Sources of learning – an evolving 10 year view

I’ve been having a few conversations of late that have aimed to tackle difficult questions like – “How can I learn better?” and “How can I be sure I’m learning?” These are challenging questions and ones I’ve wrestled with a bunch. So, I thought I’d share my evolving perspective after 10 years of writing about this.

My mental model here is that our “learn rate” is proportional to time + energy spent on 3 sources – Books/synthesized information, People (and insightful conversations we have), and our own experiences. When we take the time to reflect on the time + energy spent on these sources and synthesize what we’ve taken away, we begin to develop or improve existing mental models, and over time, make changes to how we approach life. That translation of theory to action is learning.

Reflecting on the mix between these sources in my journey in the past decade, I think the biggest change has been the proportion of learning coming from my own experiences. When I started writing a decade ago, most of my learning came from books and more experienced folks – I didn’t have too many experiences to reflect on. That has changed and the mix looks a lot more balanced of late.

So, my perspective on the “how can I learn better?” question comes down to – what kind of habits/infrastructure do we have in place to make sure we’re reading, regularly having interesting conversations that we learn from, and reflecting on both of these along with the experiences we’re having every day?

And, if I had to break that down to sub-questions, they would be –

i) Are we regularly reading good books/subscribed to insightful blogs or podcasts?
ii) Are we spending time with folks we learn from and having conversations about what we’re thinking about vs. the weather?
iii) Are we finding time to reflect on the above + our own experiences and synthesize?