I used to think I was bad at math. Not just mediocre, but actually bad. This belief stuck with me for years, even when I did things that proved I was decent at it. Every time I encountered an equation or saw the word “calculus,” I felt like an impostor who could not learn things that were mathematically rigorous.
When machine learning started becoming impossible to ignore due to the nature of my job (SWE), I found myself in a peculiar position: I was really curious about AI like everyone else, but was also convinced the math would be too difficult for me to grasp.
This is nothing new; I’m sure that opening paragraph resonates with most of you. But this kind of thinking is what stops most people from learning anything interesting.
The problem isn’t that we lack curiosity. There is an abundance of curiosity in all of us, but for some reason, only a select few are brave enough to embrace and explore that innate desire we all have.
If you watch a three-year-old explore the world, you’ll see that curiosity is our default factory setting. The problem is that somewhere along the way, we learn to be afraid of our own questions. We get trapped by “wrong identities” and the false stories we tell ourselves about what we’re capable of. “I’m not a math person.” “I’m not a technical person.” “I’m not a creative person.” These stories feel true because we rehearse them for years, but they’re usually just based on a handful of anecdotal experiences from our childhood when we felt confused or embarrassed by something that felt difficult or out of reach.
The Small Courage
Here’s the basic truth: learning anything worthwhile that doesn’t come naturally to you requires courage. Not the dramatic, movie theater kind where you rescue someone from a burning building. I mean the small courage to look stupid while you figure things out. The courage to embrace the beginner’s mindset with the belief that you will “get” things that seem difficult now in due time if you put in the reps.
When I finally decided to start studying ML, I had to accept that I would spend weeks feeling like an impostor in my own brain. I’d read about gradient descent and think, “Everyone else probably gets this immediately.” Of course, that wasn’t true. But the feeling felt real enough to almost stop me.
Courage > intelligence. This has never been truer than it is today. In a world with LLMs and an abundance of knowledge tools, the ability to start over (to become a beginner again) is the ultimate competitive advantage. And being a curious beginner requires courage because it means admitting you will feel stupid for a while before things start to make sense.
The Purest Fuel
The beautiful thing about curiosity is that it’s the purest form of human agency. Unlike ambition, which can be corrupted by external pressures, or discipline, which can become boring and rigid in some ways, curiosity remains essentially yours. When you’re genuinely curious about something, you’re operating from your core self, not from what others expect or what you think you should want.
I believe that curiosity is the only reliable guide to self-actualization. Curiosity is the only internal compass that points toward whatever version of yourself you ought to become.
The best part about curiosity-based learning is that it makes the learning itself enjoyable. When I was forcing myself through math courses in school, every problem felt like a punishment. Meanwhile, learning ML from a genuine place of curiosity and desire to understand how these systems actually work made the same mathematical concepts feel like tools rather than obstacles.
I can’t overstate this enough because it’s such a powerful fuel for self-education. Formal education often works against our curiosity by imposing external schedules and measuring progress through tests that may have nothing to do with understanding. Self-education that’s driven by curiosity lets you learn at the speed of insight rather than the speed of curriculum.
Complexity Is an Illusion
The most important realization I’ve had in seven years is that complexity is usually an illusion. Things that seem impossibly complicated from the outside often turn out to have elegant, yet simple cores that are quite easy to understand if you take the time to decompose them into their constituent parts.
Machine learning felt like black magic until I understood that it’s essentially sophisticated pattern matching. The intimidation factor exists precisely because these fields want to seem complex. Complexity creates barriers to entry, which protects incumbents. But almost everything can be understood by anyone willing to start with first principles and work their way up.
Here’s a secret: the experts in any field were once exactly as confused as you are now. The difference is that they pushed through the confusion. They were curious enough to tolerate not understanding something long enough to eventually understand it.
Breaking Free from Identity Stories
The biggest obstacle to learning isn’t lack of time or resources; it’s usually just identity. We construct stories about who we are (“I’m not a math person”) and then defend these stories even when they limit us. These identity stories feel true because as we established earlier, we’ve been telling them to ourselves for years, but here’s the thing, they’re just stories.
The best way I’ve found to overcome these stories is to just start with whatever interests you, regardless of how prepared you feel. When something genuinely sparks your curiosity, follow that thread wherever it leads. You might start reading about AI because you’re curious about chatbots and end up learning linear algebra because you need it to understand how neural networks work.
This is how real learning happens, not through carefully planned curricula, but by following interest from one topic to the next. The path is never linear, but it’s always more engaging than forcing yourself through someone else’s idea of the proper sequence.
The key is to stay curious enough to tolerate confusion. Confusion isn’t a sign that you’re not smart enough; it’s a sign that you’re learning something new. The goal isn’t to eliminate confusion but to become comfortable with it, to trust that clarity will come with time and attention.
The Compound Interest
Here’s the remarkable thing about curiosity driven learning: it compounds in ways you can’t predict. The statistics you learn for one project becomes useful for understanding A/B testing. The programming concepts you pick up while building a side project helps you understand how some intricate part of software products are built.
These connections only become visible in retrospect. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. Following your curiosity is almost always more useful than trying to optimize for immediately practical knowledge. The most practical thing you can do is to become more capable of learning, and the most reliable way to do that is to follow your genuine interest.
You Can Just do Stuff
If you’re curious about something, you already have everything you need to start learning about it. You don’t need permission from anyone or credentials from any institutions. You just need the courage to begin where you are, with what you have, knowing that you’ll figure out the rest as you go.
You can just do things; let your curiosity power your agency.
The world is full of people who never started because they felt unprepared. Don’t be one of them. Be curious enough to begin, brave enough to be confused, and persistent enough to keep going. Everything else will follow with enough repetitions.
Curiosity is your birthright, and the courage to follow it wherever it leads is the key to becoming whoever you’re meant to be.