Naturally, the idea of learning and improving is fascinating to me, but from personal experience, mastering the skill of learning is not as easy it would seem. I always found school easy, but learning from my mistakes, especially personal interactions and non-book-related mistakes, was a whole new ball game. If it was a formula, I had it down; if it required nuance and interpretation, I have always felt like I struggled in that way. I have never related to any character in the bible more than Paul when he says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do.” As an enneagram type 5, this absolutely drives me nuts. I have this driving urge to be competent in whatever I’m doing, and so often, I am not.
In our financial lives, being able to learn is critical. Learning financial literacy is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of our financial learning journey. We need to be able to learn from our mistakes, evaluate what we are doing in the present, and be able to correct course when we steer away.
In this post, we will explore why we should care about learning, the struggles that inhibit our ability to learn, and how to learn from a given situation practically.
Why Should We Care About Learning?
There are numerous benefits to learning, but we will cover two main points when it comes to why we should care about mastering the skill of learning.
1) When we learn anything, we develop our ability to think and think well.
We talked about how 90% of our actions result from our habits in a previous article. Learning requires us to take a more active approach to our thinking which is a great thing. When we learn from our mistakes, we have to decide what’s true, how we should have responded, and critique our own perspective.
A great example of this is being able to discern the difference between us acting insane or just acting disciplined?
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Discipline is insanity without false expectations. So very accurately, our sanity relies on our ability to think well.
2) You are destined to repeat mistakes if you can not learn from them
I know it is easy to say a generically good thing, such as it is essential to learn from our mistakes. Still, when it comes to our financial freedom, we must be able to learn from our mistakes and, ideally, the errors of others to have any chance of lasting success.
One of the most frustrating things in the world to me is making the same mistake over and over again and not being able to identify why. Unfortunately, I often feel stuck in situations where I know I have made similar mistakes, and I can’t seem to learn from them. Often what has stopped me from being able to process my mistakes was not understanding the obstacles in the way of my learning.
What Stops Us From Learning?
Even in the most basic sense of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain, our logic tells us that learning from our mistakes or harmful situations is a good thing. If it is in our best interest to master the skill of learning, why do so many of us repeatedly find ourselves stuck in similar hard situations?
There are a number of elements that stop us from learning from our everyday situations, but today we are going to focus on a couple of crucial ideas.
Recognizing and Separating Weight
I think before we go any further, I need to define what it is I mean by weight. Weight is any type of biased belief that makes a situation have extra meaning. Weights are everywhere in our lives, whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Our ability to cut to the root of the situation is critical to mastering the skill of learning. What stops me so often from seeing a situation clearly is the different weights that get added to a situation that I am either unaware of or unable to define.
There are three primary “weights” that influence our perception of a given situation. Those are the weights we bring into a given situation, the weight that others put on a situation, and the reality of the situation.
Being able to accurately define and separate the weights in our lives is half the battle. This allows us to learn from our situations effectively and stop making the same mistakes.
Stopping to Early
You can’t learn from a situation unless you understand why it happens, or perhaps a better way to phrase it is our leveling of learning is directly tied to our level of understanding. The first step to understanding something is creating the space to be able to think about whatever it is effectively. But if I am being honest with myself, one of the biggest reasons I stop learning is because I think I have found the answer. I stop being curious.
If we think we are right or understand something, we typically don’t think about the situation, person, or thing anymore. For example, if I know my couch is red, I don’t spend time thinking about what color couch that is, did the lighting affect my perception, etc… We may not think of it as a big deal when it comes to the color of our couch, but what about when it comes to more important things? Anytime our knowledge stops our curiosity, we are inhibiting our learning. When I find that position in my life, it is an enormous warning flag whenever I start to think that way consistently.
Mastering the skill of learning is a process that we can sharpen rather than an objective that we can hit. To summarize the best advice on learning from our situations, I will have to quote the great Ted Lasso “Be curious, not judgmental.”
Be curious about ourselves, our situations, and others, and it will make learning from our mistakes that much easier.
