Here are some things that I want you to understand about learning, growing and pursuing happiness.
You know, for the longest time, I believed that I was learning thoroughly, deeply by listening to audiobooks by listening to podcasts. This type of learning stimulates the brain to entertainment, and to spark some new ideas. But it’s not enough to change you to the level that you need to change.
Just upon beginning to work from home as a result of the COVID-19 I found that I had less time in the car and more time to focus on sitting and reading, I now read 10 pages a day. That was given to me by a mentor of mine, Jeff Olson, who said, if you’ll just read 10 pages a day, every day, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you learn and how quickly you get ahead and the compound the effect that this will have upon your life. So I took up the challenge, and I now read 10 pages a day every day. In a book, I have finished multiple books since I heard that.
It’s had a really interesting impact upon me. My surface learning has been replaced with deep learning. Deep Learning has allowed me not just to flirt with the information, but to date it, to marry it, to build a relationship with the information that I’m getting from these books. Here’s why; in order for you to change you’ve got to actually create When we create something when we speak, when we teach, when we draw, when we write, it takes deeper levels of our cognitive capacity to create than it does to consume.
When we are listening to audiobooks, for example, or podcasts, it’s more difficult to create with it unless we have the discipline of stopping pausing, writing down what we’re learning, if we just simply consume, again, it’s a surface level communication. But if we stop and actually underline and write in the margins, And teach that to somebody else. Now all of a sudden, we’ve gone from being a consumer to being a creator. The moment that we turn into a creator, we gain power. We are given the ability to change ourselves and to change other people.
I would encourage you to consider your own morning routine. My guess is that for many of my listeners, you, like me, have less time in the car. If this is true, if you’re spending less time in the car, whether it be getting to or from work or two are from appointments, then I want you to find the time create the time to actually read.
You will start to see the world differently. So that’s what education really does. It’s not just that you’re taking information from someone else’s book and putting it into your brain. You start to recognize the world around you at a deeper level, because you’re a deeper person. Things that we’ve put into our brain, create a filter or a lens through which we see the world around us.
So the takeaway from this is, you need to read and create. Now you might say, I don’t read. Okay, listen and create, write and share what you have learned. Because in a knowledge economy, surface level thinking is not going to get you what you want.