This is the Best Way to Learn Something
Ok, well it’s one way. And it’s called directness.
No matter your learning style — reader, writer, mover, visualizer, converser, or a blender of styles — having a direct application of your learning to your lived experience is a game-changer.
What is Directness?
When learning is intertwined with the given situation you want to use it in — it's direct. Think about when you're enmeshed in a relationship and you sync to the other person. If you consider your learning as your ‘partner’ then you’re going to want to ask him or her to have a dance.
The ways in which you can apply directness might be project-based, experiential, or immersive. This learning-by-doing is both a mindset and a way of being.
Scott Young, the author of Ultralearning: Accelerate your Career, Master Hard Skills and Outsmart the Competition explains:
Learning is an investment in the future. It’s almost always easier, in the moment, to get something done without learning a new or better way. The overwhelm people feel, especially the attentional deluge of emails, meetings and short-term, but ultimately unimportant tasks, can create this sense that there isn’t time to invest. Ironically, patience is the fastest way forward, the more you can cultivate a sense that you’re building skills that will accumulate you can focus more on the bigger picture of what you’re trying to do in your work. This, in turn, allows you to become more productive in your work in the bigger picture. It’s a virtuous cycle, but one that we often don’t feel we have time for, even if the truth is closer to the opposite.
In this tango with your learning partner, you need to inject both practice and play. The exact measurements are for you to decide. And when you practice patience with yourself and the learning process as a whole — you’re investing in the future self.
As a fan of psychologist Carl Rogers (I’m currently reading On Becoming a Person), I resonate with his famous adage, “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.” I asked Young what he thought about this quote with the lens of modern leader and the ability to adopt a beginner’s mind.:
I think we often give lip service to ideas like lifelong learning and learning how to learn. These are ideas that sound great, but then when you realize they often involve failure, frustration or effort that goes beyond the minimum needed to get by, and people start to recoil. I think the solution can’t be at the level of philosophies, but at concrete systems that implement these changes. Not just the idea of learning more, but actual systems and practices that tend to produce it.
Watch Young apply one of his systems that employs directness to drawing himself over a 1-month period:
Since we will have different and interesting challenges throughout our careers and lives, direct and experiential learning will become even more pervasive. Young encourages a mixing directness with other methods including drilling, retrieving, feedback, experimentation, and more.
Learning Embodied
The point is really to know what you need to turn theory into practice, knowledge into information, and in some instances — thoughts into embodiment.
Directness has a close cousin in transfer. Take what you learn in one domain or discipline and applying it to another setting. This context-jumping is really where the juice resides.
For example, as someone who has been in group therapy for several years I find that these three pillars show up again and again and again:
- Noticing you have (or hopefully don’t) an attachment to an outcome
- Choosing curiosity and responding over judgment and reacting
- Understanding the stories you're telling yourself and how to let them go
If I could count the number of times these have found their way into my coaching conversations I’d be writing this from my yacht in Portofino. OK, I have no desire for a yacht (see no attachment to an outcome!) but you do get the picture.
One of the most poignant examples of transfer I’ve heard is Elizabeth Gilbert sharing how she went from 20 years of mediation and yoga training (aka the classroom) to a lived experience (aka embodiment). What brought about this shift? A panic attack at the Sydney airport at the height of the pandemic.
Role Reversal
I was coaching a client and she asked me how do I best learn? And I answered by teaching. It's a well-known sentiment but what does it feel like when you move into the teacher mode early on? Right on the spot she switched into teacher mode and helped me with ‘fire breathing’. I’m not sure that’s the real name but humor me here.
My client asked what I’d be doing after our call. I told her I was going to walk down to a hippy area of town (Shakedown street?) eat some chicken and then come home to write. — apparently this article.
She gently offered that I close my eyes:
Then she said to breathe in and out naturally (I found a fitting park bench to sit on). And after a few welcomed inhales and exhales we started:
20 fierce breaths out from the belly button followed by a very slow inhale at the end.
Rest and repeat.
We did it 3 times almost together as I was a bit slower or less confident than her (hence being the student).
And when I opened my eye I saw what felt like The Upside Down from Stranger things with a sea of dandelion seeds.
Then 3 seagulls in perfect unison flew overhead. A sure-fire sign I thought!
“How do you feel?”
“I felt light-headed as if I was about to leave this plan. An alternate state of being was waiting around the corner’
“Exactly” the one-time student-turned teacher grinned.
The Wolf You Feed
We need to directly apply learning to our own lived experiences. Duo lingo might help you grasp rudimentary Spanish, but it’s only a complement to the direct learning that takes place through jamming with a Spaniard.
Meaningful learning only happens when we picture ourselves in a future scenario where we put our insights into action.
‘Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in,’ wrote Leonardo da Vinci. Our minds favor challenges so long as they are tied to our intrinsic motivations.
When we hoard what we know we do ourselves and others an injustice.
And when we’re OK with looking goofy, we can swiftly apply what we learn without skipping a beat.
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