#34: How Learning Happens
#34: How Learning Happens
3 key ingredients I've learned from learning about Learning
I have a confession to make: I can’t drive. Not yet, anyway. While I can see the appeal of it, I generally had no use for that skill until I moved to my current town. In 2021, for the first time ever in my 31 years of existence, I actually need a car to live.
This post is not about driving. This is mostly about my personal relationship with learning. Just like everyone else, the pandemic has shifted a lot of things in my life including my mental model of the world.
Though, even prior to that, I’ve already written a little bit about this process of unlearning what I know to learn what I need to know. Just what is it about learning that makes it an infinitely difficult task for people such as myself?
Learning about Learning
I’ve come to realize that in order for learning to truly be fruitful, it must have these things as part of the experience:
1. Emotional labor
Seth Godin, one of the best advocates of this concept, said it best on this video: [On Emotional Labor] “The act of doing work you don’t feel like. The act of having a conversation that might be difficult. The hard work of digging deep inside you and producing an idea that scares you.” Here’s a short blog post about this from Seth, if you are interested in knowing more about this: https://seths.blog/2017/05/emotional-labor/
Real learning cannot happen without an investment of emotional labor. It is often invisible, overlooked and under-appreciated. In retrospect, I find that the best pieces of work I’ve ever done in the past had this as a common ingredient. (In a time when I have yet to learn about the term itself)
2. Personal insecurities
The first time I publicly opened up about this was during my talk, Spring 2021 at UX Camp Chicago: Winter Edition. During a low period of my career, I had nothing but personal insecurities. It was particularly difficult to overcome, and seemed impossible to worm my way out off at that time. It wasn’t until I forced myself to finally deal with the cards I’ve been handed… and use those to my advantage. There is nothing quite like turning personal insecurities into fuel for learning.
With this belief, of course, I am hardly alone. Heard this line from Venture Capitalist Josh Wolfe years ago on twitter and I couldn’t agree more.
3. Mythical Mastery
The last bit of puzzle when it comes to learning what matters: there is no such thing as mastery. A test of a worthwhile subject to study is the complete lack of actual experts… because everyone who seriously studies it is a perennial student of the craft. By no means am I discrediting the value of the top people and their work in these fields. That is not my intention.
Learning is an ongoing process, a neverending game of some sort. The ultimate price is the process, the journey. The more you learn about a thing, the more you understand that you actually don’t know a lot. I am willing to bet that, for all of what these top people has achieved, they still wake up the next day feeling like they have a lot more to learn.
That is, if the field is exciting and the scale of the influence is unbelievably breathtaking. There is no mastery. Mastery is a myth. Every level leads to more challenges. The minute you proclaim yourself as an expert, it feels as if you’ve already lost. To me, anyway.
Perhaps, the reason why I can’t drive is that the act of driving itself lacked one of these things mentioned above in the experience. This is not driving’s fault. Driving doesn’t need me. There’s already, arguably, an excess of drivers on the roads out there today.
It’s the other way around, this time. Learning is not the difficult part. It is the absence of any of the three ingredients I’ve written above. The good news is that there is a way around that and that is to find them in that subject you struggle with (‘Driving’) so badly. If admitting is the first step to recovery, then I would say I am already halfway there.
To learning how to drive and beyond.
Thank you for reading!
Range, a great book I would highly recommend, has this line about learning:
“It is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later. It is so deeply counterintuitive that it fools the learners themselves,” ― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
What are your thoughts about learning? Do you have some stories, insights, anecdotes about learning during the pandemic era? I would love to know. My inbox is open: nikkiespartinez@gmail.com
If you liked this topic, you might like my post :
All future-focused. All present-oriented. Thank you again for reading working title.