“We live in such a wonderful age to be a learner”

A reader from last week offered this in response to me sharing my motivation behind writing this newsletter. He asked how long it takes me to write this newsletter. I replied that it takes me about 1-2 hours each week, but much longer if you count the hours I spend reading, writing and in conversation with amazing people around the globe about all these topics.

It works for me because that’s how I actually want to be spending my time. I have always known learning was a motivator for me, but I don’t think I ever knew how central it could be until I took the leap to self-employment. In my corporate career I would love the first 3-6 months of every job and then get restless after the inevitable plateau after 3-6 months.

That is to say I claimed to love learning, but really was not taking ownership of it. I was giving ownership of my own learning to corporations and then getting frustrated when they didn’t prioritize my own curiosity.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been spending three hours a day studying Chinese. While many glorify learning as fun, it can also be an excruciating process. Sitting in my class yesterday, I was hearing words, but my brain was saying “too much, too fast.” I’ve mostly been keeping up, but at that moment I really just needed some distance to digest it all. Past experience, however, told me that this was part of the process and something very much worth continuing with.

I’ve been thinking a lot about learning as I’ve been immersed in the class. After taking the amazing course “Learning How To Learn” I know that the biggest factors to learn something is not “trying harder,” wanting to learn something or even the amount studying. Surprising things like shorter studying periods, breaks between learning sessions, sleeping and exercise may be just as important as my actual intention to learn the material.

In the fall I was living in Taiwan with mindset of "I want to learn Chines" but plateaued once I solved the problem of saying Yīgè Zhūròu dàn chǎofàn, Dài zǒu and Wǒ shì bǎoluó. Basically, I cracked the puzzle of being able to order Taiwan's delicious food.

I've tried to make sense of the factors that are enabling me to learn at an incredible pace over the last few weeks. Channeling my inner strategy consultant I created a five piece framework to think about the elements needed to actually learn something.

Here are my off the cuff reflections on what I think really matters:

So why is learning so hard? I think because getting these five elements aligned at the same time can be almost impossible.

I think this is also why people still default to thinking about grad degrees and universities as places where you have to go to learn. Despite YouTube offering almost endless knowledge, most people have a hard time designing their time around these five elements. By opting into an academic degree, you naturally align your environment, time, social environment and feedback mechanisms around learning.

In the real world, we want to be seen as “learners” but its almost impossible to constantly meet the base level conditions to achieve that aspiration.

As an adult with a full-time job aligning these five aspects can be almost impossible. This is compounded by organizations claiming to say they want to create environments around personal growth, but also signaling at the same time that they don't care about learning by creating environments where reading at a desk is still seen as a bit weird, prioritizing sleep and health for learning's sake is still seen as a bit "woo-woo" and lets be honest, managers just wanting you to do what enables them to feel safe and secure in their jobs.

It is a magical time to be a learner, indeed, but it doesn’t mean its all that easy.

What have you tried to learn and succeeded or failed at? Have you worked at an organization that really cares about learning? I'd love to hear more ?? e-mail me your comments or post below.

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