how to stop having FOMO as a curious engineer: hold a thread

little worthless advice to learn passionately without boxing yourself

I received quite a lot of distressed queries from a pretty funny population of engineers which is the curious kind.

those with such an insatiable desire to learn that they end up in a peculiar situation where they feel completly lost.

it starts to dawn on them that this beautiful universe is infinite in the way it’s shaped and that their mortal shell will not hold long enough to understand any sizeable portion of it.

so then they feel stuck and they end up either in constant FOMO or jumping from one thing to another like a puppy in a buffet.

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

what I usually tell these precious rare souls is that they haven’t found their thread yet and that they should look closely.

and that’s what I’m going to show you how to do right about now with a rather convoluted story.

short trauma dump about my seasonal affective disorder

I get SAD during winter.

like real SAD.

it’s better now that I’m literally pilled up all winter on high doses of vitamin D.

but there was a time right in between high school and university that it was pretty bad.

I was walking the beautiful winter soggy path between the subway station and this very inspiring and colorful pre-university school (CEGEP for those that speak quebecois).

god damn.

everything was gray.

the trees were gray the clouds were gray the road was full of all kind of greyish grime the road was gray the metro was gray I believe I had a gray shirt and when I got inside the cafeteria I saw different tones of grayish brown.

I was looking forward to jackshit.

not even to be done with my day because the road home will be darkish gray with the everlasting winter dome hovering above my head.

I proceeded to move FSD-style on the third floor where I found an empty spot to just open up my books.

now that day I came in a bit earlier than I usually do because in my grayish luck I didn’t realize that my morning class was canceled.

so I mechanically opened up my books.

and this is where I caught a glimpse of my thread.

a sparkling glimmer that looked almost blinding to my very SAD eyes.

it was a physic book if I remember correctly about electricity and magnetism. nothing cutting edge that would blow fullfilled people boots away.

but for me it was a glimmer of something I truly enjoyed at a cellular level.

I was reading doing some exercise reading some more correcting my little mistakes and I was having a jolly time.

I felt a true hue of something passing through my little parched and wrinkled gray soul.

and suddenly as I was reaching inside the depth of the universe through the easiest magnetic fields questions you could think of I latched onto my thread

I couldn’t even tell at that time what fabric it was made of. but I felt so so good holding it.

THEN something even more remarkable happened.

some of my friends saw me and came to sit with me. smile in hand they all were surrounding me like a warm and earnest social hug.

now I love these guys. truly great people with most likely a much more well balanced mind than I ever had.

but at that time it was like a whole fat gray persian rug was thrown on my head and was suddenly unrolling it’s beautiful gray motifs over my eyes.

that particular group of friend didn’t give two shit about physics let alone any particular subject. they were purely social beings of the highest degree. they were into exchanging and having fun and making amazing social plans.

now. I’m not a recluse or an antisocial mole dweller.

I like people I like to chat.

buuuuuuuuut

but at that particular moment in time I would have spelunked and wiggled my body down to a comfy hole if I could just open that godamn book and study just a few more minutes.

I then did something that was totally out of character which was to excuse myself because I had to go to a non-existent class at the fourth floor.

I got up took the escalator to the fourth floor then another floor then I walked down a corridor then I climbed a whole bunch of stairs into this secluded tower that hosted the math classes.

I walked some more and I would have continued to walk through the wall if I wasn’t at the literal furthest end of this beautiful gray building.

I opened my books studied some more and fucking loved every minute of it. I didn’t stop at the physics stuff god no. I did my math problems I read that novel I had to write a report on I read and worked and studied aahhhhhhhhhhh man.

it was during this stretch of time and the weeks that followed while I was sitting in my gray puddle of SADness that I realize that I love learning.

I loved it to a ridiculous degree.

not just the physics or the math or any subject really.

It was this act of learning this meta concept of learning that brought me boundless joy.

hell yeah man lets learn some STUFF

felt like a 3 yo davinci discovering painting existed with hands and feet completly smudged with a joyful mess of colors.

I got better over the years to allow myself space to enjoy this learning act while not ending up like a crazen oakenshield alone in his room filled with gold.

look at all my learning man look at it it’s beautiful don’t touch anything thanks gtfo

but that thread that I grasped that day I never ever ever let it go.

what can you do with this thread?

great question buddy.

nothing, the thread is useless.

hope it was useful 🌹

best,

yacine mahdid

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for more learning topic do consider subscribing haha no man I’m joking.

but for real this thread that I clasped with my rattling hands from the jaws of the universe has no purpose.

a bit like the color purple or a triangular shape has no purpose.

these little threads that compose our existence are higher level concepts and construct that are layered in our slice of the world.

if you look closely in different situations you can see them being there holding up our human conceptualization of what’s going.

remember that group of friend? boy did they find their thread. I don’t even know what the name of the thread they found was but it must have been something like “social connection” or “friendship through sharing” or whatever.

I’m very happy for them. my thread was something else.

with that thread firmly in my hands I started to make my moves but always by looking for its very distinct shape and color in whatever I was doing.

sometime it was vibrant. layering a whole room in thick woolly texture.

other time it was there thin and barely visible (you had to squint hard).

and a few time it was just not there severed by accident or sabotaged.

that thread helped me finally decide what I wanted to do with my life which was to learn about learning.

I went into cell and molecular biology in uni to really understand how cells worked. I was in particular very interested about neurons and how they manage to create this concept of learning I loved so much.

I was voraciously learning anything I could put my hands on about the brain and its functions.

I pushed my learning skills academically and outside of a classroom for the pure thrill of it.

there wasn’t a single subject I didn’t find the thread right there for me to hold. even things I couldn’t give two lints about (like cooking) I found it solidly anchored on the oven and the pans.

there were situations though where this thread was so weak that it was waste of time to look for it.

so I cut myself out of these setups pretty quickly.

from the outside it looked sudden but from my perspective thread in hands it was nonsensical to continue wasting my days while I could just go where the thread was so much more there.

what I did with this thread

I did a whole lot of research in different labs

I published scientific articles ran some experiments that tested the limit of how I understood how to learn

I taught to hundreds of people in person online 1-1 in groups video blogs power point via dms anything goes

I got into artificial intelligence where the blueprint of this thread is dissected to its first principle and the learning stream can be controlled and oriented towards useful tasks

I also found this thread with such a gleam in entrepreneurship (albeit totally by accident) which led me to build a cool ai company in the industrial supply chain space that solves a real problem

I also became a father and found that thread with all it’s primal radiance within these babbling learning masters

more generally it gave me these little secret superpowers:

• even when I go into seemingly absolute random tangents I never feel I’m off track because I see that thread as clear as day.

• I rarely feel any sort of FOMO because what matters to me is if this thread is there in the situation I’m in. there is massive advance in thermodynamic computing? that’s very cool man I’m looking at latent reasoner right now.

• It gives me a silver lining whenever I work on the most boring tasks known to man (grant writing) because I can always bring it back to this higher level concept that is dear to my heart.

what now? what do I do yacine!!!

get depression.

go into debt if you have to.

(note: do maybe delete this dumb joke before publishing)

it’s rather simple. you just need to look and peer and look at all the stuff that truly brings you a sizeable amount of joy in life.

shed for a minute all the other’s expectations and look deep. shed also the convention about topics which are very arbitrary delimitation made by others.

these thread lingers and appear across subjects.

maybe it’s a thread called “creation” maybe it’s something about “community” maybe it’s “power” or maybe it’s also this “meta-learning” thingy I got going?

I can’t know for you and these threads have this wondrous quality of not having clear-cut names.

but once you have it in your hands you would find it ridiculous to let go.

hope it helps buddy god speed