Learn, Un-Learn and Re-Learn
“The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, un-learn and re-learn.” — Alvin Toffler
I remember, back in my schooling days I used to hate calculus. I used to argue that I won’t be using calculus to buy groceries but my parents always adviced me that whether a knowledge has a use or not, learning it won’t harm anything and in addition to that, learning always serves a new and different way in which we interpret different things.
The thing about our childhood and our teen ages is that learning is easy. We don’t know what to look for and we really don’t care about it. Everything is provided to us. And the easiest of the things is that our goals are just academic excellence. Now that we have a goal and the equipments needed to accomplish that goal, all we have to do is just learn. However, as we grow, there’s a sudden urge to follow a professional path. And this is the stage where things start to get out of control, where the goals are uncertain and we don’t have much equipments to follow a specific goal. And when we figure out a goal, suddenly, the ‘Why, What, How, When and Where’ of the things pop-up and the hunger for learning rises. We start to specify the things we need to learn, but somehow it feels very difficult and time consuming. Ever wondered why?
Well, when we are young, our minds are just like an empty jar. We don’t know what exactly we want, to serve our purpose as a human. As young individuals our goals are usually condensed to have a lot of fun. So just learning through and completing our syllabus is enough. But as we grow, we start to think about how to earn a living by doing what we love or what’s best for us. We start to get serious about the kind of education or the type of knowledge we want to persue. And now, we start to learn the skills that are necessary for our professional growth. However, there comes a time and a situation where we figure out that what we learned doesn’t apply to that specific situation and we get frustated and agitated. Why is that something you learned just failed like that? Did you make a mistake at some point?
Infact, I’m in the same situation. Actually, I was. Then I got to know about the three step procedure about how to learn anything. The thing I want to convey is that, simply learning what we wish to learn is not enough. In order to achieve mastery, we need to learn, un-learn and re-learn. I’m not a master of anything. I’m also a learning individual like you all who shares a common goal to develop and provide value to the society. But I love this learning process.
Learn :
Learning is the first step that we carry out in acquiring any knowledge. This is the process where it is necessary for us to gather as much information as we can and start utilising them in our daily activities.
Un-Learn :
This is the part where we need to figure out what works best for us. Let me remind you that I’m not suggesting that there are learning processes which are of less value. What I’m saying is that we have our own tastes and some processes might work for us, while others might not. This is the stage where we can figure that out by filtering out the learnings that won’t work for us and further developing the learnings that work for us.
Re-Learn :
This is the part where we develop our learnings. We visualise, we practice, and we perfect our skills. We try to combine things, try out different methods and experiment with various permutations and combinations in order to achieve the best results. Maybe, we will develop a unique style of our own.
Of course, by following this process there’s no gurantee that I won’t make any mistakes. Infact, we learn from our mistakes. Now, some might follow this process, others might won’t. It doesn’t matter much as long as we never stop learning.
I think that we all are in different boats on a vast sea of time sailing towards our own versions of pole stars and finding the perfect shore for us and every little thing we come across is something new to learn.
