Learning to Learn
Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach someone to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.
With each passing year, I’m beginning to think that being smart is extremely overrated. In fact, while we may be smart in one topic, we may also be stupid in another.
Today, knowledge is up for grabs online and offline. There is more information available to us now than in any period of human history. But why does it seem so difficult for us to harness such abundance of knowledge? Why can’t we learn what we want to learn?
Thinking about the process of learning, we can come up with a simple cycle. Everybody is different of course, but we’re more similar than we think.
1. Pick a subject
What are you curious about? What are the problems you want to solve? What gives you purpose?
It’s amazing to think how many fields of work are available to us. The human brain can have as many diverse interests as there are stars in the galaxy.
So no limits. Discoveries are for winners. Make a choice and learn.
2. Dive into resources
After you’ve chosen your topic, a quick search on the internet will bring you thousands, if not millions, of websites. This is bad, because you won’t know where to begin.
But the learning process is always easier when we’re complete beginners.
For example, learning how to play the guitar is easy when we’re starting out. But learning how to sing and play the guitar — both at the same time — will be a tougher challenge.
So read the article. Watch the video. This is the time to discover what the subject’s all about.
3. Panic
Now that you know slightly more about one thing, reality interrupts this blissful exploration to tell you that you’re running out of time, money, energy, and/or brain cells.
This is good. You’re reminded that there are limits in the real world and responsibilities you have to deal with. Your learning doesn’t exist in isolation.
The panic that comes — thinking that we’ve wasted our time on something too specific or too vague — is both a biological and psychological reaction. And this happens to everyone, even to the smarty-pants.
How we deal with it is what we need to learn in order to learn.
4. Realise you’re not an idiot
Being human is not just making mistakes. Being human also means learning from mistakes and moving on.
Stress and pressure are highest when we start to believe that every mistake we make comes from who we are. This is not true.
We make mistakes because we lack certain knowledge. To recover from mistakes, we must realise that there isn’t something wrong with us, but rather, there are gaps we need to fill in.
In 8 words: you are not knowledge and knowledge isn’t you.
5. Do it again, again, again
Perfection isn’t created from one attempt. It comes from a million.
The worst thing that can happen to a human being is believing we know it all. Because once that happens, our ability to learn becomes a thing of the past.
In an always changing world, asking ourselves to be stupid for life seems a little cruel, but it’s probably the best solution.
Because while being smart is nice, an open mind allows you to learn to learn.
More than anyone ever has.
