How do I learn difficult subjects?

Shabeel Kandi
5 min readJan 9, 2020

If you strive to be the best version of yourself, this post is for you.

There’s a concept known as financial compounding, but most people don’t know about intellectual compounding. Buffett and Munger employed this to great effect and to accumulate mental models such that they can make large decisions quickly. Intuition is simply reading a lot.This allows people to convert typically slow thinking and bad fast thinking (bad intuition) into good intuition. In academic literature this is known as Type 1 and Type 2 thinking.

One of the common patterns for a self made billionaires is their ability to self study, self reason and accumulate a set of their own mental model. Intellectual capital compounds at a hidden rate and most people use tangible badges and net worth as measures. Intellectual capital is filling out the decision tree and is a forward looking view while net worth is backward looking. Just like how the wrong way to value tech companies is revenue but should rather be by their retention rate and network effects.

Most people value themselves on their individual badges, which is what society labels for you. But most of what is predictive in life, is how you make decisions. Being effective and investing your time in the right area at the right time is a skill, not purely luck. Allowing readings to fill your mind takes advantage…

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