10K post - Musings on learning and the learning mindset

[Nielsio]

Challenge
As animals, humans are specialized in not being specialized. They can live in caves as hunters/gatherers and they can live in a skyscraper and make a living on the internets clicking buttons. This means that humans have an uncanny ability to adapt themselves to the environment, to find patterns, to generate rules and principles and to make them part of their subconscious as easy as it were to breathe.
If you understand this then you will understand a big part of how we can learn well. It is by coming into new environments and finding our way through it. This is called a challenge and if you can learn to love the challenge, then you will succeed.

On the lookout
One way of never learning new things is by assuming we already know what there is to know. A good way of learning is by assuming there are always things we can learn. That way, we are on the lookout for things we do not already know, or could know better.

Balance
Assuming we already know what there is to know is bad, but jumpings into environments too alien is also bad. This is where balance comes into play. We want to keep challenging ourselves, but we also want to remain with a certain degree of familiarity, which gives us confidence. Learning how to balance and to recognize out-of-balance keeps us on the learning curve without risking a relapse.

Confidence
When we know we need to keep challenging ourselves then we also start to plan ahead. We set goals and from those goals we can derive potential things that we need to learn. This is important because in order to keep our confidence up, we must remain in a state of familiarity which means we can investigate what we might come across.

Patterns
The human mind is very skilled in finding patterns. Some short term patterns might be deceitful though. This is why we must investigate thoroughly what underlying principles are at work, and we should try on a regular basis to keep reiterating those principles to ourselves to make them part of our nature. This is the reason that buying yourself something every now and then helps your brain to materialize that you’re doing something good in the long run.

Fitness of the mind
This leads to the next point: the state of mind for making good decisions. A state of mind that leads to good decisions is one that is clear, focused, aware, and not inhibited by other things. This is the reason why we keep a good bankroll; so that our mind stays clear and we don’t start worrying about a loss or a minor mistake (on the other hand we do have to play at stakes that matter to us; and this is where *balance* comes back again).
Having a good state of mind is what you can call the fitness of the mind. One has to find out for one’s self how to attain a good mind-fitness. But first and foremost, one must need to be *aware* of how clear, focused and aware one’s mind is. If we are not aware of those things, we cannot change our behaviour, actions and attitude to make it better.

Key to learning
Lastly; awareness is what gives us information based on which we can make better decisions than we could do otherwise. First we challenge ourselves to be more aware, then we try to practise using more information and how to use it wisely, and finally we want to create a situation where we can do these first two steps. If we do not create a situation where we can learn, then we will not do so.

So if we want to learn, we want to set ourselves up to learn well.


Good luck.