The Simple Thing Most People Surprisingly Neglect After Learning
Are you learning to learn, or learning to do? Part 4 of 4.
Summary
🤔💭 Why are you learning: You should be learning for a reason—apply your learning.
🧑🏫🗣️ Teach others: Teaching solidifies your understanding.
🆚🫵 Compete with yourself: Results come from sustained curiosity, not competition.
Last week, we reviewed and refined our knowledge. Now, we do.
Apply your newfound knowledge!
Learning for the sake of it is not pragmatic. Ensure what you’re learning is aligned with a goal or a problem. I spent most of my time at university learning things that rarely, if ever, are directly applicable in real life.
Guess what happened to much of that knowledge? I forgot.
Take action. Apply your new knowledge to create something or help someone. When you do, you’ll realize that you’re not just learning that thing—you’re building confidence.
Anytime you succeed you create a feedback loop.
You learn something new, you apply it, you solve a problem, you move on, you learn the next thing. A problem is a wall. At first, problems pose big questions—can you do this? Can you pass this wall? With each wall you scale, you build yourself up. You start to instill confidence in yourself.
I can do this. I have everything I need.
Eventually, you’re no longer scaling the wall slowly with a rope. You’re doing parkour, backflipping off it while spinning and drinking lemonade, not spilling a single drop.
Problem-based learning
An intuitive method to tie you learning to action is problem-based learning.
This is a learning paradigm in which the problems you define/encounter determine the learning you do. For example: you start building an app for the iPhone. This is a big undertaking—you’ll have to learn about scoping the app, developing for iOS, publishing the app, marketing, oh, and also all the technical details required for the actual development.
One by one, you encounter problems.
Each problem is a thing you must learn, a wall to scale. This puts you in the driving seat, complex real-world issues become the subject matter. Action is emphasized through problem-based learning, as you’re encouraged to solve the problem in front of you.
You’re not just absorbing facts.
Once you’re done scaling the wall of a problem you’ve acquired intimate experience helping to make that knowledge stick. But there’s yet another thing you can do to further reinforce it—teach.
Teaching to make knowledge stick
If you really want to make new knowledge stick—teach!
The Feynman Technique is a useful tool to learn by teaching. Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who believed learning a new skill to be an active process of trial and error, discovery and inquiry. The core principle for his approach:
If you cannot explain something clearly and simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Feynman’s technique comprises 4 steps:
Concept selection
Teaching—simple and clear
Review, refine, clarify
Simplify understanding and create analogies
When learning you encounter new concepts—find one that sparks your curiosity!
You don’t have to directly teach someone else, you can simply write notes as if you were teaching a child.To teach a child, you need simple and clear explanations. This forces you to fully grasp the concept to be able reach that level of clarity.
There’s no hiding behind jargon, complexity and vague descriptions.
As you try to explain, you’ll realize where your blindspots are. You’re forced to reflect. You learn what you need to target.
Be creative. Streamline your thoughts, make them terse. Create analogies that feel intuitive, explaining the concept without directly explaining it.
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better - Edsger W. Dijkstra
There is no pressure to keep up
Anything you want to learn should be done at your own pace.
There is no sense in feeling unneeded urgency. Yes, I know your favorite productivity hacker has told you to watch everything on 2x speed, get up at 3AM, take an ice bath, and to stop reading in favor of taking mental images to save on your knowledge hard drive after downloading new ram to your motherboard(???).
But that’s not sustainable.
Blowing yourself up with stress because you feel behind is counter-productive. There is no reason to work all the time. Work until leisure feels good. Do things for leisure until work feels good. Find the balance that fits you—is it 80/20, or maybe 50/50?
All gains in life come from compounding—even knowledge. But to get towards the end of the curve where things truly accelerate, you must attain the proper foundation. You cannot compound your knowledge on a foundation of sand.
The only way to reach the compounding stage is to be consistent.
Consistency requires a sustainable pace. You will only start compounding once you keep learning, every day, for a long time. Remember: there’s no rush.
Who are you competing against?
The Note
The Quote
I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them - Joe Abercrombie
The Promote
This week, I particularly enjoyed reading
of write about misinformation and the impact it can have on us:
Excellent text. The topics seem obvious, but you managed to collect and present them in a very clear and transparent way that resonated with me. Good job! I like it!
Definitely a hands on learner myself