High-speed learning? Not so fast…

Last week there was a crisis in the Golding home. We have a fireproof safe where we keep valuables and important documents. We tried the combination, but the safe was stuck and wouldn’t open. Panic ensued.

With 60 seconds of Google work, I learned that sometimes the bolt mechanism can get stuck, and a forum post from a woman revealed that a locksmith coached her to tap 5 times with a rubber mallet above the handle. I learned how to solve the problem!

But I didn’t have a rubber mallet, and I didn’t have the same model safe this woman had. I improvised by wrapping my regular hammer in a towel and experimented by tapping in various locations. Luckily, using this method, I eventually was able to get the safe opened.

Knowing and doing were two very different things.

I mention this story because in today’s fast-paced world, where no one has any time to learn, we keep hearing this question that John Hattie rhetorically asks in his book:

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just download knowledge directly into our brains, just as they do in the movie, The Matrix?

Unfortunately, as renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains, our brains don’t work this way.?Our brain is a learning machine, and it learns by itself to correct its previous mistakes.

Let’s go back to the Matrix. Even after Neo downloads all the learning in his head, he loses to Morpheus in his first kung fu fight. And then he fails again when he takes his first jump off the rooftop. In other words, acquiring knowledge was just the first part of the learning process. He still needed the experiential part to learn and adapt as he tried it.

Real learning doesn’t come when you acquire the knowledge. Rather, it comes when you struggle to put it into action.

As John Hattie elaborates further in his book mentioned above, we don’t learn in a straightforward way, but rather in a more staccato fashion, where we listen, we try, we concentrate, we try again, we make mistakes, we correct, and we learn together.

That last part—learning together—is critical to the learning process. Kio Stark says it’s the open secret of learning:

We learn from—and with—each other.

Had I not seen the post from that woman about tapping the safe with a hammer, my stuff would still be locked away and inaccessible. If Neo wouldn’t have had Morpheus to help him on his journey, he wouldn’t have been able to become The One and help others. Each day, we learn together with our family, our friends, and our coworkers.

Which leads me to why I’ve chosen to name this new LinkedIn Newsletter series "Read. Learn. Share." We must be curious enough to learn something new, and brave enough to embrace the struggle to put it into action. But then, once we truly learn it, we must share it so that others may learn from it as well.

Maybe it’s time for you to write your own newsletter here on LinkedIn, so that you can share what you know? Everyone has knowledge to share—who will learn from you?

-----

Books referenced in this edition:

• Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn by John Hattie, Gregory C. R. Yates
• Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It by Ian Leslie
• Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything by Kio Stark

-----

Liked this article? Subscribe and discover more!

Read. Learn. Share. is Curated Curiosity?. I regularly share quotes with brief commentary on LinkedIn from things I read, watch, and learn. This series takes us on a journey that goes deeper on top-of-mind topics and themes.