Category Archives: working

About Learning

As I enter my last year of highschool, the idea of “learning” holds a very important part in my life. This year is going to decide the rest of my life (according to peers and seniors) and so the idea of learning or being good at something by learning it had become more or less the focal point of my life now.
So I decided to read up a little of this subject, something which we’ve all done and we all continue doing, in different ways.

So here’s what I found from learning about learning –

Learning new things has become a skill everyone has to develop in order to thrive in the mordern world where change is an everyday occurance. In order to handle this everyday change, we need to be able to learn and unlearn just as rapidly.
With the mordern world, if you want to reach any level of success, you have to aim for being the best (it’s hard to accept it, but being average just won’t work anymore).

Every field out there is constantly changing, everything is becoming bigger and better and to keep up with the changes we have to be able to develop ourselves in such a way that we thrive, and that can only be by having the habit of learning (all the time!)

When we think of learning schools and colleges is mostly the first thing that comes to mind. For the average person going back to school/college or being in institutions isn’t always an option, that’s when ultralearning comes in.

What is ultralearning?

( Source – Ultralearning by Scott H Young )

According to the book by Scott H Young, “Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning.” Simply speaking, it is a way of dealing with the ever changing world by taking the power of effective learning into your own hands.

It’s about taking decisions concerning the idea of learning, more so, the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of learning. Ultralearning tends to have unusual steps/methods for the most effective learning, and these “ultralearners” are those who make/search for some of these bizarre steps for maximum learning efficiency.

Ultralearning aims to highlight some of these core points

  • Start by learning the ‘how’ of learning. To put it simply, understand how you want to learn the new skill.
  • Practice makes perfect, so try to implement what you’re learning in everyday life.
  • Your comfort zone is your biggest enemy. Step out of it when it comes to learning new things.
  • Feedback from outside can be your biggest help. Learn to take criticism and suggestions.
  • Dissolve difficult and complex tasks into smaller simpler tasks.
  • Constantly testing your knowledge helps in making an assessment of your own skills and changes you need to make.
  • Explore different concepts and ideas to widen your horizon.
  • Focus is an essential part of learning. So cut off distractions.

Speaking of distractions, which are the most common when it comes to learning?

Your Work

Some of the work that we wish to pursue can be a little too difficult, making it easier for other things to distract us, or simply seem like a “better” use of our time. That’s when the idea of breaking complex tasks into simpler task comes into play. When you try to do something complex it’s difficult for your brain to take in all the new and complex information. Breaking a difficult task/skill into smaller, more manageable chunks allows our mind to accept and process information much more easily and effectively.

Your Environment

It’s obvious enough, the things in and around your surroundings hold the power to grab your attention and distract you from the work right infront of you. Surrounding yourself with a “learner friendly” environment is essential to make the most out of your learning time.
To test out how well a work area is for you, try learning something for a set amount of time, during that timespan keep track of how many times you get distracted by something and at the end of the timespan test yourself to see how much of the information you were able to retain. Try it with a few possible options and go for what suit you best.

Your mind

The biggest distractor! If you feel constantly distracted, without it being your environment or any other external medium, it might be that it’s all internal!
The negative emotions – depressive, angry thoughts, the whirlwind of thoughts travelling in your head, the daydreamings, the million notes going through your mind – it all plays a big role in messing up with your ability to learn and have a clear head for recalling information you’ve already learnt.

With all these distractions known, it’s important to note that you can overcome these distractions with a little hard work and effort.

What is Interleaving?

Interleaving is another skill that people who are forever learning swear by, especially while learning something new.
It is all about spacing out the learning process over a long period of time, randomising the information and frequent active recalling of past information that has been already learnt.

It allows the brain to hold focus for longer periods of time and forces you to adjust yourself to probelm solving in every step, allowing the information to be stored as a long term memory rather than passively learning and re-learning the same thing with no positive result.

A few final tips for all the hungry learners

  1. To learn a concept completely, it’s important to understand it fully. And to understand something thoroughly visualising it plays a very big role.
  2. Practicing everything you learn – be it in the form of tests or quizzes or even using it in real life situations helps fixing something to your mind.
  3. Whenever you face roadblocks, take a break. Overly obsessing over a particular topic might not always help solve it, instead, taking a break and looking at the problem from a different angle can help get a better perspective.
  4. Plenty of sleep is always a key aspect of learning. Sleep not only affects your recall and memory, it also helps your mind calm down and helps functioning of your creative side.
  5. Self motivation is the most important aspect of learning something while being happy. When you learn something that you actually love and have full interest in, you feel motivated to be the best at it.

Being Busy Is Good?

In today’s time, we as a society have glorified the idea of being ‘busy‘. People that are seen constantly stressed, buried in their work are viewed as more accomplished than someone not swamped by work and worry.

Today’s hustle cultre views these so called ‘hard-workers‘ as the image of the ‘perfect employee‘ and holds this standard of being busy on a pedestal.

Is being busy actually bad?

No, it’s hard to say that everything about hustle cultre or being busy is bad. But it’s definitely a point to note that these do glorify the idea of constantly being on the go and working and have even made it the norm for today’s generation to constantly be working and measuring their own self worth by how much they’ve accomplished.

Think about it, how many times have you criticized yourself because you didn’t do ‘enough work‘ or you didn’t ‘work harder‘?
How many times have you actually been happy on a day off and been glad that you took care of yourself?
Have you ever felt miserable for taking the weekend to rejuvenate and work on things that make you happy instead of working extra?

According to the standards we’ve created for ourselves, anyone who isn’t busy and doesn’t spend every second immersed in work simply doesn’t stand up to these standards and is just termed as ‘not hard working‘ or simply ‘lazy‘.
This outlook of society makes us judge our own self worth by the amount of work we do and the labels society puts on us.

Glorifying the idea of always being busy tends to make us much more about self and can, in a sense, make our thoughts and actions even more selfish.
We tend to get more stuck in our own little world excessively brooding about our own work and our own problems which obviously have a negative strike to our mental health but also end up in us neglecting close friends and family.
Cancelling plans last minute, not being present for special occasions and being missing from important moments tends to become ‘normal‘ for busy people.

Now, once or twice these actions may be ignored or forgiven but constant occurances tend to leave cracks in relationships which might eventually leave you feeling lonely and distant, unable to maintain those relations.

The current idea of busyness doesn’t necessarily put in ‘quality of work’ as an important factor, instead, ‘quantity of work’ becomes the deciding factor.
When we place priorities in the wrong areas it does end up being counter-productive and instead of actually getting things done we might only be wasting precious time.
It’s necessary to keep track of how and what you spend your time. Know if the time you spend on doing something is actually for something ‘productive‘ or is it just being busy.

How to know if you’re actually productive or just busy?

Being ‘busy‘ isn’t something you’re forced to do, it’s a life choice – something you make and continue.
Know that being efficient isn’t about the number of hours you spend doing something that may or may not have a positive outcome. Efficiency is about the number of positive results you get on doing things.

Think about the things you do on a daily basis that you think are ‘productive‘ – does it actually give outcomes that help you grow? Does it help with things you’re struggling with/find difficult?

Being busy is just about passing time doing things that seem productive,while actually, using time for things that support growth is real productivity.

Answering emails is one such task that might seem and feel productive but it has more cons to pros. It doesn’t matter how many times a day you check your email, you can always expect more to be there eventually. It always makes you feel productive but in reality it just gives you that extra stress that hampers with actual productivity.
It’s often advised to check your emails only once or twice a day to allow some actual productivity instead of spending hours each day in ‘pseudo-productivity‘.

But why is it that we fixate ourselves in pseudo-productive work?

When we’re constantly under stress and lose work-life balance (which is a consequence of hustle cultre) we tend to mess with our attention span, and the constant pressure from work and personal life harms the cognitive bandwidth.
Even though having narrow cognitive bandwidth might help you hyperfocus on something, it also has its cons – popularly termed as Tunneling.
Tunneling, according to dictionary.apa.org is defined as

https://dictionary.apa.org/cognitive-tunneling
"a psychological state, typical of people concentrating on a demanding task or operating under conditions of stress, in which a single, narrowly defined category of information is attended to and processed. "

In the most simple terms, tunneling is being extra focused on things that are right infront of us that may not be so productive, which is caused by extreme stress in our lives.

A definite point of importance is that when we become so fixated in our own lives doing ‘productive’ work, we tend to have less time for things that actually matter, like our own physical and mental health.
We tend to have less time for decisions that affect us, instead we make impulsive decisions because taking cautious, calculative steps isn’t an option anymore.

So how can we get rid of busyness and make time for things that actually matter?

• It might make us feel important to be constantly busy and get that validation from society. But remember that the same busyness has long term effects on your health.
These long hours of stress and lack of sleep and completely ignoring self-health can lead to problems like headaches, insomnia, fatigue, seizures, etc. When you make changes in busyness, you will only have positive changes in your physical and mental health and will improve relationships with people you’ve been pushing away.

• Take a deep dive into the work you’re always busy doing – then think if spending all that time and resources is actually a wise decision. Spend time doing things that you actually find valuable – does it feel productive?

• Learn to ignore the voices, views and opinions of society that promotes hustle cultre and being busy. Keep in mind the actual goal you have, that which you strive for. (I know it’s so much more easier said than done, but give it a shot!) Challenge the idea of being busy and go for what you believe you want to do.

• Understand the importance of saying no to things that don’t serve purpose to your life, instead, spend that time on things that drive you and things you find yourself excited to do.

• Sometimes you can find true satisfaction in doing less. You could do hundreds of tasks a day but they won’t necessarily bring you happiness, but even doing one task that drives you can be the source of your happiness.

• Encourage yourself and people around you to get the image of being busy out of their mind and instead set being productive as the idealistic mindset.