It’s not about what you’ve learned; it’s about what you do with what you’ve learned. But, how can you apply what you’ve learned if you don’t remember them in the first place?

So, last year, in an attempt to find out if I could learn and remember better, I ran a year-long experiment where I recorded every single one of my learning (I ended up with 456 learnings and I published the 52 best ones in this post.)

With 2017 coming to an end, I’d like to share my key learnings this year, new insights from my second year of doing this. If you’re keen on doing this for yourself I have an exciting announcement at the end of the post.

Let’s start from the beginning, not just any beginning but…

The Beginning Of The End

A brief thought on reflecting effectively

One of the reasons why I love year-ends is because the “end” of anything always gives rise to opportunities for reflection. We may build an understanding of the world through our experiences, but it’s only through the process of reflection that we develop our understanding more deeply, and convert our intuitive knowledge more applicable.

There’s only one problem: The first step to effective reflection is accurate recall, and the human memory is kind of faulty and unreliable, partly because we’re biologically susceptible to a whole host of cognitive biases, and that memory is largely about perception.

For example, the recency bias is the phenomenon which makes it easier for you to remember last weekend’s events than what happened during the second weekend of February earlier this year. The misinformation effect is another, and studies have shown that it’s surprisingly easy to instill false memories in people.

The list goes on.

When you add all of these things up, you start to realize how challenging it can be to form the accurate and undistorted picture we need for effective reflection. One of the key purposes of reflection is to learn from previous experiences, which means that in order to reflect effectively means that we need to fulfill two criteria.

During reflection — Remember as accurately as possible what has happened. After reflection — Assimilate the information from the reflection in a way that we can remember it in the future.

As you can see, we’re missing a crucial part: before. Or at least, a structured way of ensuring we have all of our learnings and insights.

Which brings me to…

Drawing Circles

Before we can connect the dots, first we must have dots to connect.

Iwant you to imagine each year as a circle. One that we draw continuously with each passing minute, day and month. One which we’ll complete at the end of the year; a full circle so to speak.

If the goal is to have a fuller, richer, and more durable memory that we can draw from, then, doesn’t it make sense to supplement our memory, in addition to the few big and easy to recall events, with a collection of little moments that would otherwise be lost in our stream of consciousness.

Here’s the central question I was trying to answer:

If it’s a circle we’re drawing, how can we draw a more circular circle? What if our circle, instead of being drawn from connecting 15 points, was drawn from connecting 50, 200, or more points?

I’ve been diving into how memory works this year, and the 30 second summary of what I’ve learned insofar is this:

We remember what’s memorable, and memorable memories are packed with details and emotions. In a similar fashion, we can apply those principles towards remembering everything else in life, no matter how trivial, if we can in one way or another, make it memorable. What’s memorable sticks with us.

Which explains why you’re more likely to forget what you had for lunch forty-days ago then that time when you use a crocodile as a boat to cross the river.

But I don’t ride crocodiles daily (if you do, please call me) so how I was interested in exploring how I can remember what I want to remember (my learnings in this case) with greater ease and efficiency?

Time to experiment.

The hypothesis: By investing a miniscule amount of time (30–60 seconds) to record every interesting learning I come across, I would be able to encapsulate them into a fuller and more contextual story which I can then retrieve more easily, and therefore be able to use.

In essence, a time capsule of my year in learning.

As of the time I’m writing this, 29/12/17, the total tally: 312 learnings.

I’d say 65% of them came from books, 30% from podcasts and the remaining 5% from articles.

52 Key Learnings In 52 Weeks Of 2017

I’ve added notes to my favorites among the lot.