People who do things rarely ask, “where should I start?”
They simply start.
Any time I’ve learned something it’s because I wasn’t afraid to act. Most children naturally do this because they’re almost incapable of calculating risk.
As adults, it’s much harder because our pre-frontal cortex is fully developed and we have much stronger emotional associations to things. The act of dissociating the emotional responses from the act of learning is difficult.
For me, it’s been difficult to accept that I can be good at math.
I failed math in the fourth grade and was afraid of it for most of my educational career. Although, I did well in my math classes and even got into my high school’s math team. I was pretty unconfident in my abilities until recently.
Instead of thinking about my fear of math, it’s way more productive to just spend time doing it. I’ve built a curriculum to re-teach myself some of the fundamentals I may have missed and am slowly working my way through it.
How are you holding yourself back from learning?
