I’ve said it before that Confucius had it best. ‘Action without knowledge is dangerous, knowledge without action is useless.’ During a phase in my life where chronic health problems made getting out of bed a Herculean task, I was left with the conundrum of how to keep growing, improving and applying myself while completely incapacitated. My accumulated experience up until that point taught me that in the midst of significant personal blows, there’s always an angle to be found. The buk has to stop with our own personal response to these crises, determining whether we’ll build resilience or plunge into dis-empowering perspectives and victim thinking. To follow the Buddha’s advice of embracing these phases of life with nonresistance, expanding my mind was the answer, and how better to do that then streamlining the very process of learning itself. This is exactly why for the last several months I’ve placed a sharp spotlight on… ‘Learning How To Learn’.

I tried to make the research for this Manifesto extend as widely and deeply as possible but the starting point simply had to be Learning Guru … Cal Newport. Cal was there at the Genesis of the whole ‘Meta learning’ phenomenon, writing books about ‘How To Get Straight A’s In College’ and changing the game entirely by framing things more empirically. He was notorious for guinea-pigging himself and putting boots on the ground by interviewing real graduates with real results, not professors with ineffectual theories from their White Ivory Tower. Soon I was led to Barbara Oakley’s work on how she retrained her touchy-feely, language-learning brain into a problem-solving Mathematics and Engineering powerhouse. 2018 brought a new classic in the learning field, ‘Make It Stick’, where 2 cognitive psychologists specializing in memory research lift the hood on cutting edge learning principles. Speed Readers were interviewed one on one, Memory Experts were studied, and on the more conservative side, textbooks on K-12 Education were reviewed. Full immersion! Context given, scale of research provided, time for the meat and potatoes.

MY LEARNING FLOW IN PRACTICE

Leverage

Self-directed learning is the perfect intersection of motivation, emotional relevance, keen interest and personal fascination all coming together and gearing you up to soak up learning up to 10 X your capacity. Motivation being one of the deeper and more elusive layers, is often missed for that very reason. Chasing it is futile. You cannot choose what fascinates you. Like seeking happiness, you have to come at it more laterally. By pursuing personally meaningful goals and putting yourself in front of real world challenges you can catalyze the learning process in a way that’s not immediately obvious. Experiential learning according to Eben Pagan is any attempt to do something IN THE WORLD and seeing where you fall short IN THE WORLD. The counter intuition is that the shortfall itself is what cracks the enigma code of the hippo-campus of your brain giving it the proof (not promises) that it needs to realize what you’re trying to learn is salient information that’s hugely valuable in your current environment. The brain needs to watch a lack of mastery play out poorly in your world.

IN PRACTICE: Taking some time to clarify why it’s important to learn what you are about to learn and what will be gained from it in your own personal life is critical but this can really only be done effectively after accumulating real world experiences and sticking points. Challenge yourself with controlled but difficult experiences and situations; try difficult jobs, try to imitate and model something or someone that inspires you, try to solve something, build a skill, try to accomplish something in your life, and crucially see where you hit a wall. You have to be triggered on an emotional level before elaborating on things on an intellectual one. As we’ll see, learning done properly, in the spirit of deliberate practice and active, generative, creative learning is expensive and energy intensive. There has to be deeply compelling bigger picture vision behind it. The type of thing that makes your spine stiffen and your head cock to attention like a tiger whose found his next meal. This is what makes the struggle exciting. As a purely anecdotal example from my own life, I noticed that the top performers in college, when I dug a little deeper, often had a storied history of unskilled work behind them. I would take emotional average overall IQ any day.

The bigger picture

Acknowledging the ‘Fallacy Of The Perfect Source Material’ (lecture, video, book, mentor) is to surrender to the fact that learners need to become researchers to some degree. With the local library superseded by our high-speed Internet Highway, gone are all our excuses. When coming to new topics we are no different than criminal investigators searching for Bigfoot. To have any hope of getting an accurate picture, it’s going to be a process of combining as many different sightings as possible from as many different angles. Similarly, it’s only by using a healthy variety of sources (hopefully well vetted ones) that we can cross reference, triangulate on significant details, discern the crucial principles, take special note of the repeated ideas and ultimately allow a higher level topology of the topic to form in our minds. A kind of heat map of significance. Anything less than this is just one dimesional dogmatism.

IN PRACTICE:

“Fools rush in while angels fear to tread”.

Rather than jumping straight in, go on what Barbara Oakley has coined a “Picture Walk”. Scan through everything at higher levels. Try to get the general shape of this new material in terms of core topics, skills and sub skills. This “Picture Walk” is extraordinarily powerful at every level from scanning the table of contents, to skimming through specific sections before studying it to even drawing out bigger picture models to piece together what you’ve already learned into a logical structure.

As Anders Erickson put it “Masters are able to see both the trees and the forest.” As an example of this, one of the professors in Barbara Oakley’s book noticed that when students organized their notes into a logical structure they were shocked how much they could recall. Structuring what you are learning into your own personally meaningful mental models dramatically aids the recall.

Have Output

Once again we come across that universal dynamic of 2 things appearing diametrically opposed whereas in actuality, they symbiotically feed into one another. Light/shade, defense/offense, knowledge/experience. In this case, the balance to strike is between input and output. Passively consuming material doesn’t cut it, so my intention from the outset is that the learning is only finished when I can replicate, deploy or use that knowledge myself using my own mental models and representations. Reproducing what I am learning out of my brain and onto the page whether spoken, dictated, sketched or scribbled into a notebook is a cornerstone habit which sets off the following learning keys.

I am forced to focus very intently and spend time meaningfully knitting together the content into my own mental models with the bricks and mortar of understanding and meaning. Barbara Oakley describes this process as chunking. Linking together memory traces into patterns through meaning which can be made automatic and internalized with practice. The glue that chunks everything together is wide open to your own interpretation and intention. I could be assimilating the writers influence, wit, and style, drawing connections between big ideas, understanding new technical material and so on.

It grounds the learning in reality where you are constantly testing yourself in your ability to do something. A rhythm is now established with a constant stream of output and some gold standard to compare it with, allowing us to gamify the process and set up the feedback loop necessary for real expertise.

IN PRACTICE : rather than taking smart notes, take things a step further and take Smart Prompts. Become like a Chessmaster analyzing the board. Through understanding, chunking and mental models link things together and form mental chunks. Alongside understanding things, in part it will feel like putting a jigsaw together, coming together to form a tapestry of meaning in your mind. Take notes that are questions that point to those chunks so you can practice recalling them. Make your output completely dispensable: scribbles on a page, diagrams, teaching someone (even your rubber duck), but you can refine the questions over time. When you do output practice try to plot the right level of challenge. When you pull things out of your head and you use them to create something in the context of higher order skills, if you get the complexity level right, you will produce a flow state while also learning what you need to learn.

Creative output

Recalling material and playing around with it in the context of a higher level skill is not the only way to pull things from your brain. There’s plenty of room for creativity, which is where ‘Elaboration’ comes in. This is an exercise in breath rather than depth. This is where you allow ideas to bounce around like a pinball, free-flowing and making connections widely throughout your various interconnected neural networks. Analogous situations, relevant examples from your personal life, ramifications, metaphors, specific areas and experiences which cash out the facts you are learning, procedures which seem to have the same structure, examples where you can use the content and so forth.

IN PRACTICE : In terms of elaboration, use the more relaxing rather than tensing muscles. Stay on topic but expand on the topic in a type of free flow with no judgment other than to see which spurious connections your pinball brain forms. Pen has proven the best for this is the laboratory of my own mind.

Anders Ericsson’s 10,000 hours

After that it’s really Anders Ericsson inspired. Deliberate practice and feedback. After generating a long stretch of chunked and integrated material and comparing it against the gold standard, whether from a book or teacher, you have clear cut feedback on what to work on next. Now, like a well trained classical musician, you resist going over what you know, like strumming the 3 chords you learned years ago and you practice where you are falling short.

IN PRACTICE: Resist all temptation to redo what you already know. All skills and competence are internalized mental representations that are kept in that infinite storage warehouse that is your long-term memory. Intense focus while clumsily upgrading your game and practicing new improvements with the full RAM of your short-term memory is what’s required to keep building upon these mental representations.

The whole point is that when you actually do effortlessly breeze through everything you know well, your creative output will have substance. Importantly it won’t even take any extra effort because your giant and ever-growing library of chunks are in long-term memory, like a song you know off the cuff or a totally automated procedure like reversing a car. Jazz musicians capture this dynamic beautifully with Clark’s Terry’s quote:

“When you play don’t practice and when you practice don’t play”

Diffuse mode and focused mode

Barbara Oakley has a fairly sizable thesis on this in one of her books so I’m only going to touch on it. In a nutshell, the type of effortful generative learning discussed here can really only be done in 20 or 25 minute blocks of time followed by 5 to 10 minute breaks. It’s important to know all the ramifications of doing this. By taking breaks you are allowing your brain to go into a fundamentally different mode of thinking that makes connections more widely, which will rapidly improve the learning process. By setting the criteria of success at completing the 25 minutes rather than accomplishing something specific, you can get over the hump of procrastination far more effectively. By having breaks you also allow yourself to work more intensively during the 25 minutes.

IN PRACTICE : I’ve found it useful to compartmentalize two different gears of learning and to always be aware which one I’m in. My first gear would be similar to a wide-angle lens where for pleasure I will read, listen, watch, research, chase the tail, form a blurry but all-inclusive bigger picture snapshot of the current zeitgeist in whatever area I’m exploring. Even Joshua the memory champion in an interview debunks memory as one monolithic thing that someone can optimize and still sees the value and necessity of reading widely without the overhead of trying to memorize everything and intensely working on it. This is an equally valid enterprise once you know what’s actually happening here. You’re checking out the scenery. However, the real meat and potatoes is where you hit upon something that on an emotional level you register is extremely integral to your specific life situation. Then it’s time to actually implement it as skill and mastery practice.

Use the Pomodoro technique. Learn in 25 minute focused blocks and then take a break for 5 minutes. Completely let your brain wander free..

Transferring knowledge

With AI on the horizon what’s the point of learning anyway. Whatever we want to know is on the Internet. Does Google not now have the monopoly on facts? Putting information in our head instead of Google servers is not actually about accumulating disconnected facts so you can break out the emotionally irrelevant factoids at the party,. Rather the point is that it allows us to undergo a process the famous jazz trumpet player Clark Terry(love jazz analogies as you can see) calls, ‘imitation assimilation innovation ‘. When we assimilate and integrate knowledge and learning property, we extract underlying principles and rules so that they become mapped onto the landscape in our own mind. We change and improve how we actually think generally. Our own neural networks need training data just like our AI overlords as it turns out.

By spending the extra effort and time to truly assimilate information, the vision would be when you get out of your head and into the world and just live your life, in your pursuit of well-being you all all the while be quietly informed by all of your mental models helping to get where you need to go and the relationships between them, which were architected by your successful learning strategies.