Ask HN: How did you “learn to learn”?

I think learning has a lot to do with talent and persistence. Different people have different genes to learn different things. I think learning has a lot to do with someone really needing you to fix something for them. Deliver a product with some new technology, bug fix, analyse something complex, whatever. You really HAVE to deliver and your brain will get into ultra focus mode. Some people I know say that they learn best when things are broken and they need to fix it urgently because the customer might be losing money.

Obviously everyone has the ability to learn from the start, or it'd be impossible to even learn to learn. But what have I done to improve my learning capabilities? The best kind of learning, practice, by newer considering my own knowledge as lacking for a task, but rather something I'll have to improve I get practice in learning any time I try to solve a new problem.

University does help a lot as well. Even if I definitely don't remember every fact from every course I've studied (although claiming that all is forgotten within 45 minutes would be a major exaggeration), I've been "forced" to learn a lot of different subjects within a limited time frame. In itself this means practice in learning and it also creates a large base on knowledge upon which I more easily can learn new things. Math stands out as the most important in that, as it's something that I find too tedious to learn on my own, but which is the language used in almost all technical subjects.

Although education can be really expensive, they won't teach you stuff you really want. If you find a particular subject interesting and study it on your own, you'll find that you make progress faster than you would if you study it in school or college. You can teach yourself to do anything if you like it and are willing to make effort in it.