Wasted Effort

I recently finished my first semester (albeit online) of college. Despite taking my finals only last week, I can already feel myself forgetting the material I supposedly “learned” over hours of studying and sleepless nights. This is kind of scary, imagine waking up a decade after graduating university only to realize you barely remember an equation from all the math classes you took.

A few days ago, I also finished reading the Almanac of Naval Ravikante, and I’m going to use this quote as a jumping off point to talk about wasted effort.

99% of effort is wasted. Obviously, nothing is ever completely wasted because it’s all a learning moment. You can learn from anything. But for example, when you go back to school, 99 percent of the term papers you did, books you read, exercises you did, things you learned, they don’t really apply. You might have read geography and history you never reuse. You might have studied a language you don’t speak anymore. You might have studied a branch of mathematics you completely forgot. Of course, these are learning experiences. You did learn. You learned the value of hard work; you might have learned something that went deep into your psyche and became a piece of what you’re doing now. But at least when it comes to the goal-oriented life, only about 1 percent of the efforts you made paid off.

When pressed on this aspect of learning, most educators would echo Naval, in saying that knowledge gleaned and subsequently forgotten over the course of high school and college teaches one the value of “hard work” or “learning how to learn”. In a similar vein, most history teachers would reference the cliche phrase of “history repeats itself”, to convince you of the value in what you’re learning.

Knowing up front that I’m likely going to forget 99% of what I learn, study, read or watch puts I think even more pressure on me in the present to curate what I spend time doing. If I’m going to remember an arbitrary 1% of what I consume today, then I want make sure that I give myself as high a probability as possible of making that 1% something genuinely useful and intriguing.

For me, that means exploring concepts in Philosophy, Mathematics, Computer Science and Microeconomics. I want to make sure I read more primary sources, & biographies - and less of the money-making newly minted guru get-rich-quick dribble.

I also think that Naval’s point about how content you consume can seemingly have no effect on your overall character, yet change some archaic inner gear of your psyche is important. In other words, these effects build up, and over the course of decades, consumed content can have a large impact on you through the accumulation of small changes to your inner psyche.