The Three Different Stages Of Learning
This article is about learning. Bear with me here, because I’m not sure where this topic is going before I write it. That said, it’s going to give a basic overview of the stages you’ll go through when learning a subject.
I split learning up into three stages:
- The initial learning stage – where you swallow up everything like a sponge and do as you’re told
- The second stage where you understand your subject and need to take responsibility for your learning
- The third stage where you move from “swallowing information” to fine-tuning the process.
These are meta-categories, obviously. Every subject is different and there’ll be different challenges. Already I can think of a million things I’d like to add to the topic.
However, hopefully this article will help some people simplify their learning. I’ll talk about the three stages in order.
The Initial Stage Of Learning
When you start learning anything, you’re going to be terrible at it. It doesn’t matter if it’s kickboxing, learning Chinese or playing the banjo. You’re going to be useless.
The worst part of being useless is that you don’t know just how little you know. With any skill, you know so very little that building some sort of comprehensive system is out of your reach. That’s the reason most people who get into fitness waste years messing around on the gym machines before understanding enough to actually make gains.
It takes time to build up just enough knowledge to start programming your own knowledge. This period is inevitable. Trying to circumvent this period is what winds me up about the Tim Ferriss life-hack brigade; none of the lifehacker teachings are actually about achieving proficiency at anything, merely skipping that first essential bit where you learn stuff and make mistakes.
So let’s assume we’re not falling into the trap where we spend a year trying to find a way around our first year of learning something. We plough headfirst into as many mistakes as we can.
I’m a big fan of learning something as intensely as possible for that initial period where everything is new. You’re never going to build the excitement for learning a subject again. You’re never going to have the opportunity to fire off quite-so-many synapses and build as many new connections in your brain again. You have a limited amount of time before the, “Holy shit!” dopamine rushes turn into, “That’s interesting” and then “Yeah, yeah, whatever…” non-rushes. Make the most of them while they’re there.
If you spend hours on something every day for a year, you will be good at it. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking like Robert Greene, Malcolm Gladwell or whatever other guy is selling you the secret to learning. You don’t need a once-in-a-lifetime mentor. You don’t need to start learning when you’re four years old. You don’t need to be born in September or whenever the school year starts. All of those things are stupid rationalisations from keyboard warriors.
Obviously, you can’t overcome genetic incompatibilities. If you’re five-foot-five, then you’re not going to be a professional basketballer. (That said, Paralympians make us all look like excuse-making morons.) For the most part though, you’re not going to be aiming for “best in the world, professional” whatever. You’re aiming for proficiency.
The key to this stage is to do as you’re told. I’ve written elsewhere on this site (but I can’t recall where… I think it’s this article) that you need to find a single program and stick to it. Remember, when you start learning something, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. This is inevitable. Don’t be one of those people that spends hours a day arguing with other people who don’t know what they’re doing about whose system is the correct one.
Pick one, do it until you know what your subject is all about, and then you won’t need to argue about resources again in your life.
When you reach proficiency, you’ve finished stage one.
Proficiency And Building Your Own Systems
At stage two, you can start arguing on the internet about whose system for learning a subject is better.
Just kidding.
At stage two, you’ll have a fundamental understanding of your subject. If it’s language learning, then you’ll probably understand the grammar, vocabulary, writing system and tones of the language. You can get this understanding from a few books. For some languages, you’ll need a little time to learn and retain the information. For some languages, you’ll need a whole lot of time.
Regardless, once you’ve gotten the fundamentals own, you’ll need to individualise your program. If you’ve done enough stage one work, then you’ll be able to build your own curriculum for learning.
Essentially, this is the bit where you stop reading the “Subject 101” text books and move on to “Specific Applications Of Aspect” text books. Of course, those books aren’t general reading anymore; they’re part of a system for learning you’ve devised yourself.
At the second stage (of this completely arbitrary system I’m making up as I go along,) books go from font-of-all-knowledge to merely-a-tool.
We’re all individuals and we all learn in individual ways, which is why you need to build your own system of learning as soon as you’ve gotten the fundamentals down. This will help with inspiration, motivation, relevancy and overall success.
For instance, a hypothetical language learner is going to have a completely different program of study if he wants to go to a new country to find a wife versus if he wants to start a business in the same new country.
Teaching a guy how to speak formally about business contracts is a waste of time (and won’t succeed) if all he wants to do is chat up girls.
In terms of building your own syllabus, it’s mostly individual. However, you do need to cover all the bases within that.
To carry on the example – the guy won’t survive long if he touches down in a new country and all he can do is the equivalent of saying, “Hey girl… wanna come back to my place?” He’ll starve to death and have no money before he gets any success with the ladies.
Arbitrary Stage Three: Individual Style
At a certain point, you’ll probably abandon the systemic approach altogether and your learning will be more about developing stylistic quirks and ironing out personal weaknesses. It’ll be about attention to detail in terms of mistakes made and working out how to apply your skills or knowledge to specific problems.
A good example would be something like a professional musician. A professional musician rarely thinks about specific techniques or movements. Instead, that’s all muscle and neurological memory.
What the musician will think about instead is stylistic choices, how to play a particular piece accurately and how any one given piece fits in with all of the others.
As a more general example, anyone who is a native speaker is fluent in their own language. Their mistakes are limited to poor practice – bad grammar, ignorance of words or whatever. Ultimately though, a native speaker is concerned with technical details in their language and more so stylistic quirks. Like using the right vocab to fit in with their social crowd or writing a letter to get a point across unambiguously.
Final Thoughts
Let me capture this train of thought because I’ve finally found something that I can relate back to copywriting and this site in general.
Copywriting techniques are a fine-tuning process.
The majority of your training in copywriting is subconscious. You’re using language that you’ve used your whole life. It’s just in a different way.
So pick up a copywriting book, read this blog and spend a few weeks handwriting good adverts. Let your brain accumulate material. Don’t ask too many questions. Especially not the “Is copywriting evil?” questions.
Once you’ve done that, sit down with yourself and work out what you want to do with copywriting and where you want to go with it. Then build out your own learning system based on those goals (and hopefully knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses.)
Once you’ve done that, you probably don’t need my help.
However, once you’ve done that… the rest is just fine-tuning. You can spend hundreds or thousands fine tuning your copywriting. You can learn little tricks and techniques, and they’ll make you better. All they are though is additions to the fundamentally solid body of learning you’ve already put together.