The Return of the "Old Ways to Learn"

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here.

When I was young and in school, I was taught the basic and simple way to learn:

1) Pre-read before the class

2) Listen and ask questions during the class

3) Revisit and apply after the class - to me and my peers, this meant spending 8-10 hours on exercise books and tests every day.

Fun? Not really.

Designed for maximum effectiveness with the latest discoveries, such as brain technology? Probably not.

But it was easy to follow and yet effective. It got me into a top university in China and then Singapore after all.

However, I could not remember since when this way of learning became unacceptable to me.

The reason? So much things to learn vs so little time.

Look at the options we have: online classes, short videos, books, blogs, learning from peers etc etc. And there are so many within each of the categories. Take reading for example, so many books and so many "Must-read"book lists!

Also do not forget, I have many other important things to do, e.g. entertainment.

Who has the time to pre-read and who has the time to revisit afterwards? There are so many new things to catch up!

I can recall a few times when I started a book and just vaguely remembered that I probably read that book, and I just straightaway went for another one, even though I cannot remember a thing about what that book tried to communicate.

The consequence was quite serious.

I did not really learn from those reading because I read just for the sake of reading and there was no thought put into the process.

Worse still, as time went by, I gradually got lazy and lost the ability to think deep to extract useful learning from the books.

Worse still, I also started to doubt whether reading could be helpful. So I spent much more time on other important things like entertainment.

Here, I would like to share my recent experience in learning.

I was learning the capabilities of my current firm, basically to understand what we had done for our clients.

I used mind-map to get the material into a structure and went branch by branch. It took 3-4 days.

And I had the overview and I knew where to put every new piece of knowledge I received afterwards.

And then I started revisiting the mind-map on a weekly basis (a bit incredible to me as well). After two weeks, I could remember more, understand more and explain more.

Now I continue to add to the mind-map and revisit weekly.

Even though I have not got the chance to apply the knowledge in a client situation yet, I can clearly feel that I am actually learning something and it will help me in the future.

And it makes me believe that "Old" is "Golden" when it comes to the ways to learn.

So here is the take-away:

1) Focus on the results. Look at what you learned, not what you read, listened etc etc. Spend the time to extract what is useful to you.

2) Do not rush. Good things are worth the time. Rushing will negatively affect the outcome.

Here, I recalled what a friend who is successful and rich way beyond my current "imagination" said. And I would like to use it as the ending for this post.

"A fatal weakness of ordinary people is to blindly pursue efficiency."

Till next time!

BTW, XMind is great for mind-mapping (not sponsored)!