Torture of learning something new

For years I spent time doing secondary research at the intersection of cognitive science, pedagogy, hci, media theory, philosophy of education, sociology of education & design chasing my own curiosity for what makes learning so hard, what can online tools can offer to change that

I developed a satisfaction in converting my own frustrations with learning to questions researchers thought about. I learnt to use their vocabulary and concepts they used to formulate questions that I cared about & in that pursuit I felt the power of my mind : in forming quick associations between how the same question could be explored differently by different domains or different frameworks and traditions.

It led to me develop my own style of finding interdisciplinary research and for the first time after I could feel the velocity of my mind in forming connections in disparate fields that I never experienced in formal education.

Even though the experience was based on borrowed intelligence which is using something someone else researched and connecting that with another, the experience of constructing relationships between existing bodies of knowledge to investigate a problem was the first proof for me that my mind wasn't uniformly dull.

Recently I made the decision to pick up product design by enrolling in a bootcamp & picking up practical execution skills to translate my ideas over the years to actual projects & now that there is no intermediate layer between my mind & my hand to form associations I can feel the dullness returning. I can feel the experience of slowness in picking up procedural aspects of learning figma, of internalizing UI patterns, of internalizing visual design principles & this is something that is bound to happen when learning any skill that involves making but I do miss velocity of thinking in abstractions