Cluebook of Pakko

“Pakko” is a Finnish word.

If you look it up, in a dictionary, you will find the meaning.

Must.

Obliged to do something.

Mandatory.

There is a famous website for muscle-talk called Pakkotoisto.

Real-world learning for me — just like for everyone else, has contained painful moments. When you are in school, you have to do things. Basically. There are some exams that didn´t go as well as you would like. Some were a breeze. I was for the most part of school on the “breeze” side.

When I was around 10 years old, I started reading PC magazines and computer literature. The local library set my first feeling of total awe: a Finnish language, two part Lisp book.

Why I am going through these snippets of life? Have no idea.

I just want to explore the tuning of my forward-looking executive function center by shedding some memories.

Programming learning is something that you can do — I certainly recommend picking up a programming language and learning it! It takes a few hours. That´s all. You will then be able to write rudimentary programs. Play with those. Make a small number guessing game, and have fun with it.

Change the programming slightly.

Then you will quite soon see, what is the loop we sometimes get stuck: learning new abstractions. Optimizing a piece of code. Thinking, whether we should learn another language, or stick with the current. This is all good stuff. Learning anything is a worthy deed.

Back in 1990s I feel that almost everything was learned in a “RPG-style”: you talked to people, you went to library, borrowed books, stumbled upon material, and ingested it all. Read in the candlelight — in middle of the early morning hours. As much as possible, not everything. Controlling the learning process to keep you from spawning to unfruitful paths, aas also part of the the whole shebang.

Learning showed that there are limits to what you can know.

With computers came the exhilarating and life-long attitude change: learning requires application of the skills. There is no such thing as a theoretical computer programmer. All programmers do code. They plan, write code, run it, and get back results. Even in the age of cove.

Pure rote memory of something does not equal a skill. Capability to reproduce a fact, fast, is not true learning.

Combinatorial skills are something that resembles learning. I think yet we are ongoing in a eternal quest to understand the core of learning. Combining things can happen basically in two ways:

— learn something so well it´s an automation, OR

— learn to time-slice two things conjuicely

Skills are something that you can choose to initiate, advance, and hone.

Advancing a skill is one of the greatest things human can do.

Recently I had really interesting 2 hours of a Google meet with a person who has done computer games in the 1980s. We talked about a lot of things, code, the server, practicalities, and had fun!

Pain?

Earlier there was the pain in learning. It is reality; I for sure cannot deny the existence of pain.

However it is also a reasonable question that would we feel the emotional fulfillment, and even grateful self-compassion about having learned something, if we did not feel any of these supposedly negative emotions?