If someone’s explaining an abstract concept, I imagine you’d like to understand what it is that they’re alluding to. Without a strong intellectual foundation, making connections to foreign concepts becomes harder and takes longer.
It’s an aspirational goal to quickly grasp concepts and then be able to explain them to others.
It’s been said, “no one really understands anything until they can explain it to a 3-year-old child.”
Sometimes you might be reading something about a complicated subject. As children are, they usually are interested in everything. When you're with your kids and they are curious, it's essential that you can bring them into what you are doing. Can you confidently and comfortably take a complicated subject and make it digestible? That should be the goal.
Establishing Connections
The brain works through neural connections, and Joe Dispenza has often shared what Donald Hebb first stated, “neurons that fire together wire together.”
“This principle is known as the Hebbian learning rule: i.e., if interconnected neurons become active very close in time during a particular event, their connection strengthens and ‘a memory’ of this event is formed. In other words, ‘neurons wire together, if they fire together.’” (source)
We need to spend time associating different actions together. This is just one reason that people often resort to the same types of activities in a dedicated place. When your spouse or colleague needs to focus on deep work, they often retreat to the same place, don’t they? They have built those neural connections and can activate what they need when they are in that environment.
It’s important that we study and learn in ways that cultivate lasting understanding and continuation of knowledge. It’s our responsibility to organize what we are hearing and to understand that there are sometimes conflicting goals that need to be directly addressed. This is also where an application of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) could be present. (NLP is a psychological approach that relates thoughts, language, and patterns of behavior learned through experience to specific outcomes.)
But, getting into the right environment and mind-frame is one aspect. Equally important is actually remembering what we are learning and studying.
Digesting Information
We also need to understand that the croc brain acts as a buffer. Not everything that you hear will get past the croc brain to a part of your brain that allows you to remember what you hear.
“No pitch or message is going to get to the logic center of the other person’s brain without passing through the survival filters of the crocodile brain system first. The croc brain has a short-sighted view of the world. Anything that is not a crisis it tries to make as ‘spam.’” — Oren Klaff, Pitch Anything
With this in mind, it’s important that we stimulate, invigorate, challenge, and stretch our minds as we strive to learn. Without tension, how do you elongate anything? Without pressure, how can you make a diamond? Without study, how can you learn anything?
Albert Einstein remarked, “the power of compounding is the eighth wonder of the world.”
Have you ever had something explained to you and all of a sudden, you just “get it”? I know I have. Most likely, the initial explanations never made it past your croc brain’s filters. Your brain recognized what you had heard as “spam” or unimportant.
The core goal with intellect is that you can experience growth and breadth of knowledge. If you are a fashion designer and you know how to identify colors, that’s great—but that’s step one. You need to know how colors blend together and gain an understanding of which colors fit and which colors do not fit.
The Right Environment and Novelty
We need to ensure that we are working in a way that cultivates true growth of intellect through two things:
The right environment
Novel concepts and ideas that stick with us
I thought that multiplication tables in math class were the best thing ever. They were competitive; they were engaging; and they were fun. Then… learning larger numbers was new, novel, and valuable.
For others in my classes, they didn’t share the same levels of engagement or excitement.
For them, looking back, I can see that they did not have fun and were not engaged—whereby they were not in the right environment, and their neural pathways were not as active as mine. Secondly, their perception was that these multiplication tables were more of the same.
This is a realization that I haven’t always had but, it’s another reason that books like Atomic Habits by James Clear or Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl did not impact me as greatly as they did other people—those concepts were not novel to me.
Create the right environment and stay there.
Establish novelty and engage with it.
Keep learning and keep growing.
We are all unique and can learn from everyone; it’s up to us to determine what is worth learning and what isn’t. — Harrison Wendland
If you're always right, you're not learning. If you're never failing, you're not reaching. The objective is not to be right. The objective is to succeed. But if you're always winning, you're undershooting your potential. — James Clear
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. — Wendell Barry
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