Hey internet friend, welcome back to a slightly different type of review. If you want to just see the dog picture, click here. This seemed most fitting in the computer category, as the series covers technology. However, it could also have easily been put under the philosophy section as well. In this review I want to discuss the lecture series, Learning to learn by Richard "Dick" Hamming. Before diving in, it is prudent to explain who Hamming was.
If you want to skip this paragraph, you can just check out his Wikipedia Page but the TL:DR version is that Richard "Dick" Hamming was a mathematician who first started working on nuclear weapons after finishing his doctoral degree around the end of WWII. After that, he spent around 30 years at Bell Labs and then went to the Naval Postgraduate school to teach this course (although I suspect he may have taught others as well). It takes around 24 hours to watch all of it, and I did it so you don't have to (unless you want to).
There were a few big take-aways. First was something that he called "Great Thoughts Friday." Every Friday, after lunch, Hamming would think about the week, and his direction. Asking really hard questions like, "am I looking at the right thing? Am I making progress in the direction I want my career to go? Where can I see my career eventually going? What direction do I want?" Because when you know the answer to these questions, it is easier to keep going, as well as to plan out the direction you want it to go. It was mentioned that spending 10% of your time doing this will yield fast returns. After a month you are 40% better off than someone who didn't do this. If you did it every week of the year but take off two weeks for vacation, you are 500% better off than someone who isn't doing this. This is something I started doing a few months ago and found real and immediate benefit.
Another thing that Hamming mentioned was meeting with people outside his discipline. Rather than finding people who were also in the Math department, Hamming would seek out the most interesting table and join them at lunch. For a while he ate with the Physics department, until the interesting people eventually left. Then he went and sat with the Chemistry people, but he found them too dull. He asked them a question about the work that they were doing and whether it was making a change to make the world better (I am paraphrasing) and one dude stopped Hamming in the hall later and stopped him to give him an earful about it. That dude was upset and felt called out, but Hamming watched as he turned things around and his career had a steady upward trajectory after that. Before long, that dude was the head of the Chemistry department, and kept moving upwards.
I don't want to give away everything, because I think there is value in going out and watching the series yourself. However, I will say that some of the math-heavy lectures can probably be skipped by people who aren't hardcore math lovers. Did I understand any of it? Yeah, I suppose a little. Do I think I could have probably skipped those and gotten the same out of the lecture series? Perhaps. I will say that the lecture on Quantum Mechanics was fascinating and even though I didn't understand almost any of it at first, it will probably be one that I later revisit because it was a little mind boggling, TBQH.
Overall, I thought it was a very interesting series and well worth my time to watch. It felt like stealing an education, and to be able to sit in a class that the Navy thought their top brass would want to know about felt a little humbling. Looking around at the people who would go on to be Admirals and other high ranks, there was a concrete feeling that, "if this wasn't good, it wouldn't still be going." Also, it was fascinating that some of the predictions that Hamming made about the year 2020 were absolutely dead accurate. Considering he died in the late 1990s, that he would be so correct was just a testimate to his forward thinking.
In closing, I would highly recommend going through this series if you want to advance you career. There is stuff in here that isn't covered anywhere else, and while I wouldn't suggest you sit there with a pen and take notes, I will share that going through this course had real benefit to me, and I suspect it will have benefit for you as well.
I hope you enjoyed this review, internet friend. Check back later today for my weekly upadte (if you are interested) but if not, I hope you have a nice day and a great week. Cheers!