Knowledge Flywheel
Learning is the process - here is how to optimize it
If you are reading this, chances are you are a seasoned knowledge consumer with 4-5 Udemy courses in progress, a couple of books started, a certification exam on the horizon and tens of articles & videos consumed a day (or we are friends and you are reading this to support me, which is incredibly sweet of you, but you are still hard-core knowledge consumer). Your learning plate is probably full and I don't need to convince you that continuous learning is a must. But what you could use is some stress relief from the information bombardment, a constant need to find time & energy to learn, and the battle with the forgetting curve.
What if I told you that learning could be easier and more fun? We view learning like a bank: we gather knowledge, store it away, and get dividends here and there. If you know where to invest you get higher returns on your “knowledge investments”. But each gathering process requires effort. It is exhausting. Learning becomes a chore.
Easy and fun is achievable if you instead of thinking of learning as a linear process build it as a cycle or even better “flywheel”. The trick with the flywheel is that once it starts moving the gained momentum will perpetuate, letting the wheel move forward practically with no effort. Jim Collins used the metaphor of flywheel to describe how great companies gain momentum and grow by continuously following a set of right actions. I believe we can build our flywheel of knowledge: specific steps that with the right execution will build up momentum and what in the beginning is hard to move (learning) becomes an effortless and unavoidable part of life. The steps are: consume, consolidate, create, and communicate.
Consume
It all starts with consumption. Choosing good sources for learning is crucial. As they say: garbage in garbage out. I am pretty sure you have already a good selection of learning materials, thus I will not stop on this. But I want to address the key characteristic of effective consumption: it must be active. Active engagement could mean stating questions before reading a book or formulating a hypothesis about the topic you are about to study. Further in the process, it is about testing yourself and finding what are the gaps in your understanding and what else you need to learn.
Re-reading the same material or even re-reading your notes is a passive way of learning and not an effective strategy. Re-reading will not make you understand more, instead, it can create the illusion of understanding because of the mere exposure effect. Re-reading also doesn't help much with memorizing: the strengthening of neuro links to remember the information happens in the process of retrieval, meaning when you try to recall what you have read. In a fancy term, it is called “desirable difficulty” - that difficulty of trying to recall information is exactly what creates learning.
One way I use this concept is after reading or watching a video I open the notes app and write down all the points that I remembered and thought to be important. Then I see if there are gaps in my understanding. If so instead of going right back and looking up what I can't remember, I try to re-fill the missing links from my memory or develop ideas to fill in the missing parts. The missing parts are also a "curiosity fuel" that leads to my next round of learning. This exercise not only tests your memory but also tests your understanding (and improves both).
The key in this step is to consume intentionally and actively and most importantly not to stop your learning there.
Consolidate
The next step is consolidation. The goal is not to remember or write down everything you have just consumed. On the contrary, by being intentional about what you are moving from working memory to long-term memory and/or what you are writing down, you are filtering out the fluff and focusing on the most crucial bits.
Consolidation is the process by which newly acquired information is gradually integrated into long-term memory. It involves the stabilization of memories and the strengthening of neural connections that support those memories. Although consolidation happens over time in the background, there are steps we can take to help our brain consolidate information more effectively and improve retention. First, it's important to recognize that the primary tendency of the brain is to conserve energy. As a result, the brain filters out information that it deems unimportant for survival. So if you want to learn more effectively, you need to 1) demonstrate to the brain that the information is essential and 2) assist it in consolidating the knowledge most efficiently.
We show the brain what is important by connecting emotions to information. Again it is the survival mechanism: the brain remembers well everything that it dims important for survival. That`s why information that is accompanied by negative emotions like fear or pain is remembered more vividly. And why we tend to remember traumatic events so well – our brain is essentially making a note to avoid similar situations in the future. However, it's not just negative emotions that help with memory retention. Positive emotions can also create stronger neuro links. Curiosity is an excellent emotion that can drive both learning and remembering.
As for consolidation the best way you can ensure effectiveness is to link it with your previous knowledge and develop new ideas based on the knowledge you just acquired. After writing down what you remembered and trying to close the gaps, take another 5-10 minutes to think about how this knowledge is related to your previous knowledge and how you can apply it to your life and work. I call this contextualizing: you use the knowledge in your context (and the context could be your work). When you include contextualizing into your daily life, any consumption of information becomes learning. For example, I recently read the piece about Jeff Bezos and I thought about his Day 1 philosophy: the philosophy of considering every day of the company as Day 1 like a start-up by focusing on customers, bold experiments, and staying curious. It is a genius business principle, but it is also useful in the context of learning to approach yourself and your learning as Day 1.
By building links between the consumed knowledge and your previous knowledge you helped your brain consolidate the knowledge. While your brain now has a higher chance of remembering the knowledge, with the current rate of consumption you want to help your brain even more by writing it all down, thus not putting a burden of remembering the details on your brain, so it can focus on what it does the best: creating.
Create
You actively consumed the knowledge, you helped your brain consolidate it. Now, it is time to create. For some reason, in our society creation is not considered a part of learning. The school system taught us to separate learning from doing. Like you learn something for many years, do “practice“ exercises and when you are complete with your studies & find a job only then you start doing. But that doing is actually where most of the learning happens. And also the most fun. No wonder we perceive schools and universities as so stiff and boring.
I challenge start creating right away. Write that code, prepare that data dashboard, build that website - no matter what you are learning: create from the get-go. And write down all your ideas - let your idea bank grow and get you compound interest. That doing part is when most of the learning happens: you create, you face the problem, you try to solve that (remember, desirable difficulty?) and you learn more. And all of this happens naturally, you don`t need to force yourself: solving real-world problems is fun and engaging. Don`t wait until you finish learning to start creating (and not learning projects, but real ones!).
I believe we also need to re-consider this for our kids: why do we make them work on “practice“ problems for so long (and make them extremely bored ) when they have the motivation and energy to contribute to real problems and learn simultaneously? This is the topic for another newsletter that I promise to address soon.
Communicate
Ok, I will be honest here: I replaced the word share with communicate just to keep the Cs abbreviation, but you got the idea.
At this point you probably will be “no no, I am learning stuff for myself, for my work, I don't need to share”. But sharing is the part that brings the flywheel into movement. When we teach we learn. When we know that we are going to share the knowledge we become more international as learning gets a new social dimension to it. We are social animals: sharing knowledge is built in us as a survival mechanism to ensure the sustenance of a tribe. Sharing doesn't have to be on the internet. Sharing could be with your peer in the learning group when you help to understand the material better. It could be with your colleague. It could be by writing articles for your company's knowledge bank.
When we share we get feedback, and the feedback feeds our next level of learning. For this reason, I am planning to start offering a couple of coaching sessions on learning skills and the note-taking process. It will help me to get more immediate feedback on the way I explain things and potentially improve this newsletter.
Sharing also forces you to organize your knowledge in an understandable way and as you could have guessed that helps your brain to consolidate it effectively. Not to mention that sharing builds up the knowledge bank that gives you compound interest.
The cool part is that if you did previous steps of the flywheel correctly, sharing becomes easy as you already wrote down important parts, you consolidated and contextualized knowledge, you developed your ideas and frameworks (and hopefully wrote that down) - that is a ready foundation to start sharing.
White zones
If you take a look at the flywheel graphic, you'll notice white areas that I marked to highlight the importance of a diffused state of mind (more on that in the next editions). These white zones are an essential component of your flywheel as we need a diffused state of mind to allow our brain to consolidate knowledge and create & strengthen links. This means that the time you spend not actively learning is just as crucial as the time you spend studying. Mindlessly walking in nature, working out, spending time with loved ones, and even doing nothing at all - these are all important parts of your learning journey. So, even if you have all the time in the world to study, don't forget to take breaks and allow your brain to rest and consolidate information during those white zones.
The flywheel will work if you feed yourself with quality information, consume it actively, consolidate it, do not postpone creation, and most importantly share it right away. Sharing closes the loop and the feedback you get will be a moving force for the next cycle of your learning. The more you do this the more your knowledge flywheel will gain momentum, and the faster & easier your learning becomes.
That’s all for today. Let me know if you have questions, suggestions, or comments. Hit the reply button and let`s chat!
See you next Wednesday!
Thanks for reading,
Jan