By profession, I am a learning designer. I have lots of thoughts about the solutions that this sector employs (or doesn’t). These include, at least on corporate level, its addiction to PowerPoints, avoiding the behavioural science (if it can help to build addictive apps, it can help us teach people), and forcing people to learn without understanding any motivations. Small wonder then I want to understand how to learn – and why I take a magnifying glass to my own behaviour like a mad scientist. It helps that I love learning new things. But I also know that I used to be really bad at it. I still am, sometimes.
If you ever worked in training, or read any vaguely self-helpful book, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “growth mindset”. Carole Dweck wrote a book about it, arguing that our attitude about being able to learn trumps “natural inclination”, however we decide to define that. That usually means that if you are more accepting of your mistakes while learning something new, chances are, you will stick to it. If you’re a perfectionist who can’t deal with setbacks, becoming an expert is really damn hard. The concept is used relentlessly in everyone and their mother’s performance review, and it’s prominent in pop-psych consciousness. It did face some criticism: it was hard to replicate the school experiments that Dweck talked about, for example. The idea is still useful, though. It reframes setbacks as a part of a learning process, not friction that will ultimately derail it. Ask me how I know.
When I was little, I got through education really easily. I would go through most of my textbooks in the few days in the summer. In the school year, I did my homework, and multiple other people’s because I moved like an enterprising young woman. Then, I would just get bored in class. Yet, I always had good grades.
But that didn’t prepare me for learning skills independently. Most of my life, I just avoided anything I didn’t have the natural inclination for. It’s easy to become complacent if you’re coasting. It can hollow out even your genuine interests and passions.
It wasn’t until I started going to the gym (this is such a bro-motivation-page type epiphany) that this started to make lots of sense. I had never lifted any weights before then, but step by step I managed to get to the strongest I’ve been in my whole life in three years. In the gym, you are “lifting to failure”, which means that you repeat any movement with the highest possible weight until your body gives up and cannot handle it anymore. Failure guarantees progress – because if you do it often enough, the benchmark for it steadily rises.
When I had put skates on my feet for the first time at the tender age of thirty, I didn’t realise how much I would strive to prevent failure. When I first signed up for roller skating classes – the clumsiest person that you will ever know – I did anything to prevent myself from falling.
I would brace my core and my legs, and avoid any moves that could potentially lead me to falling down. As my classmates started to make steady progress, my own anxiety held me back. I wouldn’t do a crossover: lifting my leg would mean I don’t feel stable enough. Toe manuals? Oh no. Spins? Forget it. My legs would hurt me so much after every session because of how much I squeezed every muscle in the effort to keep myself upright. And I just didn’t want to fall: I saw it as something to be embarrassed about – in a class full of beginners who didn’t have a problem with falling, by the way. I thought that falling meant I am not learning, when the opposite was true.
My classmates went ahead to skate backwards. I was still stuck in the same place. Only when I started to let go – and fall, and then cross my hands, place them on my knee and stand back up – I began to make any progress. Recently, a friend invited me to skate on ice, and I discovered that the skills I’ve learned are helping me there, too. I wasn’t perfect, but I was fine – I moved on ice competently enough to enjoy the process.
One of my recent faves, Cal Newport, argues that career fulfilment doesn’t always follow an existing elusive passion. And you don’t have to even know exactly what that passion is. Sometimes it just follows expertise. This is a departure from “following your passion”, which is hard to do for those who don’t know what it is, and just as tough for those who understand that choosing a formal direction for it in your teens is a lot of responsibility and believe in all sorts of sunken cost fallacies.
While every job is going to have its ups and downs, great days as well as tiresome and boring ones, as someone who has always followed natural inclinations named by someone else, it reframed something I had never questioned before.
My entire life, I just knew that humanities was something I was naturally good at. I wrote for a local division of national newspaper as a teen. Words, at least in Polish, always came easy to me (sorry F. R. David mate, better luck next time).
I wasn’t bad at science at school either, but I never explored anything that would be closer to the intersection of humanities and science because following the natural inclination seemed like the obvious choice. And I didn’t have to try.
Yet, I would fix fairy lights with my dad, who also helped me to set up lighting for the cardboard dollhouse I made. I’ve since learned how to use HTML, CSS and JS, so I can do web dev. And I’ve got an analytic head that is good at understanding and finding patterns which I ultimately proved with my grades when doing linguistics modules at the university.
There was a correlation between choosing a natural inclination and coasting. Hitting the ceiling was easy, and without adjusting where it was, staying at the same level was easily becoming a habit. You need some pressure to make a diamond, after all.
If you didn’t develop the ability to learn, and overcome setbacks in the process, you can follow any amount of enthusiasm you want. The problem is, it will wane after the first failure. And if you’re in your comfort zone without being challenged, you will eventually get complacent. If you’re choosing that because it is easy, the gap between the natural ability and mastery will gradually grow larger until you decide it’s not worth bridging anymore. Bridging it is effort. And it’s never too late to make it.
So in my year of challenging myself to do new things in hopes passion follows expertise, and in hopes I get better at learning, this is where I will focus.
My curriculum will include learning more in-depth information about behavioural science. I have been a practitioner of some of it that overlaps with learning, but I want to be smarter about applying it, and push it further once I’ve got electronics, UX and some proper coding under my belt. Electronics/robotics are genuinely new and will push the boundaries of what I know. I fixed fairy lights as a kid and did calculations in physics without practically observing why they worked. I’d like to fix that gap. And besides, who wouldn’t want to be Iron Man, or Elisabeth Sobeck? I have been a learning designer who is competent at graphics for a while too, but I also want to polish my knowledge about UX and formalise it.
All of this is to see if I can be more intentional and improve learning as a whole – and challenge myself to do something interesting that is different than “we’re an edtech company… we make PowerPoints for people”. I’m already on that Python grind crying in Codecademy free trial every other evening for an hour.
See you at a soldering class 💖
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