I have heard too many times that most of the things that I’m gonna learn in life are going to be doing it by myself, i.e. via experience, active learning, day-by-day. I realized a short while ago that I was doing (or better, trying to do) only 1 of the 3 mentioned words; day-by-day learning. Regarding the other two actions (learn by experience and active learning) I was framing them in the opposite way, so, in a conceptual and a passive manner.
Complicated to understand? I would try to make it easy.
Let’s start from the basics. Since we born, we learn. Since we are child, we grow up receiving a ton of information that our mind process; some of this useful, other not much. Perphas, when thinking about to study the first thing that has come up to your mind has been schools, however, the topic that I want to talk about goes far away from schools, but in every inch of our lifes.
To learn is something that we do every day intuitively (without thinking). Have ever you listen the said: “Every thay we learn something”. That is totally true. Now, when it comes to acquire higher-effort knowledge, such a new concept that a boring teacher is explaining when we are almost falling sleep, to stick those ideas in our memory is more complicated than we think, even if we try to be attentive students.
I’m a folk who likes to know more about different stuffs, yet, during the last years I have struggled to learn new concepts mainly due to my technique.
Passive learning
Passive learning is to learn in a conceptual way. It’s to learn watching videos on Youtube or listening Apple Podcasts.
It’s here where my problems began. I have listened during the last 2 years a ton of podcast and videos on Youtube, either in English or Spanish, and yes, I have learned a lot (honestly, more than in four year of my university degree). However, I do think that I have only acquired the 20% of knowledge that in those videos/podcast have been displayed. So…we can say that I’ve not been very productive/smart when consuming content (by the way, I try to be selective with the podcast/videos that I consume).
Thus, which has been the problem to lose to many hours? The answer is passively listening or just watch videos (without simultaneously perform any secondary action). The same happened me when I was reading. I was literally watching a screen without knowing that what I was consuming will be irrelevant the next week due to my constant forgetness (a memory has not unlimited capacity, though, if you are a super smart guy that every cool idea is recorded is your brain-storage, you are an exemption).
Henceforth, some years has passed out to realize that my behaviour wasn’t the appropiate. Even os, never is late, so I have tried to turn around my way to the things during the last months.
Activate vs Passive learning
After a video that I was watching in Youtube randomnly, my mind totally blew up. The guy was talking about the difference between Active vs Passive learning. I felt very damn and stupid.
The difference between active and passive is basically that in the former you are doing (or practicising) things while you learn while the latter you don’t do anything. For instance, active learning could be to write an article about a concept to realize that you comprehend it, or to have a have some application to write down the ideas that you think that are useful for you (I have recently started using OneNote for it) while learning passively would be sit down watching a lesson and don’t take useful notes (as in the school, just sleep).
What do I gain keeping notes in my notebook based in the cloud?. Well, when I have a thought or idea that may be handy and knowing that my mind it’s gonna screw up if I don’t note down somewhre, I just need to open my OneNote (either PC or mobile) and write those. Then, I go back to this application and I re-read all this forgotten ideas to try to refresh my memory or to just take action.
This is may new way to learn and so far, it has worked very well.
As you may know, due to I live in Prague it’s difficult to find books in English or Spanish (too difficult to speak Czech), so I used the Amazon Kindle. I discovered some time ago that all the notes that I was taking in the e-book can be exported to a Word, but in the past I was lazy enough to trasferred it. However, during the last time those notes outlined in the device I’ve exported to my OneNote account, where I have on hand all the annotations to re-read when I’m boring. (A example of my notes in OneNote in the above screenshot).
More than take notes
I do not only to jote down ideas that I purposelly learning. Have you ever had moments when you think of something you'd like to do but later during the day, you have forgotten? From time to time it has happened to me. Yet, there is solution for that: take your phone out of your pocket, open OneNote and write it down. Very simple and effective. Maybe, those ideas that you are taking are not not going to change your life (a recordatory that asserts that you must call to your grandparents today it’s not going to create a start-up), but it’s useful and doesn’t take time to do.
Now, don’t take me wrong. I’m not a fucking crazy guy that during the last months has been annoting every idea that has come up to my mind. No. I try to be selective with what I think and do. However, if I were a person who just always have interesting ideas, I wouldn’t be foolish… I would write down every of them.
I honestly think that this is a essential skill in today’s society. We consume too much information, so to filter that out is something important that can be learned from my viewpoint. There is a great barrier to make this up that is laziness, hopefully you will overcome that!!
PD: I would like to know if you use some other way to learn which I can put in practice. Don’t hesitate to tell, please!
Passive learning siempre! Y de lo que leo, escucho,... me suelo acordar de cosas interesantes. Sobre todo si lo escucho con motivación.