Two Misunderstandings of Learning that Stop You Being an Efficient Learner
Am I an efficient learner?
To become a better learner, ask yourself this question first. My definition of an efficient learner is someone who can learn fast without sacrificing the quality of learning.
I used to answer this question with a confident yes, but it turned out to be a false positive. I’ve been an inefficient learner for a long time without being aware of it.
Learning seems to be a default setting for all human beings, but no one is actually born to be a good learner. It’s like breathing. Everyone knows how to breathe, but training is necessary to breathe wisely. If you have attended any gym or sport or meditation classes before, you’ve found that how to control your breath is the basic to learn. The same thing applies to learning skills. Learning is a skill that needs to be studied and practiced to get improved.
And when I reflected on my journey of how I figured this out, I spotted two biggest misunderstandings that kept me from being a better learner.
Misunderstanding One: I’m a top student at school, so I must be good at learning, and vice versa.
The mistake here is: quality of learning can’t be determined by the test scores, and therefore top students might not be efficient learners. Let me tell you something counterintuitive. Top students at school are more likely to stop sharpening their learning skills and end up becoming average learners.
How do I know that? Because this is exactly the thing that happened to me. I used to be one of those top students at school. Studying was never difficult for me. And my lazy mind kept using the same system to tackle all kinds of studying challenges until I found it was not working well anymore when I went to college and started to work. I finally realized that I might be smart at studying, but I was at least a mediocre learner.
Good at studying ≠ Good at learning.
Learning is a more complex thing than studying, but we can hardly notice its complexity when we were at school. According to Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary:
- To study means to read, memorize facts or attend school in order to learn about a subject.
- To learn means to gain knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something.
To truly learn something, getting high scores is not enough. An efficient learning process is digesting memories into knowledge and then transforming understandings into abilities. Having accurate memories is sufficient for passing exams. However, to tackle real-world problems with no best or correct answers, we need more than merely good memories of the meaning of the words. In-depth understandings and practices are necessary to make effective decisions and take wise action.
Let me give a simple example. Many of us can easily pass our driving license tests., but learning hasn’t stopped after getting the license. For me, the first half-year of the driving experience was full of nervousness. I made some mistakes but also gained better skills of safe driving, which, to me, can only be developed through on-the-road drivings, not in-the-mind ones.
High testing scores might be a positive signal that you grasped the knowledge well, but it is never the end of learning. Bad testing scores might be a discouraging message that you failed to remember or understand certain things, but it is actually the starting point for real learning to happen. Learning, to its core, is a journey of finding and fixing your weakness.
So be cautious when you evaluate your learning skills. Don’t let how you perform at school and the scores you got from an exam get in the way of developing your learning skills.
Misunderstanding Two: I can quickly solve most of my problems using the Internet, so I must be a fast learner.
This is a typical illusion that a “Google Learner” can have in the Internet age. I used to be a “Google Learner.” When I was at college, I studied Human-Computer Interaction which is a field that focuses on designing the ways humans interact with all types of computational devices. For the nature of this multidiscipline field, I need to deal with knowledge and tools from various areas to get my technical projects down. Online courses/tutorials/Q&A community became the primary sources for me to learn how to do something like using a game development tool or fixing a programming bug. Every time I didn’t know a term, I googled its wiki page. When I encountered any technical issues, I googled the problem to search for answers.
This trick seemed to help me finish projects quickly. But in fact, those quick fixes blinded me from deepening my learnings and also hamper my problem-solving skills.
Good at problem-sloving ≠ Good at learning.
Seeking pieces of time to learn is properly a hack but absorbing only bits of knowledge is definitely a trap. By googling, I gained a lot of knowledge in bits and pieces, but it turned out that I failed to master any subjects. Due to the lack of a holistic mental representation of the subject I learned, my googled takeaways more often misguided me when complex problems showed up. I fell into the traps of chasing the symptoms; fixed one, but another showed up, and the root cause can hardly get caught.
What’s more, my heavy dependence on this Internet tool stopped me from thinking through my problems independently. And therefore, I didn’t get a chance to test what I learned.
The lesson here is: finding a quick fix on the Internet might be easy. Building the ability to solve complex problems is difficult, and it takes time. And it requires strategic learning. It requires in-depth understandings.
A good problem fixer is not necessarily a good learner, but an efficient learner must be an excellent problem solver.
So what did I do to become an efficient learner?
Since I saw the issues with my learning habits, I’ve started to research how to learn faster and better. After digesting and analyzing many videos, Ted Talks, books about how to learn, I noticed many similarities between different kinds of good learners (people who can speak ten languages or people who master an instrument or sports). It is because we are humans whose brains are running in a similar manner. And luckily, I have some psychological foundation to understand the mechanism from the perspective of human cognition and brain science.
During the time, I first absorbed many learning mindsets and methods and then applied them to my daily learning activities to test their efficiency. And later, after I graduated from my college, I went to a highly competitive industry (VRAR), and it made me realized that good learning skills are like a person’s superpower. To catch up with the technologies changing at lightning speed, I started to establish a solid learning routine back up by efficient learning methods. I keep tuning in this learning system to fit my diverse learning objectives, like improve my acrylic painting skills or learning Computer Graphics from scratch.
Now, I have built a learning system that includes two parts:
Mindsets + Routines
- Mindsets — Correct How-to-learn mindsets are the high-quality gas oil for the learning machine. Those mindsets keep cleaning the negativities out on my journey of learning anything.
- Routines — A well-built How-to-learn routine is an efficient machine that can assist me in achieving my learning goals step by step. By following it, I can quickly make action plans to learn particular topics and then execute them, which targets my efforts and attention on the essential knowledge according to my specific learning goals.
All together, they are the foundation and scaffold that I rely on to grasp any knowledge and develop any skills.
In my next article, I will share the learning structures I have developed over the years with you. And I will give some examples of how I decomposed any big learning projects into daily to-dos and guarantee a high-quality outcome. Something executable.
I hope this article can invoke some sober reflections on your learning skills — what is missing and what is good. Feel free to leave out your stories about learning down below.
No one can become a good learner without effort. In the end, I will attach some of the good ones at the end of this article, feel free to check them out.
Thanks for reading.
Good Resources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unityETmypk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3kNlFMXslo
https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/elon-musks-2-rules-for-learning-anything-faster-cf9a79fba35
The first 20 hours — how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU
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