Learning About Learning

In today’s digital era, information has never been easier to access than at any other time in history. Everyone, you and I included, can simply Google their way into the largest knowledge base in the world. Yet even amidst this time of great change, an old proverb still holds true; you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

This can also be understood in the context of learning, even when limitless data and information are at your fingertips. In fact, the sheer amount of information out there can also represent an obstacle to one’s learning journey. Even though knowledge resources are plentiful, those who do not hunger for learning will remain ignorant and eventually stagnate or become obsolete as digital transformation continues to impact business. You can’t force the horse to drink if it doesn’t want to, and it’ll grow weak, eventually die of thirst if it persists in not drinking.

However, for those who do want to improve themselves but are unsure of how to maximise their learning efficiency, the insights to follow should help you in learning how to learn. They will also serve as guiding lights for those with the hunger to learn but are unsure of how to make their journey through the vast sea of information.

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” ― E.M. Forster

Your Learning Attitude

Learning should be a naturally cultivated attitude more than anything else, as natural as the act of breathing. While it can sometimes be challenging, it should never feel like a struggle to get out of bed in the morning, something you need to force yourself to do.

Once, we helped organise a big workshop; it seemed to be proceeding quite well. When I asked one of the participants for their experience, he explained how he felt there was zero learning. That took me by surprise, since even bad workshops have their takeaways, and you get to learn what not to do. At that moment, I felt bad since we indeed could have organised a better workshop, but it was coupled with a sense of sadness for that person’s experience. Three days into the programme, he expressed learning nothing throughout its duration.

What I took away from this scenario was that the process of learning shouldn’t be an on-off switch, but one that is constant. If you’re talking to your boss, there’ll be something worth learning from the occasion, regardless of the conversation itself being good or bad. After the experience, on your way back to the office, take some time to revisit the situation in your mind. What did you learn from this? What could you have done or said differently? If you achieved a positive result, what did you do differently that led to it? Your learning attitude should fundamentally include such a process of inquiry.

It’s true that you may need to devote some time to acquire certain skills and specific knowledge. However, it’s the presence of learning as a natural aspect of life even outside of these occasions which establishes it as an attitude more than a trainable skill.

Reflection for Retention

Learning is only part of the equation; the other crucial part has to do with absorbing and retaining what you’ve learnt. From personal experience, absorbing knowledge after a workshop or a particularly good conversation isn’t hard if you reflect upon your experiences shortly after. I’m not talking about mindlessly filling out the obligatory post-programme feedback forms that formally document your experiences; real reflection should come from within and be thoughtful, not something you need to force yourself to act on. Does this sound familiar? That’s because reflecting is also part of a healthy learning attitude.

In today’s business world, everything’s becoming faster and everyone’s becoming busier. The result? The act of reflection finds itself buried under the endless hustle, and many people may not feel like they have the time to reflect upon what they’ve learnt. They may also be hesitant to dedicate reflection time in what they feel is a time-consuming process.

But reflecting doesn’t need to be time-consuming; in fact, just two minutes is enough to further process what you’ve learnt. Just concluded a very positive conversation? Experienced a very productive meeting? These incidents are ripe for self-examination and introspection – think back and consider if there was anything you did well, on an individual level.

When you’ve identified these positives, you can harness them as learning points to apply to similar situations in future. In time, such frequent reflections can be fully integrated as part of your learning process, becoming a subconscious activity.

Even when the incidents are rooted in negative sentiments, reflection still has a part to play in the learning process. In any given incident, regardless of the good or bad that’s occurred, whether you succeeded or failed, there’s something worth learning from it.

When reflecting and analysing your experience, one perspective is to approach it like peeling a fruit – firstly, separate away the good and bad sentiments surrounding the event. These feelings can affect you on an emotional level and cloud your thinking, distracting from the learning process. Instead, focus on the issues. If you managed a poor result, think about what you could have done differently, and give yourself a reminder for next time. If you achieved a good result, were there any changes to your approach this time that represented the turning point towards success?

It’s still useful to reflect even in a team scenario, where responsibility is split and the performance of the team is taken as a collective whole. Within the team, what good contributions did you make? If the team did not do well, what could you have done to help boost their performance? On a wider level, if the business ecosystem played a role in helping you succeed, which elements of the ecosystem were particularly useful? Further analysis can pave the way for a conscious effort to leverage these elements to drive future successes. Insights exist both in failure and in success and are simply waiting for you to unearth them.

If you want to learn more about yourself, use another perspective that focuses specifically on your feelings to trace their origins. For instance, why do I feel the way I do in an uncomfortable business situation? By determining the root cause of this unease (perhaps, that I was feeling the way I did due to a lack of preparation) one can take it as a learning point to avoid repeating the same mistake.

Moreover, looking inwards also helps when taking part in a learning programme or session. When you’re in a specific learning venue, whether it’s an online course or attending an in-person lecture, relating the study material to your life story can boost your knowledge absorption. With the content linked to your work situation or an event in your life, it’s easier to establish and recall this information in your memory banks.

No business can exist without the motivation to establish it and keep it running. Motivation is the source of energy that turns mere dreams into accomplishments. The same definitely applies to learning - whether it’s studying a new language, playing a musical instrument or mastering industry best practices, you need motivation to see you through to your goals without giving up on the journey along the way.

From a learner’s perspective, the possibility of achieving a result can indeed be very motivating. The ability to apply what you’ve learnt and putting your knowledge into action is also a huge motivator. Elaborating on the examples above – for instance, the chance to use your new French language skills to communicate with native French people, or playing the guitar for a receptive audience – one can see how the opportunity to convert learning into action can create even more motivation than simply aspiring for a result or qualification.

While getting a positive outcome from your action of course helps, it does not matter even if the outcome turns out contrary to your expectations, since you can always reflect on what you’ve done and modify your approach for next time. However, many people who are stalled on their learning journey do not manage to apply what they’ve learnt to practice; eventually, they experience a bigger regret for not getting anything done with the skills or knowledge they’ve learnt.

The desire for results can sometimes slide into negativity, especially when one is too focused on outcomes to the detriment of the learning process. Being overly eager for action is a good thing and worth encouraging, actually – even if you end up rushing to get things done, that’s still preferable to not taking action. However, in being overly eager for results, you might end up evaluating everything against the benchmark of those results. In doing so, many valuable learning opportunities may be overlooked in the rush to achieve your desired outcome.

While outcomes are still important, building towards successful outcomes becomes more likely when you place your focus on the process and capture the learning opportunities on the way – it might well turn out that the insights essential to achieving success are those that you may have otherwise missed out on, had you opted to rush the process.

Also, particularly when it comes to learning life skills and behavioural skills, the life story that you’re relating to should be a positive one. If you constantly breed negative sentiments by discouraging yourself or feeling discouraged by other people, it’ll become a challenge down the road and adversely impact these skills. An awareness of your personal narrative as it relates to these life skills you’re picking up will prove helpful.

Journeying Towards New Knowledge

How much information are you getting in your daily life? If you look at your email, it’s likely that you are constantly being bombarded with promotions, recommendations and new information. How about your LinkedIn social media feed? There’s so much out there to learn, and one might feel like they lack the capacity to do so, or even the knowledge of where to begin.

You can start by determining some fundamentals, namely the context, goals and purpose behind your learning journey. While it’s not possible to ascertain your goals and purpose with 100% clarity from the very beginning, you should aim for the maximum possible clarity available to you.

In this example scenario, I’ve heard good things about data science, and I’d like to learn it. But data science is a pretty wide field, so I’m opting to focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), since they’re continuing to grow in importance as part of a wide-scale digital transformation trend. If I don’t understand anything about the concepts behind AI and ML, or even what they are about, how can I expect to know what I can do with these technologies? This is where background research comes in, to help me decide if it’s worth investing into a learning journey to pick up AI and ML skills.

The context, goals and purpose matter here, because if you spend too much time being too invested in too many things, you’re not actually making any progress in your learning journeys. By finding the right path determined by your objectives and your goals, you can focus on going down that path and maximising your learning efficiency. This helps even after one has committed to a field of study – with so many AI and ML courses available online on websites like Coursera, how do I know which programme to embark on? Once again, with knowledge of your context and goals, you can further sift out what doesn’t meet your preferences to arrive at the choice that is appropriate for your specific needs.

With today’s business climate subject to more change than ever, your context for learning and skill acquisition may change as well. However, since it’s mainly an overarching theme, the context is more accommodating to change than the technology you’re aiming to study. Armed with knowledge of your context to plot your learning journey, if you generally know where you want to be in the next few years’ time, you’ll have a clearer direction towards that goal.

If you’re not clear about your reasons behind learning the technology or skill, and are simply learning it because of its popularity, your learning journey will keep undergoing course corrections as your subject matter goes out of style and you seek out a new thing to learn. You’ll go everywhere but end up nowhere. Knowing your needs and knowing your plans on a fundamental level will help you be clear to yourself about the reasons that drive your learning; in the endless sea of knowledge, they’ll be the compass that provides context on where you are and where to go.

Knowing Yourself Further on the Journey

Besides knowing about your goals, context and purposes, you also need to know about yourself on the learning journey. Dig deep enough to discover how and what makes you tick.

If I’m learning a soft skill like influencing and negotiation, I must first understand how I can use my strengths and weaknesses appropriately, concealing or leveraging on them as the situation evolves. With a simple Google search, I can easily familiarise myself with the theories behind influencing and negotiating with people. But on a deeper level, if my nature is that of a people-pleaser, it’s bound to clash with the theories I’ve learnt, with my innate nature winning every time. In a negotiating scenario, my performance is bound to be subconsciously influenced by it. If I don’t understand this aspect about myself, all the knowledge of negotiating techniques in the world will still result in me being a poor negotiator.

Evaluate yourself and evaluate your learning journey. On this journey, learning about other aspects, what have you learnt about yourself? It may have been the result of deliberate self-analysis and reflection, or simply a coincidental discovery, but what you’ve learnt about yourself is undeniably part of what you’ve learnt along the way. It affects not just how you absorb knowledge, but also what you end up absorbing.

Don’t be disheartened if it seems like your journey is leading you back to past experiences – there’s always the possibility that there’s something new to learn from them, that you did not pick up on earlier in your journey. Perhaps a significant executive meeting happened in the past, and on reflection you’ve made some takeaways regarding your content strategy. However, you may not have found the last insight that the experience had to yield, which relates to articulating your content strategy well. Revisiting past scenarios can help in unearthing new learning points as well.

Sometimes you just won’t know about something you needed then, until another incident down the road happens to implant this delayed realisation in your mind. When that happens, don’t feel discouraged at not getting everything right the first time – simply go back, pick up what you now know you needed, and continue on your journey.

What to Unlearn

It sounds contradictory, but unlearning is also an important part of learning. Learning good habits sometimes means unlearning bad habits; the same goes for learning new perspectives, where we must sometimes unlearn fixed mindsets.

While learning something new, it can be helpful to restrain from passing judgment, or imposing your views and opinions on it from the start. If you filter all new knowledge through the lens of your past experiences, knowledge, views or beliefs, you may lose out on key information. Digital transformation is pushing the world a step into the future, and in doing so making it progressively unrecognisable from the past. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated these changes. An era where the only constant is change is also a good indicator that past experiences may lose value quickly.

When you’re learning something and find yourself saying, “Oh, but this doesn’t apply to me”, that’s a huge learning moment in itself. That’s when you should pause, let go of past biases and prejudices, and look at the idea again.

This is normally understood as being “open-minded”. From personal experience, however, I’ve learnt that no one admits to being closed-minded. Everyone likes to think of themselves as being open-minded, even when they’re not actually like that. If you’re asking people to be open-minded, you won’t see much of a change in their practices.

What you can instead request is for them to hold their opinions back. People tend to much more easily realise that they’re being opinionated or biased on further reflection, as compared to realising that they’re not being open-minded. This represents a new perspective on being accepting of knowledge, and one would have to unlearn their past understanding of things to arrive at this conclusion.

The same applies for all of learning – with new discoveries, scientists can overturn long-held assumptions about the way our world works. In turn, these discoveries are further fleshed out or obsoleted by new discoveries by other scientists. We should likewise approach learning as a natural attitude, an endless journey and an ever-present catalyst of change.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

1. Cultivate a Learning Attitude

You can learn from anything, and everything. Good or bad, positive or negative, success or failure – it doesn’t matter, since there are always learning points from every experience. The only time you stop learning is when you close yourself off from new opportunities to learn.

2. Take Responsibility

You can learn only if you take responsibility for your current situation and dedicate yourself to changing it. It’s much more difficult to attempt to change other people than it is to change yourself through learning. When you reflect on your successes and failures, you emerge with real insights.

3. Unlearn Old Perspectives

Unlearning is just as important as learning. As you learn new knowledge, unlearn old information that may distort your understanding. That way, unfiltered by past perceptions and experiences, you gain a fuller understanding of the concepts.