Learning to Learn - DBR 049

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

Learning how to learn If we’re going to be more productive, we have to learn new skills and get better at the skills we have. Knowledge is important, but we get paid for producing results. This requires skills. I see people with limited desire to learn. And when learning does happen, it is usually more about knowledge than skill. I decided to think about why and what to do about it. So I picked up a skill. While this happened, I learned some lessons about learning and want to share them here. "I know how to learn. I learned how to learn in school." Well, maybe not. I’ll give evidence from my interaction with university students. Plus, I believe it’s very different as an adult – motivation, resources, etc. I think most college and younger feel that they “have to”. We typically don’t feel that way. Regardless of where you are, you need to be learning Why?

• Career - What got you here won’t get you there
• Productivity - As you gain experience, you should be spending less time on things you have lots of experience with
• Attention compass – most people already ‘know’, they still need to learn to ‘do’
• Hobbies/activities – get on with new things, you won’t be working forever
• Note most of these are more ‘skills’ vs. ‘knowledge’
• I think we struggle with implementing this idea
• Are we ‘bad students’ – well, we got good grades
• Are we afraid of looking foolish
• Another issue: much of what we learn in college is knowledge-based.
• Learning skills is less common in many disciplines. More about this later

Learning how to learn

• Learning ‘textbook’ material i.e. college learning
• Nobody is taught how to be a student. We just don't upskill people in how to learn.
• Maybe it's something of a mystical process. Maybe we don't thoroughly understand it.
• But when I'm talking to college students about productivity, they ask about studying and taking notes.
• I did some research in these areas, like how to take notes and whatever's going on there. And the findings I got were pretty inconclusive.
• Learning Knowledge/information vs. learning skills
• Both are important and there is not a very bright line
• Programming is a skill
• The ‘skill’ is problem solving with a specific set of tools How to teach problem solving?
• We learn skills as children – sports, etc.
• As we become adults, we are less likely to take on new skills

Learning as an adult – I’ll share four experiences and some of what I’ve learned

• MBA – no prep, I relied on my previous academics
• Ph.D. – lots of study about how to learn, not much result – I couldn’t find much. Later, I found Cal Newport’s books on the subject, which would have been great – highly recommended
• Bass and podcast – hired coaches

The goal of both kinds of learning: change the way your brain operates

• How brains work (neuronal chains)
• Plasticity (chains connected in different configurations)
• Habitual (fire together, wire together)
• Any kind of learning, we’re changing old and/or creating new patterns/chains
• Ideally, we set those chains by having them fire multiple times
• As a bass player, I want physical things to fire in chains
• Learning, then is to get a chain to fire multiple times, so it ‘sets’
• Skills are a little different, they involve nerves and muscles, but it’s still repetition

I think we fear being bad at it the first time

• We feel like we look and sound stupid. It hurts our egos.
• our expectations are really high and it's frustrating to us
• to me, skills are more visible in the… bad at it the first time sense

Case: developing this podcast and learning the bass

• Story of the bass
• No real background
• Good motivation, solid goal, but not money on the line
• Plenty of time to ‘get ready’
• In retrospect, I feel I did some of the right things here, so I am trying to apply that to the podcast
• The podcast
• Learning to do a podcast is a practical exercise.
• The podcast is something that takes lots of different skills and lots of different techniques, and I've got to be patient with myself and willing to go through that learning.
• From the bass learning, I realized that “DIY” here is inefficient now, let’s use those lessons to develop a template about learning a new skill

Attention Compass

• It’s a useful skillset
• building solid “work athleticism”
• demonstrated sound practices
• They help people put their attention where it needs to be, when it needs to
• So, let’s use this skill to develop a template for learning

How would we approach that? What to do about new learning?

• Figure out how to quit exploring whether to do it –
• Have a naïve approach, the “beginner’s mind”
• Be prepared to be bad at whatever it is (reality)
• Figure out how to get feedback
• Get a coach

Recap