The Andrew Pak Difficulty Scale
Or rather it's a "progress timeline" but "difficulty scale" resonates better! ;-)
We’re Past the “Opening Moves”
Now that my reading discussion group and I are collectively done reading chapter 1 of Elad Hazan’s Introduction to Online Convex Optimization, we’re starting on chapter 2.
Well, I’m starting. The eager beavers of the group, i.e. almost everyone but me, are already pretty much done with it.
And I applaud them!🔥👏🏻🎊
Because I want to catch up to them and become an eager beaver myself! In my defense — they all had a head-start (how typical of eager beavers, eh) due to the simple fact that I joined the group after the reading had already begun and I thus had to get started on the first chapter in a hurry. Not in a rush — I never rush! — but in a hurry.
I always start every run with proper form and focus on avoiding tripping over my feet, so to speak.
💥🔫🔥🦿⏩ 🏁😎🎉
Nevertheless, one nice thing about being slightly behind is letting others scout out the material ahead of me and then report back the “intelligence”. One could draw an analogy here to war times during which intelligence officers report back to a war theatre’s commanding general top secret information, so powerful that it could potentially turn the tide of the war overnight. 🫡🕵🏻♀️🎉
Except, in this group, I am a mere pawn who’d get eaten if I ventured out first. ♟️☠️
Thus, the others are all Queens, Knights, Bishops, and Rooks, who are bravely marching ahead of me and inspiring courage within myself — by cheering me on all along the way to inevitable Victory! 🔥✌🏻🎊😙
Hmmm… I guess, in this analogy, I could also be the King. 👑😎😂
The king is after all also letting everybody else march ahead of him on the chessboard. Except, that would make me an old, frail, almost entirely helpless, and even worse, usually unhelpful, coward. No thanks! 🔥❌❌❌😤
No, I’d much rather be a pawn with a valiant heart and humble brain. And I feel incredibly privileged to be a part of this amazing group of super smart and super kind people. 👊🏻🔥😃
Never Be Afraid of Difficulty or Difficulties!
So yeah, I haven’t started chapter 2 yet, but in preparation for it I posed the following cheeky question to the group:
On a log scale of 1 to ♾️, how does chapter 2 compare to chapter 1 in terms of difficulty? The symbol ♾️ here represents some light reading for 5-year-olds and 1 requires winning a Nobel prize in physics three times. 🔥🔥🔥
I don’t know if there’s already a name for such a scale, but if not, I hereby name it The Andrew Pak Difficulty Scale!
The Andrew Pak difficulty scale dictates that your understanding of any given concept or subject matter approaches infinity as time also approaches infinity.
Note, however, that I said it’s a log scale at the very beginning — it’s a logarithm function of time, so understanding increases slowly, but it always increases! And that’s all that matters — because it means you are always fully in control of your own destiny!
Always!
The Andrew Pak Difficulty Scale FTW! 🔥🧠🎉
Yours always,
The Andrew Pak Difficulty Scale 📈🎹🤘🏻🎉