For anyone thinking about learning

What do you learn?

I’m thinking about learning. What is essential to gaining any capability? If you’re like me, you want to know about the real-life reasons people learn and how we end up learning what we do. Learning shapes your life, after all.

Think of the coolest thing you’ve learned…

It’s unremarkable that we learn some things. It’s remarkable when we learn exactly what we need to succeed and fulfill ourselves. How do we end up learning what we do? I’m not sure. But I would argue that you must learn exceptionally well in some domain if you are going to do anything that can’t be easily done by someone else.

Luckily, you are set up to learn and individuate naturally. You learn starting with the things that have the least friction to you, like things you have natural talents for. You learn what is the next evolution at your current level and in your current environment.

The magic happens here. Learning is iterative: you have the opportunity to learn the next thing once you have learned the previous. And learning is precious. I crave more of it in tough times and credit it with any success I’ve had.

How then, do you get to the point where learning happens for your next goal?

Starting Point

What you learns today depends on what you learned yesterday. You learn to public speak smoothly first, then you learn to pause for effect, then to make a joke that lands.

Learning is iterative. How you learn is more similar in all iterations. You have to have a gap between the intended outcome and the real outcome. You make a joke that doesn’t land—shame. This feels bad, so you have to iterate until you get the reaction you’re looking for. You do this along a path that is set out in front of you.

How you stay along your path

This is what you look like while you are learning: you are in an environment that produces challenges for you. Or you seek and accept challenges for yourself (i.e. the perfectionist who sees a failure where others see adequacy).

Either way, there is a desired outcome that is challenging to achieve. You can understand it but can’t make a reality… yet. In this sense, learning is simple. You seek out opportunities for challenges first. Then you go about those tasks in the way that makes it most likely you succeed, acknowledging that you will likely fail on the first try. But maybe you are lucky and only fail on the second try. That’s a good thing.

The Sweet Spot

I consider this an old but gold idea: the sweet spot is practice where you make ~50% mistakes. It’s the sweet spot because you have to adapt to get the desired outcome more often… the task is challenging enough you don’t easily execute what’s desired.

It’s learning because you know that attempts 1 and 2 were 50/50, so you ought to think about how to make the next couple attempts more than 50%. You try something different… you struggle, don’t understand, understand more, and (hopefully) learn the ability. You struggled so you could do your task more reliably.

Managing expectations becomes critical to sustaining motivation for learning in the sweet spot… anyone expecting 100% success should stick to brushing their teeth. Give up bigger aspirations. Reliability of difficult things becomes the ideal. The challenge is doing things reliably that the ordinary person cannot.

This is often frustrating to learn because you are closer to ordinary when you begin. You need motivation to endure frustration. You choose what makes it most likely you’re willing to endure lots of failure. The simplest form of that is choosing something that successful learning will meet your deepest ambitions.

Do I have a choice?

Plainly, yes. You do have a choice of what you learn. It’s much more narrow than you might like. This is because your learning must serve you in order for it to really happen at all—you won’t do hard things that aren’t worth it. Learning is hard.

Why do you learn at all? To become more well adapted to your environment. Most environments are somewhat stable, so you can predict some things that will happen again. You can also predict some patterns that will work for you. If this works, you get comfortable with what you know and do. You are, after all, trying to live comfortably.

There are lots of skills required for anyone’s life. And life gets better when you have more complex skills that more nicely suit your environment. You don’t want stability to disappear. You want to create it wherever possible. Learning does this for you.

Aside: this is what happens with super-learners… they find stability and extraordinary reliability quickly across domains… back to the main thread (learning helps you live).

On top of that, you must learn if you are going to meet any of the challenges of life… how do you make real friends, for example? You are constantly seeking adaptive behaviors. You figure out how to keep track of a friend’s life in a way that shows you care. Like any adaptive behavior, if you do this well, it will lead to stability for you.

But Kyle, I still don’t know if this means I choose what I learn… it sounds like I learn what is in front of me through the mistakes I make?

Let’s draw out an example:

You’re a university student choosing a degree. You decide, ‘I will take psychology.’ You think this is a choice for any number of reasons (an interesting program, good professors, good opportunities to come). You aim for this choice because it provides you what you think you need—this is deeply personal. This defining choice sets you up to follow the required path that life then puts in front of you. A sequence like this follows: you act out the ways to get your degree. You start with picking up the right books, talking to the right professors and TAs, and scheduling enough time to read papers; you get a C-; you start studying a different way; you review that unit you misunderstood (it confuses you at first, you only get 50% of it); you get a friend to quiz you, he tells you what you got wrong, you understand better; you know the material. Now you have a new capability. You not only struggled for it, but you chose it. You learned what others do not know. It brought you something you did not have before.

There’s more—you also learned generalizable behaviors because of the choice you made to go to school and take this program. You constantly refine your learned behaviors, what do I read, who do I talk to, what topics am I studying extra? You learned how to meet so many challenges all because of one choice.

Something drove that choice…

You have a defining choice and many subsequent choices. It takes everything you’ve learned to make any defining choice. After a defining choice, you begin to chase the stability that having a niche like this one offers. You’ve learned how to find a bit of stability already and you’re getting more comfortable.

Ultimately, you chase the future you. You hope that future you is better off (or at least not worse off). You also learn to choose what the future you does, if you are especially reflective. You learn some vital behaviors, habits really, along the way. Those behaviors define the capabilities you learn (you learn public speaking because you chose a future you that speaks to others).

It all happened fast, because you needed to do something, you chose that thing, and you lived through the challenges.

The techniques you use (broadly)

Aside: learning is (in part) a process of copying and differentiation. You navigate all the possible behaviors at your disposal. You might copy one person for one goal and do the opposite of that same person for another. These decisions come down to you, but they are not made in isolation. I hope to revisit this topic because it’s emerging to me that some people learn mostly through watching the models of others.

What about you?

There’s something vital missing in most discussions about learning:

• Learning is a process of becoming someone.

You learn most when there is alignment with your sense of who you are becoming. Genuine interest breeds emotion and emotion defines attention. Attention defines learning as shown by the shock of making a mistake that you care about.

Your ideas about the future matter. If you have a dream of who you want to be, you will shift your life so that your learning is aligned with this dream. You are the person who decides what you learn. Elements of personality emerge here. You might become known for a certain style or way of living or recognize this authenticity in yourself.

This is good. You chose this.

Until next time

You don’t so much decide how you learn, you decide what you learn. There are constraints on what you’re learning based on what types of mistakes you can make. When you are aware of and willing to make mistakes, learning happens. The joke lands or it doesn’t. That is the learning outcome. You ask yourself, ‘what didn't work’, because it didn’t work. Then you keep trying.

You will be willing to learn so long as the thing that you are learning is worth it. It’s worth it because you chose something for yourself.

Good luck with all the learning for your choices and for seeing them through.

Kyle