Learning - Mastery and Failure

How do you learn?

One model used to analyze the process suggests that we learn in a few different ways. Some of us learn by seeing something done, or by reading about it, while others take in information when someone explains it to them. Others understand when they actually do something for themselves.

That's how you learn to do something right, anyway. You see something done right, you try and copy it, you don't do so well, you do it again and get better, until you succeed.



I tend to get a lot of things wrong. A lot of the time I find this is where I learn the most important lessons.
In my last fight, I found myself on my back getting controlled by my opponent. I failed with several submission and sweep attempts, because I'd been doing alright with them in training and hadn't had to correct small mistakes in my technique. As a result I lost the fight. Afterwards, I spent a long time correcting flaws, making sure that it wouldn't happen again. Inspirational quotation alert: when Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to have failed so many times, he supposedly responded by saying "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward..."

When you get things wrong, you have to work a lot harder to find out why. You start dissecting things in your head, trying to work out why things work, why you're failing, what other people are doing that you aren't doing, or what you're doing that others aren't. Eventually, if you put the hours in, you find that you begin to understand the principles behind what you're doing. Learning to deal with failure is important, otherwise you'll find yourself giving up at the first sign of trouble.

Also, when you struggle to get the hang of something, you get a good idea of how much you really want to succeed in any particular area. If you fail first time, sometimes it just makes you realise how much you want to be good. George Leonard's Mastery is an excellent book about the process of really devoting yourself to getting good at something.

Now I'm trying to improve my writing, so I'm attempting National Novel Writing Month, where you try and write a 50,000 word novel in a month. I'm finding it hard, most of what I'm writing is frankly pretty poor, but you know what? I'm starting to develop a writing style, as well as a way of maximizing my productivity (time spent writing a blog instead of working not included).

The lesson? Give yourself permission to fail: in fact, put yourself in a situation where you're going to get things wrong.

Dom