How do I put learning at the center of my life? That's the exploration we will take together.
How do I put learning at the center of my life? I have always found this challenging; I hunger for more nourishment than the world offers me, in the midst of taking care of business. How do I create time, space and energy to feed my hunger sufficiently?
What is enough? Someone once asked me "What would feel like enough reading?" I didn't know the answer.
I know how to do the work I need to do. Boy howdy. As a kid, I did my homework. Most of the time, the homework didn’t feel like learning, it felt like meeting expectations. I'm good at that. Although I didn’t have the words to describe my needs as a kid, I longed to dive deeply into something(s) and develop mastery. I tried to do this a few times with various passions but the chaos at home, the rigid structure of learning environments, sexism and my own confusion about how to do it held me back. By the time I was 16, I’d mostly given up on myself.
As an adult, it took fifteen years to find my way into a field that requires deep learning (tech). I didn't know yet that my skills at meeting (or exceeding) expectations would be more valuable than my ability to learn. I rarely miss deadlines and I am, generally speaking, all over things. One CTO said to me "I can give you the ball and you will run with it, usually into the endzone." In some ways, the work satisfied me, for a while. I get to dive into complexity, as information systems (my focus) because ubiquitous. But the same ideas about “learning” suffuse the tech industry. Is finishing a Udemy course sufficiently satisfying? Sometimes. Is passing a whiteboard test proof of learning? Kinda.
But that isn't what I mean by learning.
What I mean by learning is exploring something novel with my voracious curiosity. Consuming knowledge and experience, then making things (concepts or tangible things or both). Following an inquiry like Alice tumbling after the white rabbit into Wonderland. Like Neo following the white rabbit towards the inexorable blue pill decision that stands guard before the Matrix. The gateway to learning is a choice, a moment in time when you choose a viable path and follow it with your attention. I'm often on the starting line, eager for the Time to Choose gun to go off. I'm devoted to changing deeply, to finding out "how deep the rabbit hole goes."
And yet, this energetic need to learn is too often sidelined, a distraction. What passes for learning is mostly junk food. Requiring no wisdom to create and only subsistence when consumed. I want farm-to-table, deeply nourishing and delicious learning experiences. Ones that teach me about the process as I engage with it.
A journey down the rabbit hole can take a lifetime. It can take two minutes. It can be mapped out by others who've gone before you. It can be a road not taken. Time and destination are secondary. Acting on the choice to see what you can see is primary.
I don't mean running around willy-nilly chasing rabbits. Learning requires discipline and structure. Just not the kind of structure you can buy from Amazon or Udemy or a master's degree program. You can buy products and they can be part of a learning system. I love workbooks. They are one part of our knowledge, the inner garden we design, build and tend. Learning practice is an organic process that can yield a healthy and thriving ecosystem of interrelated insights and skills. You grow stronger, both from the work of weeding and from eating the fruits of your labor.
For too many of us, the inner garden is a withered, abandoned and overly-dogmatic place paved with concrete. The weeds of social media posts and culture war slogans and teach-to-the-test curricula and job expectations and advertising jingles and bad fixes for fake problems have taken over. Our ability to craft a learning lifestyle is swallowed whole like we are Jonah trapped in the Fail Whale. Like my sixteen-year-old self, we have given up.
I'm ready to invest in inner knowledge farming and nourishing myself with my work. I want to support everyone else who is on this journey with me. Over time, these posts will be an investigation, a practice, a process, failures and little wins ... I am following the white rabbit. Want to join me? Let me know, along the way, how you are doing so I can learn from you too.