#89 – Learning experiments

Poder aprender", el pódcast que te ayuda a aprender idiomas, hobbies y skills de manera más efectiva.

Acá hablamos sobre hábitos de aprendizaje, práctica deliberada y estrategias para aprender mejor.

Mi nombre es Walter Freiberg y te invito a desarrollar tu poder de aprender para

alcanzar tus metas personales y profesionales.

There's not a single unique way of learning or developing a skill.

We really like this idea of theory and learning the theory.

And sometimes we get stuck before putting things into motion.

Usually all it takes is the willingness of running an experiment and learning from that.

What are the different ways we can leverage to learn something in our lives?

What's the difference between theory and practice and figuring out when something is working for us?

What about the length of time that we run our learning experiments?

And what about the results of an experiment and the evaluation process?

These are some of the questions we'll answer in episode number 89 of "Poder aprender".

I don't think there's a single way to learn.

It's like every teacher has their own methods.

In Spanish, we have this saying like, and we say: "Cada maestro con su librito".

It's like: every teacher with his own little book and his own little method.

And what about every learner?

What about the methods that every learner gets to use or gets to choose?

It's not that we are stuck with the methods that teachers are providing us.

We get to choose.

Every teacher has their own methods, and every learner has their own ways

and their own methods and preferences.

And I like to see... I like to think about the world of learning as experiences and experiments.

You know how there are experiments in science?

Like... scientists do all sorts of experiments, even social scientists.

We get like the experiments in physics or biology or different hard sciences, and we get that

in social sciences and we get that in life.

We can create our own experiments.

We decide what works for us and what... what we want to try and what we want to experiment with.

If we don't have experiences and if we don't try different methods, how are we supposed to learn?

How are we supposed to know what's working and what's beneficial for our own goals and what's not?

There's also this thing about learning preferences.

You know that this kinesthetic style or visual style or auditory style, we have different preferences.

Even though that doesn't mean that we are bound to learn just in a single way.

We may have a visual preference, and that doesn't mean that we cannot learn by listening to

things or by experiencing them in physical ways.

And I think that it's valuable to play and to tune in into all those preferences, and they

might change, and they might be different in different times of our life, depending on

what are our life circumstances, depending on the stages we are in our own life.

It's one thing to learn a language when we are kids, when we are babies, and it's a very

different thing when we are in our twenties or in our forties or in our sixties, and we can

leverage different methods and different ways to learn and acquire languages and other skills.

The same with life circumstances.

There are ways that might be more beneficial when we live on our own or when we live with our family,

and we can use different circumstances to our own advantage depending on where we are living and the

arrangements that we have created to live our life.

That can take many, many forms.

Sometimes we feel like we are stuck in a certain... with a certain method or we are stuck learning

in a certain way, and we can shift things around.

We can try different things so we can play with other environments.

We can put ourselves in new circumstances, we can learn with more of a playful attitude.

We can create that for ourselves.

Another aspect of learning experiments is connected to instruction versus experiences.

I believe that it's important to follow instructions and especially to be able to follow instructions

or to be willing to follow instructions, being a person who is receptive to learning,

who's receptive to the teachings of others.

I think that's a good quality of a person, of a learner, and there's also

this willingness of having experiences.

And being willing to put things into practice.

So, another way of expressing this would be that there's theory and there's practice, and I believe

that there's a time and place for each one of these.

It's good to learn the facts and to learn the information, and oftentimes we need to put that

into practice, otherwise we don't see change and we, we don't see new things in our life.

So, when we are thinking in terms of experiments, learning experiments, I would encourage us to think

in terms of practice, putting things into practice.

Of course we can experiment with different theories and frameworks, and we can learn.

We can read all sorts of books and until we don't put that into practice, we don't really

know what's... how that's working for us, right?

How do I know if something's working for me?

I need to put that into practice.

I need to put that to the test.

I need to test that in the real world, like... in the actual world.

It's not like just my idea and how this would play out or my... in my imagination.

I need to put that into practice.

I need to bring this to, to the physical world.

Usually it takes... that's what it takes.

Another layer of following instructions and having experiences is about

trusting or not trusting others.

It takes some trust... being willing to follow and being a follower even for, for a while.

Sometimes it can be for a long time.

In order to start creating experiences or start playing with experiences, because many times we

need some theory and we need some instruction, or we need some facts to start putting that into

the world, and that takes usually some trust.

One other thing, that is my ability to experiment, trusting my own ability and trusting my... in

my own skills and in my own powers of learning and my ability to get better at the skill

that I'm practicing, that I'm developing.

I need to have some degree of trust in my own ability to experiment and

being willing to, to mess things up.

Sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot depending on where we are.

And that's completely fine.

I truly believe that we need that sort of balance between following

instruction and having experiences.

And it would be a good idea for most of us to lean in more into the having experiences

side, because usually we are really good at theory and learning about specific things.

And sometimes we... we don't feel like putting things in motion or taking action.

So the nudge here would be to be willing a little bit more to have an experience instead

of just learning about the thing and learning the theory and just following the instruction.

Following the instructions is fine and it's useful.

We can combine that with having an actual experience in the field.

When we are thinking in terms of learning experiments, the question might be something

like, what's the duration of an experiment?

How long am I supposed to continue with this?

How can I know that I've given this a fair chance.

I think it's all about giving something a fair chance.

What happens is that sometimes we are telling ourselves that we are running an experiment.

Maybe it's too short, like one day or three days or maybe a week.

And we haven't given that a fair chance.

We can't really know if that's working or if it's not working because we didn't

even have time to see and to assess the results of what we are... what we are doing.

I think that's important in the first place to give it fair chance.

And that might be a month, three months, a year?

It depends on the skill.

It depends on what we are doing.

It depends on what we are trying to cultivate and yeah, it might be different for different things.

But, usually it takes more than one day or a few days or even one week.

It's good to slow down and to reflect on what is really a fair chance depending on the specific

thing we are learning and trying to develop

A person that came to mind when I was thinking on this topic and this episode was the Buddha

and how he tried different things in the world of meditation before he got enlightened.

He tried different things and he ran different experiments.

He tried different meditation techniques, concentration techniques.

He had some experiences with ascetic practices that seemed to be leading nowhere, but until

putting that to the test and experience them firsthand, he didn't really know.

Was this the way that he was looking for?

And one thing that is interesting to me and... that doesn't mean that it's always

an absolute requirement, is that he was willing to learn from the teachers of his

time and he tried to master their techniques.

And then, after he exhausted all the possibilities available to him and he

'there must be something else.'

And nobody seems to be having that answer.

Maybe it is time to figure that out myself.

And maybe I can look back in my own past.

When I was a kid and I was in and I had those deep concentration states, maybe I can use

something that worked for me in my own past.

Maybe that's the next experiment and there's something I can develop in a different way.

There were those learnings with the teachers of his time.

And at the same time, he was willing to go beyond that.

There was an experiment, a period of time, I think it was seven years where he tried a number

of things and at the end of that he realized that maybe he needed to develop his own thing.

So there's a lot of value in this trial and error.

Being willing to try things, being willing to put that to the test, using the collective wisdom of

his age, what's available in the world at that time.

And there's also this question about time.

As human beings, we don't have unlimited time in the world.

For that reason, we need to be careful with our experiments.

Sometimes, we get stuck and we run experiments for too long.

Maybe we run an experiment for 10 years.

It would have been better to just cap it at one year or one month.

And we continue doing the same, even though we are not getting different results,

and sometimes we are getting backwards.

It's like we are not making progress.

We are regressing in our life or in our learnings, whatever that might be.

So, there's something to consider there.

The value of time.

It's important to give something a try, give something a fair chance, and at the

same time, I think it's a good idea to limit that on... on a specific timeframe.

And the last portion of this episode is about the results we get of an experiment.

We need to have some sort of evaluation on what we've done.

It's important to mention here that we can learn from whatever happens.

We can learn from the good stuff and the not so good stuff.

There's value in learning and appreciating what worked well for us.

And there's a lot of value in learning from what didn't go so well.

And it's like when we are learning from other people, sometimes we can learn

from the virtues of the person we admire.

We take that as a role model and we can also learn from the opposite.

From a vicious person, a person who is not inspiring at all and who would be

like the opposite of a good role model.

And we can think: 'this is not what I wanna do and I would like to do the

opposite of what this person is doing.'

So that's an opportunity to learn from them and we are learning from what we don't want.

And that happens in families sometimes, where there's a person who used to drink

a lot and part of the family takes that as an example of what he doesn't want to do.

I don't want to live my life that way.

And that works as an example, is like the opposite of what we want.

So here we need that aspect on that layer of reflection and self-evaluation

of the work that we've done.

And in order to assess something we need to take action.

For that reason is usually helpful to have a bias for taking action, a bias for

action, and being willing to experiment and to put things into practice, because

that gives us something to work on.

If we don't have an action and we don't have something that might go wrong, it would be hard

to assess and to evaluate and to reflect on that.

We are going to just continue doing the same thing over and over.

When we stop, when we pause, and when we take a moment to reflect, that's when we can really

know, is this something I wanna keep on doing?

Is this something that moves the needle forward for me?

Maybe this is not what I wanna do.

Maybe I want to do something different.

Maybe I need to shift things a little bit, try a new thing.

And that's something we can see after we've done the experiment, after we've taken the action, after

we've run the experiment and got the opportunity to do things and being willing to mess up and

not to be perfect, and we can learn from that.

We can learn from our own mistakes.

We can learn from what we did right?

We can learn from mistakes from other people and we can learn from what other people

did right and did in ways that we want to start doing and adopting in our lives.

There's a difference between learning from others and learning from ourselves.

We might get inspiration or we might get some information, and at the end of the day,

I think it's valuable to do the experiments ourselves, and risking mistakes and risking

things go wrong for the sake of having an experiment and having a learning experience.

This episode has been a learning experiment for me.

You might have noticed this episode is not in Spanish and up until now

all the episodes were in Spanish.

This is the first episode in English.

I don't know how many more episodes I'm going to create in English.

And, at the same time, this was something I wanted to experience.

So I was willing to run an experiment.

I was willing to give this a chance, and I'm very willing to learn about what I've done here.

Occasionally, and for a while, I don't know for how long, because I don't, I'm

not set on a duration of the experiment.

You might listen to some episodes in English or Spanish.

Based on what I'm doing right now, this is a fun experiment to run and an overall learning experiment

that I've been considering since a long time.

And now I feel ready to start leaning into this new zone that might be a little bit more uncomfortable,

than what I'm used to, and I'm glad I'm doing it.

What would be a good learning experiment for you now?

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Sigan aprendiendo y acuérdense de practicar bien.