To Learn list

I just watched a video of the CEOs of PayPal and LinkedIn (Dan Schulman and Jeff Weiner, respectively) discuss the idea of a To Learn list, and it got me thinking about lists.

Lists make sense

Lists help us make sense of the world and decide what to do next. Shopping lists, wedding lists, the top 40, Yellow pages, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, Google search results, social media feeds, checklists, playlists, bucket lists, etc. are all there to help us organise the world’s information in a way that’s useful or interesting for us. The cognitive load of a list is nicely manageable for the 3-pound human brain, which is probably why they’ve proved so popular; the list is a very accessible mental model. More and more journalism is now around lists (e.g. ‘7 ways to…’, ‘6 times when…’, ‘8 tips for…’). Wikipedia hosts this non-parody (and actually captivating) list of list of lists. Arya Stark, the warrior and princess, just finished working through this deadly list. Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance artist and anatomist, wrote out an equally gruesome list back in 1510. Umberto Eco, the philosopher and poet, summarised it well:

“The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogues, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”

Here's a list of the world's most intriguing lists. Your inbox is a list. This paragraph is a list. We barely notice them because they’re everywhere.

Lists are curation by another name. The formation of a useful list is the finding of good, relevant items from a larger set, making sense of them (e.g. by organising them and describing them) and maintaining and updating that list over time. And some lists (like social media feeds and Google search results) which are created from vast pools of content (billions+), require algorithms to make them.

Schulman and Weiner agree that most of us maintain a To Do list, but that few of us even have a To Learn list.

Why don’t we keep To Learn lists?

Well, some of us do. Indeed, in the responses to Weiner’s original post, many people say they operate a live To Learn list. But amongst the general population, it’s rare. More common is a reading list of books we want to get to. But I think what Weiner has in mind is a list of materials/activities specifically to help us develop our skills. I think there are a few reasons we don’t do this.

Who’s responsible?

The responsibility for learning over the course of a lifetime (lifelong learning) falls to everyone and no one. Governments, schools, colleges, universities, employers, professional bodies, think tanks, charities all can, and do, play a part in adult education. But none take ownership - and, in general, we as individuals don’t either. The upshot is that after compulsory education, very few of us continue to learn in a systematic and sustained way.

Time & urgency

The busy modern worker has very little time to learn. Survey after survey states that time is the biggest inhibitor of workplace learning. Frequently cited research from Deloitte suggests that workers make just 1% of their time at work available for learning. LinkedIn’s research makes a similar claim (see page 37 of this report). Learning, therefore, gets relegated to the important-but-not-urgent quadrant of Eisenhower’s 2×2 matrix and meta-activities like To Learn lists are banished to the outskirts of that quadrant.

Intangible benefits

The impact and benefits of learning are difficult to measure, and there are several reasons for this. The benefits are often manifested over the long-term: weeks, months and years, sometimes throughout an entire career. Those benefits are unpredictable: sometimes they are exactly as the teacher/lesson intended, sometimes they spark other ideas or behaviours which bring other unintended benefits, sometimes they bring a different kind of benefit (like a learner’s engagement, happiness, well-being). We are simply not able to capture the downstream effects of slight changes to the wonderfully unfathomable human brain. That the causal chain between the activity of learning and its benefits is so difficult to observe diminishes the learner’s motivation; what’s the real incentive to learn at all?

But we should all have one

But a To Learn list is a very, very good idea. As lives and careers lengthen, new jobs and skills requirements emerge, and the demand for interdisciplinary skills grows, lifelong learning becomes an economic imperative. 80% of CEOs believe the need for new skills is their biggest business challenge. For employees, research now shows that opportunities for development have become the second most important factor in workplace happiness (after the nature of the work itself). Learning is indispensable. And if you don’t have a good list, how on earth are you going to learn what you need?

This is personal. We’re talking here about a personal list for which you are personally responsible. Technologies (like this, that and another) and the suggestions of colleagues, friends and family are wonderful support acts providing essential guidance. But the protagonist is you. In the end, you need a system which outputs a list which is made by you and works for you.

That system needs to get you to do the learning, to actually influence your behaviour. So at a certain point, the To Learn list has to turn into an action. Maybe you reserve a single slot on your To Do list for the top item from your To Learn list. Maybe you commit to learning one thing each day or each week. Maybe you spend an hour a week learning. Put these lists into a calendar - a practice called timeboxing - and suddenly the music starts and the dance begins. We know what we’re doing and when we’re doing it.

The list may be small. It certainly shouldn’t be huge. You want it to be manageable, to focus your mind, to enable high-quality choices. Less is more and might be as few as one. Individual items should also be manageable: for most people, ‘learn 10 regular verbs’ is more effective than ‘learn Russian’.

Your To Learn list might not be a literal listing-out of what you’re going to read/watch/listen to. It might include questions. Leonardo had ‘Ask about the measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese’ and ‘Find a Master of Hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill, in the Lombard manner’ on one of his lists. Walter Isaacson (biographer of Steve Jobs) says of Leonardo in this excellent interview: “One of the things I've learned from Leonardo is how to be even more curious and how to be more observant; how to make lists every morning of the things I want to learn or the questions I want to ask.”

It might include annotations, sketches, early clues and follow-up thoughts. It might be reflective. It might be combinations of ideas. It might incorporate some To Do actions. It might not be grammatical or make sense to anyone but you. That’s the beauty of it. It’s a means of capturing those magical moments of wanton curiosity - when your brain does an exquisite, ineffable thing - and ensuring that they are addressed, at some point in your future. Therein lies the joy.

Here’s my current, rolling list:

You need to stick at it. Ideally, your system will be resilient to other changes in your life (a new phone, a new job, a new home). A lot of software that might give you a To Learn list won’t stay with you through all these changes. But some have a chance of staying with you: a notes app on your phone backed up to the cloud might; your personal email might; your LinkedIn account might; a spreadsheet back-up to the cloud might; pen and paper might, if you hold onto your stuff in real life.

So create and maintain a To Learn list. Don’t be merely curious! Be intentionally and systematically so. The quality of your future life is a function of the quality of that list.