I Memorised Dozens of Books, Then Forgot Everything — a Stumble Taught Me I'd Been Learning Wrong
Years of reading, highlighting, summarising — and almost none of it stuck. The failure was useful. It forced me to change how I learn entirely.
Le Pham
Tinkerer · CEO · Hope Dealer
One evening I went back through the old notebooks I had bought to save every good line for the future. Every page was dense with writing, the strokes slanted and hurried, the ink smudged where I had rested my chin or set down a glass. Stacking them up, I used to think I had covered a long distance just by writing a great deal.
The strangest feeling when opening those notebooks again is not nostalgia and not pride. It is a mix of confusion and something falling short. All that knowledge I had memorised, and I cannot remember when any of it entered my life, which corner of which decision it lives in, what it was I got up early for.
For years I believed that doing more, reading more, grinding through everything in front of me would somehow raise my level. Learning like a marathon without noticing I had taken the wrong road, running only so I would not have to stop. And anything you run at for too long goes numb. You do not notice your legs got tired somewhere back there.
At my first university I carried an attitude common among my friends: take in as much as possible. Sign up for extra subjects, evening classes, race each other towards some dramatic acceleration. Except that the more I studied, the more I noticed I was better at taking notes than at understanding.
Every book was a mark at the beginning, the middle, the end. Finish it, close it, tick the checklist. I once read three in a single day and felt like I had packaged a small achievement, and the next day someone asked what one of them said. I hedged, produced two or three lines from the back cover, and the rest had slipped into some fold of memory.
I used to believe speed was a sign of growing up. Number of classes, number of pages, number of quotes copied out. I held on to them like a measuring tape to see how far I had come. But a long tape and a path that keeps circling back is just drawing the same ring over and over.
The first time the code was wrong
The real stumble came when I started working with tech and automation. Problems with no ready answer and nobody there to mark them. Even with the formula memorised I had no idea how to plug it into real life. Write a bit of code, run it, get it wrong, fix it. Repeat, hit the wall, get bored. But for the first time I saw that nobody measures the small steps for you. Only you can feel them, and only if you are honest enough with yourself.
There were nights I sat watching the screen blink and thought about learning by doing, the phrase the books keep repeating. Until then I had learned to be finished, learned to fill in a circle on a list of things to do. It was only with a broken piece of code that I went back over every line and asked myself honestly: am I actually understanding this, or am I just used to repeating the motion?
#learning#books#reflection#habits#personal growth
Le Pham
Tinkerer · CEO · Hope Dealer
Tinkerer in financial economics, serial entrepreneur, and professional stumbler. 99% failures, 1% still here.
And then I remembered the time in Canada and the States, where people around me cared far less about memorising material quickly and much more about how you used it. It shocked me at first: every assignment turned on a real experience or a problem that forced you to think. Nobody was embarrassed to ask a stupid question, nobody laughed at a wrong answer. Once I mangled a concept and the whole group simply looked at me and asked more questions. In Vietnam I was always afraid of being criticised. Over there I slowly saw that not knowing is an opportunity, not a blemish.
Nobody had ever told me that learning is for feeling your way, not for memorising. After a few years inside the old way of thinking I became good at collecting knowledge and clumsy at applying it. I had the screw in my pocket and kept forgetting the screwdriver, so when the moment came I sat there holding the theory.
Back in Vietnam I was the man standing dazed at a crossroads: too many turns, each with a sign promising that this course will teach you, that method will make you good. The habit of sprint-learning, notes, checklists was still in my blood. But every time I tried to retrieve something I had learned, I hit a gap: no real sense of understanding, no memory of the first collision with an actual problem, no stretch of failure. And only the wrong things stay with you.
I think most of us grow up inside an environment of testing, correcting, controlling. Get it wrong and you are told off, laughed at, ranked. What I gradually learned was not how to understand anything. It was how to avoid exposing that I did not understand. Learning as defence, not as discovery.
I used to award myself a title: outstanding student in the art of hiding what I did not know. Get through the test, and if not a high mark then at least avoid being named in front of the class. But whatever you hide long enough, one day you have to face.
Later I discovered the paradox: the more I feared being wrong, the harder it was to learn anything new. Like learning to drive by inching forward so as never to scrape anything, and never getting over the fear of a busy road. Learning while waiting for enough confidence to go live, instead of going live to find the confidence.
The funny thing is that with AI and automation, being wrong is practically compulsory. Type a line of code and nine out of ten times it fails, and the tenth is not guaranteed either, and yet it stays with me better than the theory I lost sleep parroting. Get it wrong, fix it, forget the fix, go feeling around again. It turns out failure is the fee you pay for success, not its opposite.
Learning again from the beginning, slower but deeper
Looking back, I still take notes, still buy notebooks, still write whenever I learn something new. The difference is that I go back to the old pages now, look at those hurried slanted strokes and ask: have I ever used this? If not, cross it out, or add a line of actual experience. Some days I smile at how stupidly wrong I was. Some days I only sigh, without the old amount of self-blame.
Another thing those winding years taught me: speed is not the only measure. Peace does not come from reaching the finish first, but from the feeling of understanding enough, understanding deeply. Enough here does not mean quitting. It means knowing when to stop, so you do not drift along with the machinery that swallows time like plain water.
My family, the people who are still there at two in the morning when everything is chaos, are a kind of emergency brake on the habit of learning with my head down. They remind me to rest, to fix the way I am looking at things, to think about the quiet spaces instead of chasing the plan. A few times my wife has said softly: you study a lot, but have you ever studied slowing down? That was the moment I realised resting is part of learning too.
Some things I learn and relearn and never finish. Fixing my own code, reinstalling software, running into an old bug or a new one every time. Finishing a book, abandoning it, coming back months later to find the same gap in the same place. Gradually I stopped feeling guilty about the unfinished, because growing up is not about never stumbling. It is the part where you get up one more time.
It took years to see that each stumble is a small waking up. Failure accumulates a little at a time and nobody grades it for you. And success is as light as steam on a cold coffee: it does not spill, it quietly disappears so you can breathe.
Since I learned to laugh at my own mistakes I have learned faster, and lighter. Learning is for living, for understanding, not for ticking off a list.
One recent evening I sat again in the corner of the living room, looking at a notebook full of handwriting under the yellow lamp. The pages trembled as I turned them quickly, and somewhere in there was the passage where I had it all mixed up or laughed at my own clumsiness. It is strange: the more wrong I was, the longer I remember. What about you, is there something you were sure you understood that only sank in after you kept tripping over it?
