Learning To Learn

I’m reasonably sure that I love to learn. Very few things excite me as much as digging into a new subject and watching myself getting better at it. I was a decent enough learner in school, followed by a few years in the wild west of college where the love for learning was sucked out of me. (Indian engineering colleges have a unique knack for doing that.) But over the past couple of years, I’ve slowly gotten back again into the rhythm of learning.

Learning what, you might ask. Well, for a long time, it was anything which caught my fancy, which was a lot as I had quite a wandering mind. But nowadays, I restrict my learning habits to a few specific areas, although I do consume quite a lot of general material in the form of books, podcasts, articles etc. But this post isn’t about that. It’s more about developing an approach to learning which helps you learn more effectively, enabling you to retain more of what you learn. While finding the motivation to learn something new can be quite challenging in itself, all the effort you put in could go to waste without the right learning method.

For most of us, including me, learning outside of an institutional setup consists mostly of reading books and articles, watching videos, taking online courses etc. The danger with such forms of learning is that you retain barely 10% of the information that you consume. Haven’t you ever had the experience of thinking about a book you had read just a few months back, only to find out that you can barely remember anything about it. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Reason 1 — When you’re learning anything new, your brain gets stuck at the first obstacle.

Once you encounter the first difficult idea in something you’re learning, there’s hardly any point in pushing forward without properly understanding it. But that’s exactly what we tend to do, with the effect that we barely process any of the information which comes after it.

Reason 2 — We need to make mistakes firsthand, so that the brain can truly understand the concept

After you read an article, simply try explaining the concepts you learnt in it to a friend. Unless you’re an autodidactic genius, chances are that you’ll make a lot of mistakes and end up going back to the source material again. But the end of this process, you would have understood the concepts way better than if you had passively read it.

Which brings us to the learning pyramid.

The top 4 layers of the pyramid are what are referred to as passive forms of learning. The information reaches our brains and are stored in our working memories for a while, after which more than 70% of it is simply lost. The bottom 3 layers are active forms of learning, where you actually apply the concepts that you learn.

And as you can guess, we retain way more information when we learn actively. But we don’t do it, because it’s the more difficult thing to do. It’s easy to read books once you get into the habit, but it’s harder to write a summary of it after each book. But building active learning habits can really change your life. Now it doesn’t come easy, you have to really think about how to integrate such habits into your life.

Personally, I try my best to ensure that there’s a direct mapping between the things I’m learning and the things I’m doing. This helps me immediately apply my learnings to my daily activities. But it’s not always the case, and if so I try and do the following things to make sure the information sticks.

• Write summaries — Immediately put what you’ve learnt into your own words. You can only write a good summary if you’ve really wrapped your head around the concepts. This blog post itself is an outcome of this.
• Listen actively — Try and replay in your own words what you’ve just learnt. Maybe even record it on your phone. This has really helped me when it comes to podcasts, as you don’t always have a notebook just lying around.
• Discuss with family or friends — Simply talking to others about a concept can help you retain it better.
• Teach — This is by far the most effective way of understanding and retaining information. Maybe get together a bunch of friends and start a learning group where you teach each other what you learn. It’s definitely a difficult task, but quite worth it.

Now whether you learn actively or passively, when you’re learning something new, you will learn really fast, provided you’re reasonably motivated. But soon you’ll start to notice that the rate of learning starts dropping even though the effort you’re putting in is the same, or maybe even more. And slowly you plateau out. This holds true whether you’re learning music, a language, or even quantum physics.

There’s another factor to consider. You’re gonna have good and bad days. Which means that what you actually experience will be closer to the graph below.

It’s very very easy to lose motivation and get stuck on a plateau / dip. (I’m on several of them at once right now). And even if you get out of one, there will always be others that follow. But to become a true master of your art, you need to see plateaus as an opportunity. As David Foster Wallace wrote in his novel Infinite Jest, ‘the path to genuine mastery of your craft is “slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’ There are some tried and tested ways in which you can get out of plateaus and get to the next level.

• Stick with it — Nothing can replace consistent daily action in terms of effectiveness in the long run. Don’t get disheartened if you don’t see the effects immediately. Rest assured that they will come.
• Practice deliberately — Be intentional with your practice. Have a clear idea of what you’re learning currently and how it fits in the larger scheme of things. And don’t push too hard. Sometimes you need to space things out and let your brain soak in all the new information effectively.
• Embrace discomfort — Be willing to try new things, even if you get worse initially. There’s no point in trying the same things and failing every time. Sometimes we get stuck in our comfort zones and build our whole games around it. But growth is only possible when you find the courage to step outside them.

It’s easy for me to preach all of this, but I know how difficult it is to implement it in practice. It’s something I struggle with daily (amidst all the other existential angst). I guess what’s really important is to figure out why you’re learning in the first place. If your goal is to be the best guitarist in the world, you should definitely be busting your ass practicing those scales and progressions every day. But if all you want is to be able to play a few songs at the next house party, there’s no point feeling anxious about learning curves and all that.

Whatever your goal is, it’s still a great feeling going to sleep every day with the knowledge that you’re better than you were yesterday.

Sources

1. https://www.smartlanguagelearner.com/language-learning-plateau/
2. https://www.psychotactics.com/art-retain-learning/