Learning By Doing
We’ve convinced ourselves that the path to learning requires thinking and reading. The reverse it closer to the truth.
You Are Your Actions Not Your Resume
Several years ago I interviewed someone for a design position. The candidate didn’t have much design experience and had no formal training in design. At first glance they weren’t a good candidate for the job. On paper they should’ve been rejected from the interview process.
And that’s the problem.
The ‘paper’ didn’t tell me anything about this persons capacity to learn.
I decided to interview them regardless of what the resume was telling me. It turns out they had enthusiasm by the bucket load and highly developed ability to learn by doing.
The revelation was when they answered my question, “Tell me about a time you learned a new skill and how you overcame you lack of knowledge?” The candidate described how they got into bread making and built their own terracotta oven from scratch. They had reached out to experts, traveled to Italy to watch the age-old process first hand, and learned bread making through trial and error.
We hired them and never regretted it for a moment.
Creating Is Learning
There are several phases to learning. Understanding happens in the doing phase of learning. You might learn something by reading. You can even learn by watching. But you will never truly understand until you try doing it yourself.
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
— Richard P. Feynman
Learning to be a good creator by scrolling through images on your phone, or on some website is like trying to learn how to cook by eating the pages of a recipe book. Cooking, as with all creative work, includes your body, not just your mind. Understanding how to do something often happens from the neck down.
The pages of a cookbook will never teach to understand flavor.
Think of learning in the same way that you might think of architecture of a building. Architecture is a blueprint but it is not the experience.
It is impossible to understand the context of building a home without physically being at the location, seeing the position of the sun, the prevailing weather, watching the surrounding traffic patterns, and observing the behavior of the human beings in the space itself.
You would be a very arrogant if you were just to sit at your screen and try and interpret all of those things by guesswork alone.
And yet that is what we ask students and workers to do every day.
To truly learn, you need to put yourself into the context of the thing that you’re creating. You need to engage all your senses. Get outside and learn by doing.
Learning Doesn’t Happen Without Context
One of the frustrating things about modern medical practice is that there are no longer house calls made by medical professionals. So instead of the doctor or medical practitioner seeing the context in which you are experiencing your disease, they see only a narrow view through your description.
Let’s imagine a scenario. A patient walks into an doctor’s office and describes a nagging cough and some mental fogginess. After a short conversation and a few general questions (which is all insurance allows for) the doctor assumes either a seasonal allergy or cold. They prescribe a drug to deal with the symptoms. The patient leaves but the problem persists.
If the dpractitioner had been at the patient’s house they would’ve noticed several cats in the house and a lot of dander. They would’ve scheduled a specific allergy test and recommended changes to the patient’s lifestyle to deal with the root cause.
Context is everything. Learning happens in context.
Again, learning about people’s experience from a downtown office is like trying to build a house using only a description. There is no context and therefore there is an incomplete learning opportunity.
Mood Follows Action
The most powerful way to change your brain is through action. Thinking (or overthinking) does not change behavior.
The best way to think is through action. The best way to change is through action. The best way to learn is through action and the best way to manifest your reality is through action.
As an advisor, I often hear from my clients that they’re stuck on a problem and need advice. They will ask their board members, their investors, their friends, their partners and their advisors to give them answers. But what they really doing is postponing action.
Leadership means making hard choices and acting on them. That doesn’t mean every choice or decision will be perfect. But inaction is worse than no decision at all.
The role of an advisor is to give you the tools to go from thinking to action as quickly as possible. If you’re really stuck, that starts with drilling down to your purpose or your ‘why’. From there you can create a decision stack or develop the confidence in yourself to take action.
Being clear on your ‘why’ allows you to make quick choices and take fast action. Clarity on your ‘why’ gives you that gut feeling of knowing the way ahead.
Action is where the learning happens. Action is where understanding happens. Action pulls you forward.
If you want to learn fast, take action. You’ll probably stumble and make mistakes but it’ll be worth it. Babies don’t walk by waiting to go to college to take Walking 101. They try. They fall. They try again.
Nature is brilliant. There’s evidence of taking action all around us. The fastest way to learning is by doing. So, let’s do it.
