Learning How You Learn

Learning how to learn is underrated. I can understand why, because the recursion evident in the entire idea makes it sound ridiculous, but it really makes a difference in life when you have a solid understanding of how to pick up new skills, regardless of what those skills are. As someone who writes books, creates traditional and digital art, does graphic design, live streams, uses a vtube model, made and rigged parts of said model, codes stream overlays, and develops software for a living, I feel like I have some idea how useful it can be.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the way people learn. Not entirely because of my own academic career, though that time in school definitely contributes, but more because I’ve worked in ed-tech and there are several teachers in my family. Hearing about the way people learn and the psychology behind what we understand and what we remember is fascinating, but the main things I’ve taken from it are that it’s never too late to pick up something new, and that trying – whether you succeed or even end up using a new skill – is good for you. It’s why I’m not shy to try new things, no matter how complicated they are, and why I get really annoyed when people insist they’re not smart or talented enough to do something new.

Everything is available online now. You can find and sign up for local classes and interest groups or purely online versions, and a quick google search will net you tutorials on every imaginable topic, so why don’t more people take advantage of it?

This is a personal blog and not a professional essay, so I’ll commit the internet sin of not providing sources, but it’s generally accepted that it’s easier for kids to learn new things. Something-something neuroplasticity, blah-blah brain development. I’m not going to argue against any of that, it’s well studied by people who made it their life’s work to figure out how the brain works, but I will point out that the word I used there is easier. It’s easier to learn things when you’re a kid with a growing brain, no responsibilities, no existential concerns, and no preconceived notions about your potential and your own limits. It’s harder when you’re an adult paying bills and stressed by world events, and even more so when you’ve had difficulties in school or trying to teach yourself in the past, but it’s not impossible.

I’ve met many people who seem to believe that they can’t learn new things, as if they’ve fulfilled their potential, found a niche, and can never change. Some of these are older people who subscribe to the philosophy that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and some are people who’ve convinced themselves that they’re either too dumb to pick up new things or not talented enough to ever do anything worthwhile anyway. They think they know the outcome, so they won’t start.

I’ve also met a fair number of people who seem to think that learning ends when school does, or when they leave the office. The way they describe it, the idea of absorbing useful knowledge sounds like a chore. I get the feeling that sentiment comes from people who didn’t enjoy the way they were taught in school. Everyone approaches learning differently, but for whatever mysterious reasons (money, tradition, ye olde biases) we still often teach kids – and adult students – by sticking them in a classroom and lecturing at them until they can parrot things back at us with acceptable accuracy. Obviously, that’s not everyone’s definition of a good time (and it’s why some people – myself included – learn better by ourselves) – so why would you do it to yourself on purpose?

Sometimes this attitude comes from perfectionism. Perfection is rare, even among the most skilled in any field, so the idea that anything else isn’t worth having makes any endeavour seem pointless to begin with. The odds are against you being an immediate and brilliant success, and you don’t want to be mediocre, so why bother? It makes sense if that’s how you see the world.

The thing you’ll notice about these groups is that they won’t learn new things because they’ve decided not to. It’s not that they’re actually incapable of learning new things, it’s that they don’t believe in their capacity to do it, or they have a very skewed perspective on what learning something involves.

The fun thing is that they’re all wrong.*

*I’ll preface this with something a lot of these motivational posts don’t like to acknowledge: yes, there are some cases where people actually can’t do things. Physical disabilities can limit your ability to pick up things like new sports or musical instruments, brain issues can make forming memories or focusing for long periods challenging. Not everyone is gifted with the sound health presumed by every promise of you can do anything if you try hard enough, and it sucks. But for the majority of people, with or without these challenges, there is something new you can learn. Maybe not anything, but something.

Personally, I’m a very independent and experimental learner. I’ve always been that way. I hated lectures and didn’t pay attention in class but my grades were good because I learned well from books. I taught myself PHP when I’d barely started high school because I wanted to add things to my PHPBB forum back when the social internet was made of more than 4 giant sites. I did that by picking up something that someone else had made, breaking it, fixing it, changing it, and watching what happened. Nowadays I do the same thing by following, deviating from, and combining docs and tutorials I find online – it’s how I got into streaming, how I’m learning 3D rigging and Unity, and how I pick up new languages and frameworks for my actual job.

This can come across as a humble-brag, and I’ve had a lot of people use it as a reason to accuse me of being smart. I won’t comment on the accuracy of their accusations, but I hate the reasoning behind them. I can learn new things that way, by myself, because I know how I think, how I understand, and how I remember things most effectively. I learned how to teach myself using the internet because I wanted to make things and there was nobody around with the expertise to teach me how to do those very specific things, but it works well for me because I’m an impatient introvert. That ability to learn is a skill to acquire and explore information in a specific way that suits me personally. It’s not magic, and it’s not special, it’s just something I had the opportunity to put a lot of practice into, and one that works well in a world with nearly infinite knowledge out on the internet.

Some other friends of mine have tried recently to do the same thing. They picked up an online course and tried to explore a new career path. Neither finished the course. This has nothing to do with how smart they are (or whether they’ll ever see this post, which is doubtful anyway) but it has to do with how they learn and how they remember things. I’m not talking about the idea that some people are visual learners or auditory learners or whatever, but the idea of how they connect with the things they’re trying to pick up and the way those things are presented.

I’m an introvert. Dealing with other humans stresses me out. When I look up tutorials online, I usually actively avoid videos because I don’t want to listen to someone else speak and explain things. I especially don’t like waiting when someone explains a topic and then circles around to elaborate and drive a point home from many different angles, something that is the cornerstone of a successful in-person lecture when a teacher is trying to connect to as many different minds as possible in a crowd. Even when I was in college, I ended up skipping a lot of lectures and leaning on handouts and textbooks instead. It’s much faster and easier for me to read and skim through information once I get the general idea. …Unless the topic at hand is actually about the human voice, or something so visual and interactive that it’s hard to describe – like my latest forays into 3D modelling with Blender.

One of my friends is an extrovert. Like, the most extroverted of extroverts. Alone time is a foreign concept to this person (though they’re good at respecting it in other people). They love talking to other people and are more likely to engage in, care about, and remember experiences they shared with others, conversations they had with others, and things they did with others, as opposed to words they were staring at on a page. I can say this confidently because they graduated from university with an impressive knowledge of their chosen field, but only ever seem to bring it up through examples of what other people they know or follow have done, and not from the dry technical text-book type of explanations that I use to approach the same topic.

To this person, doing the course online, by themself, was a trial. It was work. It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t easy to get into, so it wasn’t worth the tradeoff. It’s a completely valid reason not to study the course online, but that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of learning the topic in a different setting.

Another friend could be described as timid. They can explore new topics on their own, but when they get stuck, they’re too shy to ask for assistance. Despite this, they’ve also been academically successful in the past. Why was this case different? I suspect it’s the difference between an isolated online environment and a classroom. In a classroom, they might be working alongside friends who would be easier to approach than strangers, or they might get feedback or direct attention from an instructor who might notice the knowledge gap without being asked. Their problem has nothing to do with intelligence, it’s the confidence to speak up and ask for help – which is magnified by the difficulty in reaching out to people you’ve never met online.

This person is pretty determined that they’re not capable of learning a lot of things, but as I said – that’s not the problem. Everyone needs help sometimes. Even in my solo approach, I can never use just one tutorial to learn something, but I know how to search for more information on the same topics and mash things together.

In my case, learning how to learn was learning how to research, how to test things on my own, how to be patient with my experiments, and understanding which cases human/vocal instruction would help me vs annoy me. For other people, learning how to learn means recognizing that they do better in group/in-person settings, or that they need instructors who are easily accessible and who they’re comfortable asking for help. The friends I mentioned are self-aware enough to know why their studies didn’t work out, but I found they were an interesting case study for the invisible reasons why purely self-directed learning doesn’t work for everyone.

Brains are weird, and the way people learn is different. The best way to learn isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, it’s understanding yourself. It’s not something we teach people to think about, and it leads a lot of people to limit the kinds of projects, hobbies and jobs they take on, not because they’re incapable of learning new things, but because they’ve had challenges learning in the past and decide they can’t without really understanding why.