Honestly, it takes me a while to try to understand my blog posts again. I have to trace the steps I took to get to the same understanding on the problems I had in the moment. I wanted to go deep into a niche topic, but without repeated exercise, I was not as engaged in the material. I attribute a lot of results in my life to an obsession with going deeper in a topic, where I want to really understand something.

But going deeper doesn’t necessarily mean trying something niche. In a sense, that’s more of a “breadth” idea, since I am learning something new.

I think going deeper in a topic means developing your current understanding, applying what you know to solve something that you don’t. I feel much of math is structured this way, in that, you don’t need to know a lot of things apart from the fundamentals to understand something. There exist some fundamental truths or styles of thinking that you can reduce your problems to.

I think a big reason for trying to learn something new comes from a desire to gain understanding, and to be more secure in what I know, but if these results are what I’m after, then I should be more focused on this approach: using what I know to solve something I don’t initially know how to do. I think that I get surprised often by how much my friends who have worked in some domain extensively don’t know some specific topic or idea, which might be some indication that I should know less things, but know their fundamentals deeply.

I feel like this approach from fundamentals is the whole essence of developing intuition. I find that with concrete effort in using already present knowledge to solve problems, the solutions to complex problems end up being deceptively simple. My friendship problems can be solved with boundaries on my part. My most effective and eagerly reviewed work are my most understandable pieces of code. In a world where I see things as unecessarily complicated, reality says that its not that deep.

So, in the future, I hope to really understand things and be more confident in what I know. Towards this goal, I’d like to try to simplify my problems as much as I can, which involves using clear thinking and caring a lot about simplicity.