Is it better to learn from people or from books?

I firmly believe that meta-learning, i.e. learning how to learn, is arguably one of the most important skills in the 21st century.

The world is changing so fast, that the skills you need to learn will change from decade to decade, if not year to year. If that weren’t enough, deep learning and machine learning are breathing down your neck (here’s my recent article on building skills in the AI era). So, if you don’t know how to learn, you will be really left behind.

Of course, in the Internet age, we have innumerable options available at our disposal to learn. We can learn from books, podcasts, the Internet, online schools, instructors, peers, colleagues, or anyone really.

But for the topic of my discussion, I want to broadly classify these options into people and books(i.e. broadly as a metaphor for one-way, broadcast mediums of communication). Just to explore if one is better/more effective than the other, or if such a comparison is even a valid one?

As the 'Learning Pyramid' info-graphic suggests, the retention rates (they key for gauging effectiveness of learning) gets better with more interaction and discussion. But it also depends on your learning style. Of course, the ultimate way to retain knowledge is to learn, practice, absorb, and then teach so others can learn from your knowledge. In a sense, writing is a way to articulate your learnings.

But that's published statistics from some time ago. What do real people in today's time and age think about this? I started by polling a few people on Twitter. Here are the results of the snap poll.

The general consensus was that learning from people is the best way to learn.

Well, in my opinion, the answer is not that simple. My version of answer is, it depends on a variety of things. It depends on what you are trying to learn, what your current skill level is, your access to skilled resources to help you and more.

Starting out:

If you are learning factual knowledge or starting out on some basic skills, then your best bet to start out is a book. For example, you want to learn how to program in a new language or learn about the history of a country, a book would be a great starting point.

This is so because an expert with deep knowledge has put a lot thought, research, and experience into bringing that knowledge to you. You will also have reviews on the book and what people have learnt from that work. Further, that knowledge has been stylised and structured into bite size chunks for your easy consumption. You can jump around, speed-read, annotate your readings, and reflect on things as you are learning.

The 'asynchronous' learning from a book is very valuable. This is a bit like dealing with reading email or a document than say, having a phone conversation to learn something. You have time to pause, reflect, and imbibe. Before you respond. However, in a phone conversation, you have to fully present, absorb in “in real-time” and take notes simultaneously. It makes it a bit harder.

Enhancing your skills:

On the other hand, if you are looking to learn an experiential or a qualitative skill, or seeking advanced skills, you might be better of learning from a person to begin with. One of the easiest places to imagine this is sports coaching. You can read all you want about how to improve your stroke in swimming or your badminton backhand. However, working with a qualified coach will help you accelerate the learning significantly.

There’s a key advantage of learning this sort of skill from a person. You can get personalised attention. The qualified expert can quickly assess where you are based on your skill, your questions, and your motivation. They can very customise the teaching to your specific needs.

Practice makes it real: Of course, it goes without saying, both the coach and the book provide just the starting point. You have to then practice (aka “do”) till you make it perfect. If you only read but don't apply it, it is just theory. If you just jump in and start doing, you may miss out the basic foundational skills. Ideally, you want to leverage both, keep doing things, and iterating on the learning loop.

The overall idea is to hack or accelerate learning so you can get there quicker. To become an expert, you have to keep iterating across people, books and practice.

Finishing up Over time, you will iterate in a learning loop between a book and a person, in no particular order. As you get to the advanced levels, people will play a bigger role. 

As you get closer to ‘Mastery’, you will start learning more from people including yourself. Self-reflections, journaling, watching yourself and teaching will become more important than books, or even individual teachers.

Credit: I want to thank Preeti Somani for suggesting this topic and Arun Sharma for the infographics.

(Amit is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. Find his other blogs on LinkedIn and tweets here @amitsomani)