Efficient Learning Cannot Take You All the Way to Mastery
Mastery means choosing a craft you love enough to keep pursuing even after the easy gains run out.
No one has ever become the best in the world at something by being the most efficient learner of that skill.
The learning curve for most things is logarithmic. At the beginning, almost everything helps, and you become dramatically better over a short time. But eventually, the easy gains run out. Each additional improvement requires much more effort than the one before it.
If your goal is just to become competent, this is a good place to stop, the 80/20. You can spend the same time improving something else at a much better rate.
But if your goal is mastery, to become the best of the best, you have to tank the diminishing returns. You accept that the next few percent of ability may require hundreds or thousands of percent more effort because you care about your absolute ability, not your efficiency in getting there. Those thousands of hours are what enable you to go from the 90% to the 99% to the 99.9%.
I think about this a lot when I reflect how I learned to code. I spent thousands of hours reading documentation, watching YouTube videos, trying new tools before their APIs stabilized, and going down dead ends. A lot of what I learned never became directly useful, but some random things would, often much later in a way I could never have predicted.
None of this was especially efficient. I just loved coding enough that I did not care. I did it because it was fun.
That might be the most important part. The right craft to master is not one without diminishing returns. It is the one you love enough that pouring hours into those diminishing returns feels effortless.
You cannot make that exchange for everything. You have to pick what you’re willing to learn inefficiently.