Think of a few things you’re both good at and engage in frequently. Ask yourself: How did you learn that, and how do you continue to learn even more about it?
Really ask the question. Remember the little steps, the moments of elucidation, the improvement in your technique. How did it happen? What was your environment of learning?
Why bother asking this? Whenever I want to learn about something new, I have a fairly specific technique that works very well for me. I start with total, confusion-inducing immersion. I’ll go anywhere I can find streams of information and I’ll read/watch a bunch of stuff. I won’t understand 90% of it, but I’m looking for patterns, not details. I’ll scan for citations, even informal ones – do a bunch of these articles/posts/videos seem to reference a specific work? Is there a known book, individual/organization, or core hub that people “in the know” seem to view as a major authority? Then my next step is to get to those things and start diving deeper – but I couldn’t have known where to go without that first step.
That method, the intentional diving into a confusing deep end and looking at a massive volume of information for patterns that I’ll revisit later, works for me. It’s always been what worked for me. I remember my father telling me how to pass my driver’s test: “Don’t bother studying or preparing. Just go take the test, fail, look at what you didn’t know and that will tell you what to study. Go back in two weeks, take it again, and you’ll pass.” That’s exactly what happened.
So like I said, it works for me. That method can give me a good working competency in a lot of different subjects very quickly, and very deep expertise on the ones I continue to study. But over the years, I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily good advice for everyone. Many people would be stressed beyond panic if they tried to learn in that unstructured, chaotic way. Plenty of people wouldn’t get anything out of the dive into the deep end except more confusion.
For many people, a very structured, planned curriculum is a much better learning environment. For me, that’s torture to the point where I learn almost nothing, because my curiosity about a subject generates questions at a rate twenty times faster than they’re getting answered, so I lose focus. In many ways, I need to be able to chase every wild thought I have while I’m learning, in order to surface the gaps in my knowledge and connect all the dots that are starting to appear in my mind.
My overall point is this: It’s very, very helpful to have a good working model of what learning environment actually serves you. Most people haven’t actually thought about it, and so they spend time in models other people suggest and don’t learn as much as they could. If you take the time to consider how you actually learn, you can experiment and tweak that method and then deploy it whenever you want.
Learning in the way that serves you is fun. It’s encouraging and exciting instead of a chore. And we could all stand to have fewer barriers between us and our curiosity!
The Opportunity Machine 