You Gotta Build Mental Strength

by Sanjana Kulkarni and Justin Skycak on

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See, the thing is math is cognitive athletics. That’s basically what it is.

You wanna make progress? Well, you gotta build up your sub-skills, practice them really well so they’re just automatic and you can pull them together and practice close to the edge of what you know, where things are tricky.

Where you make a mistake every now and then, and you get feedback on it, and you have to try again and again and you gotta really demonstrate the skill.

Prove that you can actually do it before you keep moving on. You need to retrieve it from your head.

You can’t just consume stuff and then do projects where you outsource every difficult step to a calculator or to AI. If the tool is doing the hard part, then you aren’t really getting the rep.

And without reps, you you don’t get stronger.

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