Learning to learn
At work or in life, I often stumble upon subjects where I’m found lacking in understanding. Alternatingly, it resulted in me either staying quiet out of embarrassment or walking away slowly because I couldn’t contribute or sometimes even try to steer the conversation to my comfort zone.
Over time, I learnt that there’s a more important option here: learn!
It’s not as simple as it sounds. To begin with, there’s a mindset change involved. Being mindful/aware of such situations and interjecting auto-response is a challenge. To be able to do that, I had to look inside to see “Why” I was doing that. Introspection is key. Once you tap into your core reason, you can tweak it. I felt the need to contribute to every conversation. That led to my feeling of insecurity.
No body knows everything!
In my mind, I knew I am not master of everything. What I’ve come to realize is, nobody is a master of everything and that it’s alright if I didn’t know something.
Be the last to speak
Coupled with this understanding was something I read in the past : “Always be the last person to speak in a room”. The reason this holds well is , firstly, you don’t make the obvious points that everybody thinks of making. Secondly, you have the advantage of listening to everyone’s opinion to bring a differentiating point of view.
What changed?
Keeping the above things in mind, I decided to take a different approach to what I was doing. I started paying great attention to the topic in discussion and glean as many key words as I can during the conversation. Sometimes, I would even interrupt if I had a dumb question.
Next, I would go watch YouTube videos with most views on the topic and matched the key words with the video. Alternatively, I would read experts view on the topic.
The essence of this process is to form an understanding of this topic. If the subject interested me, I would make it part of my daily reading. One example is reading about economy. About 6 months ago, there was a lot of news on Inflation ( it is still a hot topic & will continue to do so for another year at the very least). I wanted to understand it better so I started with Investopedia’s definition of Inflation. 6 months in, I continue to read on the subject & beyond.
The beauty is, learning compounds. It’s the initial ramp that’s the hardest. Once I formed a minimum map of what the scope of the subject is, my brain could start interlinking individual learnings on the subject.
Human brain , specifically neocortex, is capable of finding patterns. All you have to do is feed enough data to it.
Hope this helps anyone who has the same difficult I had!