Learning With Patience and Flow
I often think about the days when I was still in school or when I was early in my career. I think of all the things I could have put my time and attention into but didn’t. It takes time to engage a topic to a depth that’s truly intellectually satisfying and truly valuable to our curiosity and skillset. One of the big challenges we have in our lifetime journey of learning is finding a match between the conditions required for learning (access, teachers, etc.) and our readiness to consume that knowledge (are we ready to engage?).
For me I wonder, if only I had spent my time learning about bitcoin and blockchain in 2012. Or if only I had spent time to learn more about AI when I was in college. What if I had joined the haptics lab while working on my capstone in control systems? What if I had joined a strategy team vs. doing RF design? There are so many paths in my posthumous multiverse.
Well, maybe I just wasn’t ready to engage in these topics back then, but now I certainly am motivated to learn new (and old) things and a backlog of material that’s many lifetimes long. Of course, now, we’re in the middle of our careers and don’t have an infinite amount of time left to learn, grow and achieve in time for that to be useful in our careers as far as we can envision today.
So we are left with a conundrum. For those, like myself, who have wide ranging interests and a desire to deeply engage those varying topics in order to truly benefit from it in life, we strive to choose the maximal learning path. But how do we decide what is maximal? I certainly can’t predict the future, and anyone that thinks they can, is kidding themselves, so how do we handle this paradox? It’s a really tough decision because as humans we are prone to buyer’s remorse, which is the tendency to look back with longing for a different path. This is natural, but it’s also painful and as I mentioned above, a trap I often fall into. What to do…
I’ve wrestled with this for some time trying to think about how to maximize my time and choose the best next thing. Through reflection I’ve come to a fairly simple take, but to the disappointment of some, it does not include hacks to fabricate more time or increase our capacity and rate of knowledge capture.
So here’s my simple framework:
You can’t do everything and that’s ok
We cannot consume all we desire, no matter how hard we try. We should attack our learning objectives with urgency, but we should be comfortable with the fact that we will miss out on some things. Time is a nonrenewable resource unfortunately, but…
Learning is a lifelong pursuit
We don’t stop learning when we stop working. Think of the rest of your life as an opportunity for growth. Who knows what you’ll find along the way.
Going deep takes time - we must be patient
It takes time and effort to go sufficiently deep on a topic that it builds our mental models and toolkits for future decision making. Be patient and engage deeply. While 140 characters can provoke ideas, you must spend time to gain a depth of understanding.
Let FLOW be your guide
Learning takes perseverance but be sure you enjoy the ride. If you can’t attend to the topic while learning, how will you make that topic a cornerstone of your work or life? It’s ok to quit a book, blog, podcast, etc. if you don’t find yourself engaged. Move on.
Learning is exhilarating. There are few things more enjoyable than grasping something new. So while you may feel like you don’t have enough time to learn it all, you do have the rest of your life to pursue that feeling. So be deliberate, be patient, find where curiosity and flow intersect and flow, and get moving!
- Chris