Learning How To Learn

Growing up, learning was somehow always easy. Later in life, this was probably due to a number of different factors, including sacrifices made by my family, providing what can only be described as an environment incredibly focussed on learning.

As I started to have the freedom to make choices, I have to say I made some pretty amazing blunders. These choices eventually culminated in me as I exist today, so I suppose they weren't a complete loss. However, they did rob me of some of my best years to learn.

Once you realise a mistake, a rational person should want to correct the same. Hence, the quest to learn how to learn. Given the Internet, We actually do have a great way to approach this by way of Learning how to learn

This course on Coursera by McMaster University & University of California San Diego is an excellent study and is broken into manageable chunks of 4 weeks. The required course material needs about 9 hours of study and makes for some interesting reading for anyone who wants to Learn how to Learn. This is easily my favourite recommendation for anyone on Coursera. Yes, even more than that AI and ML course. 😁

There are some powerful ideas in there that you may have heard of in other context or even have been using unconsciously. Some of these include identifying the focussed and diffused modes of study, identifying the process and choosing to value the same over the product for successful learning, identifying procrastination and habits that leads to the same and tools to manage learning.

One example from the course that really resonated was the notion of product focus inducing a perceptible pain. And that, the pain went away once you began. This was incredible to me as this described the various times when I had been stuck in a similar cycle. A shift to a process approach is great in that you learn to take steps since the process is what you are focussing on.

Do check it out and hopefully this should help anyone looking to learn, learn better!