Editing 0 The Guide to the Guide (section)

= Common Failure Modes =

While these guides are intended to be accessible, make no mistake: learning physics is extremely challenging. If you commit sufficiently to this journey, it is liable to become one of the most difficult undertakings in your life, it is also likely to be one of the most rewarding. Below are two ''failure modes'' that you should be aware of:

# '''Thinking that you understand something when you don't''': Words like ''energy'', ''quantum'', and ''electromagnetic field'' are bandied about casually in conversation, but most people, if challenged, would not truly know what these things mean. It is absolutely fine to not understand something, but we are all quite good at convincing ourselves that we understand something that we do not. We are all excellent self-deceivers. To prevent this problem, it is important that you challenge your understanding with practice problems covering any topics that you believe that you understand to confirm that this is true. This will slow you down in the short term, but over the long term, it will prevent you from wasting massive amounts of time having to unlearn your mistakes. Remember, ''slow is fast and fast is slow''.
# '''Giving Up and Burning Out:''' Physics is brutally unforgiving. If you're wrong, you're wrong, and you're going to be wrong a lot before you start being right. For this reason, it is important to remember that our current knowledge about physics and math has been built up by some of the most brilliant people in the world over the course of thousands of years. It is bound to take a substantial amount of time to learn even a fraction of what has been discovered. You are not "stupid" if something doesn't make sense to you over the course of days, weeks, months, or even years. Confusion is an experience that unites all people who have ever studied physics; confusion is the indicator that you still have room to grow! The trick is to ''dive deep enough into the subject that some things are unfamiliar, but not so far that everything is unfamiliar''. This positions you to learn new things without battering your confidence to the extent that you burn out and give up.
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