Create, Learn, Repeat
Learning is how you stay relevant in any discipline. Necessary skills change over time.
It’s also how you grow your community.
You have got to learn how to learn to make your best work.
Lifelong learning is the unsung hero of every successful creator in the world.
Two very different ways of learning: Lifelong learning vs School.
[Asking questions slows down the production line. Just memorize these dates, regurgitate them on test day, and make sure to use a number two pencil.] Invest in a lifelong learning mindset. Self-directed practice.
More Learning = More Success
Today’s learners face new challenges. Their primary hang-up is understanding what they want to do. The new obstacle is figuring out which dream to pursue and then cultivating and applying the necessary energy to engage in that pursuit.
The Internet provides → Limitless knowledge vs Limitless distractions
The master skill of all: How to learn.
Next time you aren’t able to do something as well as you’d like, simply enroll yourself in Me University, plan out your semester, master the information, and award yourself a PhD in the problem you just crushed. It’s empowering. In fact, it’s addictive. It’s the secret weapon of the highest performers.
Anything is learnable. Though each person’s path will look different. We are learning machines, but to tap into that power you need a purpose.
Learning How to Learn:
Personal Phase
Curiosity — Get clear what you actually want to know. You don’t need to learn everything.
Trial and Play — Doing kept me learning, and learning kept me engaged. It’s a virtuous cycle. There is no substitute for jumping in the deep end.
Inspiration — Why did that happen?
Public Phase
Scaled Instruction — There is no substitute for watching mastery in action. Let curiosity and inspiration guide your exploration.
Get Zura Javakhadze’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Community — Passion is infectious.
Individual or Group Instructions.
Practice Phase
Repetition- Most skills have conceptual components and mechanical components.
“Skill gets imprinted through action” — Twyla Tharp
DEAR it.
Deconstruct other people’s methods →
Emulate the different elements →
Analyze those parts. Put the winners together →
Repeat with the new formula.
When you are able to complete your own personal objectives, you have learned the material. Learn the skill to the level you require it.
Identify learning preferences — Do you prefer to start with details and work your way up to larger concepts? Or do you need to make a mental map before you can absorb specific facts and figures?
Though skills are the fundamental building blocks of mastery, they provide only a fraction of the richness and depth. (How relatable that is to chess?)
Mastery is never an end in itself, it’s always a by-product.
Thinking in terms of some mystical perfect endpoint is an obstacle to growth. Learning is a continual, nurturing, fundamental life process, just like -and deeply entwined with, creativity.
Achieving mastery doesn’t mean you know it all, only that you know how to navigate the material. You know what you know and what you don’t.
Learning experience itself will teach you what mastery feels like, what’s required, and why it’s so worth-while to achieve it.
Mastery begets Mastery.
Your creativity gives you the capacity to design the life you want.
Create, learn, repeat.
Notes from the book Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis, Chapter 8.
