How to change the habit of wanting to learn everything to achieve better results?
What you want to be when you grow up, is the single most question that gets asked when we were a child. Last week I was reading a lesson in Hindi for my 4th grader ‘papa jab bacche the’ — ‘When dad was a kid’.
Narrated from the perspective of a kid about the time when her father was a child. The ‘dad’ had a different answer every time he was asked the question ‘बड़े होकर तुम क्या बनना चाहते हो?’ — ‘what do you want to be when you grow up.
He wanted to be a watchman at first because he can make a loud noise when the whole city sleeps. Another time he wanted to be an ice-cream seller because he can roam around with handcart. The next time he wanted to become a railway shunting master as he gets to clean and fix trains. He wanted to be a pilot, an actor, a dog yes a dog, and so on.
At the end of the story, after he encounters an army person, ‘dad’ realizes that ‘वह इंसान बनना चाहता था’ — he wants to be a human more than anything else. (English translation here).
The problem with wanting to learning everything
The amount of information available on the internet is vast one can be a lifelong learner. Last few years availability of MOOCs and online courses made learning come home, come to you. Courses taught by emeritus professors of top IVY league colleges are freely available that were out of reach a few years ago. Every day we see the social posts, I learned the ‘XYZ’ course from the ‘ABC’ university, I completed ten certifications from a cloud service provider.
Many of us subscribe to tens of courses across multiple learning platforms. How many of the courses have we completed? how many of the courses had an impact in our career, personal life. Where have you implemented those learnings? Have we reached learning fatigue?
I am guilty of doing it, I have subscribed to more than 15+ courses in each one of the platforms, I want to learn reading music, fascinated by how music is created, I would like understand music creation, I want to know about quantum computing, I have infact created a Quantum computing group on social platform. I wanted to create robotics, understand supply chain analytics. The list is endless. And this fizzles out over some time. A research study says the range of drop out in online learning is 40–80%
We human beings are the most curious creatures in the whole ecosystem of life. There is nothing wrong with learning for the genuine curiosity of a topic. But we don’t have infinite time. So how to make sure to channel our energy and focus on a few things that matter most to achieve better results?
Multiple reasons why we do it
- Genuine curiosity to learn new things
- It probably could help in our careers
- It probably could help in our personal development
- A colleague of mine did the course and got a promotion or pay hike
- The course is from the top IVY league university and I can brag about it
- I can afford to pay to get a certificate
- New-age tech skills, I need to know breeding edge technology
- Bored with current learning activity because you find something new novel more exciting
How did I manage to change the want to learn everything?
- Don’t fight it — Let the curiosity run its course
- Write It down — You want to learn something, complete a MOOC course, achieve a certification, complete your first marathon or start photography write it down on paper why you want to do it. Yes, its important to write on a paper, not mobile, not computer pen and paper, and see the magic
- Do it 100 times — The thing that you want to learn, try doing it 100 times. You want to learn badminton, can you play for 100 days continuously. If you fail to do it beyond ten days, stop it go back to step 1, and read why you want to do it in the first place. If you want to read books, try reading 100 days daily, or 100 pages or 100 books in a year before you give up. Once you make this habit of ‘Doing it 100 times” either you like and continue achieving better results or give up and avoid wasting time.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. — Steve Jobs
Summary
- Most of us guilty of wanting to learn everything and anything, curiosity is human nature.
- Know why it happens, why you want learn a particular thing?
- The better of way for your learning to result in good outcomes is to write it down and do it 100x times.
Two good book recommendations
Thank you for reading this article — I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to comment, share it and let me know what you think about it.
Disclaimer: All the opinions expressed are personal independent thoughts and not to be attributed to my current or previous employers.
