june 2024
Now more than ever it has been shown that learning efficiently will pay dividends for you in the future. The most common misconception out there is that learning is proportional to the time you actually spend “learning”. From my experience, and reading about how others learn, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Learning is the ability to build mental maps to continuously architect a better of the universe around you.
Learning over a longer period of time looks like an exponential curve. You are continuously developing tools and mental maps that will only make learning more efficient down the road. As you continue to build a vault of intuition, knowledge, expertise, practice, you will find more streamline methods to acquiring more knowledge in the future. It’s hard for us to comprehend this because as humans, we want results fast; that’s why we love instant gratification. Why spend so much energy for some result in the future when you can receive the same biological stimuli instantly? Understand that the exponential curve is also challenging because it’s hard for humans to look that far into the future and get a grasp of the sheer scale of those results. We were never designed to understand exponential growth because such a thing never existed until the agricultural revolution (which only happened in the last 0.5% of our existence on this earth).
So now, we understand that learning progresses over time at an exponential rate. This is good if we want to learn. We also understand that it’s not instinctively natural for us to take advantage of this growth and capitalize off it. But what if we wanted to capitalize off this exponential growth of learning? How could we accomplish this?
Be consistent, be efficient, and become recursive.
These alone will allow you to build an enormous wealth of knowledge over time. And it’s time to start now.
In order to be consistent, you have to understand that large amounts of effort (in learning) within sporadic periods of time, don’t solve our equation of compound growth. Remember, learning is exponential. If we sporadically add to our knowledge base, we will only have subtle steps in our knowledge, nothing exponential. Find periods of time to focus exclusively on this small chunk of learning. This chunk of your time has to be devoted to only learning though. Your mind doesn’t work well with multitasking. You might think you’re a master at it but splitting your effort means splitting your results.
Now what we do within this time is how we will become efficient. To be efficient in this chunk of our time we need to maintain focus. This is accomplished by our ability to retain attention on only one task, and thats learning. It could be a misconception that maintaining extreme focus is building out, step by step, your time and how you spend it. I don’t believe this is how we will maintain focus and be as efficient as possible. Allow yourself to wander during this chunk of time. Stay on task, continuously learning about your subject, but wander through it. Float high within the topic and grasp a high level understanding. Dig into the weeds to build a robust infrastructure of low-level knowledge. You’re staying focussed but you’re letting your mind explore the ins and outs of this subject.
I believe this is how you can best spend your time when learning a subject. When you spend your time following a structured format, your outline is based off of an estimate of how long you believe you’re going to spend on each part. This is an estimate. There might be sections that require more time than others. Give yourself this flexibility during your chunk of time.
Now finally, why do we need to be recursive? As we efficiently learn more about the ins and outs of our subjects, mental maps need to be constructed. Build yourself a map through each subject you dive into. Use this map to lead yourself through the subject. While it is helpful for understanding a specific subject, it is even more helpful at gaining a stronger grasp of external subjects. Having a new outside view will allow you to view new topics with a new lens. A new lens allows you to find new discoveries.
Build off of these mental maps. Draw them out. Close your eyes, and walk yourself through each map as if you’re following an atlas across the country. This is where the compounding takes place. You have finally built a rhythm of subtly, but continuously, learning new little pockets of a subject. Now this is added to our function recursively and will continuously compound over time. Time hsa become out friend, and not our enemy.
I encourage you to never stop learning.
What reason do we have to spend each day if we will know the outcome of tomorrow? This leaves an empty void bare of gratification. We lose all hope in seeking truth, in finding tomorrow. If you continuously learn, you’re always trying to find the answer for tomorrow. The answer may never come, but you will build a beautiful path along the way discovering even more paths that lead to more joy and prosperity.