Category: How to study

Caramel coffee, Panda Dung tea, and gaining aesthetic and ethical knowledge

It is strange how your memory works and the way you connect specific Knowledge with experiences, even if they are entirely unrelated. My wife bought me a series of Chrismas coffee pods calendar for our coffee machine as a homemade advent. Each morning I come down to the kitchen and see a plate with two coffee pods and some other treats to mark one day closer to Christmas day.

This morning one of the pods was a caramel flavoured coffee that was distinct enough for me to stop my working and enjoy the hot cup of joy. While drinking it, I was transported to a sleepy bus ride in Thailand a few years ago between an airport and a ferry on the way to Koh Samui. I had fallen asleep listening to the Homo Deus audiobook by Yuval Noah Harari and woke up to a story about tea.

Take tea, for example. I start by drinking very sweet ordinary tea while reading the morning paper. The tea is little more than an excuse for a sugar rush. One day I realise that between the sugar and the newspaper, I hardly taste the tea at all. So I reduce the amount of sugar, put the paper aside, close my eyes and focus on the tea itself. I begin to register its unique aroma and flavour. Soon I find myself experimenting with different teas, black and green, comparing their exquisite tangs and delicate bouquets. Within a few months, I drop the supermarket labels and buy my tea at Harrods. I develop a particular liking for ‘Panda Dung tea’ from the mountains of Ya’an in Sichuan province, made from leaves of tea trees fertilised by the dung of panda bears. That’s how, one cup at a time, I hone my tea sensitivity and become a tea connoisseur. If in my early tea-drinking days you had served me Panda Dung tea in a Ming Dynasty porcelain goblet, I would not have appreciated it much more than builder’s tea in a paper cup. You cannot experience something if you don’t have the necessary sensitivity, and you cannot develop your sensitivity except by undergoing a long string of experiences.

Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

The author was describing the need for an alternative approach to the scientific method of empirical data and mathematics for gaining knowledge about ethical and aesthetic things. The humanist approach suggests Knowledge = Experiences x Sensitivity. Experiences are subjective and require a mixture of sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Sensitivity requires you to pay attention to your senses and then allow these sensations, feelings, and ideas to influence you. In this way, knowledge is built up with cycles of experiences and actively practising sensitivity to your reactions. This type of knowledge is not from a book but a practical skill gain by continuous iterations towards enlightenment. 

Harari writes that ‘The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a large variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences.’ Close your computer, make a coffee, sit back in your chair and close your eyes, and start your journey to aesthetic and ethical knowledge.

Pick up a copy of Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow and contact me on Twitter once you have read it.

Elon Musk’s Semantic Trees

I am a big fan of Elon Musk. He was born gifted, but he has been able to master how to learn, he reads a lot, surrounds himself with experts, and does a lot of experiments. Has been able to identify industries such as banking, energy, transportation, and space, that are important to the future of humanity and apply his unique thinking and resources to disrupt these fields.

One of the things that makes him unique is his ability to identify and master the core principles of a chosen field and then apply these to disruptive solutions. Elon Musk believes that most people have limited their capacity for creativity by not knowing how to outline their information in a way that leads to new connections.

Elon Musks has two stages of learning:

  1. Semantic trees – build the trunk on first principles
  2. Make connections – add peripheral knowledge as connections to these principles

Semantic trees

Not everything you learn in a field is equally important; some elements are central, and others are peripheral. Identify these central elements and then master them first before moving on to the peripheral elements.  

“Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Elon Musk

Taking this semantic tree approach, you can create a conceptual framework of the fundamental ideas and central debates of a discipline to help you come up with new ideas that have value. Naval Ravikant suggests a similar idea when talking about aiming to be able to pick up any book in a library and understand it. By learning the fundamentals of a subject first, and then you can pick up and understand any text in that field.

Introductory textbooks are a great place to start building a conceptual framework for a new field. You can usually find the reading list for many university introductory courses on their websites as a starting point when looking at a new area. These introductory courses for some of the best universities in the world can also be found on Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) platforms like EdX and Coursera if you need a more directed starting point. 

Make connections

We remember things better by associating them with something we already know. The fundamental knowledge of an area can be used as ‘hooks’ for new learning to be attached, speeding up your understanding and helping you remember more of what you read. Once you have built the foundational truck of your semantic tree, you can start to read more widely around a subject to construct vast trees in across multiple sectors. By starting with the core knowledge and then adding the peripheral knowledge to the truck of core principles, you will find that although slower, in the beginning, you will be able to go much further and faster with your learning in the long term. 

One approach that Bill Gates suggests is to find the leading thinker in a field and read everything they have published. This approach allows you to quickly find interesting peripheral knowledge and understand how these have been linked to the core principles by an existing expert. Once you have your semantic trees, over time, you can start to connect your current knowledge and new ideas as you come across them, using these connections to come up with new usable insights that can help you build experiments in your work.

Build your first tree

When approaching a new area, first learn the core principles and then move on to the advanced material, making connections to these core principles for faster and better learning. Build the truck first and then read everything you can to make the connections.

Try building a tree now; 

  1. Open a blank document (paper or digital) and write the disciple as a title at the top of the page. 
  2. Have a go at listing five to six fundamental principles in that area; these might be a formula in a maths-based subject or rules in a non-technical discipline.
  3. Try to find the reading list of an introductory module at the top university for that subject and edit your list with these new items.
  4. Now you have the trunk for your semantic tree, add any peripheral knowledge, ideas, or debates you can think of, using the core text and a google search to help. 
  5. Connect the peripheral elements to the fundamental principles you believe they relate to in your tree.

I would highly recommend reading Ashlee Van’s book on Elon Musk and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Connect with me on Twitter if you want to discuss these ideas. 

200 hours of learning challenge

The need to develop ourselves into experts has never been more critical. Retirement ages in the UK are rising to catch up with increasing life expectancy, meaning millennials, like me, will need to work into our late 70s. As well as working longer, if we want to be paid well, we are going to need to have a broad and deep set of skills as computing and automation hollow out the jobs market, turning many middle-income jobs into high-income ones. Being experts in our chosen fields is the only way to build a meaningful, enjoyable, and financially rewarding work.

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.

K. Anders Ericsson1

The good news is that expertise can be learnt. K. Anders Ericsson in the paper ‘The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance’2 argues that ‘…the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.’ In the paper, deliberate practice is defined as ‘…a regime of effortful activities designed to optimise improvement.’ 

The journey to expertise is a decade long pursuit, but most of us are not starting from scratch, and some starting qualification in your field is likely to accelerate the process. To become an expert, we need to begin a deliberate practice that stretches your current abilities and takes you out of your comfort zone. A coach, mentor, or teacher will speed up the process too, telling us how to develop expertise in the field, provide a feedback loop, and developing the ability to coach ourselves.  

Reading is the easiest way to start your deliberate practice. Many of the worlds smartest and most impactful people spend significant amounts of their working lives reading. Bill Gates, in his Nextflix documentary, talks about finds the leading expert in a field he is interested in and reads everything they have published to build up expertise in the area. Naval Ravikant suggests first developing the habit by reading fiction that you love. You will naturally move towards theory, concepts, and non-fiction.

Finding time

Deliberate practice takes time, and so we need to create this space to develop our expertise, but how much? Benjamin Franklin used to dedicate one hour per day during the working week, whereas Warren Buffet spends around 6 hours per day reading and thinking. Many other examples of highly successful people’s learning practices can be found with a quick Google search, but the baseline seems to be an hour so let us start there.

For me, the two best times to find an hour are first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Getting up at 5:00 to study before the world wakes up got me successfully through a degree while working full-time, but the current absence of a commute for most of us means we can push this back a bit. My new practice is to get up at 6:00 am (ish), do some sit-ups and 5 minutes of light exercise to wake up, and then sit down to learn for a solid hour at least. If life gets in the way, I can skip the TV in the evening and do the work then. For people that have more commitments outside of work than I do, finding an hour during the working day might work too as long as the learning is related to the work you do. You will find yourself less productive in the short term, but your new skills will start to make the remaining hours more effective over the longer-term.

We have talked about reading is an excellent place to start, but there are additional ways that we can make each hour of study time more meaningful. The first is to highlight your reading and transfer these a separate document; you could then summarise these highlights in your own words. Once your knowledge starts to grow, you can begin to apply your learning to projects at work and creating a network of like-minded people you can discuss ideas with and solve problems collaboratively around the things you are learning.

The 200-day challenge

  1. Find something to learn
    1. Read a book you will enjoy
    2. Take a practical course to learn a new skill
    3. Set yourself a problem to research
  2. Find an hour in your day to dedicate to that thing for the next three months
  3. Take notes and put them in place you can review regularly – roam research is a good option as it allows you to create links between similar themes from your various notes over time.
  4. Commit to it for the next 200 days.

Send me a message on twitter if you want to join in, and we can add a social element to the challenge. 

1http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf

2https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert