4 Lies You Need to Stop Believing About Your Ability to Learn
By: Katie E. Lawrence
Tags: Health, Startup, Productivity, Business, Education

Many a person has set out to learn something new — with little success. While learning is a natural process and something we were made to do, actually carrying out the learning process and gaining skills and knowledge is more difficult in practice than in theory.

“Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will.” (Vernon Howard)

This came to my attention recently while listening to Brené Brown’s new podcast, Unlocking Us. If you haven’t heard of her, this woman has spent the majority of her adult life compiling thousands of pieces of data on vulnerability, shame, courage, and interpersonal connections. She writes on how to overcome fear, shaming, and ultimately how to find your power.

In her first episode of this podcast, released just this week, she speaks about a concept she and her team have coined FFTs — better known and understood as the bluntly named “f***ing first times”, or TFTs, terrible first times if you’re around young children or prefer gentler language. The idea behind this concept is pretty obvious — trying something for the first time sucks.

The question is, *why* do first attempts suck?

Phrased a different way, why is it so difficult to learn something new? The truth is when it comes to our cognitive abilities and the process of the brain gaining information, it isn’t hard — it’s the lies and created barriers we’ve built up around learning that makes it so difficult.

Brené Brown, the expert on vulnerability, would explain to you that it’s not the learning and the conquering that’s inherently difficult. What’s difficult is building up the courage to start learning in the first place, and to handle the inherent setbacks along the way. Learning is a natural process — but we can only live that out when we remember that vulnerability is too.

Unfortunately, the lies stipulate just the opposite.

“It’s not worth it if I could fail.”

As I said, Brené Brown is the expert on vulnerability. She doesn’t take shit from anybody. And she is adamant about the fact that we have to be vulnerable. It is hardly ever fun, never easy, always a struggle, yet always worth it.

While this certainly applies in our relationships, business adventures, writing excursions, and conversations, it also applies to how we attack what we attempt to comprehend and succeed at in a pure psychological way.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”― Dr. Seuss

Many a person has walked up to a topic, a major, a subject matter, or a class and walked away because there was a possibility that they wouldn’t be able to learn it. I certainly saw this concept play out in my own life when I attempted to finish my online self-paced Calculus 1 class before the end of the year.

While an 80 isn’t an A, it’s still more than the 20% mark I had reached when I considered quitting.

The thought I finally had to solidify in my mind was that even if I didn’t get an A+ in the class, I would learn more about math and grow my ability to comprehend complex mathematical and scientific concepts by continuing on than quitting because of the possibility of failure. While an 80 isn’t an A, it’s still more than the 20% mark I had reached when I considered quitting.

The truth is, it is near impossible to consume information, read a book, be in a new place, and talk/listen to an intelligent without learning something. Even if you don’t get an A in the class, completely learn the language, get the degree, or get awarded the certification, you learn something. In the end, that’s all that really matters.

“You’re too old to learn something new.”

I hear this a lot when people hear that I’m learning both Spanish and ASL in addition to my native tongue of English. They comment on how they wish they had started earlier and know that it’s “not worth it” now that they’re past their teens.

“It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.”–Claude Bernard

It is true that it’s harder for adults to learn than children. But most adults take this too far, saying that they can’t learn at all. This simply has to do with the fact that children’s brains are literally wired to rapidly retain more information related to their survival, such as the faces of people they trust, the language their family and friends speak, and more. However, adults actually do have a learning advantage in several areas. I think Harvard Health put it best.

“On the other hand, the branching of dendrites increases, and connections between distant brain areas strengthen. These changes enable the aging brain to become better at detecting relationships between diverse sources of information, capturing the big picture, and understanding the global implications of specific issues. Perhaps this is the foundation of wisdom. It is as if, with age, your brain becomes better at seeing the entire forest and worse at seeing the leaves.”

Adults are better able to connect relevant information. An adult can learn just as much as a child and can hypothetically do it with the same energy and speed, as long as they approach it the right way and learn things that relate to what they already know.

While your ability to learn in a certain way and your ability to learn at the rate of a child decreases with age, this never reaches a point where you can realistically and authentically say “I’m too old to learn something new.”

“That’s too hard to learn.”

Nothing is too difficult to learn. Let’s get that out of the way right now. People frequently make excuses about why they can’t do something. We complain all of the time that an article is too hard to write because it’s too complex and would require too much research, that an application we need for our business just has too many parts, and that we’ll never be able to successfully do something.

Instead, I want you to prove to yourself that you can learn anything.

Think about the first time that you drove a car. You had never been able to operate a 2-ton pile of machinery — and then suddenly you were able to drive with your leg propped under you, the radio blaring, going 70mph down a freeway with your phone in hand. That’s pretty impressive in terms of what you were able to learn to do.

“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”―Abigail Adams

Many learning coaches and articles on the subject will guide you towards working on getting the things you’re learning down to muscle memory. Obviously, this is a good idea. Muscle memory is the reason people are able to drive, type, sing, play an instrument, speak, and do all sorts of other small (and large) tasks. However, I would tack something on to this piece of advice.

Sequence the act of learning itself to muscle memory.

During my freshman year of high school I was faced with a seemingly impossible task. I was required to write what people in policy debate call a “negative brief”. It’s simply a document meant to be a document of specific arguments against the case of a specific debater, as well as the bill or piece of legislation they want to pass.

It is supposed to have potential cross-examination questions, arguments about harms, the plan itself, whether the plan would solve for anything, what the plan would do to hurt the world/country, as well as an introduction, conclusion, and sources.

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

In a debate tournament with twenty or so competitors, you had to write a negative brief against each of those cases in order to be truly competitive. The only problem was, as a first-year debater, it took me an entire week to write just one because of how inexperienced I was. These negative briefs were not about simple concepts, either.

You never knew what you were getting into and you usually didn’t know anything about the subject going into it.

However, through continual practice, leaning into the discomfort of constantly learning something new, and persistence of use and refinements of my practice, I was (eventually) able to write a killer and winning negative brief in record time — 45 minutes. By my final year of debate, I could churn out high-quality briefs that were organized, simple, yet strong in little to no time.

“The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid.” — G. K. Chesterton

Looking back, it interests me that a negative brief was simply a 5-or-so-page summary of the most high-quality arguments and facts on a single subject, and writing one was a process that I turned into a habit.

I learned the art of rapid learning and got it down to muscle memory.

I got to the point where I could write a negative brief almost on autopilot — I knew how to format it, what to type into my Google search bar to get prime results, and how to format evidence like the back of my hand. I know to use that same skill to learn new information quickly in conversation, for a book or writing project, and in different areas of my college life.

“Recipes tell you nothing. Learning techniques is the key.” — Tom Colicchio

Obviously you don’t (directly) use the muscles in your eyes, hands, feet, etc. to learn things — but there are routines and mental habits you can build up to immediately hit the ground running and learning when you encounter a new situation. This is exactly what the vulnerability expert herself recommends. Learning has to come automatically, as well as the discomfort that comes with it.

Take whatever it is you’re learning, determine your process, and mass produce it every time you sit down to study. You’ll find out that nothing is too difficult to learn if you know how to approach it and stick with it till the end.

“There’s just too much information.”

I’ve spent much of my young adult life reading through and studying the work of Cal Newport in terms of successful students. Looking around at the college students I both know and have heard of, I’m fascinated by the successful student’s ability to never be overwhelmed by or talk about the grandiose amount of information they’re expected to intake, grasp, and learn.

Professor Newport has written the books to How To Be A Highschool Superstar, How To Become A Straight-A Student, and How to Win At College. He interviewed various students for each of these books and not one of them discussed how difficult it was to learn things.

Sure, they would agree to the fact that many of their classes involved a lot of work, quite a bit of reading, and an overwhelming amount of material, but at no point do they claim that the concepts themselves are difficult to learn.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as too much.

You might not be willing to learn something, you might not have the energy or motivation to learn something, and you might not be willing to take the time to sit down and process a concept, but there’s never “too much” or a concept too difficult to understand.

‘Any fool can know. The point is to understand.’ –Albert Einstein

Intelligence really doesn’t tie into your ability to learn — that’s more about your grit, motivation, and willingness to do your best. As long as you pursue your learning and educational adventures with tenacity, a sense of purpose, and the tools you need to truly grasp the information put in front of you, the concept of “too much information” and “not enough time” will vanish away.