Learning isn’t just about downloading information; it’s about growing organically. Like gardeners tending plants, teachers and mentors nurture our progress rather than merely installing data. (aside: Or maybe it really is about downloading in our era of open source weights for powerful language models).

No matter the professional or academic path you set yourself on, you’ll have keep learning to adapt and excel. You've likely experienced these transitions and adaptions already such as your jump from middle school to high school or high school to college. Each likely came with fresh study methods. But not all environments are equally good for your development.

No doubt you've had an educator really helped you learn something. I claim that most of the effect that had on you was that your learning needs and the learning environment which they cultivated for you had a happy resonance such that your learning flourished easily. This is non-trivial and depends on many personal factors and I think it is why two people can have such wildly different experiences with the same educator. Another part of the puzzle is the environment they created facilitated your natural enthusiasm and energy for a subject.

One way to find a suitable professional path is to lean into the types of learning that energize you. To get a heading consider the following exercise. Without telling anyone just pretend that you've become a new kind of person who is already engaged in the kind of path you might be interested in. When you encounter a choice in your normal daily life, ask yourself, "what would a person who made choice x do here?" If you want to be a PhD in comparative literature, let that idea guide you as decide what to do on a Saturday morning.

Sometimes your audition will take you on an non-optimal path. The reason I first learned LaTeX was to prove to myself that I was serious about math. While I think there were more productive ways to convince myself, it ended up being useful later in my PhD. The point is, every experiment, even if it seems random, can reveal new strengths or spark unexpected interests.

1. Learning is about adapting, not just absorbing facts.

2. Teachers guide growth like gardeners, not technicians.

3. Your unique path depends on the kind of learning you love.