107. Would You Like To Become A Learning Machine?

Step 1

Recognize that you have been lied to your entire life. Learning is not what you were taught. Your mind was treated like a storage device ready to take in and store established information. You were conditioned to be a passive receiver of inputs to produce reliable and accepted behavior.

Step 2

In an act of rebellion reject the notion that your mind, and therefore you, are a container. Your mind is an active agent. It scans the environment, seeks patterns, poses questions, and generates hypotheses to be tested.

Now we dive into the more difficult steps. You don't have to follow everything strictly. My intent is to show you how far you can take this approach. When you feel the tension in your mind as you read on understand that it is like the pain of waking up after years of bedrest. It will take time for you to adjust.

Step 3

True learning seeks out problems to solve rather than simply storing instructions.

• Active exploration: You see mastery not as a static end-goal but as a dynamic process of question-posing, clarifying misunderstandings, and seeking new problems within the subject.
• Self-directed inquiry: You construct your own path by constantly testing hypotheses, finding anomalies, and correcting errors. Even if you rely on books or experts, you do so critically—not passively.
• Continual refinement: Mastery involves explaining the subject’s principles to yourself and others in increasingly concise and powerful ways, always testing whether your grasp truly solves relevant problems.
• Generative creativity: You become adept at generating interesting questions or novel applications.

Step 4

Memory is a tool for thought. I use Anki for this but you may use any spaced repetition software. Anki uses flashcards for active recall and ensures I never forget something I decide is important.

• Flashcards serve as questions that drive deeper thought, not just rote memorization. You craft them to highlight conceptual linkages, surprising results, or anomalies that you still need to investigate. For example, rather than “Name the capital of X,” you might ask “What unexpected factor contributed to X being chosen as the capital, and why does it matter historically?”
• Each time you review a flashcard, you ask: “Do I really understand this? Is my explanation robust enough to handle unusual cases or new contexts?” Mistakes or uncertainty prompt you to look deeper, like discovering an edge case or contradictory evidence, rather than simply toggling “wrong” or “right” and moving on.
• Anki becomes a tool for exploring the reach and limits of your current theories. You might keep track of questions that stump you repeatedly, then re-engage with textbooks, experts, or your own reasoning to arrive at deeper explanations.
• Success is not just recall but clarity of your conceptual framework. You notice that new, deeper questions sprout from your flashcards. Over time, your curiosity broadens and illuminates further territory.

Step 5

You have done it! You are now a learning machine but there is just one more thing for you to understand and it is this: No knowledge, no matter how certain we are of it, is infallible. There will always be errors to correct especially in areas you believe you know well. You want to be cognizant of this as you blitz on.

Godspeed on your learning journey.