Now that I’m a few weeks into my masters, I feel like I’m getting a bit of momentum going. My first assignments deadlines are approaching and I’m having to put in hours of work for them, which means working every day on something.
I’ve my first due for submission this week, with many more to come between now and Christmas, and year-long projects and reviews to be thought about and worked on.
My first few days in university were exhausting. Long hours of lectures are just one thing. Many might neglect the mental energy spent in figuring out how to get to a new part of town on time, wandering blindly into the campus to try and get some food before navigating the building codes to find the right building and lecture hall. Meeting fellow students, and lecturers, and getting involved in conversations and discussions.
I finished my first couple of days in a state of mild mania, and realised that I’d been in such a highly attuned state of flow for the whole thing that my mind had barely rested. I was exhausted.
But I also felt like I’d already learned so much.
Not just information on lecture slides, the names of studies and facts – which are essentially trivia.
But learning about a whole new chapter of my life.
- I now knew where I’d be studying for the next year – what the university looked like, the layout, some details about where things were located on campus.
- I found out what the course would be like; something I’d been patiently and somewhat apprehensively awaiting all year.
- Not only that, but doing a masters in psychology had been something weighing on my mind for the previous four years since I’d finished my undergrad, the whole time I was away in Vietnam. Sometimes in the back of my mind, sometimes at the fore.
- I met a lot of new people, who I’d be sharing close space with over the next year.
- I also learned a lot about myself: how I’d react to being in this situation, what I knew already and if I could bring anything worthwhile to the table in my course, either in my work or in my interactions with others.
- In addition to all this, I discovered all of things that I now need to learn, in the future. That in itself consumes a lot of mental energy.
These are big things to learn.
It’s not about the trivia, it’s about discovering a whole new part of the world. Like starting a new job, there’s a lot to take in. And after even a few days, you and your world are not going to be the same as they were a week ago.
It’s the type of learning that shifts your perspective of the world, of yourself and your view of everything around you.
Not only that, it’s a form of time travel. Your future is clearer, the new information consolidating thoughts in your head. Things like your mental visualisation of, say, what your workplace will look like (in this case my university). In many cases this can be so different that your vision of the future changes. Where you see yourself in a year. Already all of these things have changed so much since I started. Plans and aspirations are influenced.
Such perspective shifts can even change the past. If you’re training for, say, a marathon it can sometimes be hard to know if you’re doing enough work. It might feel like you are, especially if you’re following a set programme and training schedule, but there can always be nagging suspicions or doubts.
Sometimes it’s necessary to compare your work rate to someone else, though that can always backfire. It might feel like you’ve put in as many hours on the clock as you could, but then maybe you haven’t really tried your hardest, or gone training as much as you could.
And then you run the race. The question of “have you done enough?” gets answered. Sometimes it can be genuinely impossible to know in the present, such is the nature of doubt. You run the race and do great, and the questions gets answered: turns out you did do enough.
Or maybe not.
Same goes for writing and academic work.
Have I done enough work? You don’t know until you’ve done it.
So there’s a lot going on in your head at the start of a new venture like this. Big changes in consciousness, and it’s exhausting. But if embraced and tackled in the moment, then your body will embrace the challenges in a state of flow. And that’s where real learning happens.
And again, it’s not just trivia – facts learned for their own sake. Facts can be looked up; the real type of learning changes who you are.
This process of trying, and making mistakes, reflecting on them, and then looking to improve, is the exact process by which we learn any skills, whether painting or playing football or playing the violin, or even social skills. Seemingly routine tasks like cooking or cleaning follow the same mental pattern.
In his book the Talent code, Daniel Coyle lays out how the connections in our brain form the biological basis to learning skills, and how the process of deliberate practice is the way in which everyone from Jimmy Hendrix to Cristiano Ronaldo to Gary Kasparov have learned and then honed and continued to refine their incredible skills.
Not only the greats and those that appear to be born geniuses, it’s how all of us learn the basic and complex skills we use every day, whether artistic or motor skills or a combination of both.
How does it work?
- First, do something with a clear goal, or a defined way of deciding if it was done correctly or not. In my case, it’s writing, or college essays, with questions or topics and a finished article at the end of it.
- Then, reflect. Did I do it? Or, if it’s something you need to achieve a certain standard at, did I do it well enough?
- Next, repeat. Until you get it ‘right’; or at least right according to your own personal standard.
- What next? Repeat it, again and again. And then some more. True skills are consolidated until you’re blue in the face, and then repeated some more. Even Roger Federer will lost some of his tennis game if he doesn’t practice daily.
This is how writing works as a form of learning.
Not just reading texts and journal papers and lecture slides, memorising facts and trivia. But using your brain to put information together to learn something new. Synthesising information, building skills and learning how to do new things. There are steps to doing an assignment, and figuring those out is part of the learning experience.
Reflecting and taking in new information and then reflecting again.
“Is it right?”
Or at least, “Is it good enough?”
It’s the process of writing first to think, then reflecting on what you wrote, and then refining it until it’s right. Once a piece of writing is published, or an assignment submitted, you’re opened up to even further feedback.
You start with a question. These are often left open-ended, with an invitation to choose your own topic. So first you must find the topic.
To do this you must read. But read with the thought in the front or the back of your mind that what your reading must fit into the wider context of what the assignment is asking.
This part is difficult, often because you feel like you’re reading blindly and nothing is fitting. You’re like a child testing out all the proverbial shapes and trying to fit them into the holes, one by one. And then, you get it. It might come soon, or it might take hours or days. You need to sleep on things to process them. Sometimes it can be the key to having what feels like an epiphany, but is really the product of hours of conscious and unconscious deliberation on a topic.
It’s basically a process of problem solving. It’s not the mere absorption of facts, to be regurgitated in an exam which shows off your memory. A crucial extra step is having to critically analyse how the material fits into your existing worldview – in this case, how you’re going to use the information to approach your assignment.
And that’s just getting the question down. Once that’s done, you have a clearer goal: the writing assignment itself.
What follows is similar. It’s all work. Read, understand, then put the information to use in a wider context.
And that’s where real learning happens. Perspectives shift when you assimilate the information into what you already know, or change what you thought you already knew in light of new details.
Learning changes you as a person.
This is the same way that writing forces learning. You think about things and you write, or you write as you think. And the more you write, the more your thoughts get put onto the page, the more space there is in your brain and the more ideas are inspired to come forth to fill that space.
You don’t publish your first draft.
You re-write. This can be painful, as you come to grips with your own thoughts, or at least your best attempt at expressing them on paper. This part is the same process where you iron out details, back and forth, in a conversation with a friend. You get the action ‘right’.
It’s difficult. It can be painful to re-read what you wrote. I avoided it for a long time, sticking to journaling or scribbling notes for years before deciding to go back on what I’d written – what I’d thought – and tried to fix it and hammer it into a worthwhile set of ideas.
You can change your own mind. Just by writing and editing what you once thought, you consolidate the information in a way you can understand – not just memorisation of facts, but real understanding of how they fit into the piece of writing as a whole, or into your life.
And this, to me, can be the most exciting thing in the world.
I feel like I have momentum now, where every time I sit down to write – either something for college or something for myself – I’m learning new things. Articulating ideas and revising them until I have them expressed just right (or right enough). Often, it doesn’t matter what it’s about.
The important part is the learning process.
Eventually, you get to a point where you’re happy with what you’ve written. For now. Your article is finished or the deadline bears down on your assignment and you’ve no choice. You must give up with tinkering and just submit, or post or publish.
Sometimes it’s never ‘right’. Sometimes you feel like you’ve expressed yourself or the idea as best you can at that moment in time, and you’re content.
But the learning isn’t done yet.
Because once it’s done, it’s time for someone else to read it. Essays and reports get graded. Articles and posts get read. People give you feedback. This can be done through the cruel format of online views and likes. Or a grade metaphorically stamped on your work by a lecturer. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. Often, the work you thought was bad gets a great response, and what you poured your heart and soul into for weeks is ignored, left on the shelf.
But you don’t know until you publish. Often, just the feeling of having sent it ‘away’ is enough to inspire the next stage of learning. You’ve proof-read it ten times and then, somehow, you spot a typo the first time you read it after you’ve posted it. Or there’s a sentence you want to immediately change.
How does that happen?!
It’s because even the act of publishing it forces a change in perspective. It’s finished. It’s done. It’s out of your hands. It’s been said.
Even just saying something, or writing it, can affect how you see the idea, or the world into which you’ve placed it.
And it’s a different thing now.
And sometimes, people will love it. And the feedback is positive and fantastic and even strangers like what you’ve done.
Or you get a good grade on your essay. Or positive constructive feedback. Which is further learning.
Other times, not so much.
The information set out is only part of the material being graded. A lot of what you write is judged on how you write it. And it’s not just the writing, but also how you did your research. The details are all there, contained in the article or essay or project.
Through the writing process – which is, the learning process – you learn about way more than just the topic at hand.
You learn about yourself: what you already know and don’t know, and what things you need to know or could potentially know.
You learn about what you think. And about how you think. You learn about your limitations. Your fears. The things that make you procrastinate. About what’s driving you. About where you see yourself in the world. About how you relate to others. And about how you want all of these things to be.
It goes back to what I said about the new perspective changing the past.
Because then, it turns out: you did do enough work.
Or maybe not.
So it goes.
You don’t know until you’ve released it.
But perspectives on things that seem ‘finished’ can completely change your understanding of the world.
And that’s what real learning is.