My name is James. I have been using spaced repetition systems for a long time. I'm actually not sure how long all together. In highschool I used a bunch of different systems to cram for exams - physical flashcards, Quizlet, Memrise as well as some . But to be honest, I'm not sure I would consider these spaced repetition systems because I would only look at them 1-2 weeks before the exam. I certainly didn't record repetition histories or try to optimize the process in any way.
TODO: Upload pics of old flashcards
Towards the end of high school I found Anki. Similar to the systems I used before, I mainly used it to cram for exams.
I used anki for around ... years.
TODO: Find old decks and check
I really appreciated the huge number of shared decks and plugins.
I continued to use Anki after I graduated high school and went to university.
I began to take an interest in Finance and Investing after randomly stumbling across Martin Shkreli's Finance Lectures one evening. For the first time in my life, I watched lectures and read books purely for pleasure. I joined the Finance club at university and signed up to audit lectures on security analysis. I learned to value forecast cashflows using Excel. I spent the summer holidays reading books on valuation, accounting, Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor and watching lectures.
At some point I came across Charlie Munger's writings.
This accelerated my interest in free learning. It was like someone had made the connection between having knowledge and being successful obvious to me. It broke the connection between credentials and skills. I realised that my approach to learning and knowledge up to this point had been stupidly cynical. I had surrogated certificates for the knowledge they supposedly represent.
I read about the learning habits of successful investors. A lot of them seemed to stress the importance of an interdisciplinary education for generating ideas and deeply understanding different industries.
TODO: That guy who read every Science mag.
I read about Warren Buffet reading thousands of pages per week. I saw the connection between compounding interest and compounding knowledge. This must have planted the seed for my obsession with incremental reading.
I joined a subreddit called r/SecurityAnalysis and started ... .
TODO: How did I find it?
I wanted to use SuperMemo to read fund letters and study for the CFA exam so I could apply to work at a bank.
I imported 1000s of fund letters.
After two years of intensive incremental reading, one of my major findings is that you cannot predict where your interests will take you.
If you are doing free learning and following the learn drive, you really have no idea where you will end up, even over short time periods like 6 months - 1 year.
After hardly any time (TODO) using SuperMemo, I completely revised my goal of working in Finance.
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