Why Doesn’t What We Learn Always Become Understanding We Can Build On?
You read the same paragraph three times. You jump between videos. You practise again. You take a break and have another go the next day, but your progress seems slow. You keep forgetting what you just understood, and it feels like nothing is really sticking or connecting. Day after day, you feel more frustrated. Maybe it’s learning to code, maybe it’s learning to cook, or ride a bike. Whatever it is, we get left feeling disappointed and demoralised. We have all been there, feeling defeated because we felt we were failing to learn something, but… could it be that perhaps you weren’t failing at all? Perhaps you were simply trying to build a picture before enough pieces had found where they belonged? Let’s put all this in perspective. Think about the last time you felt defeated while using a smartphone. For most of us, it would be a resounding “never”. Now, imagine someone who has lived most of their life before the digital age, maybe like our own grandfather or grandmother. They would be feeling lost when using a smartphone. Many of us would know someone like this. How Would You Teach Grandmother To Use A Smartphone? Take a second and imagine how you would begin to teach Grandma to use a smartphone when she has only ever seen other people using smartphones. You might start her off from somewhere familiar, such as by showing her how calling a friend with a smartphone is like calling with one of those older phones with buttons. Once Grandma gets it, you might then start to introduce other simple apps such as calendar, notes, and messaging. You might compare them to physical things that already exist: the calendar app to paper calendars, notes app to a notebook, and messaging to a mailbox. As Grandma gets familiar, you might start to introduce her to new ways of using those apps. Calendars can be marked with scheduled events, messaging can be used to leave a grocery list. She may also start being creative with the apps, such as using messaging to send jokes to you. After some time and practice, she might start talking to everyone whose contact she can get without breaking a sweat. How Would You Not Teach Grandmother To Use A Smartphone? Now, take another moment to think about how you would not teach Grandma. You probably wouldn’t be teaching Grandma ‘advanced’ features like backup and restore from the very beginning. You would also know in the back of your mind to hold off on that until she had at least grasped the simple and familiar stuff. You wouldn’t try to teach her the whole smartphone at once nor expect her to get it in a day, and importantly, you wouldn’t expect her to remember a giant pile of instructions first and somehow become proficient later. You would take it slow, teaching her one thing a day, heck, even one thing a week. Finally, you wouldn’t rush her practice. Instead, you would let her take time to get familiar, and you might even want to help her get some of that regular practice, such as by using calls and messaging as part of your routine with her. Why Do We Start With What We Already Know? There is certainly more than one way to learn new things, but learning becomes much easier when we start with what is familiar. In particular, we start where context is familiar. We think of a familiar setting, and somewhere in that setting is a thing or space that this new thing can be compared to. This starts our new thing off in a familiar setting, a familiar context. It starts to find its footing. Over time, it begins to connect to other things that are already familiar to you. The strongest contexts often come from needs or wants, and usually, we fit new things into the situations we are most acquainted with. I know all that sounds really confusing. So let’s bring Grandma back for a bit. Let’s say Grandma needs to contact you, family, and friends while she has to be somewhere outside of home. She figures that she can bring the smartphone with her when she goes out. → known need: I need to contact people→ known behaviour: I use a telephone→ new possibility: this telephone comes with me When Grandma has a list of groceries she wants you to get on your way back from work, she figures that messaging would work better than calling. → known need: I need to give you a grocery list→ existing understanding: I can use a written note to give you a list→ new use: I can send the grocery list as a text message We see two questions in action here: Once we use these questions to help find context, we start to be able to use what we have learnt. Using our new learning repeatedly then gives what we have learnt more opportunities to stick and connect, rather than leaving us with a list of isolated steps to remember. When Nothing Seems To Connect So now. You read the same paragraph three times. You jump between videos. You practise again. You come back tomorrow. Nothing seems to connect. Remember those? Now compare yourself with Grandma. On the surface, the two of you might seem quite different. She felt lost with a smartphone, something that you know and use like the back of your hand. But underneath that difference is an experience that might feel surprisingly familiar: when faced with something that feels hard to learn, both you and Grandma can end up feeling just as lost. So maybe you aren’t all that different after all. Grandma didn’t yet have enough familiar context for the new information. Maybe sometimes we don’t either. Difficulty can sometimes be the experience of receiving information before it has enough context to become understanding. Maybe the pieces haven’t connected yet, and we are still unsure about how exactly to think
Why Curious Conversations Still Left Something Missing
I spend a lot of time on my work, and to keep myself from overworking, I made it a rule of thumb to almost never refuse a catch-up with friends when they ask. Chatting at cafes are my usual favourite, and at one of those catch-up sessions with a friend, a familiar topic came up. Crypto. The Conversations That Stayed With Me Some of my friends had already known that I have spent a fair amount of time in the crypto world, so I was more than comfortable to talk about it with him. A few talking turns later, I had felt that we had lost each other somewhere in the conversation. He started to seem more lost and confused. I started to feel some frustration when trying to clarify. Even though we parted ways that day as per our usual, I noticed that what happened that day had gotten me thinking a little more. Fast forward half a year and many more catch-ups, the topic of crypto would show up every now and then, and whenever it did, I would notice something interesting. The questions were usually different from friend to friend, meeting to meeting, but the feeling left with me afterward, it was usually the same. It would feel as if we had been discussing the same topic, yet somehow we hadn’t discussing the same things, but had been talking past each other. Dont get me wrong. The conversations were genuine; The curiosity was genuine; I had tried hard to put jargon away, to ask questions… and yet, even after all that, something still felt missing. The more I reflected on it, the harder it became to blame the disconnect on any single conversation. It got me thinking hard. Why Curiosity Wasn’t Turning Into Understanding Looking back, crypto as a topic wasn’t what those conversations were about. So what WERE they actually about? I did not have a clue back then. All I felt I knew was: So to finally get myself some peace and quiet in my head, I decided to give this matter some attention. Without any clear direction, I began by recalling those conversations and some of the patterns I observed. The topic would be broached by the friend. After a few talking turns, questions would arise, and clarification would follow. It was here that my interest heightened. Those questions would keep branching into other questions. Clarifications often required more clarifications. Curiosity was present, but it didn’t lead to confidence growing. Something definitely was going on. So I dug in deeper. The conversations were accumulating information, yes, but they were not building understanding. Connections were made, appreciation followed, yet certainty never seemed to follow. These were not disconnected. They all seemed to be pointing toward something. And then there was the aftertaste that they left me with. What was that? The lack of satisfaction. That was what I had been feeling. The same was probably true for my friends. Our conversations had ended without anyone feeling fully satisfied. Not me. Not them. The more I reflected on those conversations, the less interested I became in what had gone wrong, and the more interested I became in what would have helped. Getting To The Other Side If I wanted to figure out what would have helped my friends, I needed to also look at what had gone on from their perspective, and to do that, I put myself in the shoes of each of my friends once again. I imagined what it was like for them during and after those conversations. The confusion was real. The frustration was real. The uncertainty was real. Even with all the sincere curiosity going into the conversation, those conversations were by no means easy them. Then perhaps the problem wasn’t anything to do with curiosity at all. Perhaps what was needed wasn’t more curiosity, but something that could help it take root, help that interest grow into understanding. And so my attention slowly shifted away from the problem itself and toward a different question entirely: What would those conversations have looked like if they had gone well? Questions would have resolved instead of triggering further burning questions. Likewise, clarifications would have felt settling and not have been left wanting. Information would have begun to fit together over time. We would start to have the same maps of crypto in our heads. We would start to feel confident that we were talking about the same things. At the end of it all, both of us would have left with a sense of progress, and for them, a sense of having received something tangible in their hands. Each conversation could have helped my friends find crypto a little bit more familiar, like getting a bit more familiar with the roads each time they drove by. With each drive on the roads of crypto, they could have had something new to drive home with. Each drive could feel like a refreshing leisure ride with a friend, and not with a boss or a driving instructor, but with a buddie. Ultimately, I wished there was a space for all of this. This was something I could not stop thinking about. Eventually, I Could Not Ignore It Anymore Sure, I had gotten to the bottom of what went on in those conversations. Realistically, no one was asking for more than that. However, there was also something else that also kept circling back into my mind: Why did my friends even choose to talk to me about crypto? Yes, they were trying to make better decisions for their future and needed a way for the scattered pieces to start fitting together, but they were not asking casually. Each of them had trusted me enough to ask, so it certainly was more than simply a set of awkward conversations. That mattered enough for me to go beyond just wanting answers to scratch my own itch. It made me want to get down to building that ideal