Forget what school taught you

The first step to getting good at anything is forgetting what school taught you.

Maybe not all facts, but the reflex behind them. School trained you to learn on terms you did not choose. You don't pick the subject, the speed, or the direction. Do that for twelve years and you stop believing your own actions drive your learning. You wait for the next unit, the next teacher, the next course.

My girlfriend is studying German right now. Watching her grind through standardized tests like the Goethe exam reminded me how much I hated school. Twenty people do the homework, not because they care, but because they were told. After the lesson the homework paper goes in the bin. You don't get good at the language, you get good at being graded. Those are different skills.

The real world is unsupervised. Nobody sets the target or grades it directly. The one skill school kills, figuring things out without instruction, is the one that actually matters.

The things I'm genuinely good at, I learned on my own. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Take AI. There's no syllabus, and no course stays current for more than a quarter. The people getting good at it are the ones poking at the tools and adapting as they change, not the ones waiting for a best-practice guide or a company policy before they start.

The barrier isn't access. Any skill you want is free and available right now. The barrier is the habit school drilled in, that learning is something an authority hands to you. A teacher or a coach you choose and point at a real problem can be useful. But it must be you who drives it. A standardized curriculum imposed on everyone is the trap. Don't wait around for it.