The First, Most Important And Crucial Criteria Needed For Learning

The First, Most Important And Crucial Criteria Needed For Learning

Without a doubt, there is a single question that you can ask yourself right now that’ll answer whether you’re going to be successful at learning something.

It’s not an esoteric question. It’s straightforward, easy and universal:

Do you need to learn this thing?

In addition to that, do you need to retain it once you’ve learned it?

If the answer is “yes” to both of these, then you don’t need any help. If the answer is “no” then you’ve found the core issue with why your learning is probably not getting the results you want.

(You can probably extend this to things other than learning; experiences, life goals and the like. But I’m hardly an expert on that sort of thing, so draw your own conclusions.)

Our brains (and bodies) are adaptation machines. They’ll adapt to the stimulus you give them, and if you make those subconscious, carnal parts of your mind and body feel that adaptation is a necessity, they’ll make it happen.

With most hobby learning, people do the opposite of this. They have weak motivation and consider their hobbies, well, hobbies. “I’ll put in an hour a day but if I miss a session it’s ok and if Game Of Thrones is on, then I’ll catch up some other time.”

Those people are secretly telling themselves that their hobby isn’t important and that they don’t really need to do it.

Example: Language Learning

I love learning languages. I think it’s something everyone should at least try. Learning a new language will help your brain make new connections, you get to learn about a new culture and there are all kinds of other benefits too.

If you enjoy learning languages, it’s also fun. So much so that many people want to learn a language. Language learning is a massive, massive industry. Yet most people never get to anywhere near a functional use of a second language, let alone have that level of language learning and ever use it in a real setting.

Why?

Because they don’t need to use a new language.

If you’re a native English speaker, it’s almost impossible to create an artificial need to learn a new language. Everything is in English. Even if you go abroad, people will bend over backwards to practice English with you, all of the signs and stores have English options (at least in Tier One cities) and nobody has time to speak to your mangled second language abilities.

Now, you can build the need, but most people don’t.

Here are two scenarios:

1. A girl wants to learn Italian because some hunky dude on one of her reality shows has an accent which she thinks is Italian and besides, she’d like to go to Venice one day and maybe order a coffee and know what the name means
2. Another girl grows up in Burma and realising that there are few economic opportunities, migrates to another SEA country or even China. On the way, she has to learn not only English (it presents the most opportunities globally) but also the lingua franca of the country she is in; be it Thai, Mandarin or Vietnamese.

One of those people is going to succeed and one is going to fail, statistically. What’s crazy is that it isn’t the one with access to learning tools, money and magical apps that turn language learning into a fun game that’ll succeed.

It’s the one working long hours in an alien country with no real access to learning materials and no money for lessons.

The second person has a crucial need, and that’s what you need to mimic when you want to learn something.

How To Build a Need

On self-help blogs, the advice for this sort of thing exists, but it’s stupid and wrong. It doesn’t matter how many times you visualise yourself chatting up the Italian waitress, that’s not going to make you do the boring work of sitting down and writing out grammar constructs.

…And really, that’s what you need to do. For all Duolingo is fun and Teach Yourself is a brilliant introduction to most languages, you’re going to need to put in hours to get to a functional level of language learning.

Daydreaming isn’t a motivator, but here are some motivators. These aren’t language learning specific, but they do help:

1. Economic

Pretty much every strong motivator can be boiled down to an economic motive. Now, different people will attribute this to different things; social scientists will say it’s a cultural construct, evolutionary psychologists will say that it’s a status and survival thing.

It doesn’t really matter. If you can find a way your new knowledge will make you richer or stop you from becoming a pauper, that information – and the dedication to learning it – will sink in.

Back in the day, every boy in England was expected to learn the names of all the cities and towns in England (and sometimes the Commonwealth) and know what they were the centre of manufacturing for.

Nowadays, if you don’t live in London, Birmingham or Manchester, nobody knows where your town is and whether or not it exists.

The reason for this; it used to be a requirement to make money. Now learning about towns and cities is simple trivia.

Trivia doesn’t stick reliably.

2. Romantic

Alright, the second big motivator is romantic opportunity. If I were more PC, I’d say “social opportunity” but I assume everyone reading this is an adult and can take the fact that sex sells – even in education terms.

It’s worth noting that I don’t mean dreaming about an Italian waiter or a French maid here. Most adults who learn languages, for instance, do so because either they move for work (economic) or because they have a partner/spouse and/or subsequent children that use a different language.

The romance motivator is also pretty obvious in stuff like learning about fitness/nutrition, weird niche subcultures and the dork-speak the dating marketing adopts.

3. Other Primal Needs

There are a ton of different motivators and things that switch the “want” to a “need.” If you can’t find either a romantic or economic reason for learning something, (and you’ve really tried – most things fall under those two things,) then consider trying:

• The Seven Deadly Sins
• Maslow’s Hierarchy (the bottom rungs)
• Time/Pressure Deadlines
• Sheer Bribery

Final Thoughts

Most copywriting serves as a variation on a theme. That theme is “turn something from a  “want” into a “need.”

When you are writing a sales letter for the next great protein powder, you know in the depths of your soul that the person reading the finished product doesn’t need this protein powder. They could eat a chicken breast or something else that tastes like it’s actually designed for human consumption.

But by the end of that sales letter, they need to click that button. What is it you do to get them there?

Because when it comes to learning past a certain age, that’s what you need to do for yourself. Convince yourself that it’s not just a nice thing to learn a new skill or fact, but that it’s a pressing need.

One that you need to address right now.