Learning is not Linear

Don't learn to do. Instead, do to learn.

Learning is a lot like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle which also involves a lot of thinking and linking ideas together, not just from other people, but from your own experiences. Learning, in fact, is a lot like creativity and innovation. In today’s newsletter, I’d like to discuss the idea of learning and the fact that it is not linear.

Learning and Creativity

The musician and composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, was quite a complicated person. He wasn’t too likable either, yet he produced some of the best classical music still known, played, and listened to today. I’m personally inspired by him because he was able to piece together snippets of music, that he had written down in his notebooks he carried everywhere with him, to then pick back up years down the line and create some of his most memorable works. He didn’t find his true composing voice until the age of 31, a few years after he started going deaf.

The whole point of telling a bit of Beethoven’s struggle is because learning and creativity take time and organization (like Beethoven’s notebooks), and surely they do not hit you all at once. It’s the accumulation of all your learnings and experience, that you piece together, that will bring your learning and creativity into complete focus.

To emphasize the point of learning as exploration and the fact that it is not linear, here is a quote from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford and my interpretation of the quote as well as the inspiration I got from it.

Quote

Details do not make up the total work. The contents should not affect anything compared to the form. Through only through the form is the whole person affected. Make your form consume your material.

My Interpretation

Ideas will come and go. Sometimes at full strength and others at very weak strength. That's why sometimes you just have to go with the flow and work smart and vigorously when the flow is very strong, then relax when the flow is very weak. It's very similar to the agreement in The Four Agreements, always do your best, nothing more, nothing less. For example, if you feel sick or if you feel down emotionally, you may not get as much work done compared to when you feel very good or when you feel like everything is going right for you.

This very description feels very much like me. Sometimes in composition or any type of learning or creativity, the end will come first, and other times the middle will come first. Then you have to figure out where each piece fits best. That is the way that Beethoven composed. He had a theme that he was working on. Sometimes he would get one little tiny piece of that theme and then work from there. Other times he had to stop because he was stuck. After receiving more inspiration, he would build it up into a full composition.

How you can use The Beethoven Strategy in your learning and creativity

Even though Beethoven was all about playing and composing music, which may not apply to us, we can still learn and experiment on how he did it in other domains like learning.

For example, you pick up a book on investing, like The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, but it all seems like gibberish to you. So, you decide to get a different, more simplistic book that explains investing in more of an approachable way like William J. O’Neil’s bestseller, How to Make Money in Stocks. But then you need to take the next step by experimenting with what you learned from both books, and maybe revisit The Intelligent Investor for more inspiration while actually investing in the stock market. Learn from the successes you gain and improve upon the mistakes you make then continue the cycle of learning and experimenting.

Piece together the knowledge you’ve gained from the books you’ve read and the experiences you’ve had. Most importantly, write it down like Beethoven did, that way you can revisit what you experienced and learned about and improve on it over time.

Learning is never done

Keep on encouraging yourself to explore the world around you. Keep on learning new things and doing new things. We’ve got a limited amount of time during our life to enjoy the joys of learning and making connections. So, take full advantage of it while you can. Your older self will thank you for all the time you’ve put into improving yourself and not giving up even when you didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle put together yet.

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