LESSONS LEARNED

     Here are a few simple insights about learning found just on the other side of complexity in the school of hard knocks…

1.        Life is one huge learning experiment. One object is to develop good judgment. Oddly good judgment is based on experience and experience comes from bad judgment.

2.        Learning is about as smooth as glue.  You can go years and forget most of what you learned before and then have a lifetime of profound life-changing insights in a matter of seconds.  The trouble is you can easily forget them too.

3.        Just about the time you figure something out, your understanding of it is either obsolete, the thing changes completely, or it’s irrelevant. Then you are stuck with just one more useless idea that is taking up valuable head space.

4.        The product and value of learning has nothing to do with ability of effort. This is sometime disappointing except when serendipity happens.

5.        People would get along so much better if the speed of their learning of the most important things was similar, but that will never happen. That is the purpose of patience and tolerance and motivation for teaching.

6.        One of the most irritating problems in life comes about by people’s inability to communicate their learning completely and clearly.

7.        Your learning curve greatly accelerates when you start acknowledging how much you don’t know.

8.        The most useful learning is a result of unusual experiences, reaction to intuitions, pain, lack of expectations, open-mindedness or luck or lack of it.

9.        It is nearly impossible to learn what someone else has learned because there is too much pride of ownership and need for individuality involved.

10.    The full path of learning seems to be circular—starting from plain old common sense, going  to erudite, academic, complex BS, and then returning back to simple common sense.

11.    The ultimate aim of learning is truth, but paradoxically our definition of truth keeps evolving or does it?

12.    The most solid learning occurs in three waves—first you know something in your head, then you begin to know it in your heart, then you finally know it by doing it with your hands. This is so you can live it instead of just talking about it. Of course all this comes after you realize the mutual importance of both the literal, concrete and the abstract metaphorical meaning of what you are learning. Sometimes you get totally lost in the middle of this mess.

13.    A major learning spurt can occur when you go from trying to prove what you know, to disproving it.

14.    The best learning comes from the best questions and the best listening.

15.    Learning evolves from information to knowledge to wisdom; when you begin to see positive value in negative things, you are approaching the wisdom well.

16.    Exclusion reduces your learning in half; inclusion doubles it. Your brain favors the first, and your hear the second, and your soul knows the few things to dismiss.   

17.    Real learning is not knowing about something, but seeing the relationships between things that may not be so obvious.

18.    It takes courage to admit failures and mistakes, but this humility is what opens the door to knowing what you need to know to avoid making mistakes and failing. Successes are fun, but they don’t really teach you that much.    

19.    Never be certain that what you think you know is always so.

20.    Every once in awhile you have to take pauses from learning to relax, avoid burnout or knowing too much for your own good; but you really can’t ever stop learning.