The Summer I Taught Myself to Learn

I was a kid who didn't know how to do long division in high school. Here's the method I stumbled into fixing that, and why I've used it for everything since.

My sister opened her acceptance letter on the couch and started crying.

Harvard. She posted a video breaking down everything that got her in: her essay, her grades, the stuff she did outside of class. I sat there watching it and something clicked that I haven't shaken since.

Her grades were good. But they were A's and B's. That was the part that got me. I had been telling myself a story where people who got into schools like that were a different species, "Cracked", born with something I wasn't. And here was my sister, who by little-brother law I was obligated to consider completely unremarkable, and her grades were A's and B's in hard classes. That was it. That was the whole secret. Do what I was already doing, just in harder classes, and be genuinely curious about what I was learning.

I remember thinking: I can do that.

The problem was that at the time, I very much could not do that.

The heart-drop

Freshman year, none of my classes were honors, and in math I was taking Algebra 1. It was my worst subject, and if I stayed on that track I was going to be taking precalculus as a senior. So after my sister got in, I decided I was done taking the easy route. When it came time to pick classes in the fall of my sophomore year I told my guidance counselor I wanted to take all honors classes. Not just honors geometry. Honors everything. History, English, all of it, which was a real jump from a kid who'd never taken a single honors class in his life. And I got through it. Somewhere in there I had the thought that changed the plan: this learning thing actually isn't that bad.

So I got ambitious. I decided I would teach myself Algebra 2 the following summer so I could jump into precalculus in the fall. I signed up for a college algebra course over Zoom, ordered the textbook, and figured I'd just... learn it.

During the first Zoom call, my heart dropped.

I opened that textbook and I did not know anything in it. And I mean anything. I want to be honest about how far behind I actually was, because this is the part people leave out of these stories. I was starting basically from zero. I'd taken Algebra 1 during COVID, which meant I hadn't really taken it at all. I didn't know how to factor. I didn't even know how to do long division. I was sitting in a class that was supposed to teach me Algebra 2 and I was so far behind I was practically helpless.

The professor on the Zoom couldn't help me either. He was teaching to a class, not to the one kid who was clueless because he was missing the prerequisites. So the work fell to me and my sister. She could look at my face and know exactly which part lost me, which is something no one else was able to do. We started from the actual bottom. How to factor. How to do long division. The stuff I was embarrassed not to know, we just sat down and did.

There were nights I can't believe now. We were on vacation at Martha's Vineyard and I have a photo, timestamped, of the two of us doing math for 6 hours until midnight. Not because anyone made us. Because I had decided I was going to close the gap and closing the gap took as long as it took.

What actually worked

Here is the what I came out of that summer with, and it's the half the reason I'm even writing this blog.

I did not get good at math because I'm smart. I got good at math because I accidentally figured out a method, and the method turned out to work on everything.

It had a few parts, and I've used every one of them on things that have nothing to do with math.

I broke everything into the smallest possible pieces. I didn't start with "learn Algebra 2." I first learned how to factor. A textbook chapter is an intimidating wall; a single technique you can nail in an afternoon is a step. I stopped trying to learn chapters and started taking more steps.

I made every day matter, even if only a little. I stopped measuring progress in giant leaps and started measuring it in whether I did something that day. A little bit of real work, every day, was a win. And it turns out a win every day for a summer adds up to testing out of a class you started with no foundation in.

I found the people who were best at explaining it and I learned from them. When the professor and the textbook failed me, I went and found who actually taught this well. Organic Chemistry Tutor on YouTube at midnight. Whatever resource explained the thing clearly, I used it. I've come to think of this as finding the meta: figure out who deeply understands what you are trying to learn, study how they think about it, and borrow that instead of reinventing it on your own.

And I just repeated. That's the unglamorous engine underneath all of it. There's no trick that replaces this. There's just the willingness to do the reps.

I tested out of Algebra 2 at the end of that summer. I took precalculus in the fall. The subject that had been my single worst weakness turned into the thing I was best at. I fell in love with it. I started following math past what I was learning in the classroom, down rabbit holes that had no purpose at the time and then, every so often, turned out to matter later. That feeling, learning something with no reason other than that you're curious, and having it unknowingly pay off down the line, is more or less why I am the way I am now.

What it taught me about me

The lesson I actually walked away with wasn't about math. It was that I'd been wrong about the ceiling. I thought some people were just built for hard things and I wasn't one of them. What was actually true is that I'd never once tested it. The gap between me and what I wanted wasn't talent. It was a foundation nobody had made me build and a number of reps I hadn't done yet.

That's not the comfortable version of the lesson. It's the harder one, because it means the thing between you and getting good at something is mostly just whether you're willing to start from zero and do the boring reps. There's no gift to sit around waiting for. But it does mean the option is almost always there, if you can stand to walk in not knowing how to factor.

I carried that same method with me into college and I still use it, unchanged. Chunk it small. Win every day. Learn from whoever's best. Repeat. Set a goal, and when you hit it, move the goal. You'll see that thread run through most of what I write here, whatever the subject happens to be that week.

I was a kid who didn't know how to do long division, working until midnight on a vacation island, scared of a textbook. I'm glad it went that way.