How To Learn Something Every Day
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Five years ago, I was sitting in yet another lecture, furiously scribbling notes in yet another notebook, trying to cram what I was hearing into the small compartments of my brain that I had reserved for “new information.” Like the trash bin in my kitchen, this compartment was constantly being filled and neglected until the time came to clean it out and make room for other, newer information. I was caught right in the middle of one of the most increasingly common problems of our generation: too much information, not enough application.
According to a study done in 2008 by Roger Bon at the University of California-San Diego, it was estimated that the average human being consumed around 34 gigabytes (GB) of information each day. From 1980 to 2008, information consumption grew by 5.4% annually. This amount of content is enough to overload an average laptop with a 256 GB hard drive in a week. This statistic was accurate in 2008, right at the birth of the iPhone and the start of the personal handheld device. Now, the amount of content we’re exposed to is even more drastic.
Compare this reality to the fact that for decades, since George Miller at Harvard University in 1956 published his landmark research, our capacity for processing information in conjunction with our short-term memory is capped near or around seven pieces of unique information at one time. Herein lies the tension that many of us feel on a daily basis. We’re bombarded with over 34 GB of content, and we’re only able to process a minute fraction of this information.
This was the tension that struck me anew in that classroom five years ago. Instead of relenting to this overwhelming narrative as I had often done before, I decided instead to take steps toward shifting how I learned. I was hopeful that this would set me up for positive growth and application in the days to come. I wanted to learn more deeply, and not just more broadly. I wanted to learn daily, not just when I needed to regurgitate information I barely understood.
I want to show you what those steps looked like. For me, this practice became defined by finding or identifying one thing every day that I was learning. I would then journal that thought into a document that not only kept track of what I learned, but also showed how many pieces of information I had deeply consumed since the start of my list. I would look back at my list every week and go over the things I had most recently learned while skimming through the items I had learned weeks or months before.
This practice, while simple in nature, has truly changed my life. I believe you can take these same steps today to strengthen your practice of daily, deep learning.
Identifying the Method
In October 2018, a group of researchers at Stanford University did a deep study of how the brain decides what to learn. They knew that most of our learning comes down to feedback — the positive or negative reactions we experience when we put something into practice. They wanted to push beyond this observation, and look more closely at how individuals determined what was actually “feedback” to their activities and what was simply “noise.” In an age of content overload, it’s becoming increasingly more important to be able to identify this difference.
For me, after I left that lecture five years ago, I began researching and experimenting with how I could develop a system of deep, daily learning that was both simple to maintain and practical for my season of life. I knew that as with most things learning-related, my application had to be personal or else it would never stick. I couldn’t simply take someone else’s method and implant it within my daily life. I didn’t want to be a parasite, but a symbiote.
I read a lot of articles and studies about journaling and the positive effects of writing down thoughts and ideas on the development of the brain, emotional intelligence, and mental stability. I knew the relation between listening, writing, and memory.
I’d heard from professors about the benefits of connecting different learning methods. They said that the more methods you utilized, the more likely your brain would be to remember something. So I decided that my method would likely include some version of writing something down, whether on a piece of paper, a notebook, or my laptop.
I also knew that, like many of us, the time I had to do something like this every day was limited. Life is busy, and between appointments, work, kids, family, hobbies, and travel, there wasn’t enough time on my calendar to squeeze in a big block of self-devoted learning and application each day. If I wanted to have a daily practice of deep learning, I would have to make it short and sweet.
Finally, I quickly learned that if I was to maintain a daily practice of deep learning, I would have to study how to better walk the tightrope of absorbing more content purposefully and not casually. After some weeks of practice, I discovered that while I was familiar with onboarding a lot of content each day, I needed to both diversify my incoming content and better parse through that which was truly important and that which I could let fall by the wayside. I had to become a more expert sifter, panning for the pieces of gold amongst the thousands of pebbles of silt.
And so, after months of study and research, of experimenting with different means and methods, I began what I called “Pieces of Gold.” On August 30th, 2015, I marked my first entry in an Evernote file set aside for this purpose. I wrote down, “ 8.30.15 — #1 — If you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either one of them.” Looking back, this is fitting advice for a person attempting to narrow down and hone learning into a daily, deep practice.
How to Learn
Since that day, I’ve recorded one thing I’ve learned each day. I’m now up to over 1,400 things that I have learned over the past almost four years. I’ve collected over 55 pages of content: tips, quotes, spiritual revelations, insights about my marriage, my friendships, my work environments. Ideas about philosophy, leadership, determination, perseverance, joy, and truth, to name a few. I’ve learned more deeply than I would have ever thought possible, and I’m applying so much more than I was at any other time before I began my list.
As I mentioned above, learning is incredibly personal, so what works for me may very likely not work exactly for you. This isn’t a recipe as much as it as a playbook. Over the last 1,400-some days, I’ve put together a few tips from my own experience that I believe will greatly benefit your practice of daily, deep learning.
1. Shift From “Life-Changing” to “Life-Impacting”
Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash
The number one piece of advice that I give to people who aspire to build a daily practice of learning is to shift their mindset away from learning for life-change. All good learning eventually leads to life-change, but rarely do our lives actually change overnight or immediately as a result of the knowledge we’ve just learned. If this is our metric for good learning, we’ll all become discouraged after the first few weeks.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a positive impact or growth in my life in a certain area, or recalled a quote or impactful thought that I had learned, only to look back at my list and see that I’d learned this knowledge four to five months earlier. Life-change takes time. It takes wrestling through good content and applying what you’ve learned time and time again. This is maturity. This is adding iron to your core. A life that’s devoid of wrestling is a life that’s not worth living.
Most of us love stories of life-change, but we don’t love what it takes to get there. As you start or continue your daily learning process, begin by shifting away from this life-change mentality. Instead, begin focusing on that which impacts you daily, and go from there.
An expert learner is impacted every day, but they’re only changed when that which has impacted them consolidates and overwhelms the previous practice or stronghold within the heart. As David Brooks said in The Road to Character, “We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves.”
2. Use Your Own Words
True learning requires intentional thought and effort. Simply hearing what someone says or reading what someone thinks and then writing down their words verbatim rarely leads to learning. It’s mimicry at its finest. While it’s important to be an individual thinker, we must admit that all learning requires some imitation.
The wisest man to ever live, Solomon, once said in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” We’re all in the process of absorbing information that has already been absorbed by previous generations or others in our time, as well as passing on lessons that have already previously been learned.
However, if we’re to truly become great daily learners, we must strive to not only regurgitate, but also to think. Whenever you read a quote, hear a talk, or see a piece of information that you would like to remember, try recording it in your own words.
The practice of putting your own words around something will not only help you store this information more deeply within your mind, but it will also help you be able to more readily explain your learnings to someone else. This idea is at the core of the Feynman technique for learning, and it has been transformational in my own learning process.
3. Diversify Your Inputs
If you truly desire to learn deeply daily, you’ll quickly realize that you need to consume more content. As I mentioned above, for myself, I began to see that I was consuming a lot of content that wasn’t actually helpful for my learning process. I needed to tone down my trivial content and beef up my content intake from sources that were helpful and effective at increasing my learning.
I started to listen to podcasts and audiobooks that I didn’t listen to before. I started to read widely, moving past the same books I would typically stick to. I started reading articles as often as possible, taking five-minute breaks throughout my day to download a new thought or perspective on a topic I was interested in. I bulked up on the types of content I was consuming, diversifying my range so as to get a better stream of learning coming in.
But if you stop there, you miss out on the true opportunity to diversify your inputs. Everything I just mentioned is primarily cognitive, intellectual forms of learning, which are perhaps among the most important types of learning. However, what changed my ability to learn deeply daily was not just increasing these pathways, but also shifting my understanding that I could learn from anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Leonardo Da Vinci was an expert learner, primarily because he was insatiably curious. Born in 1452, Da Vinci produced between 20,000 to 28,000 pages of notes and sketches about work-related subjects and everything else that interested him. He was curious about dozens of topics, including but not limited to anatomy, engineering, philosophy, painting, botany, physiology, landscapes, proportion, perspective, architecture, warfare, geography, zoology, light and shade, theories, and inventions. He started writing his journals when he was 26, and he continued writing for the rest of his life.
To become an expert learner, we all must look out and see the millions of opportunities to learn that are right in front of us. The movie that you saw last night — what did that teach you about storytelling and plot? The way the bus driver arrived at your destination, taking route B instead of route A, what did that teach you about decision-making and precision?
We’re surrounded by real examples of people who are learning in-process or who are sharing their earned or assigned expertise. We simply need to train our senses to be observant, and we need to continue to ask curious questions. This diversification will be crucial in becoming a great daily deep learner.
4. Return As Often As Possible
Lastly, no learning practice can truly be complete without a habit that places a strong emphasis on returning to what you’ve learned for recall and continued application.
For me, it has become my practice to once-a-week, typically on a Friday or Saturday, go back and look at the “pieces of gold” I extracted for that previous week and review them. This isn’t always a long process — like I said before, I’ve tried to create a structure that doesn’t infringe too much on my time. But this weekly practice, developed over months, has been the final piece of my learning puzzle. It has drastically shifted how I’m able to grow deeply daily.
At some points in my learning journey, I’ve invited other friends into the process with me. During certain months, we’ve texted or emailed each other our takeaways from each week. Typically, I would do this in eight to ten-week spurts. If you can find some people to do this with, that is one of the best situations for your learning.
Most things done in a community are better for it. However, we can’t become reliant on this community as our only form of accountability. Learning is personal. It’s at the foundation of your desire to improve and strengthen your own life. No one can make you do that. So when it comes to returning to what you’ve learned, you’ll want to ensure that you have a practice in place that is sustained regardless of if people are on the journey with you.
Conclusion
In a day and age where content is everywhere, for those who desire to learn deeply and daily, it’s imperative to build a practice that is not only effective, but also simple. Learning these days is rarely about how to consume. As pointed out in the study from the University of California-San Diego, we’ve all seemingly become experts in consuming content, sheerly by the vastness of what we take in. Rather, the test of true learning comes from what you consume and why you do it.
If you shift towards life-impact and not life-change, use your own words, diversify your inputs, and return as often as possible to what you’re learning, I know that you can become a deep and daily learner.