through Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction • Be Willing to Do Tedious Work • Don’t Undervalue Turning Up the Dial on Your Grind, but Don’t Overvalue the Last Turn • Failure Is NOT the Key to Success • The Problem with Overly Difficult Problems • Focus Less on Feelings and More on Measurable Progress
5. THE JOURNEY • The 3 Stages of Talent Development • There Are No Shortcuts in Talent Development • If You’re Making Silly Mistakes Then You Need More Practice • No Train, No Gain • Why You Should Push Yourself • What to Do When You Hit a Ceiling • Get Yourself In A Position Where You Can Eat Risk • How to Allocate Your Bandwidth While Searching for Your Mission
6. THE TEAM • If You’re Asking Someone to Be Your Mentor then You’re Doing it Wrong • Put Pressure on Your Boss to Come Up with More Work For You • Get On the Right Team • Competition as a Means of Collaboration • Your Goal is NOT to Prove You’re Smart, it’s to Make Problems Go Away
7. THE MISSION • Selecting a Good Problem to Work On • The “Progress Equals Pressure” Formula • Love What You Do • Be a Builder, Not Just a Fighter
8. MOTIVATION • Why Extrinsic Motivation Matters • How to Become a Super-Producer • Overcoming the Paradox of Serious Training • How Taxing Work Becomes Fun
9. LEARNING • The Greatest Educational Life Learning Ahead of Time • When Does the Learning Happen? • There is No Such Thing as Low-Effort Learning • The Greatest Breakthrough in the Science of Learning Over the Last Century • “Following Along” Versus Learning • The Vicious Cycle of Forgetting • The Vicious Cycle of Context Overload
and more... (hit char limit)
- GenresSelf Help
238 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 14, 2025
Fast paced, good advices, some are well known, especially if you are into self-help books like atomic habits, and productivity in general. What I liked the most are the ideas behind the science of learning, memorization, and retrieval/deliberate practice.
From my notes, these are the best pieces of advice I wrote down, which can be very practical and used to improve ourselves.
About mindset & productivity: making progress
- Be disciplined, set up a habit, compound compound compound. If you continue to make short-term progress, the long-term will sort itself out.
- Be extra consistent x extra time: The difference between 20 minutes 3 days per week and 30 minutes 4 days per week = Progressing twice as fast. That’s 60 versus 120 minutes every week. Up that to 40 minutes 5 days per week, and you’re nearly doubling again at 200 minutes per week.
- Transformation Is Discomforting: To avoid the feeling of strain is to avoid the process of adaptation, and thus, to avoid performance improvement.
- The parallel between Knowledge/mental and physical exercises is real. You need to be uncomfortable to make progress.
- Time/Task management
- One main focus (workload equivalent to a full-time job)
- One semi-focus (workload equivalent to a part-time job),
- Everything else is a hobby with whatever time you have left over
- Why intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are important
- Intrinsic motivation gets you working on interesting things with a unique perspective. Extrinsic motivation keeps you on the rails with your long-term goals and keeps you from falling victim to fascinating distractions.
About math
- Being rock-solid on the applied math that shows up all the time across all fields of engineering: linear algebra, calculus-based probability & statistics, algorithms, etc.
- Having broad knowledge of advanced approaches to mathematical modeling: differential equations, machine learning
- Going deep into mathematical modeling supporting the particular domains you're interested in.
About elite performers
- Elite performers combine 3 things: a more efficient training environment, advantageous individual differences leading to more rapid skill acquisition, or by allocating way more of their time into training than is typical
- The way they sustain such a high volume of work is by interleaving a wide variety of productive activities. They've gotten far enough in the skill domain that they're well past the narrow tree trunk of fundamentals, and now they have many different branches they can be traveling outwards along.
- Practice effectively:
- 1) have some concrete way of measuring your progress
- 2) make sure that whatever you’re doing is actually increasing that progress
- 3) make sure that the progress is increasing fast enough that you’ll reach your goal in a reasonable (but realistic) amount of time.
About Learning
- Actively doing is the key to learning. Don't passively consume, actively do.
- About the myth of passive/low-effort learning: A common theme in the science of learning is that effective learning feels like a workout with a personal trainer. It should center around deliberate practice, a type of active learning in which individualized training activities are specially chosen to improve specific aspects of performance through repetition and successive refinement. These practice activities are done entirely for the purpose of pushing one’s limits and improving performance; consequently, they tend to be more effortful and less enjoyable. Comfortable fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning.
- The solution to forgetting is review (retrieval practice) – and not just passively re-ingesting information, but actively retrieving it, unassisted, from long-term memory.
- Retrieval is the act of pulling information from long-term memory into working memory. Practicing retrieval under challenging but achievable conditions is what increases your ability to remember and use information.
- Pulling information from memory should feel challenging. Not feeling comfortable learning a new topic is natural
- Whereas a beginner perceives individual isolated pieces of information, an expert perceives "chunks" of information organized into meaningful patterns and structures
- Building and interconnecting these chunks is related to the higher-order learning and encoding
The biggest misconception I had: "If you don't realize that learning is memory, then you won’t realize that the most effective way to learn is to use memory-supporting training techniques. It’s easy to get confused, thinking: "Truly understanding something is different from just memorizing it, so learning doesn’t require memory-focused techniques like retrieval practice, spaced review, and interleaving (mixed practice). Those are about memorization, not true understanding." And if that’s what you think, then you'll likely shirk the hard work required to build memory, use fun/easy but ineffective training techniques instead, and end up not actually learning much."
About risk
An underrated component of finding career fit is building enough savings to pursue opportunities where reward is uncertain.
From my notes, these are the best pieces of advice I wrote down, which can be very practical and used to improve ourselves.
About mindset & productivity: making progress
- Be disciplined, set up a habit, compound compound compound. If you continue to make short-term progress, the long-term will sort itself out.
- Be extra consistent x extra time: The difference between 20 minutes 3 days per week and 30 minutes 4 days per week = Progressing twice as fast. That’s 60 versus 120 minutes every week. Up that to 40 minutes 5 days per week, and you’re nearly doubling again at 200 minutes per week.
- Transformation Is Discomforting: To avoid the feeling of strain is to avoid the process of adaptation, and thus, to avoid performance improvement.
- The parallel between Knowledge/mental and physical exercises is real. You need to be uncomfortable to make progress.
- Time/Task management
- One main focus (workload equivalent to a full-time job)
- One semi-focus (workload equivalent to a part-time job),
- Everything else is a hobby with whatever time you have left over
- Why intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are important
- Intrinsic motivation gets you working on interesting things with a unique perspective. Extrinsic motivation keeps you on the rails with your long-term goals and keeps you from falling victim to fascinating distractions.
About math
- Being rock-solid on the applied math that shows up all the time across all fields of engineering: linear algebra, calculus-based probability & statistics, algorithms, etc.
- Having broad knowledge of advanced approaches to mathematical modeling: differential equations, machine learning
- Going deep into mathematical modeling supporting the particular domains you're interested in.
About elite performers
- Elite performers combine 3 things: a more efficient training environment, advantageous individual differences leading to more rapid skill acquisition, or by allocating way more of their time into training than is typical
- The way they sustain such a high volume of work is by interleaving a wide variety of productive activities. They've gotten far enough in the skill domain that they're well past the narrow tree trunk of fundamentals, and now they have many different branches they can be traveling outwards along.
- Practice effectively:
- 1) have some concrete way of measuring your progress
- 2) make sure that whatever you’re doing is actually increasing that progress
- 3) make sure that the progress is increasing fast enough that you’ll reach your goal in a reasonable (but realistic) amount of time.
About Learning
- Actively doing is the key to learning. Don't passively consume, actively do.
- About the myth of passive/low-effort learning: A common theme in the science of learning is that effective learning feels like a workout with a personal trainer. It should center around deliberate practice, a type of active learning in which individualized training activities are specially chosen to improve specific aspects of performance through repetition and successive refinement. These practice activities are done entirely for the purpose of pushing one’s limits and improving performance; consequently, they tend to be more effortful and less enjoyable. Comfortable fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning.
- The solution to forgetting is review (retrieval practice) – and not just passively re-ingesting information, but actively retrieving it, unassisted, from long-term memory.
- Retrieval is the act of pulling information from long-term memory into working memory. Practicing retrieval under challenging but achievable conditions is what increases your ability to remember and use information.
- Pulling information from memory should feel challenging. Not feeling comfortable learning a new topic is natural
- Whereas a beginner perceives individual isolated pieces of information, an expert perceives "chunks" of information organized into meaningful patterns and structures
- Building and interconnecting these chunks is related to the higher-order learning and encoding
The biggest misconception I had: "If you don't realize that learning is memory, then you won’t realize that the most effective way to learn is to use memory-supporting training techniques. It’s easy to get confused, thinking: "Truly understanding something is different from just memorizing it, so learning doesn’t require memory-focused techniques like retrieval practice, spaced review, and interleaving (mixed practice). Those are about memorization, not true understanding." And if that’s what you think, then you'll likely shirk the hard work required to build memory, use fun/easy but ineffective training techniques instead, and end up not actually learning much."
About risk
An underrated component of finding career fit is building enough savings to pursue opportunities where reward is uncertain.
December 18, 2025
Just do the work.
I like that it’s a short book and he did not add fluff.
The tl;dr is just do the work.
Make deliberate effort into training / learning / upskiling and get there through habit creation.
I like that it’s a short book and he did not add fluff.
The tl;dr is just do the work.
Make deliberate effort into training / learning / upskiling and get there through habit creation.
January 5, 2026
Anything your brain can’t reliably recall is practically worthless.
May 11, 2026
This book is essential reading for every prospective college student.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews