“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.” ? Albert Einstein to his son, Hans Einstein

There is a lot of wisdom to unpack in that simple sentence Einstein once uttered to his son, and it ties in directly with the focus of this chapter.

It’s a straightforward premise. If you are lucky enough to be consumed with a goal or objective, and achieving that goal or objective happens to require the acquisition of skills or knowledge, then you won’t even notice 먹튀검증사이트. Your learning and expertise become second nature, all in pursuit of that goal.

I want to briefly repeat the story I told in the introduction of this book. I had a very motivating goal of talking to a girl in my Spanish class, Jessica. She tended to turn around and ask me for help because she was perhaps the one person who paid less attention than me in class, so I vowed to get better at Spanish so she would continue talking to me.

In this pursuit for her attention, I studied Spanish like a madman, and even researched obscure references and vocabulary to impress her. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had made learning secondary, and the pursuit of my goal was my biggest priority.

I learned as a byproduct, and that is perhaps the easiest way of all to learn.

Here’s another example which involves my older sibling. When he was growing up, the Internet was just starting to become popular. Of course, with the Internet came chat rooms, message boards, and all sorts of communication with people that weren’t right next to you. It opened the world up for many people. I remember watching him sit at the family computer struggling to type.

One day he downloaded some sort of chat program, which I now realized was AOL Instant Messenger ? the infamous AIM that nearly every adolescent, teenager, and young adult used at the time. It couldn’t have been one or two weeks later that I walked past him at the computer again, and couldn’t help but notice how noisy and busy the keyboard was. His typing speed had probably quadrupled in just that week since downloading AIM. He became nearly obsessed with chatting online, and that obsession translated into competency quite quickly.

He had made learning how to type secondary in pursuit of his primary goal of talking to his friends online more quickly! All he wanted to do was type faster so he could tell jokes with proper timing and not get beat to the punch line by his friends, and he found a way to get that done through typing more quickly. His accuracy and so-called technique would probably have been better if he attended typing classes, but he was an incredibly fast typist, with all credit going to AIM.

Here’s a final example to illustrate that making learning second can lead you to learning and knowledge without you even realizing it.

This story is about one of my friends from college. When he was still living in the dorms, he was surrounded by people who happened to play the guitar. They had all learned at some point when they were teenagers, and brought their guitars to college to serenade women. Occasionally, they also lugged all of their guitars into the same room and jammed out to classic rock songs as a band.

Feeling left out, my friend asked if he could use one of their roommates’ guitars when they weren’t there. It wasn’t a problem, so my friend began learning how to play guitar on his own, practicing the songs his dorm mates jammed to. It wasn’t that he felt left out of wanted to fit in, he just saw music as a fun group activity and wanted to be able to participate.

The next time the group gathered to jam, he was able to join in on the fun, and when they went through various songs in their repertoire, he was able to learn on the fly and play quietly in the background before becoming more confident and playing more loudly. He started to bond with these guys, and learned more and better guitar so the group could play more complex tunes and solos.

He is another shining example of why, if possible, you should make learning secondary.

Given the proper motivation, you can make it so learning and knowledge isn’t a chore, and is rather a rung on the ladder to your overall goal and sense of gratification. What’s more important when you have a bigger goal is that you focus on efficiently making something work. You might not be worried about the specifics as much, but you will probably have the same end result. From there, you have the choice to start deliberate practice, rehearsal, and fine-tuning everything, but simply having the right motivation this will get you to a point of competency and even make you stand out.

Skill, expertise, and learning can all come as a byproduct of your overall goal. What do we do with this knowledge?

Understand that a motivation other than learning and knowledge is your most powerful learning tool. You have to see the forest through the trees and understand the rewards and benefits of what your actions are leading towards. In essence, everything you learn, or want to become better at, is a tool on the way to your overarching goal or project.

Don’t have a goal or project? Make one that will make the acquisition of a desired skill necessary, but not the primary focus. For instance, if you want to learn better geography, start playing board games that require such knowledge. If you want to get better at skiing, start entering small, local competitions which will force you to improve. If you want to get better a typing, play a game that requires quick and accurate typing. If you want to learn a language more quickly, watch television shows that require greater vocabulary.

Make learning the journey, not the end point.

It’s important to mention that it’s not wise to always rely on motivation or inspiration. Those require you to be in a positive state of mind, which isn’t always possible. It also puts you in a mindset where you have a prerequisite to learning and focusing. You need to feel inspired, you need to feel motivated, or you need to be in the right state of mind. This, we all know, definitely isn’t always possible.

That’s why I want to touch upon what I call the 10-Minute Rule. It works in two ways. First, if you don’t feel like doing something, just do it for ten minutes, then you can stop. Of course, you’ll rarely stop at the ten-minute mark because you’ll have built up momentum and destroyed what was keeping you lazy: inertia.

Second, whenever you feel like stopping a task or quitting for the day, just give it ten more minutes until you stop. You may not continue much past this, but giving yourself a specific deadline will make you want to finish as much as possible in that time, and it will make you just a tad bit more productive. Your motivation may be waning, but your discipline will keep you working.

The other big lesson of this chapter is that doing, using, and applying is the most important part of learning, hands down. Recall the pyramid of learning where the most passive methods of learning yielded the least memory retention.

When you do, use, and apply your knowledge, you are at the bottom of the pyramid which is participatory and active. It’s more work to be sure, and most of us like to slide down the path of least resistance.

Doing and getting your hands dirty allows you to find patterns and make connections that observation and study would never show you. I’d go so far as to say you will never master anything without some firsthand experience. Dan Coyle, talent researcher and scientist, suggested that the rule of two-thirds is most effective when learning or acquiring a new skill. You should spend one third of the time reading and researching, and the other two thirds actually doing and practicing.

You can only learn so much about playing the guitar by watching videos and reading tutorials. Don’t expect to be able to play like Jimi Hendrix the first time you pick the guitar up if you don’t practice and do. If you’re a complete neophyte, then you need to start with research and bone up on the ground rules and boundaries. Then, go and do.

Knowledge from research by itself is useless without the experience to back it up. When you combine those two, you gain intuition and judgment, which is usually the true goal.