How Do You Approach Learning? | 5/27/21

Adjusted my biweekly circle to be in the afternoon yesterday to accommodate some other meetings. Ended up eating out at Optimist yet again and doing some Notion V2 work before Sudha called and we chatted for a couple hours. I'm getting used to her calling me VIsh lol b/c her name is also Sai so didn't want to make it confusing. After that completed another couple of tasks in the Notion V2 project before working out, doing a Vipassana meditation, chilling with Mom on the phone while eating dinner and then called it a night by reading a few pages in Meditations. I didn't use my phone for the last 10-15 min before I slept this time and I felt so much more fresh than I did Wednesday morning when I had used it immediately prior to sleeping. So I'll look to continue that.

Learning. What are our current assumptions on it? How do I think differently about it? Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks about how divergent thinking is very useful and vital to the creative thinking process. School and society and STEM has taught us the value of convergent thinking, and it definitely has its massive value in the world. Divergent thinking can 1000% be more emphasized as a key part of childhood and personal development, and not just relegated to 'the arts.' All these small and large imprints that these situations have created have had larger effects on how we learn as well. When we learn, as children or as adults, we're consuming information in the form of books, videos, podcasts, articles, etc. Now a lot of times the way that people approach it is through the lens of 'What are the takeaways of this piece of content?' They want the key points of a 200-page book lets say in 1 page or in 15 min audio version so they can practice those points. That can definitely provide value, not doubting that. This is from the unconscious assumption that "The best way I can learn about this content is to gather and implement its key takeaways."

Now what if we suppose the opposite? What if, the best way I can learn is through asking more questions about it? Instead of a book's key points, what if every chapter, paragraph, even sentence had so much potential value in it that one sentence sparked an hour of thought and reflection and ideas? Instead of converging on its key takeaways, what if we use one point in the book to diverge into many different avenues of thought? I would argue that's the best way to consume content b/c you're wrestling with it, pondering on it and even perhaps living it well after you've read, listened, or seen it. Combining the proverb, "Knowledge is only a rumor until it's in the muscle" with this, what's the best way to get that knowledge into action? Through your words, which are a result of your thoughts. So the question here is are you more likely to think about something and feel something that you've spent significant time exploring in various angles and applications or something that, even if you wrote yourself, don't connect to it as viscerally b/c you're content with that convergent takeaway? The benefit of divergent learning and thinking and content consumption is that it created all these paths to explore more. Each branch of which begets more branches, and so on. However, if you transform the plane of these branches from just going on one axis to a 3D model, it becomes a neural network of thoughts and ideas, all of which are your own to varying degrees. The magic of creativity happens when there's a catalyst that connects one of these idea neurons to another that were the results of totally different content sources and topics. And when you build one such imprint in your mind, it will happen again in a slightly larger scale. With enough of these, it just becomes natural and part of your identity as being a creative person. All from just taking time to reflect a bit longer than you normally would after consuming some piece of content.

You know what the cool thing is? This entire journal is the result of that! I was reading Meditations and some line really resonated with me and made me think. After a few minutes of thought, I wrote on line in my ideas page of the journal "Learning & knowledge is not a convergent process. It's a divergent one. Takeaways. Network interconnected." (see pic) And I spent one hour writing this, writing and learning new ideas and making new connections with in the process itself. Which I'm sure will spark more thought. What a meta morning!