How Hard Could This Be?
Learning curves, one skateboard, and six qualities to help you learn something new
Friends,
Let's go back in time to visit College-Michael. He's standing on a skateboard at the top of a quarter pipe in a small Arkansas town. His friends are watching, and even though he's never skateboarded in his life, he leans forward anyway and thinks, “I played Tony Hawk Pro Skater on N64, how hard could this be?” A good question to ask, but a little too late to stop what happened next.
Lets slow time down and uncover the assumptions he had before standing on that quarter pipe. Sure, there's some misplaced confidence and eagerness to impress friends. There's even a geniune interest in trying something new. But deeper than that, there's an assumption that learning something new should be easy and pain-free. That all we have to do is try it once or read about it and then we should be on the easy street to expertise.
Of course, nothing worth our time works that way. Learning takes effort and practice and time and commitment and lots of mistakes and trying again. Maybe you've never stepped onto a skateboard, but I'm sure we all can think of a time when we think, “I should just be able to do this, right?”
Malcolm Knowles, the expert of adult learning, saw that if adults were going to learn anything new, we had to first reimagine what learning means at this different stage of life. We enter adulthood with lots of knowledge and life experience, so how can learning take that into account? Knowles identified six assumptions of adult learning, and here's my paraphrase of them:
Readiness: We need to be facing challenges we can't solve with what we already know.
Need to Know: We need to know why we're learning something new in the first place.
Problem-Orientation: We need to focus on the how-to, not longwinded research history.
Experience: We need opportunities to integrate our personal histories and what we already know with what we're learning.
Intrinsic Motivation: We need to stoke internal desire to learn instead of external incentives like grades.
Self-Concept: We need to feel responsible for our own growth.
This is a great list! Learning as adults is complicated. Most of us are working full-time jobs and balancing lots of responsibilities, so learning has to quickly shorten the distance between ideas and the messiness of real life.
But what interests me most about Knowles list and others like it are that they assume we already have a healthy sense of self (If we all started there, then life coaches and pastors and therapists would be out of business!). These six assumptions are about the act of learning, but they don't have much to say about how to become mature and resilient adults who want to learn in the first place. So then how exactly do we cultivate that healthy sense of self? I’ve come up with a list. Here are six qualities for the inner life of learning:
Commitment: Learning anything takes time and effort. And that means we have to make decisions with a longer time horizon than just what we're feeling in the moment. We have to commit to a struggle that might take weeks or months or even years.
Humility: If we think we know everything already, why go on a learning journey? But if we acknowledge that we don't know everything, we're taking the first step toward a process of discoverying what's beyond our own horizons.
Curiosity: What's beyond what we know? The only way to answer that is to start exploring and taking proactive interest in the world beyond our egos.
Receptivity: If humility is acknowledging our limits and curiosity is exploring beyond them, receptiveness is being open to what we discover—especially from teachers and mentors who are further down the path.
Courage: Learning is hard, especially when we're on a spiritual or psychological journey. That takes an inner strength to lean into the fears and anxieties of learning and to be willing to take wise risks.
Self-compassion: Learning and mistakes go hand-in-hand. If we can practice decoupling failure and self-identity and loving the parts of ourselves that we're ashamed of, we'll be more ready to learn.
The truth is as long as we're breathing, we can learn something new. The problem is that the more we age, the easier it is to rely on strengths and avoid weaknesses, to let past failures shrink the boundaries of our lives, to assume learning should be easy, to get comfortable with the limits we set for ourselves. The tragedy here is that if we get too comfortable with our self-imposed limits, we may forget they're there—and we'll live diminished lives without even knowing it (see that Phillip Larkin poem below on electric fences. Hint: the poem isn't about cattle...).
For me, one of those self-imposed limits is thinking I'm bad at sports. It's a story I've told for years. When I was a kid I “played” baseball for a season, and by “played” I mean sitting cross-legged in left field pulling up grass and occasionally striking out at home plate (My only good memory of baseball was enjoying a popsicle after the game was over). More recently, I've tried playing pickleball and raquetball with friends—and every time I swished and swooshed, knocking the ball in every wrong direction. And then what happened on that skateboard? Of course I fell. Hard. Thankfully, I didn't break a bone, but I was certainly flush with embarrassment. And I never skateboarded again.
What all these moments have in common is an ever-tightening loop away from mistakes and toward self-protection: I tell myself I'm bad at sports, I rarely put myself in situations to make mistakes and grow, I simmer with anger when I fail in front of friends, and I tell myself it can't be helped: I'm bad at sports. The result of this feedback loop? Missing out having fun with friends, slowly learning to improve, and enjoying a more active life.
They call it a learning curve for a reason: climbing up that curve takes time and effort and resilience, no matter the subject matter. Reaching toward that growing edge doesn't always feel good, either, but most good things don't come easy. In a world obsessed with convenience and quick fixes, the slow work of learning can feel like a struggle to avoid at all costs.
But then, what kind of world do we want to live in? One that slowly shrinks down to what we can control? Or a larger, endlessly surprising world enticing us to grow beyond what we know?
Take care,
Michael
“Wires” by Philip Larkin
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
Learning by Heart: Teaching to Free the Creative Spirit
I want to live in this former ice-cream factory, please and thank you
Dynamite Larkin poem, thanks! And I love how this issue dovetails with a recent conversation I was having with my person about how we learn today. I think we were both a bit surprised to take that question as squarely or head-on as we could ... and realize it wasn't something we'd thought much about. What is my learning style? Why does learning new ideas feel so different than learning to put new string on my new weed eater? How to account for the ground note of exhaustion around learning when we're all (seemingly?) required to keep learning new thing (especially new tech) at ever-increasing speeds? So many great questions, and I love how your offerings here bring me back to them with new possibilities to chew on (as I eye that electric fence!). Cheers.