In 6th grade, I played the part of Ekalavya for a school's annual function theatre for a Mahabharata story, an Indian mythology. Ekalavya aspired to be the best at archery and wished to learn from Dronacharya, but, for various reasons, couldn't, so he silently observed Dronocharya teaching others and practised the craft himself . I completely immersed myself into that character as I played that role and started thinking of myself as if I was JUST LIKE HIM. Self-Taught.
Udacity launched when I was in 9th grade and I saw Peter Norvig teaching a programming course using Python there. I knew he is one of the best engineers, and having read his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years" , I saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime. I took that course, and I learned a lot. I read other books by great engineers, I took online courses taught by them, and all I needed was a PC with an internet connection. Little did I know this was just the start of a lifelong habit.
When I got into college, I never let my curriculum get in the way of my learning as I knew a way out. I became interested in finance and business and started learning from Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger , Phil Fisher, Howard Marks, George Soros, etc., along with courses from MIT and Yale . I read almost all of their publicly available writings and learned the talks they gave. I read as many books as I could.
Now that I am learning about artificial intelligence, I already have more than a decade of self-taught experience. It's one of the best gifts the younger me has given to the current me. I know what I have to do and how to do it, and I have to get it done.
We live in a world where it is so easy to learn from the best. This was difficult, if not in physical proximity, just a few decades back. Once I learned how successful this strategy is by implementing it myself and seeing the results, there is no going back. Looking back, I am so glad I played the part of Ekalavya; my life would have been very different if I hadn't. I am continuously surprised by how seemingly unimportant events from childhood can have such a lasting impact.
