The Art of Personal Development: Choosing your Learning Strategy
Learning is an important, yet under-rated skill. For most of us, learning traditionally takes place in educational institutions, beginning with kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and so forth, till one either chooses to enter university or other forms of tertiary education. Such educational institutions usually provide an arguably well-structured curriculum, and students are expected to follow this curriculum whether or not they are interested in the subject matter. As a result, most people when asked to describe what they have learnt (job interviews are a common scenario) would identify learning as their formal educational experience. Yet, while formal education is important, informal education is also critical towards successful, holistic personal development. Informal education compared to formal education, is largely driven by motivation, interest, and greater self-awareness. In order to strive on the aspect of informal education, several ways of thinking prove useful. In the following paragraphs, drawing from my personal experiences, I will share ways that you can use to proceed in choosing a learning strategy which is appropriate to you.
Keep in mind, like any social behavior, learning is nuanced, subjective, and inherently preferential. Similar to how different people have different personalities and how they choose to live their live differently, learning strategies should be approached in a similar vein. There are a wide variety of learning strategies and I suggest that you pick from what you think is best suited for you. Some advice for choosing your best fitting strategy is to first understand two things:
- Though repetitive and cliche, your goals and aspirations matter
- Your personality type
Before we start, I would like to highlight that the best fit is not necessarily the ‘most productive’ method. Nor is the most popular method the most effective one. If you try to force yourself to fit into a particularly method without evaluating whether it suits you, what usually ends up happening is a failure to meet initial objectives, failure to commit to sustained effort (which results in the former), and a lot of frustration. Not to mention you feel like you are straddled on a fence, somewhat awkwardly and feeling extremely out of place.
Goals, Aspirations, and Ice-Cream
This is the preliminary stage in the start of any intellectual or physical endeavor. When we begin a task, we usually explicitly or implicitly have a goal in our mind. For example, take the simple goal of eating some ice-cream. With that goal in mind, we might take the following steps. 1) Check the fridge, 2) Reprise oneself for choosing not to buy ice-cream earlier due to a spontaneous health conscience decision, 3) Proceed to find moolah somewhere in house, 4) Drive/walk/take the bus to the mart and buy it, 5) Finally, enjoy some ice-cream. It is interesting to note that most people when setting the goal of having ice-cream rarely come back empty-handed, disappointed or frustrated from being deprived of ice-cream. So the question is, why are so many people often left frustrated and perplexed when they set personal development goals for themselves?
Albeit being slightly contrived, we can learn several elements of goal setting from our example.
Step 1: Evaluation of Current State
The first step of checking the fridge corresponds to evaluating the current setting. Do you already have ice-cream? What is the current state of things? To extend this to any learning goal (whether it is learning Mandarin or Japanese, mathematics, programming, image editing, web development, machine learning, etc) it is necessary to understand our current state. What background knowledge do we have? For example, if the goal is to learn a new language, we ask ourselves if we know a) basic alphabets (Roman alphabet languages v.s. Chinese characters), b) how the language sounds like , or c) what level of proficiency do we have (e.g. only can speak but cannot write/read). By evaluating the current state, we can get a clear idea of where to proceed. Many times, I have seen people trying to learn something without understanding what they already know. By conducting this first step, it allows us to scope our efforts and limited resources (time, money, and mental energy) towards the gaps which we are trying to fill. This prevents the duplication of actions and reduces redundancy.
Step 2: Self-Reflection
Before diving into the action and starting to take steps such as finding money to get ice-cream, in our example, the imaginary (or maybe not so imaginary) protagonist takes a moment to reflect on her/his past decisions. This is an often skipped step, despite being critical towards self-development. When setting a learning goal, it is important to take a step back and ask oneself why things did not work out in the past. In some instances, it might be simply because we were not aware of this emergent field or perhaps it was not relevant to us at that point in our lives. However, in other cases, perhaps we might have already interacted with that subject matter before (e.g. calculus, derivatives, linear algebra, mandarin, physics, list goes on…) but simply failed to get acquainted and continue to abhor it. There are many reasons why things did not work out in the past, including not limited to, teacher was terrible, not interested in subject matter, class was paced too quickly, did not have time to study due to other commitments, etc. For example, I did not particularly enjoy calculus. The symbols were alien and the logic was similarly devoid of logic. Although I managed to perform on exams, it was more mechanical than intuitive. Needless to say, the knowledge did not stay in my mind for long. Much later in life, I started to revisit calculus due to my interest in machine learning algorithms. There I learnt not only of how to implement calculus but the history, physical manifestations, and purpose-driven nature of the tool. I found it interesting that the concept was build upon over a period of thousands of years, starting from the pioneering works of Archimedes till modern mathematicians including Newton, Copernicus and Descartes. No wonder we find the topic so complicating when all that knowledge is crammed into four years of high school education without any intuition.
Step 3: Identify Availability of Resources
This step is easy and practically oriented. In our ice-cream example we proceeded to find money to barter for the ice-cream. This process is straightforward in most circumstances and mainly involves considering availability of time, money, mental energy. Time and money is particularly scarce, especially for people with full-time jobs, families or other existential commitments. It is important to think about how much time and money you are willing to give for self-development, whether it is enough to achieve the goal ($2 will probably work for a Popsicle but not for Ben and Jerry’s). Like all complex life decisions, depending on the resources and goal, a reasonable balance has to be struck. Each person’s willingness to accept benefits/pay for things is different and this step is best negotiated with oneself with utmost honesty.
One tip is to start small to reduce the chance of failure, built confidence and momentum to overcome inertia (or senioritis) from small victories and re-evaluate scaling up in the future. This brings us naturally to our next point.
Step 4: Outline Practical Steps
Similar to how you do not step out of the house without a rough idea of where and how you can get to where you want to be, it is necessary to come up with a plan. My experience with plans is to start small. For example, if my goal is to pass a fitness exam which involves a 2.4 kilometers run, I might start with 400 meters everyday. Although 400 m is hardly a match for 2.4 km, the important thing is to develop a habit. It is also important to stress that in order to sustain and behavior for the long term, habits must be something that you enjoy (or come to enjoy eventually). If you start off with 2.4 kilometers immediately, even if you do end up completing the run, you will be left both mentally and physically exhausted.
The trick to starting any long-term commitment is not to spend $5000 on a gym membership and guilt-trip yourself to go, but rather to start small, discover your capabilities and inner strength to improve yourself and progress from there. To live a sustainable lifestyle is not only to be environmentally-friendly but to also adopt a positive mentality towards long-term commitments. A famous Japanese saying says it all:
Senri no michi mo ippo yori hajimaru (千里の道も一歩から)
Even a journey of a thousand steps starts with the first step.
Bottom-line, start small and end bigger.
Step 5: Enjoy both Tangible and Intangible Growth
It is important to look back upon your actions and appreciate not only your tangible results, but also, your personal growth (increased determination and discipline to commit to tasks), increased confidence in yourself, and increased appreciation of the power of your own being. When people always quote the cliched saying of ‘the process is more important than the outcome’, I feel like they left out a lot of the logic behind it.
For our contrived example, most people usually accomplish the goal of eating ice-cream if they set out to get it. However, in the world of personal development, it is normal to fall-short of your intended goals. It is okay not to have achieved a lot. For example, if your goal was to become fluent in Japanese, do not be disheartened that you cannot understand your favorite shows/videos even after studying for 1 year. For that matter, the primary goal was unrealistic in the first place. Unless you spent a whole year being immersed in the culture and context in Japan, you might probably not be able to get the level of exposure (sitting at your computer/going to 1 hour per week Japanese classes/relying on Japanese apps or podcasts) that you need to achieve your goals. What you should be happy about is how much you have improved over yourself one year ago.
To end off, life is not about competition with those around you but rather yourself from the past. Contentment comes not from being better than others (that is complacency), but rather, being appreciative of your own being and recognizing your own efforts.
Who said that Ice-Cream cannot be good for your health?
