My father once told me that the point of structured education (grade school and college here in the states) is to learn how to learn.
I quickly did just enough to pass my high school classes and to graduate around the top 10% of my class of 1,700 kids (Yes, 1,700…Welcome to Plano, TX). I dropped out of college (well, I was asked to leave…my 0.6? 0.7? GPA was apparently too low) after my first year. I felt pretty certain I knew how to learn, and put those efforts into things such as the stock market (with an impressive portfolio for a freshman in college), and online business.
Now, I see how clear it was that I didn’t, in fact, know how to learn. And this realization begs the question of what else I have to learn about how to learn. However, the fact that I clearly see that I didn’t know how to learn in the past, indicates that something was learned.
Whatever this realization is, I’ll refer to it as “learning how to learn,” and you’ll see this topic referenced more and more in this blog.
Since making the conscious decision – about 18 months ago – to figure out what the learning process is, for the sake of implementing it toward my ambitions, a structure has been forming around the process. In essence, that learning in certain ways seems to be more effective toward desired outcomes. I would imagine that there are multiple ways to learn effectively, but I’m going to present my overall structure here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or your own learning process as well!
Information as a Scatter Plot.
Whenever I’m learning something new, I devour information about it. I usually end up with about a dozen books, and multiple online resources for it. It’s also not uncommon for me to get several ebooks, audiobooks or find video presentations about the topic.
Then, I tear through the information. Quickly. The point isn’t to try to learn, it’s to construct a wide base of language and interpretations in my mind for what is involved in this topic.
This is where I see the distribution of information about a topic as a scatter plot…one of those charts or graphs with a whole lot of dots on it with a vague direction that the dots trend toward.
Rest.
I usually end up consuming information in this way for about 2 weeks on average. After such an intense period of rewiring your brain, it needs a rest.
It’s my belief that the brain, because it is a muscle, also needs periods of strategic deconditioning in the same way that it’s important in building physical muscle mass. I’ll be writing about this correlation in another post, but keep the idea in mind.
Knowledge as a Trend Line.
If the information I previously collected appears to be a seemingly-random collection of dots with a vague trend line, this next stage in learning is to figure out what that trend line is.
If my research has been thorough, I will find ideas and information that conflicts with my fundamental understandings of the world (either indicating that I need to build knowledge there, or that it possibly conflicts with my fundamental beliefs)…at the least, I’ll find ideas that conflict with each other.
In this part of the learning process, I’m trying to discover the trend line for the purpose of disregarding information. With so much new information, I can only keep so much of it…the rest is relatively useless (from a utilitarian perspective), and moving forward holding on to that information is simply draining and disallows the most valuable information to stay with me.
In effect, by finding the core understanding(s) of the topic, I begin thinking with only the most pertinent information. It’s efficient.
Develop Practices.
My last post discussed taking things out of your mind, and moving them to your body – taking your thinking, and acting on it.
I believe that the most effective way to do something is to be so familiar with it that I don’t have to think about it. In order to get there, practice becomes the gateway.
When I played hockey, I was horrible on skates. Eight years later, I rarely thought about how to skate, I just did it. That’s because eight years of practices went into it.
Conscious practice is what move my thinking to my body, so that it becomes….
Embodiment.
When something becomes embodied, it’s in your body. Quite literally, it becomes a part of you. Extending the hockey analogy, learning how to skate and puck-handle in a way that I don’t think about it defines me as a hockey player. Until that’s the case, I’m still learning.
Embodiment isn’t so much something that you do, as it is something that happens. It’s something to work toward.
Synthesis.
Once something is embodied, I find that only then am I able to take what that is and apply it elsewhere.
By definition, synthesis is taking two things, bringing them together, and creating something new.
This part of the learning process isn’t always so obvious or tangible. Often, this will simply reside in my mind as connecting various ideas and fundamental principles to design new ways of learning.
An example of this might be the (brief) neurological research I did into how the brain physically changes in the learning process, combined with the research I did into muscle development, to come up with the idea that the brain may develop in similar ways to your physical muscle mass.
Teaching.
As far as you can get in learning something through the process outlined above, there seems to be an entirely different level of learning that happens when you’re communicating what you’ve learned.
I don’t fully understand what is happening in this process, though I do have some ideas.
Regardless, the old adage still stands:
I you want truly to understand something, try and teach it.