Welcome back and happy new year.
Hope you're enjoying the start of the year.
It's hard to think of a topic more important, both through your own life and to the success
of just society as a whole, than our ability to learn.
From other people's mistakes, other people's successes, how the world works, other people's
biases, your own biases.
Like that's what makes the world great is that we can learn from one another.
Pretty obvious, right?
But what I've always found interesting is that there are so many different ways to learn
and I feel like we don't talk about that enough.
And that's what I want to talk about on today's episode.
If I asked you, which do you think will lead to a healthier and happier relationship in
life?
And a range of marriage by someone who doesn't even know you, or spending years meeting
hundreds of people from different backgrounds and figuring out what you want and what you
don't want, and then serendipitously meeting your partner only when both of you happen
to be ready to settle down.
But those are the two choices, the answer for which is going to lead to more happiness
and a healthier relationship is obvious, at least to me.
Now, the first, the range marriage, you could call that active search.
It's managed on a timeline, it has rules, and it's done whether you are ready for it or
not.
The second idea, let's call that passive search.
You are in control, and you let it happen whenever it happens, given what you want and
where you are in life.
Now, I think the same logic applies to what I've often thought of as active versus passive
learning.
I would define it like this.
Active learning is when somebody tells you what to learn and how to learn on a set schedule,
on pre-selected standardized topics.
Active learning is very different.
In passive learning, you let your mind wander, with no intended destination.
You read and you learn broadly.
You talk to people from all kinds of various backgrounds and you stumble haphazardly
across topics that you had never considered, but that spark your curiosity.
Often just because it's the topic that you happen to need at that specific time in your
life like a missing puzzle piece.
Now, I cannot be alone in realizing that most of what I have learned in life has come
from passive learning.
Something that I've learned as a writer is that writing for yourself is fun and it shows,
but writing for other people is work and that shows as well.
Writing something your own way on your own terms because it fits your unique personality
is night and day compared with performing for somebody else's expectations.
So active learning, which you will recognize as school, not only has a wonderful place
in life, but it has to be considered one of the greatest achievements of modern times,
of course.
I am not anti-school in the slightest.
The problem though is assuming that active learning is the only or even the best form
of learning.
Or more dangerously what happens is that people who have only experienced active learning
that isn't right for their personality may become convinced that they hate learning,
they hate reading, they hate being curious about the world and then it just kind of spirals
down from there.
What gets most people's minds moving is stumbling across a niche topic that either fits
their unique mind or is that missing puzzle piece for a specific problem that they're
having in life and it is hard to foster that with active learning in a classroom.
You really just need to let people's minds wander aimlessly, waiting until they discover
what's right for them at the time that they need it.
So putting this all together in practical terms, I like to keep two things in mind.
Number one, don't contain your learning, your education, to your own profession or your
own major.
Read and learn as broadly as you can.
A big part of passive learning is going out of your way to read and learn from the
widest variety of topics that you can find, intentionally looking for similarities between
different fields.
When you do that, you'll be stunned at how easy and fun it is to stumble across a new
idea that teaches you how the world works.
So if you are in business, you'll be shocked at how much you can learn about motes and
competitive advantages from a topic like biology, and if you are in biology, you'll be shocked
at how much you can learn about growth limits and evolution from business.
One problem with active learning is that it tends to be siloed with math taught in one
department, chemistry taught in another department, English is taught in a different building
across campus.
It tends to keep topics boring and lacking a real world context.
But if you study broadly enough, you will see how interconnected every field is.
Most fields fall under this umbrella of how the world deals with uncertainty and competition.
That's kind of a common denominator across so many different fields.
And when you connect these dots, if you find something that is true in more than one field,
you have probably uncovered something that is extremely important and worth paying attention
to.
The more fields that it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental driver
of just how the world works.
It's been like this forever.
Journalist Walter Badget wrote in 1859, he wrote, quote, the world is often wiser than
any philosopher.
Like looking at the world as a whole is much wiser than any single person could be.
David Centera recently summarized Jeff Bezos' mindset, he said, quote, if you are paying
attention, the whole world is a classroom.
That's great.
It's just a classroom of passive learning to pay attention to.
Let me give you a very strange example of how one topic can teach you about another.
Neil de Grasthyson once asked a group of college professors, how much TV they watched.
And he explained, he said,
only about 50% of the audience actively watched any number of hours of TV per week.
At the time, the average person in America watched 30 hours of TV per week.
So I said to them, how could you possibly claim to know and understand who you are teaching?
These professors have no idea about the influences going on in the mind of the person who they
were trying to teach.
That's so smart.
And look, few college history professors will think to themselves, hey, if I go watch
South Park, I'll understand the minds of who I'm teaching better and therefore I will
become a better teacher.
And at the same time, few people who are watching South Park realize that they are actually
learning about how a big part of society thinks.
But that is a very quirky example of the kind of broad, multi-disciplinary learning that
helps you make a better sense of the world.
And I think if you will look at some of the smartest and most successful people, they're
all multi-disciplinary learners, not just within the confines of different academic departments,
but just understanding how people think, the students of culture and media, and understanding
how people's minds works.
So read broadly, watch broadly, discuss broadly, learn as broadly as you can.
Number two, give your employees time to think and give yourself time to ponder.
If you as a boss or as an employer expect that learning stops at graduation and the employees
that you hire are merely meant to produce work, you will get the kind of employees that
you deserve.
And by and large, how the job market works today is not like that.
In 1870, 46% of jobs were in agriculture, and 35% were in manufacturing, that's according
to the economist Robert Gordon.
So few professions, historically, relied on a worker's brain.
You didn't have to think, you just labored without interruption, and the work that you
did, digging a hole or plowing a field, it was visible and tangible.
But it's not like that anymore.
Today, it's almost perfectly flipped.
38% of jobs today are now designated as managers or professionals.
Those are decision-making jobs that pretty much only work with your head, the decisions
that you make.
41% of jobs are also service jobs, and those two, they rely on your thoughts and your
abilities communicate as much as your actions.
So many of these employees will do better work if they are given time to think and learn
and ponder and discuss and just let their minds roam.
But they often can't, because so many bosses expect them to be at their desk, typing,
moving a mouse, 40 hours a week until they are age 65, and then they're kicked out
in their retire.
So without time to passively think and learn, your education, your ability to learn stalls
between age 18 and 22, most of which likely can sustain active learning in school.
And now, it seems so bizarre that as a boss, you should want to give your employees idle
time to do things that don't look like productive work.
Let them sit on the couch and think about a problem, let them go for a walk, let them
think and use their brains as you are hiring them to do.
But so many successful people found their key educational experience during free time,
passively driven by their own curiosity and their own wandering minds.
The differences in outcomes among people with the same formal education is enormous,
and a big reason why is that some people find the time to value passive learning and
others don't.
That's it for this week, thanks again for listening, we'll see you next time.
