Category: Article

And why gobble-gobble learning is not such a good idea.

In 1954, Toru Kumon, a high school maths teacher in Japan, found his son struggling with math in elementary school. To help him practice, he started giving him simple maths problems to solve every day.

He discovered that when the degree of difficulty was only slightly high, his son did well. But when the degree of difficulty was high by several notches, not only that his son couldn’t solve the problems but he didn’t want to do the practice work anymore.

That was the origin of the Kumon system of teaching maths. Toru Kumon went on to create a maths curriculum of daily practice by increasing the difficulty factor by tiny increments. Over the next seven decades, using his system, millions of students have learned maths and excelled at it beyond their own wildest dreams.

My own daughters, who hated the subject in early elementary school started loving it after a couple of years on the system and became top maths students in their respective classes.

What made Kumon such a successful system?

Just two elements — tiny increments and daily practice.

When learning, our tendency is to gobble up as quickly as possible and be a master in no time. Initially, when the material is easy, we progress well, but as soon as the difficulty increases, we start getting frustrated and learning stops.

Learning in tiny increments on a consistent basis beats learning in large chunks over a short period of time. Here are three core reasons why:

1) The sleep factor
2) The tiredness factor
3) The mistake factor

Let’s start with the sleep factor.

Our brain processes each bit of information it receives and decides what to do with it. It literary makes the decision whether to store it or discard it. If the information is important, our brain stores it in short-term memory. If repeated several times, it qualifies to go the long-term memory. Things stored in the short-time memory get deleted constantly if not used. This processing happens mostly while we are sleeping.

Believe it or not, sleep plays a big role in learning.

But then, can’t bulk learning make us smarter? Surely the brain can absorb a lot more information at one go.

Yes, it can, but there’s a problem called tiredness that steps right in.

The tiredness factor

Bulk learning is plainly ineffective when compared with daily learning — and you don’t need a research scientist to tell you that. If you’re learning a new skill, the brain is under tremendous pressure. It’s trying to absorb all the new information and associating it with what you already know. Think about the amount of glucose it is going to need to be able to do that.

Now multiply that with the number of hours you are going to spend learning in a day and you know why you feel like throwing the book out of the window.

When we get tired we start losing the little chunks past the first few minutes of reading. As the tiredness increases, we start losing bigger chunks.

And yet most of us believe in bulk learning.

And this is because we’re in a hurry. Yet, the best way to learn something is to slow things down considerably. Slowing down gives the opportunity to detect more mistakes.

Let’s have a look at what role mistakes play in learning.

The mistake factor

If we do something every day, we learn from new mistakes we make every day. When we are bulk learning the mistakes are all a blur. But daily mistakes get highlighted.

When our learning pace is slow and we learn in tiny increments we have more time and inclination to fix those mistakes. Many mistakes are made due to a gap in our learning as well. The slow pace allows us to fill those gaps.

So we get to learn — and more importantly, revise what we know. And what we don’t know. Bulk learning is not as efficient, because the mistakes are made en masse. Every mistake gets its own spotlight and hence we get the chance to eliminate those mistakes systematically.

That is what talent is, the systematic reduction of errors.

It takes most people years to become extremely proficient at writing. Yet with the right teacher and the right system, this can be shortened.

And the right system is the system that Toru Kumon discovered seventy years ago. The system of tiny increments and daily practice.

Contrary to what people believe, it’s tiny victories that work, not big leaps. The big leap comes from tiny movements.

Next week another factor of learning — the fun factor.

Photo by Sheri Hooley on Unsplash

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Picture this, a teenage boy comes to a grocery store on his bike, parks his bike outside the store, walks in, buys what he needs, and then walks back home completely forgetting about his bike.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t occur to him that he left his bike outside the grocery store until the next day.

Now imagine this, the same boy memorizes a 1944 digit number on TV in front of a large audience and repeats it correctly. He then continues to memorize and recall 7 decks of cards, a 1200 digit binary number and makes a new Guinness world record by memorizing 100 colors shown in random sequence and recalling them without a single mistake.

How did he manage to do that? How did he convert his lousy memory to a memory machine?

Memory has always been my problem. Ever since I was in school I had trouble memorizing ‘stuff’ for exams. Now in middle age, my memory is becoming more of a problem. I struggle with remembering people’s names. While writing I struggle with remembering words. The right words always seem to be on the tip of my tongue but elude me and I give up in frustration. I invariably forget scenes and the storyline from the movies that I have watched on TV, sometimes multiple times.

One of my all-time desire is to improve my memory so that I am able to remember whatever I read so that I am able to recall it when I need it. If I can retain only a fraction of the information I consume, I will be ecstatic.

I wanted to learn how memory worked.

If I can retain only a fraction of the information I consume, I will be ecstatic. My quest led me to Nishant Kasibhatla, the boy in the above story.

Nishant Kasibhatia spent his life learning to sharpen his memory. He has come up with a formula which goes like this:

The first thing we need for developing good memory is input.

Luckily Input is easy. We are all very good at it. But there lies our problem.

We go to seminars, we read books, we watch videos, we follow blogs, we listen to podcasts. It is input… input… input…and more input. But it happens to us so many times that we read a book and a few days later we forget what was in it.

By jumping from one book to another, one article to another, one podcast to another, we are only encouraging shallow learning.

The shallow learning is when we can’t even recall what our take away points were. The purpose of reading is to learn and the purpose of learning is to benefit us in some form.

What’s the point of reading something if we can’t implement it and benefit from it.

Learning without implementation is pure intellectual entertainment, nothing else.

Here are 3 things we can do to improve our input.

1. Remove distractions. When we are learning something, we need to make sure that our full attention is towards that learning. If we pick up the phone or take a peek at the emails or go to the internet we kill the momentum of learning.

2. Do Single-tasking. When we are multitasking our brain is dealing with mutiple things at the same time. It then makes the executive decision what to keep in the long time memory and what to discard. Most of the time it discards everything becuase it think it must not be important enough since you are not paying full attention to it.

3. Make sure the quality of input is really really high. Our brain has inbuilt filter to discard the poor quality information. If you don’t believe try remembering rubbish movies you have seen and rubbish books or articles you have read. Your brain has instantly thrown in the rubbish bin.

The quality of input determines the quality of retention. It also determines the quality of recall.

Add to INPUT some REFLECTION and our retention increases many folds.

We all rush to learn new things. Lerning new things is fine, but the problem is we don’t take time to reflect which is extremely important for retention.

When learning something new we need to pause for a while and ask ourselves, what is my takeaway from this. How can I use this information in my life? How can this information benefit my work, my family, my life?

When we pause, reflect, and ask these questions the learning solidifies.

Now add the third ingredient IMPLEMENTATION to the mix and the magic happens.

Unfortunately, many people (myself included), in our haste, miss this step.

What do we do? We go out, learn something new, get excited, feel good, get inspired, and then go on to learn something new.

When we continue to learn without implementation, we get the illusion of competence. We feel we are competent but it is not competence at all.

What we need to do is, stop, write down what are the few things we can take action on, schedule it in our calendar, and take some action.

Even a lousy action is better than no action because it is the implementation that internalise the learning.

Now comes the most important ingredient, SHARING.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. Teaching is a way to OUTPUT. Sharing can also happen when you explain things to others or write an article about it or make notes and share them with a buddy. When you do that you are helping your brain to pay more attention. This is when you are on the path to master the topic.

No one becomes the master of something just by INPUT. They all became master by taking in better quality INPUT and doing more OUTPUT than INPUT.

For true mastery, you need to focus more on the OUTPUT than on the INPUT.

Nishant Kasibhatia

It all depends upon how much time you spend on learning something and how much time you spend on reflecting, implementing, and sharing. Nishant recommends, if you are spending x amount of time on INPUT, you should spend double the amount of time on OUTPUT.

REFLECTION, IMPLEMENTATION, AND SHARING are all ways of output.

In today’s fast-paced information age, maximizing our memory power is not an option but a necessity. We use our memory all the time and the way we use it affects what we achieve in our lives.

No matter what your profession or occupation, mastering information, and memory management skills will prove essential, and will help you to increase your productivity and profitability.

PS: I am not in any way associated or affiliated with him. I found him quite accidentally while researching for a way to improve my memory and retention ability.

I intend to write more articles on the topic in the comings days. Stay tuned.

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

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When Karl Friedrich Mercedes applied for a patent for the world’s first automobile in 1886, he was forty-two years old.

It was against the law to drive a car at that time. He needed a letter from the King to drive his own invention. And there were no roads, no gas stations, no all-night drives to liquor stores.

He should have waited.

Should he?

He knew he was onto the fourth box of his life. How many more he would be handed out? Who knew?

Tim Urban, a writer, and a fellow blogger came with an interesting concept about our life in boxes which I first read about in Niklas Goke’s post.

Let’s say you are going to live for 100 years and each decade is represented by a box, then your whole life is just 10 boxes.

If you look at your life this way it is very easy to see, that the first three boxes of your life are gone learning to walk, talk, getting educated and landing a job.

The last two are write-off too; because you are learning to walk and talk once again perhaps struggling to remember where you left your glasses or whether you had your lunch or not.

The only boxes when you have the possibility to do anything worthwhile with your life are the five in the middle.

Even out of those, three are taken up to raise children, building a career, maintaining a social life and building a nest of eggs.

That leaves you just two boxes when you have the chance to do what you really want to do. That too if you are aware of it. Most of the people think that their sixties and seventies are to hang their boots and live a leisurely life.

Karl Mercedes knew how little time he had to turn his dreams into reality.

Although his car was nothing more than a three-wheeled bicycle running with a motor, Benz began to sell it from the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history.

Rather than planning and using those golden decades of their lives, most people just squander those away thinking what could be done in mere two decades.

Karl Mercedes spent next two decades perfecting his design. In 1909, his car, Blitzen Benz set a record of 226.91 km/h (141.94 mph) and was said to be “faster than any plane, train, or automobile” at the time.

Two decades is a long time if you are serious about following your passion. A degree in Medicine only takes seven years to complete, Economics just four, Law only three. With concentrated effort, a book can be written within a year. You can write twenty in two decades if you want to.

Even if you had no control over eight boxes of your life, if you want, you can control your sixties and seventies.

Make these two decades count, and your life will be worth remembering.

Photo by Jan Laugesen on Unsplash

In this world full of people, so many of us feel so lonely at times.

The current climate of self-isolation is not helping. We need innovative ways to stay connected. To keep that human connection going is not easy for shy people even at the best of times.

I read two stories last week that might get you thinking about how to combat your loneliness.

The first one is A bird feeder for humans from Austin Kleon’s blog:

A few years ago, after reading in a book that people who feel a strong sense of community have been proven to lead longer and happier lives, Maria Bamford started working to overcome her natural shyness and fear of interaction by saying hello to her neighbors in Eagle Rock, a diverse and partly gentrified area on the northeastern edge of Los Angeles. She bought a park bench and had it installed on the median strip in front of her house. She then spray-stenciled the words “Have a Seat!” on the sidewalk in front of it. To her delight, the bench is often occupied. “It’s like a birdfeeder for humans,” she says.

A 2014 New York Times Megazine Profile

Two things became obvious from this snippet. One, you need to do some effort on your part to stay connected. And second, innovation goes a long way.

Here is the second story, that illustrates how Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of Eat Pray and Love feels connected to her houseplant during her self-isolation.

When I got this plant, eight years ago, she was such a tiny thing. My world was a totally different place back then, and so was hers. When she was little, her leaves barely reached out of the pot that she was in – a pot that seemed comically over-large for her at the time. Now she takes up so much space that I have to duck under her great reaching fronds in order to get to my socks out of the drawer beneath her.

How can something become so beautiful, just by staying in one place, surviving only on light and water? How can something that is so still and quiet feel like such an explosion of beauty and energy? I have spent the last eight years running in fast circles around the world – laughing, sobbing, striving, bouncing from drama to drama. All the while she has sat right here with a very different agenda – and looks at what she as become.

Over the last eight years that I have been alone in this house, I have been looking at her a lot. I’ve been listening to her. She has been my friend and my teacher. She has a great sense of humor, She’s really good at being quiet. She is really good at patience and trust. She has all the answers.

Experts say that loneliness is a complex emotional phenomenon that has its bases in survival during childhood. All of us have experienced some degree of abandonment if only for a short time, and remember the painful and scary feeling that goes along with it.

If that is what you are experiencing during self-isolation then it might help to act on some of the suggestions readily available online.

Realize that loneliness is a feeling, not a fact. When you are feeling lonely, it is because something has triggered a memory of that feeling, not because you are in fact, isolated and alone. The brain is designed to pay attention to pain and danger, and that includes painful scary feelings; therefore loneliness gets our attention.

Reach out because loneliness is painful and can confuse you into thinking self-defeating thoughts. Try writing as a means of getting them out of your system. It will help to get active, ring someone and do some small talk, connect with some like-minded people on online forums, read a good book, hang out with someone non-human, do some volunteering and plan at least one social activity a week.

Keep in mind you need to look after yourself before anyone else can look after you.

This world is a beautiful place, you don’t need to keep on staring at ugliness. Look for the beauty around you and focus on that.

Photo by Meagan Ranson on Unsplash

We are going through unprecedented times in the history of mankind. Never before the whole world had come to a standstill in a matter of a few weeks. Never before countries have shut down their borders, companies have ordered their employees to work from home, and airlines have grounded their fleet and stood down their workforces.

And this is just a tiny snippet of what is going on.

Thousands of people have died.

Each day the news is more grave, more devastating.

At times like these, the natural tendency is to reach for more news. But is it the best way to face this crisis?

Staying up-to-date with news is a good thing: we need to know the seriousness of the situation and what authorities are asking us to do to limit the spreading of the virus.

But too much news is an invitation to negativity in life.

Negativity breeds more negativity which causes dread, panic, and anger, the very things we need to avoid.

At times like these, we need to be compassionate, understanding, and grateful.

Social distancing and self-isolation have provided a unique opportunity to slow down and reflect. Not the usual kind of slowing down and reflecting we are expected to do with mindfulness training but a deeper kind encompassing the whole humanity.

We are the most resilient species on this planet. We have come out of many crises before. We will come out of this one too.

Yes, this one is not like anyone before.

Yes, the worst hasn’t even arrived yet.

Yes, the economic impact of this pandemic will be more than anyone could imagine at the moment.

But we will come out of it by staying together, looking after each other, helping each other, responding to it like a unit, by fighting it together.

What can a writer do to make a difference?

At times like these, a writer’s job is to spread hope.

You should observe, listen, think and then write. The lesson we learn fighting crises like these must be captured for the next generations.

Write the stories of what is going around you.

Write the stories of people clapping from their balconies to hail our nurses, doctors, and health professionals for the care they are providing to the sick and vulnerable.

Write the stories of people singing to each other across the empty squares, keeping their windows open, so that those who are alone may hear the sound of family around them.

Write the stories of hotels and restaurant owners who are offering free meals and delivery to the housebound and of the young woman who is busy spreading flyers with her phone number through the neighborhood so that the elders may have someone to call on.

Write the stories of churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are preparing to welcome and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.

You should write, and you should write like never before.

You should write letters to your great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren telling them how humanity got together to fight a crisis like never before.

You should tell them how a total stranger in the supermarket gave you the last can of tomatoes.

You should tell them that working from home, you put in extra, extra hours even when no one was counting because you were grateful you still have a job and you want to give more to your employer who is going through a bigger hardship to keep his business afloat.

You write to them that you kept on working even when your employer couldn’t pay you because you thought that is the best use of your time and it might help your employer to save the business.

That you learned to live with less, learned to spend more time at home, learned to waste less.

You should write from the heart. So when your great-grandchildren ask you what did you do when the crisis hit, you can tell them that you. spread hope.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash