Earned knowledge vs. learned knowledge
How do you learn during your limited time on earth? One way to learn is by doing it. Unless you do and run hands-on experiments, you never learn. The details of hands-on experience are readily lost in knowledge transfer. That’s why the best way to learn is to have “earned knowledge”. However, our time on earth is limited. So, we rely on learning from others. But that transfer of knowledge is far from perfect as the tacit knowledge has a transmission error. There are several ways to internalize expert’s knowledge:
Write it down in your own language. This is where the art of paraphrasing comes in. When you read a passage over the internet, from a book., let those sources be away from you. Reflect on it and assimilate your life experience and jot down that knowledge. If you think the source or author condenses the thought in a better way. Only then you quote the source verbatim. The reflection time is crucial.
Put it into practice. When you put it into practice, you will find out the loopholes of learning. One good example is learning the process of writing. You can read thousands of books, listen to podcasts, or watch videos about writing or how to improve your writing. Unless you start writing, there’s no way to improve it. And as Peter Drucker puts it, even a bad first draft takes a significant amount of time in isolation. But if you do not have the first draft, you have no baseline to improve it. One popular notion supporting this perspective is that let your learning be transferred to action; not knowledge.
Explain it to others. A famous technique popularized by Richard Feynman is one of the practical advice you will get and also signifies the underappreciated aspect of teaching. One hour of effective teaching takes at least 4-6 hours of background research. Every word carries a weight and every thought is a perspective and if not reflected properly, objective knowledge can be misinterpreted based on the cognitive or emotional bias you carry.
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