Learning

This blog is about learning. Much learning comes from books. There are so many great books to read and so many interesting topics to discover, that there simply isn’t enough time to absorb it all. As such, when someone is voracious for knowledge, they must make choices in what they learn, and then strive to absorb that learning as quickly as they can. That in itself is a skill.

The building of knowledge and understanding is an epistemic need, one that can trigger FOMO. Anything less than omniscience is a source of stress.

Time however is as equally pressing as it is finite. It weighs heavier when in short supply. Ever felt the clock staring at you as you urgently try to meet a deadline/catch a train/ meet your date?

The more time one spends learning any specific thing, the less time one has left on Earth to learn other things. And those things you’re not learning could be, unbeknownst to you, more conducive to your personal power than the things you have chosen to learn.

It seems that some curation of what to learn, and what not to learn, would be helpful. Now only you can decide on that. We can make suggestions but you and your heartfelt ‘internal scorecard’ values are the key.

All success or power works like this:

Success is a by-product of skills (competence, expertise, and abilities)

Skills are a by-product of learning

Learning is a by-product of curiosity.

If you are deeply curious about something you will become skilful at it. Emotional intelligence starts with being curious about yourself and thence curious about other people. Not their feet or abs, but their minds and feelings.

Now whatever you and I choose to learn incurs a sunk cost, so it is in our interest to choose both wisely (to make the most informed decisions we’re capable of in choosing what we learn) and to choose quickly (to avoid the unproductive inertia of indecision and procrastination). For example, suppose you choose to read and make notes on a lengthy book, but, four hours in, you realise it’s just the dull opinion of someone writing to please their audience rather than deeply thought-out or researched meaningful ideas… but you wade on nonetheless as otherwise the four hours feels like a waste. Sunk cost bias! If the film is crap… leave the cinema!

Making wise choices about what to learn can be tricky. The accuracy of a choice tends to improve with the slowness with which it is decided, and thus there’s an argument to be made that slower, more accurate choices are superior to quicker and more sloppily made ones. Similar to husband choices, I’m led to believe.

Either way, fast or slow, momentum is the achiever’s friend, procrastination but their foe. Action beats inaction every time.

And so in light of this there’s an even greater argument to be made: that in the pursuit of growth, it is better to simply make a decision than it is to make none at all, for even in failure there is education, whilst in the stagnant bog of planning to exercise and read and learn there is little besides regret and the illusion of virtuous feelings about what you will do.

Action beats inaction again.

E.g. Anyone who says to me “My diet will start after the first day of spring,” is enjoying those feelings of a positive future despite the possible lie they have told themselves and others.

Summarising, I believe it is desirable to make smart learning choices in as little time as possible, whilst learning the chosen subject or skill with maximum depth and understanding in the shortest time possible.

“Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring” – Alexander Pope, 1711

Most people outwardly agree learning is important; fewer actually are willing to expend the effort necessary to actively learn. Most ask for ‘tips and tricks’ or ‘quicker & easier’ or ‘cheat sheets’ or ‘short cuts’.

You are not drinking deep of the Pierian Spring!

Fewer still seek to tinker with their learning methodology in order to optimise it.

Anders Ericsson’s work [1] has made it clear that practice does NOT make perfect.

The reality Ericsson proves is that PERFECT PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. Forgive the cliché, but that means The Obstacle is the Way [2]!! Tackle the hardest problems, avoid the tips and tricks and… well, drink deep of the Pierian Spring!!!

But is knowledge even important to the accumulation of goals? Surely experience is superior to reading?

No. Experience has been quite wrongly conflated with expertise.

Sure, the deeply curious eternal learner is better after 20 years of action than they were after two.

Twenty years of perfect practice means most people can become expert at mostly anything. Contrastingly, 20 years of apathetically sitting in a comfort zone blithely doing nothing… that offers nothing of value.

Again, the burden (the task) is the way.

Indisputably, there is clearly great value to knowledge, but knowledge bereft of a means of implementation is useless. It’s like a country with vast gold reserves with no way of mining them.

Experience as equated to time is overrated, for there’s not enough time in this life to experience everything to the degree that’s sufficient to master it. This is why we have specialisation, and it’s arguably better to be a master of one trade than a layman in all.

This is also the value of books, for they allow us to derive the core lessons from a true expert in a field without requiring us to invest the time necessary to fully experience it as they did.

This power of books is that they enable us to learn from those who have already invested the time to become an expert in something. They are like surrogate mentors.

Some books may take 10 hours to read; but it would take you vastly more time to live the things the writer did in order to form a conclusion with comparable authority. Good books are a blessing to humanity.

That said, reading a good book that offers you a chance to upgrade is useless if it’s not implemented. Books and the knowledge they offer are useless without implementation.

Aristotle first documented this propensity or the lack thereof. He taught and saw everyone recognise a mote of wisdom in his words. Some of his pupils implemented it and others did not. Some found implementation easy, others not so. He realised that many learners became huge repositories of useless information. They knew the facts but knew not how to use them. Others immediately tried to use the knowledge. He believed this variance was a skill in itself and called it Phronesis.

Phronesis is an ancient Greek word for a type of wisdom or intelligence relevant to practical action, implying both good judgement and excellence of character and habits.

Sometimes referred to as “practical virtue”, phronesis was a common topic of discussion in ancient Greek philosophy as it related to living your authentic values via practical application of wisdom and virtue as well as newly acquired knowledge.

Reading a book without understanding its value – or being able to implement that value – leads to us becoming cluttered with meaningless data.

Compare this with another Greek term: the sophist. Sophism was the skill in being seen to know a thing without knowing a thing. Plato (Socrates’ best-known student) described sophists as hunters and athletes in the contest of words who offered no true knowledge, just strong opinions. “Shadows of the true.” Sophistic skills were essential for anyone who wanted to move into politics and public office but lacked the deep-thinking mind that it may require to truly serve the public.

So these sophists, these opinions, these veneers of true knowledge….

Perhaps they are akin to today’s ‘influencers’. Actually, no. There are many great speakers and writers and teachers who influence me and many others. They publicly reject the title ‘influencer’.

Only influencers gleefully label themselves influencers

Socrates’ best-known quotes illustrate his everlasting doubt. He says:

“I am not wise, but I love wisdom” and

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”

But perhaps best of all:

“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers”

Sadly, lovely friend, we know that sophism has reborn in a contemporary form and become monetised on the GRAM!!

People’s entire lives and how best to live yours are on there… wake-up time, breakfast, music listened to, productivity quotas met, wife snogged, kids fulfilled, teeth beautified, nurse is a Nordic shield-maiden goddess (just friends), car… everything. It’s sophistically sold to you as creating VALUE, but it’s clearly done to GLORIFY an ego.

Rant over. Back to learning.

Neurologically, we know that what you decide to do tomorrow is based on your memories. You have an academic memory and a procedural memory. You use these to act in the world.

Imagine reading a book about riding a bicycle then thinking you can ride it well straight away.

Procedural memory is king if you want to ride a bike. Book learning is of limited value. You have to sit on the bicycle and wobble and pedal and fall and get back on. Failure is essential to learn. If you insist on zero failure you cannot pursue this skill.

Even with riding a bike, personal experience is inefficient because you do a lot of things that don’t work in order to discover what does, whereas the success derived from the experience of others can be distilled into knowledge that saves you from making the mistakes necessary to arrive at the same conclusion.

By this I mean hearing that “your feet go here and your hands go here, and these things are the brakes” is very helpful. Knowing that means you will still fall off… but you have to fall off before you learn to not fall off.

Translate that into dentistry. Are you allowed to fall off? Falling off in this context means trying to help a patient and mucking it up.

NO! Predatory lawyers and regulators are waiting to punish you if you do; they are waiting and advertising and hoping for your problems to become their target. So, if failure is potentially catastrophic, we are faced with a super high stakes challenge of learning. It’s like learning to ride a bike along a thin plank of wood between two tall buildings. If you fall… you might die. Guess what, you don’t even want to try to learn. This is defensive dentistry and I am certain it’s growing as our perceived threat level increases.

But back to a more positive train of thought… Published, peer-reviewed articles may draw knowledge from a wide data pool and can recognise patterns and trends to derive principles, and these principles can in turn be used by us to increase our odds of success.

Knowledge is not power but power potential, and rather it is the application of knowledge and not knowledge itself that constitutes power as we think of it. As such, it is in one’s interest to accrue as much knowledge as possible in order to increase their power potential.

This macro approach to knowledge allows us to draw inferences with a level of accuracy that would be simply impossible were they reliant solely on personal experience.

People trust experience more because it can’t be faked. Time-equated experience is, however, still overrated.

I’m not trying to debase the necessity of experience for it certainly has value, undoubtedly; many things require experience in order to be truly understood. I have ridden a bike daily for 20 years and I can’t teach the nuance of that.

Equally, good teachers can teach us things we don’t notice or that we struggle to articulate and consciously understand. Listening to them and reading their words not only saves us time, but more importantly it allows us to ‘pierce the universe’ more deeply than if we were to remain unaware.

It is this quality of the book or the teacher that is irreplaceably additive to our limited time on this Earth!

Good teachers and good e-books may not even aspire to tell you what to do. They may just guide you and show what to not do. The most popular clinical videos we show on Aspire focus on the clumsy, problematic endo techniques or veneer cementation. People get to see the etch activating adjacent enamel and how it led to the teeth splinting. They now know how to not do that. That is far more valuable to the learner than seeing a perfect before and after.

So far:

• There is infinite learning to do but only finite time
• Efficient and curated learning is paramount
• We learn by reading and then doing without the fear of punitive measures when we fail
• Learning without implementation is useless
• Implementation is inhibited by the fear of punishment from the attempt
• Learning from others’ failure is protective against our own failure.

“Ok, so if reading is necessary to augment my ‘success,’ and if reading is the default state of initial learning, how do I optimise my learning process to learn even quicker?”

So far we have outlined a philosophy on learning. We can now unpack the steps on what to do with it.

Again this comes back to Aristotle. Utter gobsmacking genius.

In addition to insisting on the development of a skill level in Phronesis, he cherished efficient deep learning.

If a person can reduce the time taken to learn a thing without compromising on the depth with which they understand the thing, they can gain a huge edge over any competition.

So, for example, rather than constantly reading books, we can look for people who have gone to the effort of fully understanding a book, plucking out its gems and explaining what they mean in a summarised manner.

We attempt to do this constantly at Aspire. We criticise ourselves daily to try and do it better.  It means our groups can profit from this time investment and learn exactly what they need in only a fraction of the time.

Books condense life, but accurate and pertinent summaries condense books, and thus pound for pound I believe reading or at least actively listening to summaries given by people who have fully read a text is something that will provide me with the greatest intellectual return in the shortest amount of time. I believe very few people are doing this, and yet this alone can give a human a great edge in this game we call life. Podcasts and Clubhouse are global phenomena because of this.

I criticise aspects of modernity often enough. Instagram and dopamine addiction are wrecking adolescents. But there are also incredible benefits to the digital age.

Podcasts are an obvious place to begin streamlining the learning process. We may do one on psychology and emotional intelligence in healthcare soon.

The only drawback with podcasts is that many of the hosts are doing it for their own status, and becoming a famous seems to be aspirational for many. Fame is a drug. You’ll need more and more and need to keep coming back.

***

There is a possible contradiction within this blog. I start by arguing for deep learning in a slow, luscious way – then switch to abridged methods for teaching/learning as quickly as possible.

I use abridged pertinent learning to accumulate wisdom efficiently and also to curate where I will spend more time in pleasurable learning, such as the pleasure of reading a whole book.

Podcasts are, as such, probably semi-educational easy listening; but no doubt they can add masses of value to you – and the right ones on a given subject are simply superb.

I would argue that a step-up from podcasts are audio summaries. An audio summary consists of a speaker summarising the key points of a text and articulating these findings to the listener.

The advantage that audio summaries have over podcasts is how the speaker directly delivers the information free of the fluff of banter or social observation you can expect from podcasts. No hello’s, no personal news about their cat, no updates on how they are feeling.

Finally, we have text summaries. The main reason I believe text summaries to be superior to audio summaries is because audio can play in the background, allowing you to tune them out whilst you do other things. Text on the other hand demands your full attention to be imbibed, and thus cannot fall victim to your need to check social media. It’s actually quite difficult to find anyone going through the hassle of summarising books into text summaries; however, there are online book clubs that do exactly this.

The drawback to all of this is the fact that reading a whole book can be deeply pleasurable and offers a sense of completing a journey. A text summary is cold, clipped and utilitarian. But for knowledge and my epistemic needs – they are my drug I have no desire to quit.

I wouldn’t listen to a podcast in lieu of reading an actual book. However, if you’re reading to grow rather than for pleasure, I highly recommend integrating audio, and particularly text summaries, into your autodidactic toolkit.

If you’re not improving, you’re not growing, and if you’re not growing, you’re losing.

By speeding up your rate of learning, you vastly increase your chances of success. Don’t hold yourself back. It’s why we teach the way we do. Fun, efficient, curated, transparent and for you.

[1] Peak: How All of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary Things by Anders Ericsson

[2] The Obstacle is The Way: The Ancient Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage by Ryan Holiday, best-selling author of books about marketing, culture and the human condition