Honing your skills is a continuous process

Think of it this way—you start learning when you eyes open and continue until they close. You alarm sounds—you hit the off button—it does not work! You have to take the battery out. Your shut off response is punished—battery out is reinforced.You are the last one up, last one in the shower with a very limited hot water supply—it is freezing—dawdling and late rising are punished. You skip breakfast, get to your desk early. The boss walks by—stops and compliments you on being at your desk early—the response of early arrival is reinforced. Your dental appointment is hell! The dentist hits a nerve, does not use enough pain relief—the dentist, the chair, his tools, the smells, the office are all paired with the pain—and in the future you will be phobic of dental stimuli of all sorts.

Ahead of you on a busy road, you notice everyone hitting their brakes suddenly. Speed trap??—you hit yours—and avoid a ticket unlike the unhappy person who passed you. Using caution and watching others in traffic is rewarded. We are constantly learning, though we may not realize it. This goes on from birth until death assuming a functional brain. A computer’s intelligence is based on occasional fill-up of programs, just as a gasoline-powered vehicle’s driving is based on occasional fill-up of gasoline. A human being’s intelligence is based on continuous fill-up of programs, just as a solar-powered satellite’s driving is based on continuous fill-up of solar energy.

This sounds actually relatively logical and should be easy to do, shouldn’t it? But, it isn’t!So, why is it so hard to continuously learn throughout ones life? There are two main reasons, in my personal opinion. Human nature and expectations from our social environment, and Biologically, how the human brain develops. Since elaborating on both reasons could easily fill an entire book, I refrain from doing that and instead will try to summarize.

We humans come into this world with very little “knowledge” and zero “experience”. We have to go through a long childhood where we constantly have to learn. We first learn to control our muscles and body extremities, then we learn to move (crawl, walk) and then we learn to talk. After that, we are send to school to learn skills like reading, writing, calculating and some more. All considered essential in our current society. But, even after we have spent a large number of years with our parents and in school, we still have to learn more. Once we have entered early adulthood, we need to learn how to establish a life in our society. We have to learn how to socially interact with fellow men, how to recognize friends and enemies and how to find a mate for life. We go to college or start a new job and keep learning.

However, after some time, society “expects” us to be “complete adults” and finally be able to put all what we’ve learned “to work” and become “productive”. Once we reach this stage in our life, people around us do not expect us to learn more, but to start “teaching”. And it is assumed that “teacher” should know it all, right? So, our social environment and our western society subconsciously signals us that learning is not important and needed anymore, or even worse, that learning is socially not accepted anymore since we should know enough by now.

When we are born, our brain is totally incomplete. Nature has simply put an organ into our skull and provided a “blueprint” that can be used to learn and remember. Our brain is basically “empty” but biologically “ready to go” and “learn”. Nothing has been “wired” there. Once we start to learn, our brain starts changing. Synapses get conditioned and brain cells get wired together and chemically altered creating memories and experiences.

Once we reach early adulthood - somewhere between our 20th and 30th year - scientists believe that our brain is fully developed and most of the wiring and chemical changes have been completed. We also tend to say, that we have formed our personality. Once we reach this stage, we start to learn a bit differently. While recent studies have shown that our brain has still enough capacity with “un-wired” matter, our brain starts to more and more revert back to things we already “know” and use past experiences. So, learning new things becomes less “important”. It has also discovered, that our brain loses “matter” and “unused cells” start to “die”.

This makes learning harder and harder when getting older. Our brain has less and less “capacity” to learn new things, since a lot of brain matter is already “wired” and permanently and irreversibly chemically altered plus “unused” matter starts dying and gets “lost” for learning, and we have a growing amount of “knowledge” and “experience” which helps us to solve most of our day-to-day problems and there is less need to learn new things. As a result of that, most people will stop learning after some time. But, here comes continuous learning. More recent studies have shown that our brain is not irreversibly formed and that it has enough capacity left to learn new things until a very old age! Furthermore, those studies have also shown that we can slow down the loss of brain matter if we keep learning. If we start breaking some barriers, then we can be able to continuously learn:

Never accept the “fact” that after some time, we should know enough - we don’t! Always stay curious and ask questions. It is totally acceptable to not know everything and ask questions. Keep actively learning new things every day. Our brain is a muscle that wants to be trained. While it may get less “performing” over time, it will stay “strong” if we keep challenging it. It doesn’t require to keep doing PhD. Even little things can help. Try to learn a new word in a new language every day. Break your daily routine and do things slightly differently each day, so your brain has to stay active and keep learning. These days, learning new things is easier than ever since the Internet brings us more knowledge into the palm of our hands than ever before.

Last, but not least, keep respecting the younger generation and don’t look down on them. They may know less and have less experience than you, but they might know something different that you don’t. If you observe and learn from them, you can amplify your own knowledge and experience with their fresh knowledge and then - hopefully - give it back to your younger fellow men to amplify their knowledge even more. This is how men can reach new levels in our civilization by amplifying our collective knowledge together across multiple generations. Cheers!