The natural learning process

How did you learn to walk?

You might not remember, but you first had to decide that you wanted to walk. Why did you try to walk in the first place? What was your motivation? Did you get a gold star from your mom if you walked? Did you get an A on your baby report card that year? Of course not– you were self-motivated. You saw other people doing it… then built up in yourself a desire to do something: baby goal — “I want to walk like mom and dad” — You picked a goal (as much as a baby can) — then took fearless action until you achieved it.

But what specific action did you take? How did you learn to walk? Did you attend a lecture or read a book about “how to walk”? Did you have a group discussion with your family about how to best walk? … Again this is ridiculous …then what did you do?

You just tried it… you learned by doing… pulling yourself up, to stand by the edge of the coffee table… letting go … stumbling around until you fall down …then you laughed/ cried and tried again….failed then failed then failed again until you had eventually succeeded in being able to control your motor functions…at least part of the time….still not very good when on ice.

Let’s recap the main idea:

1. How did you learn? — By doing
2. Where was your motivation? — Internal
3. What kind of action did you take? — Fearless

You failed countless times learning to walk but eventually you succeeded. That is amazing persistence that we all have but most of use lose as we get older. Think about how we learn in school ….

1. How did you learn? — Read it in a book
2. Where was your motivation? — External
3. What kind of action did you take? — worried that we might fail

As we get older our actions are more and more driven by external motivation instead of internal motivation… we must fight this. When we are kids we know how to learn and we are not afraid to do it — but as we get older we allow fear to build up inside us … we must push ourselves to keep taking fearless action. And in school we often learn things from 2nd hand accounts…we must allow kids to learn things 1st hand as often as possible.

When attempting to learn something ask yourself “What would baby me do?”… Only be driven by internal motivation….take relentless action …do the real thing.

To figure out why we fear, why we become externally motivated and why we try to learn from 2nd hand accounts we will have to dig deeper “culture” and how it affects us. Our culture is so pervasive in our thinking and actions that we don’t even know it exists unless, we are in a place where the culture is different and we get “shocked” into seeing how things are … a fish never thinks about water until it is stranded flopping around on the beach…. Same with us…but more on that in the future. For now focus on being internally motivated and take action doing the real thing.