So many people are afraid of learning. What I mean when I say people hate learning is, people don’t like to take time during their day to practice or focus on a skill they aren’t proficient in for the sake of increasing their proficiency in it.
Here are the three main reasons why people hate learning:
Learning things you don’t want to learn
School is a big offender for this reason. School has a universal system of teaching and required subjects. Most of the subjects we learn in school are not subjects a lot of kids willingly want to learn. Think about it, if as a child you were interested in dinosaurs or astronauts, you’d read all the material about those subjects until you fell asleep doing so. When it comes to U.S. History or Chemistry however, most of us study the material dreadfully JUST to pass a class.
The problem with learning things you don’t like is that now we train our brain to respond with a set of flustering emotions when we have something in front of us that we should learn, like the in’s and out’s of your new computer or how to install a program on your computer. These seemingly tiny chores might cause your brain to overreact because of past associations to learning things you don’t want to learn on a larger scale.
Not Knowing Where to Start
School is another offender here. Our public school system here in the USA has a standardized system of teaching. However, there isn’t a system for learning. Students don’t have a routine or guidelines to refer to when they want to learn something. Most students just read the material given to them over and over, memorize it and pass a test. That’s not really how learning works in the real world.
For starters, there isn’t a test to prove your proficiency on the subject. The only way for someone to really know where they stand is their consistency over a long period of time. There’s a process of consistency and reflection that needs to happen to get proper feedback for the skill at question.
Material is the biggest problem here. In school, you’re provided with the material and told to read it until you memorized it. In the real world, you’re on your own. No one hands you the material you need. If you’re trying to find out how to take care of your fish tank, but the man at the pet store says one thing and a website says another, who do you believe? Where do you even start looking for material? Do we ask someone first or look it up online first? Do we order a book on home aquariums? If so, which book out of the hundreds out there?
You see, this poses a huge problem and can turn many people off from trying to learn anything. Most people just freestyle unnecessarily until they have some results and stick with the first thing that seems the get them by. One needs a ton of motivation and time to dedicate to vigorously scrambling around until you get it right. So something like finding the right car, learning how to fix your sink or reformatting your computer can seem so unappealing and too big to figure out. After all, where would you start in figuring something like that out?!
It’s too hard and will take too much time
Chronic autodidacts and self taught people are never afraid of this because they know where to start. Not knowing where to start and not having a plan is why people can’t gauge difficulty and duration. A lot of times, people will think painting the house is too hard to learn because so much can go wrong and it will take too much time. Well, what is all that based off of? Do you know anything about painting? So why assume all that other crap without even trying?
Next time something “seems” too big, too difficult, too complicated or too time consuming, just ask your self “how do I know that?” and see what the answer is. If it’s because you feel like it’s something you don’t want to learn or you don’t know where to start, then those are your real problems.
Here are some solutions to improving your learning skills:
Have a Plan
Easier said than done, but the number one most important thing is to have a plan. The first step is to do some research, preferably through very popular books on the topic of inquiry. I recommend books over internet because a lot more thought and research go into books. These days, any idiot with an internet connection can put up a blog and say whatever the Hell they want. When it comes to books, publishers, along with the press and retailers are involved in the material. Until your information gathering skills are better, stick to books.
Once you can comprehend the skill or information you want to obtain, the next step is a blueprint. Just like a house. You don’t just think of the house you’d like and just start building it. Come up with detailed, actionable steps. This is great because if you just follow the steps you’ve created, you can accurately measure time and frequency. All you have to do now is find the time to schedule those steps in. Over time, you’ll begin to check off each step until you’re done with whatever it is you needed to learn or produce.
Have a Schedule
Don’t live your life running from one emergency to the next. Settle down and reduce your daily workload. Wake up in the morning and just plan out your day. This way, you can look at your list of actionable steps to what you’re trying to learn and put it on your list. That makes things so much easier than just doing it whenever “you have time”. If you don’t manage your time, you’ll end up with a lot less of it.
Schedule on your calendar, your daily to-do list or physical notepad the steps you need to take and handle them with priority. Don’t rush, one day at a time.
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