Learn something cool
Supercharge learning with a box, a list & instant gratification
If you think the below would benefit someone or some people who could use a helping hand to learn more and better, please just forward on this email to them.
We are prodded, poked and prompted through much of our lives. Notifications, inboxes, messages, requests from friends and family, meetings at work and prior commitments all come at us, mostly unbidden, and we feel a pressure to act on them and react to them, right away.
This leaves little time to choose, decide, and exercise agency. In particular, it leaves little time to choose to learn. I won’t expound the benefits of learning here but we are neotenic creatures; we’re here to learn and keep learning.
Learning also comes with some negative associations. We might associate it with difficult moments at school. We view it as hard work. Plenty of learning content for adults is dull. Probably learning’s biggest evolutionary disadvantage (vs other pursuits) is its lack of instant gratification; the benefits of learning are felt over the long term (months and years, not seconds and minutes).
Over the past couple of decades, we’ve developed a strong preference for and a dependence on this kind of immediacy and short-term gain. The instantly searchable web, social media, on-demand everything (music, TV, film), video games, fast food and delivery services, online shopping are some of the most obvious examples. And with the hardware in our pockets or our hands (50% of humanity now has a smartphone) the digital items here are all available to us, instantly and constantly.
The short-term is a strong tide to fight. But it’s a tide worth fighting to preserve the time and space to learn, and I believe we still have a chance. Learning, reconceived, has much of the charm of its less worthy but more tempting rivals. Here’s how we might reconceive it:
Set time to learn regularly (a timebox)
Maintain a to-learn list (as a subset of your to-do list, perhaps)
Add to the list what truly intrigues you. Use Marie Kondo’s famous litmus test: does it spark joy?
When the time to learn comes, you will enjoy it
Let’s make this more concrete with 20* examples. Obviously, I won’t be able to generate examples here that are intriguing to everyone. These are intended to spark your own ideas and your own curiosity.
How about learning how to…
Make a yellow origami dinosaur.
Solve a Rubik’s cube.
Draw spiderman.
Get served in crowded bars faster.
Improve your video conferencing experience.
Wrap up conversations smoothly and elegantly (11 ways).
Do small talk with aplomb.
Be able to answer the question, ‘What’s your favourite joke?’
Talk about yourself with charm, enthusiasm and humility.
Tell a captivating story.
Make your favourite cocktail (beautiful infographic).
Say a few words in the language of a country you’ll be in soon.
Use a new Large Language Model eg Google’s Bard.
Get better at ChatGPT prompts.
Learning — just like any important pursuit which doesn’t need to be done right away — won’t happen unless you make it happen and make that easy. It won’t keep happening unless it delivers some near-term rewards. This is essential habit theory. So organise yourself in order to make learning easy and interesting. Let’s reverse this seemingly unstoppable movement towards vacuous waste of time. Create a timeboxed time, create an intriguing list, and embark on a lifelong journey of curiosity, discovery and joy. Start today. Start right now.
*I’ve been asked why I tend to provide large numbers of examples. I figure that numerous examples are all useful themselves, individually, and that, collectively, they prove the point emphatically that there’s a lot behind a particular idea (eg intriguing learning in this case). And besides, scrolling past a list of bullets is easy for those who want to.