Designing a personal education equation

Where Seneca, IFTTT and a desire to learn meet.

“Nothing will ever please me, no matter how excellent or beneficial, if I must retain the knowledge of it to myself. And if wisdom were given me under the express condition that it must be kept hidden and not uttered, I should refuse it. No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.”

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “Letters from a Stoic”

A question has been bouncing around my brain the past few months: How does one make purpose-driven education a habit?

The question is relevant to my day job, since my team at the d.school is exploring what — and this is a loose description — a set of unique learning experiences might look like for media professionals seeking to apply human-centered design.

‘Nothing major.

The question also tags to larger trends I have been seeing in higher education. I keep hearing about more and more students taking a year off before starting college. There’s also research and experimentation being conducted around what it might mean for institutions of higher education to move away from highly structured, four-year programs.

Then there’s the simple fact that, personally, I love to learn, but the struggle to adopt and follow through on a structured curriculum is real when you have a full-time job. This is my free time, you say. Why on Earth would I want a plan for my free time? A plan allows me to build on what I learn and make connections to generate discovery and greater meaning.

Again, ‘nothing major.

“I tell you that it is the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied, they cloy but do not nourish.”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “Letters from a Stoic”

Also, if quality education is to become more fluid and, hopefully, universally available, it also stands to become more personal. So, the work of crafting a learning plan that’s right for you — one that is enjoyable, interesting and rigorous — will become all the more important.

Oh, did I cast this in the future? My bad. The future is now. Personalized learning isn’t ten or twenty years out; it’s right here … in a series of Evernote notes full of reading lists I am persistently tweaking when I could (and probably should) be reading.

Yes, I’ve been experimenting with a personal curriculum — it’s a reading list and a set of lectures that I’m working through slowly. I set the audacious goal of reading 52 books this year and learning Mandarin. At the rate I’m going, I need to hit The Little Golden Book series hard and enroll in an expensive, full-time language course yesterday if I want to meet my goal. There’s something about reading carefully and with the goal of deep retention that precludes reading quickly. There are also so many hours in each day, and the older I get the less my mind wants to work after 5pm.

There is no more rigid constraint on my personal curriculum design than time.

After months of ignoring my online video lectures, procrastinating on my reading and taking far too long to get through each, individual book, I decided I needed to change my framework and manage my expectations. The plan I had set was simultaneously too traditional and overly ambitious. It was a list of reading akin to the syllabi I received in college but without the forcing function of a weekly class meeting or grading system. There was no social contract or immediate application holding me accountable, which kept pushing my learning time down the priority list.

Then there are the distractions in the form of alternate learning opportunities … okay, fine, rabbit holes. A case in point was my discovery of the letters of Seneca. They were originally introduced to me by Tim Ferriss, via his podcast (also not on my personal syllabus). Later, I noticed references to Seneca popping up around Silicon Valley here and there. So, I bumped my original syllabus even further (never mind I had already slid in Michael Pollan’s ‘Cooked’, which I still need to finish), and dove in.

I have since come to consider Seneca’s letters among the most important texts I will read this year and for many more to come. If you sniff around any of the cutting-edge self-help and business texts — particularly on mindfulness — you’ll likely catch a scent of Seneca and stoicism. Everything from how to manage wealth to how to address death and dying are captured in these letters. The best part, however, isn’t Seneca’s writing so much as his constant reference to others, particularly Epicurus. The most compelling lesson he presents is, at least to me, the value of sharing others’ ideas with friends.

So, in that vein, here are a few of my favorite references so far:

“Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” (Letter 1)

“The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a (wo)man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in her/his own company.” (Letter 2)

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” (Letter 2)

“Beasts avoid the dangers which they see, and when they have escaped them are free from care; but we men torment ourselves over that which is to come as well as over that which is past. Many of our blessings bring bane to us; for memory recalls the tortures of fear, while foresight anticipates them. The present alone can make no man wretched.” (Letter 5)

I am taking my time reading the 100-plus letters. So, I’ll likely be back in other posts with references. For now, however, this is a book recommendation I am happy to make, and one I am glad to have included in my personal education.

A core element of learning and retention is the sharing of what you learn with others (see the quote at the top of this piece). If you can teach it well, that means you know it. It’s a simple concept, which is captured in the traditional classroom experience. Do the reading assignment, listen to the lecture, ask and answer questions in class, discuss with classmates, relay what you learned on the test, get evaluated. Wash, rinse and repeat.

There are other modes of gathering for teaching and learning outside of that framework, some of which work better for others than the traditional option. Take the salon format, the book club, or watching a YouTube video to pick up a skill needed in the moment.

This has me wondering what opportunities there may be for media practitioners to acquire and relay human-centered learning in these informal, in-person formats. What kind of learning network opportunities might there be? In journalism, there are a number of professional networks, such as The Online News Association, Hacks/Hackers and so many more. How else might this style of engagement be leveraged with an easy-to-use tool, perhaps?

We have much more work to do as a team in terms of understanding the nature of the media practitioner’s learning, retention and application experience and conducting need-finding.

In the meantime, I am changing my personal learning plan after six months of relative failure. I’m turning to the If This Then That (IFTTT) format to see if I can inspire myself to take smaller, more intentional steps:

If Before Breakfast & After Workout then Meditate.

If Walking To and From Work then Language Learning Podcast.

If Eating Dinner then Skim a New Book (to determine if you want to dive in more deeply over the weekend).

If Saturday Afternoon then Write about What You’ve Learned.

The missing piece, however, is accountability and sharing. So, hi there, accountability team. Assuming that last equation goes as planned, I’ll be back next week with something new I’ve learned.