Intentional Learning: What it is and why it matters

There might not be a silver bullet to learn a difficult skill like a language or a musical instrument — but there is a comprehensive, systemic process we map out to take us from zero to fluency

This post shares thoughts on what intentional learning is, how it works, and why it is so difficult in the 21st century. The follow-up to this post, here, shares a practical framework you can use to become fluent in a language — or whatever skill you are looking to master.

Learning in the 21st century

Thanks to the internet, we have an abundance of accessible tools and information to learn from. That is a massive plus.

The drawback is that this abundance of information can be overwhelming and impossible to navigate. Despite being in a moment where “intentional learning” has been called the most important skill we can have —we don’t really have the skills to do it well, and there are a number of cultural barriers that get in the way.

The first cultural barrier is our tendency to think in binaries, which as I have written elsewhere, makes the learning process feel like an impossible and terrifying leap from incompetence to perfectionism, filling us with fear and making progress extremely difficult.

The second — where I will go deeper in this post — is our culture of consumerism and instant gratification. We have been told that for almost anything in life, we can pay for “stuff” — products or services — and get immediate value and solutions. The “learning industry” is often no different — we are offered knowledge and skills and told that the more we consume, the more we will learn.

The problem is — there are many things that we can’t expect to purchase and receive on-demand: love, happiness, and yes, learning. At least — not the kind of learning that really matters.

Creating an illusion of learning is fairly straight-forward, and very marketable. You ask some reasonably easy questions, give some strong hints, and give the learner a dopamine-inducing pat-on-the-back when they get to the right answer. Throw in some messages that convince the learner that they are moving forward in a linear way and that they just need to keep consuming day after day, and you have a recipe for a very marketable product.

Anyone who has tried to learn a language on DuoLingo will know exactly what I’m talking about. The rise of influencer-led learning — self-proclaimed “polyglots” who insist they can show you how to learn a language in just a few weeks don’t help either.

DuoLingo is a decent way to get going with a language, but it won’t make you fluent. That’s because it’s based on simple tools you can pick up, use and repeat, rather than encouraging more lateral thinking that can be applied to different challenges. The equivalent of going to the gym and working out your biceps every day and expecting it to make you healthy without thinking about other physical exercises, let alone nutrition, mental health, etc.

Put more simply, this kind of learning focuses on what you need to learn, at the cost of the how and why. Like any successful product of capitalism, it encourages you that more is better, and might even encourage a state of addiction (just think of DuoLingo’s dopamine inducing gamification and rewards for multi-day “streaks”.)

The assumption that is more is more when it comes to learning may have been reinforced by the emergence of artificial intelligence. For machines, it is true that learning is based on being fed two things: data and instructions how to use that data. No machine has to ask why something might be true — it just absorbs inputs and then regurgitates outputs. Learning like a machine might sound cool, but the reality is that a human brain is far too inefficient at storing and processing information to work in the same way.

Intentional Learning

Our crucial advantage over artificial intelligence is our ability to make decisions on big-picture questions, to transfer learnings from one task to another, and to reason beyond narrow silos. In other words, to actually think.

David Epstein’s book Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World makes this point clear. He writes,

“For learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem… learning deeply means learning slowly. The cult of the head start fails the learners it seeks to serve.”

The chapter also cites cognitive scientist Nate Cornell and his work on “desirable difficulties,” described as “obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short-term, but better in the long-term.” He goes on to say that “excessive hint-giving does the opposite; it bolsters immediate performance, but undermines progress in the long-run.” This has been proven in study after study, based on rigorous randomised control trials in both academic settings and in real-world skills development.

Unfortunately, even if desirable difficulties makes sense from a psychological perspective, it’s a non-starter from a marketing perspective. Why choose a product that makes you do more of the work and takes longer to show results? How can anyone encouraging to help guide you “on a journey” compete with a service offering instant results?

There are few strong commercial incentives for proper, slow, deep learning. We end up in a kind of learning industrial complex — a system where the incentives are skewed towards consumption rather than outcomes, and where companies compete on the basis of efficiency, and not effectiveness.

The good news!

We don’t have to be defined by the culture or even the systems we live in.

The most important thing I have learned in an effort to pick up new languages is that the learning journeys can never be completely outsourced. Everyone’s motivations and situation are so personal that no application or even teacher can hold our hand from beginner to expert.

Ultimately, the most important thing a learner can do is to take ownership of their learning process. They will think not just about what they need to learn, but also how and why. That, in a nutshell, is the core principle of intentional learning.

Click here to go to the follow-up post, where I map out a framework to guide you on this journey.