In my journey through learning science and engineering I've read, practiced and contributed in the context of a variety of different academic and professional environments. From the engineering departments of universities to engineering teams in large corporations, to my bedroom on a Friday night with nothing but me, a textbook and too many cans of La Croix, I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to figure things out.

I've learned a lot in this time.

I have watched myself get significantly better at taking a complex, technical problem (an outage, failure, or unexpected behavior) and figuring out *why* it was happening. I have also watched myself progress significantly in learning how to identify, scope and define the work that unifies technical activities with business value. Mostly though, I think the former is my strong suit. I have came to see that the unique value I add in an organization is the persistent pursuit of figuring things out. I just love the process of teasing clarity out of ambiguity, especially in technical context. I'm sure most people would too, if they were willing to give it a shot.

In the years I have spent learning how to learn and how to define and solve problems, I have taken to doing a few things:

1. Documenting my process of learning in detail in a way that would allow a future onlooker to understand almost everything I did

2. Identifying what it is I'm doing internally, mentally, when I am problem solving

I started doing #1 as I realized that, because I value knowledge so highly, and historians often only have artifacts from people's person lives to draw from when they attempt to recreate the past, that, if I document everything I do in detail then it will be easier to figure out what happened in our day and age many centuries from now, if any of my notes or work ends up in some sort of historic sweep (mind you, I have no delusions of grandeur, I just think if I were a historian and I had a detailed account of what the people I was studying were thinking, I could find a lot of value). I also think that, when I think about the lives of my idols (Feynman, Turing, and the like), I would *love* to have access to a notebook describing their thought process.

Often times I have to try to piece together what they were thinking from lectures about their work or second hand reports of quotes from them, which aren't very reliable resources. Feynman has some awesome content on Youtube I watch, so that helps. In any case, I may not raise to their level, but I will keep detailed notes on what I do and how, as I think anyone who does science and engineering, or even arts and humanities, should.

I started doing #2 when I realized how valuable sharing perspectives and insights are, even when you aren't the best of the best, you don't have ground breaking research results, or you haven't yet cracked the code of coding at scale. I really believe good insights about learning how to learn come from anyone who is interested, persistent and engaged in their craft, regardless of their level or title. I can count the number of times I've gained useful, or at least thought provoking, insight from other people who wrote books or blogs on topics I was interested in. In fact I have often found that advice from people who have lived the same experiences and gotten good results is the most valuable.

This advice is often very general and usually presented in a way that can draw the ire of some people due to how subjective it can be, and how personal the topics usually are. But as I've grown I've found that even when I disagree or know slightly more or less than someone else, if I try and have patience I can almost always find value in the lessons and insights offered by others, as long as I think they too are curious, honest and passionate.

In the spirit of accomplishing #1 and #2 above, when I started my most recent engineering job, I decided to make a dedicated notebook to write my thoughts in. In that notebook I created two sections, "Loose" and "Firm". As I go about the business of my day to day life, when I have an idea that I think is a good idea that I should try to apply, I decide to start applying it and I write it down in the "Loose" section of my notebook. I then, leave myself reminders and start applying the idea.

Over time I observe how applying the idea works out for me. If the idea is something I can continue applying over a long period of time in many scenarios and it more often than not creates positive results, I move the idea to the "Firm" section of my notebook. I only add ideas to this page after they move to the "firm" section of my notebook (ideas that I have observed in practice over long periods of time serving me well). I share these ideas as I think they are the most valuable.