Learning to Have Fun (While Learning)
A few ways to regain the joy of learning
When did learning become a chore?
Learning is an essential part of our growth as people. With each day, we have the potential to be more well-rounded and more skilled in certain areas of our life. We gain this skill, this adaptability through learning new things. It’s an essential part of actualizing our true potential. The question is: Can this learning be fun?
I think it’s possible. As kids, we all enjoyed learning. Whether it be learning to talk or learning to ride a bike, we were all in. We didn’t hold back. When we got frustrated, we quickly bounced back. We truly lived for this learning. Learning something new was the highlight of our day. Now we’re adults, striving to regain that joy that was so easy to come by as a child.
Here are a few steps to get there:
1. Look For Small Victories
When learning something new, it’s important to have small goals. These goals will allow you to master the skill better over time and keep you more motivated as the process continues.
If your goal is to learn a new language, focus on truly learning 10 words each day. Once you’ve gained a solid understanding of those words, celebrate your accomplishment.
Share with family and friends what you’ve learned, write it in a journal, find a sentence in a book that you can now understand. You may be far from fully mastering the language, but you learned something.
Most of our goals aren’t all or nothing pursuits. If you want to get 1,000 followers, you have to get 10 followers first. If you want to run a marathon, you have to run a mile first.
Enjoying learning requires a feeling of progress. Too often, we take the fun out of learning by overlooking or own progress. You get to mitigate these feelings by celebrating the smallest of victories.
2. Focus Your Attention
I’ve gone through many phases where I enjoyed learning and many where I didn’t. I can usually gauge how enjoyable the learning was by how focused I was during that period in time.
It’s very easy to get distracted by things with more immediate rewards. For most of us, studying our notes sounds quite dull when compared to watching our favorite television show. In this way, enjoying learning requires some self-control on our part.
To maximize the joy and success of our learning, we can remove things that might distract us. Sometimes, I find it’s best to put my phone in a drawer while I work. It will always be there if I need it, but it’s out of my awareness for the moment.
It’s also important to find places conducive to focusing. You might decide to go to a local library, a nice park, or a nearby coffee shop. Whatever helps you focus will help you get the most out of your learning.
3. Find/Make Games
Games are a simple way to reintroduce joy in your learning process. Games help us find new ways to use the information we’re learning about. They can make monotonous concepts more interesting by forcing us to focus on different parts of the subject.
These games don’t have to be complex. Sometimes, all you need is a basic point system. Anything to mix up the daily routine will do.
4. Use Your Skills Before You Feel Ready
In most cases, we don’t have to be perfect before we start using our skills with others. You don’t have to know how to snowboard perfectly before you join a group of friends for a day on the mountain. No one expects you to be able to do it perfectly. The same can be said about learning languages, instruments, sports, business, etc.
We often feel the need to be good before we start showing what we’ve learned to others. We’re afraid of how they might judge us. This judgment, however, has nothing to do with us. We’re doing the best we can.
Everybody deals with failure when they begin, but these failures are what allow us to fully master the skill. When we fail at something, it forces us to find the details we need to work on. Failure will hurt at first, but it will propel us to be more complete learners in the long run.
5. Learn What You Want to Learn
This tip is really important for those learning a new hobby. Whatever hobby it is you’re pursuing, there is a reason you decided you wanted to learn that thing. Remind yourself of this as you go through the learning process. You might find a greater sense of clarity.
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to learn how to juggle. I spent a few days throwing three balls up in the air and trying to catch them, until it finally clicked. Then, I stopped learning. I was perfectly content with juggling three balls and had no desire to juggle more. I had learned what I wanted to learn and I stopped.
This is a very straightforward tip, but I think we all overlook it sometimes. Maybe we wanted to learn how to make a few recipes for our friends and family. Once we’ve learned those recipes, we get to choose whether we want to continue learning to cook or stop our learning. It’s perfectly okay to want to learn more, but it’s also equally okay to decide you’ve learned what you wanted to learn. If there is something you’ve been trying to learn for a while and it’s causing you a lot of frustration, it might be time to find something else to pursue.
A Life of Joyous Learning
Hopefully, these tips provide you with a little more joy in your learning practice. Learning is such a wonderful process. We get to take control of our skills and capabilities to become the person we want to be. Few things are as powerful.
