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How to Learn Programming Like Einstein Learned

Physics

Fatos Morina Follow

Feb 24 · 13 min read

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Einstein was a genius and one of the greatest scientists ever to live. In 1905, he
published four scientific articles that laid the foundation of modern physics,
changing views on space, time, mass, and energy. After making his name with these
four articles, he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of the
phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect.

We can all learn from Einstein’s life, especially his ways of working and learning.
Even though we may not all be a genius of Einstein’s caliber, there are still some
patterns that can be emulated across multiple fields of study, especially in software
development. Success leaves clues and reveals how we can learn from anyone.

People like Michael Jordan or Arnold Schwarzenegger are not software developers,
but their deliberate practice and attitudes represent some replicable patterns that
can be implemented both by software developers, and people from other professions
as well.

People who are the best of the best at what they do are usually differentiated by
their unusual habits, like focusing on the right things, and obsessively practicing
their craft when nobody else is watching. They not only outwork their peers and
other people outside their peer group, but they also work more efficiently and
consider learning as a way of life.

As the world’s most famous performance coach, Tony Robbins, says, “I think if
you’re hungr y to learn, you’re hungr y to grow, you’re hungr y to master things. If
you won’t settle for less than you can be or do, then you can outstrip anybody else.”

Learning How to Learn

 Photo by ǸǮ Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Einstein is reported to have said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results.” If you want to achieve different results, you
need to do different things from what other people are doing. When you learn like
others, you are going to get the same results they do. You need to be willing to go
deep into a subject and learn things differently in order to be like Einstein.

A few decades ago, a physics student achieved an other wise perfect score on an
exam, but the professor graded him poorly on a question that asked how to measure
the height of a building using a barometer.

The student wrote, “Go to the top of the building. Drop the barometer and count the
seconds until it smashes on the sidewalk below. Then use the formula for
acceleration by gravity to determine the height of the building.”

The expected answer was to use air pressure as a tool for measuring height, having
referenced a barometer. When the student argued that he had come up with a
correct solution in a slightly unconventional way, the professor made a deal with
the student: if the student could correctly answer the same question using yet
another approach, the professor would give him full marks for the question.

The student immediately came up with another response. He said that he would use
the barometer to bang on the door of the building’s landlord. When the landlord
opened the door, he would ask, “How tall is this building?”

The professor challenged the student to come up with another way of answering
the question, so the student recommended tying a long string to the barometer and
measuring the length of the string from the top of the building. Or swinging the
string as a pendulum and inferring the height by the motion it creates.
The professor recognized that all of these answers from different angles were
correct and awarded the student full marks.

According to the book Learn More, Study Less by Scott Young, this young student was
Niels Bohr, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for discovering the nature of
electrons inside atoms. But he did not learn all these approaches by simply attending
his physics lectures.

You have to be really passionate about something to go to that deep level of

learning, understanding the topic and coming up with so many answers for the
same question. Moreover, you also have to learn differently than most other
people.

Most students study for an exam because they want to get a good grade. They do
not learn more than what will be covered by the final exam, let alone spend more
time studying something related to the subject after finals.

Similarly, a lot of software developers tend to use Google to solve a problem, so that
they can fix a bug as quickly as possible. Their main concern is appearing to be
productive in front of their managers. They do not spend time understanding the
solution at a deeper level or figuring out the most efficient way to solve a problem.
They are satisfied enough that the task got closed in Jira.

Of course, there may be cases when you are under pressure and you have to fix a
critical bug fast, as the deadline is approaching quickly. Nonetheless, you should not
let those few cases divert you from continual learning.
 Credit

Now that we know how learning is critical to one’s success, let’s see how we can
become better software developers by learning better.

1. Learn the Fundamentals of Computer Science

According to the biography of Albert Einstein written by Walter Isaacson, before
Einstein was 15, he had mastered differential and integral calculus because he
considered mathematics as a way to understand nature. These fundamental
concepts, later on, turned out to be useful in his work in the field of physics.

Most people tend to avoid learning the fundamentals, as they may not see the fruits
of their work in the short-term. It is more satisfying to tell others that you have your
application ready to be downloaded in Play Store rather than informing them that
you are still focusing on the basics.

Be different than those people. Learn the fundamentals of computer science —

more specifically, data structures and algorithms — and learn them really well. You
have to become capable of implementing some of the most commonly used
algorithms and data structures yourself without using a textbook.

When you finally understand them at a deep level, you will have gained the ability to
solve real-world problems in software development in an intuitive way, which can be
a much faster and more efficient approach.

As Isaacson mentions, Einstein believed that “intuition is nothing but the outcome
of earlier intellectual experience.” In software development, that prior intellectual
experience requires a solid grounding in the basics.

As Linux kernel developer Linus Tor valds puts it:

 “I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a
bad programmer and a good one is whether he
considers his code or his data structures more
important. Bad programmers worry about the
code. Good programmers worry about data
structures and their relationships.”
Large tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon recruit new software
developers by challenging them with hard technical inter views that mostly revolve
around fundamental concepts.

In other words, no matter what type of programming language you use, your code is
just the way to express the algorithms and the data structures beneath the surface.

2. Learn by Solving Problems, Not Just Passively Watching

Tutorials
 Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

Einstein often skipped classes in college. Isaacson quotes him as saying, “I played
hooky a lot and studied the masters of theoretical physics with a holy zeal at home.”
He was not interested, nor compelled, to attend his lectures. He found something
more engaging and fulfilling — he used his time to focus on solving hard problems
and obsessively playing with ideas and equations on his own.

There are a lot of books and tutorials that can teach you programming. But they
often only give you a shallow introduction to new concepts, whereas the deeper
understanding and learning is done while solving real-world problems using those
concepts.

Don’t fall under the false impression that you have learned something by passively
watching someone rapidly developing a web application. Don’t pretend that you
understand something when you haven’t truly learned it yet. As Einstein wrote,
“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits
of thinking.”

Instead, you should be actively engaged in solving problems in order to learn new
concepts. You may find technical problems that can test your understanding of the
fundamentals from online judges such as LeetCode, Codility, HackerRank,
CodeChef, CodeForces, etc.

You can also contribute to open source projects in GitHub through fixing bugs or
optimizing existing functionalities with more efficient implementations. Working on
other people’s projects can help you learn from their implementations and
approaches and challenge you to come up with new solutions.

This kind of work actively engages your brain as you find new approaches to
existing solutions, which as a result help you learn and retain the information in the
long term.

If you already have a full-time position, or even if you are an independent

contractor, you should constantly be seeking challenging tasks for your current
level of experience. Don’t be afraid to ask your project manager to assign them to
you. Instead of shying away from these opportunities, be enthusiastic and feel the
privilege of getting paid for learning to do something that you did not know before.
As Einstein said, “Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at
death.”

Moreover, don’t hesitate to start a side project. You do not have to wait for five years
to pass before you build your own application. You can start developing a small
application and plan to scale it further as you learn more.

Publish your source code on GitHub, and tr y asking for feedback from other
programmers by contacting them via email or in programming communities.

3. Improve Your Understanding by Writing Tests

Einstein’s Uncle Jakob challenged his nephew to prove Pythagoras’s Theorem at an
early age. “After much effort, I succeeded in ‘proving’ this theorem on the basis of
the similarity of triangles,” Einstein recalled.

Einstein put a lot of hard work into building his understanding through doing
proofs. As a result, he was not only able to learn things holistically, but he also got
confident enough to tr y other things on his own.

Proving theorems is analogous to writing tests in programming: You need to prove

that a feature of a website is really working by coming up with test cases, and then
expect a particular functionality to be performed or an output to be produced by the
source code. Tests are an alternative approach to learning something new, as they
take more time and effort than passively watching a tutorial.

Some new developers are afraid to enter into the realm of testing, but it represents
one of the most effective ways of understanding the flow of execution and
functionalities of a piece of software. It can be especially helpful for people who are
new at a project and want to learn the structure and workings of it.

If you want to learn how a particular open-source framework works, you can
improve your grasp of it by writing tests. This way, you will not only understand that
framework a lot better, but your tests can contribute to the project as well.

In cases where you are working on a large project and something is unclear to you,
you can break the execution flow down into several components and write tests for
each one of them.
Writing tests will not only help your understanding, but it will also allow you to find
potential bugs, and as a result, contribute to the project overall.

4. Concentrate Deeply

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

We live in an age of too many distractions. From the moment we wake up in the
morning, we reach for our phone. Check texts. Read emails. On average, a person is
engaged in 76 separate phone sessions per day.

Obviously, Einstein didn’t have a cell phone, but he had his own types of distractions
and had ways of dealing with them that we can learn from. His son reported that
“Even the loudest baby cr ying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” adding, “He could go
on with his work completely imper vious to noise.”

His ability to concentrate deeply and work for long periods of time without
interruption helped him achieve historical breakthroughs. “I was able to do a full
day’s work in only two or three hours. The remaining part of the day, I would work
out my own ideas,” says Einstein of managing his time at his intellectually
unstimulating job at the Bern patent office, which gave him time to focus on more
challenging engagements.

Software developers can learn from Einstein and practice blocking off distractions.
Don’t pretend you are able to focus on the same level of intensity after countless
sessions ‘just checking’ Facebook messages!

Tim Ferriss, the author of the best-selling book, Tool of Titans, writes how “Single-
tasking is a superpower.” He adds, “In a digital economy, where distraction is a
currency, if you can focus on one thing for three to five hours at a time and block
out all the distractions, you have a huge leg up, you are able to do deep work and
connect dots that are unconnected.”

Tr y making a compromise with your manager about setting aside certain portions
of the day for communication, and invest the other parts invaluable and cognitively
demanding endeavors, such as learning new concepts or technologies and writing
code.

When we are able to distance ourselves from those interruptions and apply good
time management skills, we increase the chances of diving deeper into our learning,
and as a result, we become a lot more productive.

5. Be Curious and Love Learning

Image source

Software development is one of the most in-demand professions of our time. There
are constantly new job openings, which attract both youngsters and already-
employed people from a wide range of professions. They know that you can get a
really good salar y working as a software developer, and consequently, they start
their careers with great ambitions.

Even if you get a job in software development, however, you can only become great if
you love learning and programming. It is one of the few professions in which you
constantly have to learn something new.

It’s not just the existing concepts you need to know. You have to adapt to the
constant invention of new technologies and programming languages. You have to
adapt to the changes in the market and learn whatever new things are currently
considered as valuable.

You will have to consistently learn a lot. In order to keep your brain constantly
engaged in learning, you will have to be curious and stay humble.

Often, programmers get employed on the basis of their existing knowledge and start
to think they don’t need to learn new things anymore. However, you will only be able
to excel as a software developer if you are curious and love learning, as the need to
learn never ceases.

On November 1915, after writing only two pages of what he referred to as “one of
the most beautiful works of my life”, Einstein sent his 11-year-old son Hans Albert a
letter. He praised his son for his learning efforts, saying, “that is the way to learn the
most… When you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice
the time passes.”

“Curiosity has its own reason for existing,” Einstein explains. “One cannot help but
be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the mar velous
structure of reality.”

Become curious about how a framework works and is structured. When you learn
something thoroughly, you gain a clear picture of its mechanisms and
functionalities. Do not simply accept that Rails is a great framework for rapidly
developing web applications — learn how Rails works, behind the curtains.
Moreover, consider the possibility of contributing to and improving it, as it is open
source.

Watch out, too that you don’t become obsessed with money. Of course, we all need
money to pay our bills and buy food for ourselves and/or our family, but if you want
to excel in software development, you need to cultivate a passion for learning and
developing for the sake of it. You need to love programming and feel grateful that
you have the opportunity to positively impact the lives of millions of people with the
lines of code that you write.

Einstein believed that “love is a better teacher than a sense of duty.” What we can
learn from this as software developers, is the importance of not just working for of a
good salar y, but because we love learning and our work in general, and have an
intrinsic curiosity and drive that keeps us engaged after work or during the
weekends when our boss is not watching.

Always Remember: Programming Is a Lifetime of

Learning

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Aside from his learning methodologies, Einstein is one of the most influential figures
in physics. His work has helped various disciplines, from nuclear energy production
to synchronization of GPS satellites to computers, to many ever yday consumer
products.
His genius and accomplishments may lay outside the reach of most of us, but his
work ethic, humility, curiosity, and tenacity are worth emulating by anybody.

If you want to be successful, you can save yourself time by replicating the behaviors
of other successful people. Though Einstein didn’t write a single line of Java or
Python, his life reveals some inspiring patterns that we can all learn from, and apply
in the field of software development.

Einstein can ser ve as an encouragement to focus on learning the fundamentals,

learn by solving problems and writing tests for different projects, concentrate
deeply, and most importantly, love learning. If we want to succeed in our careers, we
need to become passionate about learning and recognize it as a crucial part of our
lives.

Arti cial Intelligence Towards Data Science Programming Machine Learning Technology

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WRIT T EN BY

Fatos Morina

Data Scientist | Software Engineer | Writer at

https://www.fatosmorina.com/

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