The Power of Pre-Learning: The Greatest Educational Life Hack

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Learning math ahead of time is the greatest educational life hack.

That’s what I and Jason Roberts discovered through first-hand experience ourselves and confirmed by seeing it play out over and over again in others.

Pre-learning advanced math early is simultaneously the best defense AND the best offense.

Why it's the best defense

If you pre-learn the material, you’re immune to even the worst teaching.

• Will the instructor jump into complex cases without covering simple cases first? Will they face the blackboard the entire time and march forward no matter how lost the students are?
• Will the HW problems be so hard as to be unapproachable? Will solutions to HW problems be released? Will the HW even be graded? Will you get blindsided by tests covering things that weren’t emphasized on the homework?
• Will the instructor over-estimate how much prerequisite material their students actually learned and remember? Do they understand that they likely have outsized mathematical aptitude compared to their students, and their students will not be able to “fill in the gaps” as well as they did themself when learning the material?

There’s a hundred different things that can go wrong, and most classes suffer in at least a handful of those aspects.

But if you’ve pre-learned the material, then none of that matters. You’re not depending on a risky situation playing out favorably. You remove risk from the equation.

Why it's the best offense

The point of learning ahead of time is not to sit there bored in class. It’s not about racing to the finish line and camping out.

You still push yourself. It’s just that most of the homework/exams become review, and you can focus your energy on actually grappling, extracting learning from, and solving the most challenging problems – the ones where everyone else just throws up their hands and either takes the hit or copies off (sorry, “works together with”) the genius in their study group.

And by continuing to push yourself, you leverage pre-learning to kick off a virtuous cycle.

When you breeze through the HW/exams and solve all the challenge problems and chat intelligently with the instructor, you get a reputation for being the smart kid, and you get the smart-kid opportunities like research/internship opportunities.

And if take those smart-kid opportunities seriously, put a full-assed effort into them and blow them out of the water, then you can kick off a virtuous cycle of continued opportunities that seriously accelerate your career and help you find what speaks to you most in life.

That’s the whole point of compressing time. It’s not about beating your peers to some arbitrary, superficial finish line. Finding your place in the world before time closes in on you and forces you to settle for something else. You are racing against time itself.

Time is the #1 killer of dreams and aspirations. When someone gives up on their dream, or gives up on figuring out what that dream is, it’s typically a result of them losing the race against time.

Pink Floyd put it best: “You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun. And you run, and you run, to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking.”

Whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time. Time forces convergence, and premature convergence is what kills dreams. Granted, it’s hard to understand this when you’re young, before you have any sense of the wrath of time or the meaning of convergence. But no matter how many times you claim you’ll never settle for something less than ikigai,

• it won't keep the sun from setting,
• it won't keep the time from passing,
• it won't keep you from increasingly desiring things that only a stable life can provide, and
• it won't keep you from gradually turning the dial from “explore” to “exploit.”

The further time gets ahead of you, the more likely you are to settle into a life that is “fine,” or even “good” – despite being unable to shake the feeling that you could have found something better if you had more time.

That is the point of compressing time. That is the point of removing skill bottlenecks early. That is the point of unlocking doors early and running down avenues that you might be interested in exploring.

If you’re winning against time, and you get the feeling the path you’re going down has twisted and turned into something that’s no longer a great fit for you, you can double back and explore other avenues before doors start locking behind you.

If you’re winning against time, and you want to try to break down a wall instead of running through an existing door, you can give it a shot without having to stomach a vomit-worthy level of risk.

That’s why learning advanced math ahead of time is the greatest educational life hack for any student interested in a STEM career. Accelerating helps you find your place in the world before time closes in on you and forces you to settle for something else.

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