Conquest of the Useless

Has anyone ever told you that? They’ve told me more than once, I told that myself too, and I’ve been wrong every single time.

Introduction

I can understand the fact that we need to focus on our objectives, that we need fixed career paths (although we already know they might change), just to keep moving and not to get paralized due to the vast knowledge that we’re missing along the way. We have to stick to it because otherwise we might get lost.

We all have plenty of things that we would like to learn (or that it would be convenient to learn) and we all have to organize ourselves. Some of us are constantly jumping between new fields, new concepts, or even trying to understand different entire disciplines simultaneously and that can be overwhelming and frustrating.

But there’s a limit, and there’s a weak balance between pragmatism and idealism, there’s also a thin line between specializing and stagnating. It all comes to our willingness to learn and get out of our comfort zone.

That’s what we’re discussing in this article. Why would something be useless to learn? Why do we learn things in the first place? What are our limits on learning? And how far should we chase the useless?

Why do we learn

I think it’s important to get this right in the first place, it might sound ridiculous for some people but it deserves some thinking. It’s important to find a meaning in our struggle to focus our efforts based on our priorities.

Just like everything in life there are two ways of doing it: You can learn with a purpose or you can learn as a purpose.

Learning with a purpose

This consists of using the knowledge as a tool to achieve some goal. The knowledge is in between you and your objective and learning it’s just a collateral effect.

For example, you could need to expand your skill set to satisfy the requirements of a current project. In this case learning it’s a vehicle to achieve some goal. The main priority lies on the project rather than the knowledge. This case it’s sort of a short-term concern, the problem has a determined beginning and an ending.

Another option could be learning as part of your career path. Here the goal it’s to become something, and that leads us to learn some particular discipline so you make use of that knowledge in the future. This way of learning requires more patience and dedication and it’s aligned with your ambitions, but you also use the knowledge as a tool.

Learning as a purpose

I see learning as a purpose like some kind of art. It’s almost irrational. It satisfies some deep exploration instinct in ourselves. It’s even more childish, like playing with the ideas just to see what happens. It tries to find the beauty behind the concepts and it usually pushes the limits of the knowledge in unexpected ways.

A simple example could be pure mathematics versus applied mathematics. You don’t know why it would be useful until you realize that the real world it’s hidden behind all those abstract models. That you can use them to build the blocks of the rest of the sciences.

You definitely don’t need to get lost in abstractions or figure out the secrets of the universe to learn as a purpose. There could be more mundane or physical things but I find it equally beautiful. It’s genuine learning, pure wisdom thirst without interests.

We all have some of the two ways of learning and it’s important to find a balance in order to push our limits but also be functional in everyday life. These two motivations represent for me pure pragmatism versus idealism in learning.

The Useless

What is The Useless

You’re working on the useless when you can’t imagine how you could use it or when the use case it’s far from your concerns and doesn’t have a trivial relationship.

For example, I could argue that studying Aristotelian logic will help me become a better programmer but I would have to jump through a bunch of concepts to justify that studying it deeply it’s pragmatic.

The best thing about working on the useless is that it probably makes you happy, it’s simple, otherwise you won’t invest in it. It’s like drawing or playing music without any more compensation than the actual pleasure of the activity itself.

But sometimes the useless is what drives us more to obsession and craziness, because it’s irrational by definition. That’s why for example love can break us so hard, because it’s all about feelings; I think something similar happens with your ambitions. Sometimes the people with big ambitions there aren’t simply pragmatic, they just have a powerful drive to excellence. Anyways, that’s out of this article.

You may have read this title before, it’s based on a diary Werner Herzog wrote while the filming of Fitzcarraldo ¹, a German movie of the eighties. In the film the main character (who’s name it’s the title of the movie) dreams about building up a great opera theater in the depths of the amazonian jungle. Fitzcarraldo it’s so obsessed with his dream that he’s willing to give everything for it, to the point of hauling a 360-ton steamship over a mountain. That’s the commitment I like to see in everyone fighting for his dreams, no matter how crazy it might be.

Wasting knowledge

I’ve seen people talking about how you have to focus your efforts and don’t work on things you don’t mean to use “it’s wasteful” for you time and energy and also you will forget it. And it’s right to a certain level.

It could be right if we literally don’t use it, but knowledge usually becomes part of our mental model and part of our resources, so we will probably use it to contrast or find other patterns even if we don’t land it in the practice.

I’ll give an example to avoid falling into generalities. I’m a fullstack developer, who some day aspires to become a software engineer. Lately I’ve been studying Category Theory, which is probably one of the most abstract branches of Mathematics. Anyone could think that I lost my mind, why would I want to waste my time on something that doesn’t have anything to do with my field. But I enjoy learning it for several reasons and you may find them from the previous section:

• It shapes my mind through the abstractions and I’m able to find some patterns in some ways that otherwise couldn’t be possible.
• I can truly understand the fundamentals. Category theory leads to lambda calculus, which leads to Functional Programming and that is something I would like to understand.
• It ‘s cool, period.

Multiple times I’ve thought that I won’t use some particular thing I was studying for, but surprisingly I was wrong every single time. This happens because It always helped me to build a better understanding, a broader context and stronger fundamentals. You may also change your plans and end up using it in practice, that’s something you’ll never know at the moment but it definitely happened to me.

It’s also cool to learn these things because you get out of your comfort zone and force yourself to go beyond your limits. You’re essentially learning to learn, and that in fact it’s truly important.

So don’t let people tell you what you shouldn’t learn, obviously you can take advice but don’t be embarrassed about investing time on things that won’t have a trivial relation with what you do. Keep focus on yourself as soon as it makes you happy.

Our limits in learning

I truly believe that there’s not a complex enough concept that we can’t understand with sufficient effort, patience and progressive learning.

It could be some deep level concept of your field or even could have anything to do with your discipline. If you’re a marketing person and you suddenly want to understand quantum physics go for it, with determination and consistency you’ll surely make it. Actually some of the things we already know we once thought that there would be impossible to get.

I would like to mention a quote from a famous physician that I admire, Richard Feynman, one of the greatest geniuses of 20th century physics, who repeatedly said in interviews that he was just an ordinary person who just studied hard. He said this when they asked him how could he imagine those things he did:

There’s no talent or special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or electromagnetic fields. […]. It is possible to develop a familiarity with those things that are not familiar on hand by studying, by learning the properties of atoms and quantum mechanics by practicing with the equations until it becomes a kind of second nature. Just like a second nature to know that if two balls come towards each other they smash into bits. — Richard Feynman.“Fun to Imagine” Altadena, California, broadcasted on BBC2 (1983) ²

So that’s a heavy statement in my opinion. You can try to shape your mind in order to become familiar with any concept, and then move through it making it look like magic.

I’m fascinated with this because it really demolishes the barriers of knowledge. In this era with the Internet we have access to almost any information we could imagine. Obviously a doctor won’t get his title just by studying on the internet, he’ll have a lack of experience, but for casual learners it’s all there. You could even professionalize depending on your career, doctors won’t but in IT it’s a pretty common thing.

So with patience, consistency and a little bit of confidence you could get a pretty decent knowledge base on anything you want, no matter the abstract or the specific it is, no matter your background on it, no matter the big the challenge is, just by going on baby steps.

To finish I would like to mention another quote, this time from a youtuber that I think represents this idea of achieving the useless. It’s called Stuff Made in Here ³. He’s an awesome engineer who makes ridiculously useless tools like a flying basketball hoop that moves towards the ball, an explosive baseball bat or an auto-aiming bow.

He once said this thing that seemed as funny as it was true to me:

“I’m almost out of things I can screw up so I’m feeling pretty good about this” — Shane Wighton (Stuff Made Here)

I think it’s a nice approach to failure.

Thanks for reading!