On retaining 90% of what you learn, self-accountability mindset, hindsight bias and more
Attributes of greatness
Hello everyone.
When it comes to knowledge acquisition, faster isn’t always better. Learning in any environment is increasingly becoming faster — but we rarely stop to measure their effectiveness. Most people forget almost everything they learn. The average person only retains 10% of what they learn in one year.
Forgetting what you learn can lead to frustration and wasted time when you feel like you’re learning but not getting anywhere.
There is no meaningful relationship between time and results when you hurry any learning process.
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says, “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory.”
What’s the point of learning if you can’t use it later in life or apply it when it matters most. Learning and understanding are two different things.
Many people confuse the two and think they need to be fast learners. If your aim is knowledge retention, it pays to slow down.
In reality, slow learners have found that when they learn at a slower pace, they can retain information better.
They think through ideas better, which enhances retention.
“Slowness of thought is not necessarily a handicap but could be a signature of optimal brain function,” according to research on The Rediscovery of Slowness.
Learning slowly may actually be worth your time — if you slow down, you will retain more and enjoy the process of learning.
I use slow learning to read great non-fiction books and learn new skills. I make notes, highlight ideas, underline important insights, and teach online what I learn.
Slow down to speed up understanding and retention
“He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” — Confucius
Slow-paced learning works better with self-paced learning — defining and using your own learning style is the best way for your brain to absorb new information faster.
Learning is often thought of as a painful process where you have to put in long hours and struggle. The good news is, you change that.
Learning at your own pace can be the key to success if you can do it successfully.
In our information-rich world, learning to slow down can help you learn more from great minds and about yourself, your abilities, and what you need to succeed.
When you slow down to read a book or learn something new, you rarely miss valuable knowledge.
Slow learners rarely repeat the process several times in the future. Your learning is likely to lead to mastery if you learn to slow down.
Information overload leads to cognitive stress, which decreases your ability to retain new knowledge.
The human brain’s optimal concentration level is about 25 minutes — after that, without better breaks, you are likely to forget almost everything you learn.
When you slow down, you give yourself enough time to make better connections for faster retrieval later.
“..slowing down the pace, even for a few minutes a day, and giving yourself time, decreases the emotional tension and, consequently, improves the “performance”, whether for study or work,” writes Valentina Tobia, a psychologist, with a PhD in Experimental Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience.
There’s a time and place for fast learning — when you need to apply knowledge quickly to solve a problem in real-time: it’s called just-in-time learning.
Cramming or skimming doesn’t work if your long-term goal is knowledge retention. In desperation to pick up ideas quickly, you are likely to miss out on valuable ideas.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly,” says Mae West.
Try the slow and short-burst approach if you want to become wiser over time. Take your time, take notes and allow your brain to accumulate wisdom slowly.
Done effectively, slow learning can help you focus better, understand more and stack knowledge for life.
It’s a better approach to move knowledge from your working memory to your long-term memory bank. Over the long term, slow learners retain more than faster learners. So, next time, you learn something new, remember taking your time is the most effective approach to mastery.
Recommended Posts
14 Attributes of Greatness — By and large, the high achievers had reached for lofty goals because they themselves wanted to, not because their parents had pushed them to do it. While 92% of the athletes considered themselves competitive, and this competitive streak manifested itself early in their childhoods…
How to thrive amid ‘imposter syndrome’ — Early learning experiences may contribute to the development of imposterism as well. If your parents, teachers, coaches or friends were highly critical of you, you might have developed an ‘I’m not good enough’ story about yourself.
You should have more friends of all ages — When you’re looking to develop a friendship with someone beyond your age range (or your life experiences more broadly), joining a local group is a great way to do it. That could mean a book club at the library, a community garden, or a pickleball tournament.
3 Ideas For Smarter Living
Bill Perkins on the value of experiences:
“Since the whole point of money is to have experiences, investing money to get a return with which to have experiences is a roundabout way of having experiences. Why go through all that when you can just invest directly in experiences—and get a return on experiences? Not only that, but the number of actual experiences available to you diminishes as you age. Yes, you need money to survive in retirement, but the main thing you’ll be retiring on will be your memories—so make sure you invest enough in those.”
Source: Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
Shane Parrish on the self-accountability mindset:
“Self-accountability means taking responsibility for your abilities (developing your abilities), your inabilities (managing your inabilities), and your actions (using reason to govern your actions) … Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything. It’s a mindset that empowers you to act and not just react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means realizing that the way you respond to hardship matters more to your happiness than the hardship itself. And it means understanding that the best path is often just to accept things and move on.”
Source: Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results
Gabriel Weinberg on reversible and irreversible decisions.
“There is a natural conflict between the desire to make decisions quickly and the feeling that you need to accumulate more information to be sure you are making the right choice. You can deal with this conflict by categorizing decisions as either reversible decisions or irreversible decisions. Irreversible decisions are hard if not impossible to unwind.”
Source: Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
Charlie Munger (may his soul rest in peace) on hindsight bias
"You can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form." People can't be persuaded by what they don't understand. We underestimate the importance of giving people a reason. It is often easier to get people to change with a well-explained reason backed by solid evidence. Tell them so they understand why a specific action is needed, what the expected objective is, and why you think the action is right.
Source: Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
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Thanks for reading!
To our common journey,
Until next week,
Thomas