Even with this blog, which I started to help me slow down and process what I’m learning, I recently found myself going too fast, filling up with knowledge but not absorbing it. My brain felt almost like water running off saturated ground. I need to consume less and process more.
I am a consumer of content, but that is not where the learning happens. For me, learning is done in the uncomfortable middle between where I am and where I want to be. I don’t think it can happen without the vulnerability to look at the weak and/or wounded parts of myself. It also requires the courage be uncomfortably bad at something new.
I think that discomfort is one of the reasons learning is hard. As I wrote earlier, our brains are misguided. They are ready and waiting with a dopamine pump to make us feel better. All we need to do is shift over to Instagram or YouTube and freebase the good feels. The more we get into the uncomfortable work of learning, the more they push us to avoid that discomfort. I think it this is a discipline that many of us have lost.
Because of this, content consumption becomes easy for me. I can watch a TED talk, read a blog post or book, listen to a podcast, etc. I feel like I’m addressing this issue and “learning” but I’m not. I’m consuming empty calories because I don’t stop to process before jumping on to the next thing. It’s a cheap but justifiable dopamine fix. Justifiable because it is content in line with what I am genuinely trying to accomplish. But I’m lazily consuming other people’s content and not putting the work in to process it.
Overall, it has been hard but very rewarding for me to force myself to slow down and process the content I’m consuming. I’m not reading as much, I’m not going to as many lectures, or listening to as many podcasts. The amount that I’m processing has jumped exponentially (not hard to do when it was basically at zero). I thought that I was fully ahead of this, but the last few weeks (with tons of travel and other distractions) has shown me otherwise. It’s both literally and figuratively a journey, I suppose!
Of course, Harvard already figured this out
It turns out that I’m not alone in wanting to be spoon fed content instead of going through the hard work of processing that knowledge into something useful. I’m mystified that I haven’t brought up this study from Harvard University earlier in this blog as I basically cite it weekly in my work world. A few physics professors at Harvard wanted to figure out the best way to teach their students. They put a study together that determined that:
- Students like lectures better than hands-on work
- Students felt they learned more in lectures than hands-on work
- Student learned more through hands-on work
What’s interesting is that we feel we’re learning more from consuming well thought out and well-presented content. I think we’re responding to the entertainment value of the content. What we need is the messy and uncomfortable trials and failures. It’s the day-to-day experimentation that is required for us to absorb that knowledge.
So, here’s to slowing down and putting in the hard work to make the knowledge yours!
Hey, Future John
It’s hard to say this to myself, but I really do need to slow down my book buying habit (addiction?) and dive into the uncomfortableness of doing the actual learning that goes along with knowledge consumption.
Thanks to Filip Zrnzević for the beautiful shot of this rainy Serbian forest road.