Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, there are definitely karate kid moments because all this time I was learning math in high school and in college I studied mechanical engineering. And so you learn all kinds of math, vector calculus and vector math and matrices and all of these related fields, physics and stress and strain and how to deal with complex physical systems. And yeah, I wasn’t really sure how engineers would actually make use of that knowledge. Do you just forget about it when you actually go off to do work or do you write down equations on paper? It was actually not clear as an early engineering student what you do, but when I started writing the first generation Unreal Engine and I was dealing with 3DMS, I was like, wait, I know this stuff. I learned this. And so suddenly like the karate kid, you get to paint the fence and wax the car and suddenly put all the pieces together into a 3D engine based on a whole lot of accumulated programming language and math knowledge, often knowledge gained without ever anticipating that I might use it in that way. Also, I think what’s useful is over and over learning a hard thing and then showing to yourself that you can do it, that you can learn a hard thing. So then when you come to having to write a 3D engine in ways that haven’t been done before, you’re like, I’ve been here. I’ve been here in this experience, I don’t know what to do, but we’ll figure it out. We’ll learn. I’ll learn all the necessary components. So just not being afraid of something new. That’s right. And constantly striving to make connections between these fields and look for their applications. Long after I chipped Unreal Engine, it was like going back through an engineering textbook and looking at, oh yeah, I used that, I used that, I used that. And then I got to the section on eigenvalues. I’m like, I don’t know what the hell this is. But it turns out eigenvectors and eigenvalues were the critical breakthrough that made the Google search engine technology work and stand apart from the rest because they found if you threw all the links that exist into the web and links from and to different sites and you put them in a giant matrix and you conclude it, you found a dominant eigenvalues. Then those eigenvectors described the best search results for different things. And so constantly picking up knowledge and looking for ways to put it together is the thing to do. And if you aspire to be a programmer, you’ve got to write a lot of code and you’ve got to continually learn new things and improve. And if you want to be an artist, you’ve got to continually draw artwork of all styles and all kinds and constantly push yourself to learn more and more, because you never know exactly what you’re going to end up doing in the long run, but the more knowledge you have and the more skills, the more chance you have putting it together and being successful.…

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