During the last 20 years, I gained lots of skills and kept up with software development. But the core stuff like math slipped away. I feel I can relearn major chunks of it and intend to. I think if your mind is constantly learning, you will always have the ability to re-learn the old things again.

I would mostly stick with the current plan if I were you. Maybe you could pick up some scientific textbooks to read during your commute or during a lunch break. But it sounds like more than that could negatively affect your work/life balance if your description is accurate.

Lots of learning, and definitely rewarding, but there's certainly less time for hacking/learning.

Sharpness is not something in a vacuum; sharpness is about your mind and intelligence as it relates to people in the outside world. Thinking you are sharp doesn't amount to much. Being sharp in situations is what counts, and will give you the thing you might be missing. So think of sharpness in terms of people. The only way to sharpen is to expose yourself to new things and test yourself against other people. Warren Buffet doesn't stay sharp because he plays chess, its who he plays chess with that's much more important.

1. work and socialize with smart and talented people, particularly ones that are considered top people in your field, find a fantastic team and work with them, look for people whose careers rely on their sharp minds, people that are a bit older than you, and slightly different.

2. become a better listener, try meditating to help with this. being able to clear your mind of extraneous thoughts will make you more open to developing the thinking you are looking for, it will bring you focus skills

3. think about developing skills which can result in your making more valuable contributions to situations. be curious about new things, hobbies, intellectual pursuits, also read incessantly, as over time you will accumulate much knowledge. tell stories well and be funny. you'll find yourself invited to join companies and social groups that provide what you seek, as people will always be curious about what you have to say.

(0) There is no maintenance diet. Getting sharper is necessary to be sharp. If you're not getting smarter, you're getting dumber.

(1) Reading is NOT the solution. Much as regular masturbation does not much improve your sexual technique, regular book/article/blog-reading does not much hone your mental edge.

(2) You got sharp => you know how to get sharp. Do the same thing. In other words: figure out the next piece of physics that really interests you. Get the classic research monograph. Attack all the thorniest problems with vigor and delight. Repeat.

(3) Time is an issue - you don't have much of it, and what you spend it on at the moment is worthwhile. I think if you devote some small period of time each week (after dinner on Sunday evening, say) to practicing (2), you will come to look forward to that time each week, and will feel your clarity return. In the end, the key is regularity.

I am 44 I have house, wife, 3 kids. When I was 23 I was freaking clueless, though I didn't think so at the time. (There is a good chance I still am clueless) School was easy, Navy was easy, studying and taking tests and getting good scores was easy. I was bored and figured there wasn't much else to be done. I was completely wrong about that.

So coming from an old guy. I would suggest dumping your easy job and finding one that is challenging for you. There are plenty of hard problems to solve. All of the sharpest people I know never let go of a hard problem until they figure it out, and they refuse to slog through the easy stuff like some kind of drone. There are surprisingly few people in this category. All of the sharpest people I know read continuously about a wide variety of things, and they build or write about things based on their reading. All of the sharpest people I know put down the keyboard and have some other really interesting thing they do.

As to staying sharp: I used to think I used to learn really easily.

But then I did some digging and found that in general it took me always at least 3 tries to master some new subject.

The first a brush up, look at and small understanding.

The second when having to do something in or with it and a slightly deeper understanding.

The third when the coin finally drops and I felt that I had mastered the subject.

Between the three phases there can be arbitrarily long breaks.

When I was young and had few responsibilities it would not take long to get through these three phases because I simply had little else to do.

Now that I'm older and have a fair bit of other stuff on my plate I find that the 'breaks' in between last longer. But the actual learning does not, in fact if anything it goes faster.

So all this may simply be due to an illusion, where 'wall time' vs 'process time' are further apart than they used to be and you're measuring by 'wall time'.

You're probably every bit as sharp if not sharper than you used to be, but you perceive it to be otherwise.

So don't limit yourself to one discipline. If you're into comp sci, don't just read comp sci papers. Try some humanities or even art from time to time. The most unique ideas seem, to me, to come from taking knowledge from one field and adapting it into another. I've learned so much by taking a casual interest in fields unrelated to what I do and certainly feel "sharp" when I see connections between things I'd be otherwise ignorant of if I were a "specialist."

The most important thing I could tell you is to read your ass off. Get a good list of RSS feeds for blogs and magazines in your field and read through them all regularly. Routinely look for newly published books in your field of interest and read them. Get involved in discussion boards for the same so that you can have conversations, and even debates, on the issues you want to stay on top of so that you're not in a mental vacuum - and so that you are challenged by others in your field. Keep talking about it, thinking about it, writing about it (I forget who said "you don't know what you know until you write" but it's true)...

I think my long-term strategy for dealing with this is to amass enough wealth to have more freedom of time to be able to do some of these things. Perhaps I'm naive. Time will tell.

On a more immediate and practical note, my new Kindle should arrive any day now. Reading has always been my favorite way of learning new things, and I devour books at a good clip. This makes it difficult, because hauling around several thick books at a time is a pain. Hoping the Kindle makes it easier to fit reading into my life.

Side note: make sure you finish your degree. I know guys with loads of potential who came within a few classes of graduating from top engineering programs and then got distracted by life for several years. Seems like a terrible waste to come so close and not finish.

That's my strategy as well.

How about doing a reading course with a professor-friend of yours?

I think reading & interpreting results from academic papers and posting 'distilled' versions to a blog would actually be pretty good, especially since I'd (hopefully) get some constructive criticism out of it as well.

Ultimately, I was found by a start-up and left, seeing greater responsibility and compensation. Six month in, I started looking around. The lack of mental stimulation scared and de-motivated me. I switched jobs to a non-web-centric software engineering role. It felt "scary" ("job hopping" as the country headed into the recession?), but it was the right choice.

The risk is thus: if you're bright, it's very easy to become good at most anything. Some fields (systems administration, web development) can be fun (given the right environment, e.g. the operations team I've described) and are always in high demand. None the less, if you become good at something you don't ultimately find challenging and worth-while it can be a risk further down on.

Have you consider going into scientific software development? Both your web development background (the web is the user interface these days) and your scientific education will be of help. You might take a paycut, you may not have the flexible hours, but the job might provide both the content and the environment (i.e. the people) that will keep you sharp.

If you're in San Francisco Bay Area (or want to be in Bay Area, perhaps you could finish your degree at Stanford/UCSC/SJSU/SFSU/SCU?) and know (or would like to learn) Perl, C (and some Java), there's a really interested job opening I found on a local Perl mailing list. It's related to bioinformatics, which is different from your background but nonetheless would be something that "keep you sharp".

Another option that's even more closely related to what you're doing now is perhaps picking up machine learning/NLP/information retrieval. It's very heavy on (mostly continous) mathematics/numerical analysis. I have a feeling somewhere that you're probably pretty good with dealing with sparse matrices, graphs and the like. There's tons of Internet/e-commerce companies doing more and more with that.

Sadly, you've left out many of the details that would help others understand you: when did you graduate? What was your GPA? Did you take quantum or real analysis or a compilers course? If you wanted to, how would you prepare to finish your degree or begin grad school?

There is nothing particularly mysterious about hard work and devoting time to study.

Most of the classes I took were honours level, and my GPA was quite average. My grades suffered a bit from me needing to work quite a bit to pay tuition, but that's not something that particularly bothers me. I learned much from working in the 'real world', and the few GPA points I traded for that experience has put me quite far ahead of many of my peers.

I took two classes in statistical mechanics (one graduate level), three classes in quantum physics (one graduate level), two classes in classical mechanics, one class in general relativity (graduate level) taught by a relatively well known cosmologist, and various other honours level classes in calculus, algebra, real analysis, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, as well as your boilerplate base classes physics and mathematics.

I've been thinking about going to grad school in a few years, perhaps in a more CS-related domain - I find Information Theory to be interesting, even if I don't quite understand everything that I'm reading.

I realize that I could drop everything and focus all of my efforts on study, but at this point in my life I'm not ready to do that. I am more interested in how others manage to strike a balance between life and an insatiable quest for knowledge, which is something I believe many on HN have to deal with.

Don't do it. Unless you want to become an academic, with all the attendant downsides and risks -- which you apparently do not.

It sounds like you've got the usual problem: You were used to school, you were good at school, you had thoroughly internalized the vague and quixotic goal of the student ("the insatiable quest for knowledge") -- and now you're up against the reality that school only lasts for a few years and the rest of your life lasts for decades.

The most likely outcome of going back to school is that you will spend a couple of happy years in the environment that you were raised in and that you are now missing. Then you will graduate and be exactly where you are now, except older, and poorer. I've seen this happen several times.

So I advise that you stick with your current plan. It sounds fine. Try reading more publications, try some scientifically-oriented open-source work. Do what you like. If you want to study information theory... keep reading! Buy more CS textbooks and teach yourself. Watch lectures on the web. Pepper your fellow HN readers with questions about Haskell or Lisp macros or whatever. Buy a subscription to Nature. Or work your own way through Knuth or the Princeton Companion to Mathematics or The Molecular Biology of the Cell. [1]

If you've got a good job and friends and romance and an open-source project, try to consider the possibility that you might be happy and successful.

---

[1] These are all on my list of things to do. At my current rate, I will never finish. And that's fine. Nobody is keeping score.

I think for me, it was the boredom. There was the busywork handed out by the teachers, and the slacker culture that permeated the small state university I went to. If I hadn't been so bored, perhaps I could have stayed on the path.

1) I tend to use google reader to keep tabs on several authors I find interesting. I then make it a habit to find time to read a couple articles a day. So in aggregate, I've actually read quite a bit and kept my mind from falling into a routine pattern.

2) Someone else suggesting sitting in on classes. I'll also say that depending on your location, there are like-minded folks that have meetups and tech talks. These tend to be great opportunities for exchanging ideas and networking.

3) Depending on what your open source contributions are, you may be able to shift the focus to something that you arent as familiar with. There are OS projects out there that are heavy in math and physics that would provide challenges (3d game engines and libraries come to mind). I tend to do side projects with a specific goal in mind when i want to pick up a new technology.

I listen to books on my iPod when I commute. I catch some online reading sometimes at work. I meditate and get some exercise 3 times a week. And I hang out with sharp people.

But I guess there is no all encompassing formula. Some people here seem to have other avenues.

1) Find your "sweet spot" of how many hours of sleep you need and make sure you get it. My sweet spot is right around 7hrs. If I go long or short of this for long periods I lose my edge. Apparently the number of hours required will fall as you age and if you have kids, well unfortunately you will be pulling short hours for a while.

2) Start each day with a regular routine. I use the Franklin Planner but the idea is sit down with cup of coffee without interruptions and decide what you want to get done today -- its called dayplanning in the Franklin system. Should only take about 20 minutes. Anything that needs to be done tomorrow or later that week forget about it, let it go and fully concentrate on the tasks for TODAY. (Yes, you need some kind of system to track things not necessarily the Franklin system but I like it and I recommend it.)

3) As an adjunct to dayplanning I do the daily crossword in the paper to get my mind going in the morning. You'd be surprised not just how that gets the morning cob webs out but also its a form of measurement of how sharp my mind is. Often I can tell from that if I'm coming down with a cold or subconsciously distracted by something that I need to deal with -- either can undermine sharpness.

4) I love coffee but too much is bad (esp in the afternoon) so watch the consumption of drugs... caffeine, alcohol, even OTC drugs like tylenol, advil, etc. Alcohol dulls my edge for 2 days if I drink more than a glass of wine or a beer with a meal.

5) Write a daily journal or diary. Its good to get all the ideas and emotions floating around in your head down on paper in black and white. You might be surprised at things you discover about yourself and others that you were just peripherally aware of until you write. Look for and correct any contradictions in your ideas and values since implicit contradictions interfere with integration and smooth operation of your mind.

6) Get regular exercise but don't over do it. Consider going low-carb. The brain operates equally well on ketones or glucose but many (including my self) find that low carb diet gives me more focus. Read Gary Taubes book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" for the real deal on the science behind low carb and the lack of science behind the modern diet offered by current medicine/nutritionist.

7) Make a distinction between a job and a career. A job pays the bills but does not challenge you intellectually. I currently have a job in IT that I like but its not something that fully engages my mind. Ideally you want a career but not everyone can get that. A career should be an open-ended field (i.e. lifelong challenges) that is commensurate with your abilities. If you have a job like me then you need to have other outside activities that challenges your mind. If you don't do this your mind will atrophy.

8) Read books and articles outside you main areas of interest and pickup other hobbies that force you out of your comfort zone such as learning a musical instrument or dance, etc. I meet new people in my job and I always like to ask them what do they do for a living, most people are happy to talk about themselves and I am always amazed at the things I learn from others.

9) Sadly, I must warn you that once you hit your late 30's or early 40's you mind just won't be as sharp. So all you youngsters out there do your hard thinking when you are young.

10) Make time for family, girlfriend, wife, etc but set clear boundaries so they don't interrupt or interfere with your thinking time. This is hard to do ;-)

Edit: Added #10

As an extreme example, check out this article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7141/full/nature0... (ignore the title, the 'chromatin remodelling' is not the important part here)

Sadly, I haven't had the time to play much as of late.

That's how Buffett is still kicking ass, despite being in his 70s.

I assume you mean without paying for the course? how does one go about doing this?

I sometimes have the strong urge to sit in a class - to feel like a student. I never knew you could just go and sit in a class? I also read similar HN suggestion on a post some time back. I want to try this out fwiw.

It's quite easy to simply walk in and audit a class, and I remember quite a few people doing just that when the classes I was attending were being taught by fairly well known professors.

Im pretty sure you could even go to tute classes because they just call out the roll to make sure that your there .

Some classes do roll just to make sure you dont truent more then X amount of times otherwise they may dock you 3% of your marks but your lecturers hardly remember everyones face to know you dont belong.

I would love to actually go back and do this too but i need to work. Hence i agree with one of the posters earlier that suggested to try to accumulate enough wealth to be able to spend your time learning things that you like.

Right now you're living a mediocre life. You live in an apartment, you program web sites and haven't finished college. What's so special about that? Why do you need to be incredibly sharp for that? You don't. Do something you need to be sharp to do and you will become sharp.

My best advice for you is to not worry about this shit until you're 25 and have a normal young adulthood in the meantime. When you're 25 you'll know exactly what you have to do to become sharp. Right now you're probably still overwhelmed by actually having a life of your own and a girl that wants you around.

Believe it or not, I am acutely aware of the fact that I lead a mediocre (albeit enjoyable) life, and I'm trying to prevent myself from falling into a rut of ignorant bliss.

However, I'd rather try and do that in a way that doesn't require me to drop the girlfriend, ditch friendships that have lasted for over 15 years and quit my job.

Maybe I am too young (23) to even care about this right now. Maybe not. That's part of what I'm trying to figure out.

It was: "don't be such a pussy." It works. If it didn't, then athletic and military leaders wouldn't use it.

Like he was some kind of superstar and now he's past the prime of his life? LOL.

I mean I realize I'm being kind of an asshole here, but geeez.

if you wanted better advice you should have provided more background, 'californiaguy' may not have been politically correct but that does not detract from the fact that he spent some time answering you.

If you have finished or built things academically or professionally you could point to them, which would give a more solid base for this whole discussion.

You are asking for inference, some of that inference is going to be on the spot, some of it will be wildly off the mark, if you supply more information you can guide the bandwidth of the results you will receive.

The last line of his post pretty clearly indicates that he realizes that he may be off in his estimate because he feels like coming across as an asshole. (I won't debate that point...).

Advice - any advice - is worth what you paid for it.

Better to go for the goals now, before you have a mortgage and marriage and kids and other responsibilities which while not bad things, definitely complicate decisions about what to do with your life.

The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. --michelangelo

As an experiment, I'm going to say that this sounds like one of those to me. It feels too much like a modern species, not something from the Renaissance. Now I'm going to go check and report back. :)

Edit: here's what I found. Wikiquote lists it as "unsourced". Google Books shows the phrase as appearing in a few dozen recent inspirational and self-help books (Marry Your Baby Daddy, anyone?), but no scholarly or historical ones (http://books.google.com/books?q=%22greater+danger+for+most+o...). Google web search comes up only with reams of those awful junky quotation sites. It's possible that the wording is a modern translation of an authentic quote, but in general, if 5-10 minutes of Googling doesn't come up with an original source for a famous quote by a famous genius, the odds are against it.

It's still a great line.

thanks for all the work; i came across the quote a couple of years ago (i believe google was not even "big" then) and never bothered to check back (for this post i just googled and found a couple of attributes, just for reassurance--obviously i should have been more careful)

nevertheless, i think it's a great quote, too. (i find myself citing it from time to time, about twice a year or so...)

ps: i know a couple of italians, probably they will be able to clarify on etymological issues...

Most reality-based advice is hard to listen to and sounds arrogant and demeaning. Too often HN is just a circle jerk session of smart people telling each other what they want to hear ... possibly on a thread about how the ignorant unwashed masses are so easily tricked by confirmation bias.

I am a CS grad and am 30 now and have tried to learn several things in the past that have interested me in a variety of areas. I remember a few examples where I would learn/pickup/read something fast and think that I understand it but I would truly understand it only when I took up an ambitious project that involved learning and applying something. And your mind is automatically focussed/sharp in picking up stuff when there is a goal in front. Otherwise, it may just feel like cramming. Getting sharp should be a by-product of doing something worthy and ambitious that is aligned with your interests.

Also, don't worry about mediocrity just as yet since you're just starting out. But I've seen a lot of guys getting cozy in a couple of years after they graduate and get a job. So, do keep lofty and aligned goals in mind all the time. You will surprised. And that will take you way above mediocrity while keeping you sharp and vibrant as a person.

(Time will tell if he will regret giving up physics and mathematics for the ephemeral ego boost of having his "work" viewed by n people.)