A Simple System For Learning And Execution
Every so often I like to codify my knowledge of learning. It’s a mostly self-awareness exercise and ability to opportunity to redefine the way I go about doing things.
Here is the latest iteration of that, and it’s based on something I wrote about in the very early days of the blog; the OODA loop, which I wrote about for writers.
You could call this the ORP I ERRI system, but I’ll probably think of a better name for it at some point.
The stages are orientation, research, planning, initial execution, repetition and refinement, and finally, integration.
Orientation
Before we can address any project or means of bringing about change in the world, we need to observe the world around us and, almost as importantly, potentially more importantly, understand ourselves in relation to the task at hand.
I will write some more in-depth material for that later, and put it in the Navigating Reality section of the website, but for the sake of the brevity of this article, what we need to do is to think about ourselves; the skills, weaknesses and potential opportunities we have available to us including the resources at our disposal.
And we need to think about the world; what challenges, obstacles, opportunities and so on are present, will be present, have been present but might not be present anymore, and, if you’re so inclined, you might want to take stock of the world in general and specifically the homeostasis of things.
Research
Having observed the world, hopefully as objectively as you possibly can, it’s now time to work on the best resource that you have available to regardless of what it is you can achieve, who you are, or what the world looks like; information in the form of research.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that there is a golden rule: information specifically as a word refers to new data. Old data doesn’t count. You aren’t researching anything by watching 10 YouTube videos that say the same thing, you aren’t researching anything by talking about, listening to, or otherwise consuming information that you already know or that confirms your biases and suspicions.
When we are in the research phase, we are specifically dealing with the gathering of new intelligence. We need as much of this is possible, we need to do this as efficiently as possible and then we need to make it ready and palatable or useful for our own use.
Planning
The next section is planning. We have all the data, resources, and understanding available to us.
What do we do it?
We use our understanding to formulate an initial plan. This can be imperfect-and probably will be imperfect-and it should be confined solely to what we will call day one objectives. I will talk about this more at length in the next article I write, however, it’s very easy to plan for change occurring over a 12-week period, for instance.
What tends to happen is that this 12-week period becomes a 20-week period becomes a one-year period becomes a 10-year period and before you know it, you are battling arthritis in an old people’s home wondering where your life went.
So, we focus on the task at hand and getting started. We can, and will, have to change our approach later on, so it’s important at this stage to understand that no plan is good after first contact with the enemy.
Initial Execution
There comes a point where all the planning in the world and all of the mental energy expended on coming up with an idea for every eventuality becomes counter-productive.
There comes a certain point where you have built up all the potential energy you can muster and at this point that you need to turn that potential energy into kinetic energy.
You need to act.
It’s important at this stage to understand that you are still, despite all your preparation, your visualisation, your research and learning, and all the work you’ve done to this point, you are despite it all a beginner.
From the last section, recall the phrase, “A plan is only good until the first contact with the enemy.”
You can read about Brazilian jiujitsu and you can watch videos of people securing armbars or rear naked chokes. You can understand on a logical or intuitive level how to sink in a choke or fight off a choke. The minute you are put into a real-world situation, you are going to be useless. You don’t have the muscle memory, you have never done it before, and somebody with experience is going to have developed those things where you haven’t, and you are probably going to end up losing that first battle.
So it is with everything you put your mind to. The danger is in becoming a keyboard warrior or an armchair expert; this part is painful. Being new, getting things wrong, potentially breaking things or at the very least having to come to terms with the fact that you are useless at something – Â and it will be hard work before you are not useless – is quite the psychological burden and you simply have to tough it out.
But don’t just tough it out; make sure that you take notes as you’re going.
Repetition And Refinement
Past the initial inspiration, and later the initial disappointment, at not being naturally talented at whatever it is that you are trying to achieve, you will reach a point where you stop having beginner gains and you settle into a pattern of making slow and steady gains.
Or, at least, that’s what they want you to believe.
In actuality, there is an element of the grind, but for the most part it can be avoided by proper analysis and attempting to level up deliberately.
Guys like Malcolm Gladwell make a career of writing self-help books which on the one hand want to push away the idea that there are naturally talented individuals or that anyone has an innate advantage, whilst also simultaneously suggesting that everyone can do it and we live in a world of sunshine and rainbows where expertise in an area is easily come by if you follow the correct steps.
Of course, that is rubbish and if you’re reading this blog, you probably tend towards higher intelligence which means you are unlikely to fall for it.
The truth is that everyone who achieves something brilliant does so by continually improving and refining and thus finding new ways of doing things, and the important mental step is an understanding that when you subject yourself to constant iteration and improvement, it isn’t easy. Ever.
It’s kind of, to use a possibly weak metaphor, like evolution.
People understand that evolution is a gradual process. A thousand generations separate one species of monkey from another.
However, it isn’t just a case of gentle natural selection of traits within the environment. Any given biological line is also subject to incredible pressures at various points; famine, disease, warfare, invasive species with more evolutionary advantages, and so on and so forth.
Evolution is a constant struggle when zoomed out to almost any degree.
Such is becoming good at skill; that constant process of working hard never gets easier, but it is the price you pay for overcoming stagnation.
Of course, you don’t want to get overly obsessive about this unless you are literally trying to become the best in the world at something.
Instead, you need to integrate it into your wider life.
Integration
There is no point in obsessing over any one skill or adaptation to life at the expense of all the others.
None of us are going to be paid or otherwise able to make life exclusively where we do one thing at the exclusion of others. Even top-level athletes have to worry about eating the food as well as competing their event. Presumably, they have to do their own laundry as well; as generally befits adult human beings.
It is thus a pipedream to assume that if you, say, want to be a writer that there will be some point in the future where you can sit down and write exclusively at the expense of everything else.
Therefore, we have to at this stage, having attained at least a proficiency in whatever way learning and if not some advanced skill, integrate this into our life.
The way you do that is ultimately going to be an individual thing, but it will involve setting correct priorities, almost certainly finding an application of said skill so that you can use as a springboard to the next thing, and finally becoming natural at the skill so much that it doesn’t require any mental energy (or at least a far more limited amount of mental energy) to the point where, when you do the skill you can do it relatively effortlessly, and when you are not doing the skill, you don’t have to waste mental resources on it. This leaves you free to go about your business with the next thing.
So…
Final Thoughts
The above is something I’m still working out. It’s a decent system and it comes out of me trying to more efficiently switch into a teacher role while I write the material for the vault and, perhaps more specifically, the foundations course within the vault.
Because, ultimately, the goal of the foundations course is to give you a footing in online business in its various forms and to give you enough material and even exercises that you can do so that you become proficient in those things.
Not because online business, or beginners’ online business is the be-all and end-all, but because it isn’t.
I’ll be honest; I get kind of bored talking about it, and the idea that I am a guru for beginner online business isn’t really something I am looking to achieve.
But I do need to get everyone on the same page so that we can move forward and go onto the interesting stuff.
So to do that, we’re going to orient you, research, do some planning, we’re going to have you executing your own projects from very early on, and then we’re going to get better and integrate this so that you can build business as you want and then move on to whatever it is you actually want to do.
So, that’s the article, that’s the pitch, and I will see you in the next one.