“Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely?”
—Henry David Thoreau
By the time I entered fifth grade, my mother had realized that she had a knack for supporting children with difficulty learning. For this reason, she decided to supplement her psychology degree with a teaching certification. Through months of diligent study, she gained a much deeper understanding of the things she had long known from intuition and her experience as the president of my developmental preschool. One idea she mentioned to me in passing, after a long day of certification classes, has always stuck with me:
“If it’s not in the hands, it’s not in the head.”
Now that we understand how our brains evolved to learn, this should come as no surprise. This idea stuck with me, though, for two reasons. First, hearing it out loud it helped me understand why I’d struggled in the classroom up until that point. But second, and perhaps more importantly, it was the moment I realized that some ways of learning were better than others. At ten years old, this was the first time I was exposed to the idea that there were conditions to learning.
As it turns out, having something “in the hands” (or, in other words, experience) is only one of the requirements of adult learning.
Fast forward fifteen years, to 2011, and I have just completed Anna and Lev’s intensive tutoring. My mind has been blown by the realization that by simply changing the way I approach learning, I can learn literally anything—with ease. For the next year or so, I’m like a human sponge. I set about absorbing everything I can get my hands on, from health hacks to more advanced memory techniques to speed-reading research, and more. As Anna, Lev, and I began creating our first online course, I continued devouring not just “hacks” and “techniques,” but also the foundations of learning itself. I wanted to understand: How do we learn, actually?
As you can imagine, there is a lot of research on the subject, and quite frankly, I’m not going to bore you with even a fraction of it. While I’m a firm believer that you need to understand how something works to use it confidently, there’s also such a thing as a “minimal effective dose.” After all, you don’t need to understand the exact gearing ratios of a manual gearbox to drive a stick shift.
In my research, I happened upon one researcher whose work stood out in particular: Dr. Malcolm Knowles. Educated at Harvard and Chicago University, Knowles began his career at the National Youth Administration and later became the director of adult education at the Boston YMCA. After World War II, Knowles earned his PhD while serving as the director of the Adult Education Association. For the next fourteen years, he served as an associate professor of adult education at Boston University. There, he authored over 230 articles and eighteen books, nearly all of them on what he called andragogy: the science of adult learning.
In short, this was a man who deeply understood how adults learn.
Dr. Knowles’s work stands out not because it used cutting-edge neuroscience or because it revolutionized our education system. It did neither. What stood out about Knowles’s work was his singular focus on understanding the needs of the adult learner. Never before had so much thought gone into not just the motivations behind adult learning but the actual requirements to make it happen.
So, what are these requirements?
First and foremost, Knowles understood that as adult learners, we have a lot more life experience than children do. Not only do we have a larger body of knowledge to draw from; we’ve been around the block a few times, made our fair share of mistakes, and had our fair share of wins. For this reason, as adult learners, we come into the learning environment with some strongly held beliefs about the way things work. To the untrained learner, this prior experience and knowledge can be both an asset and a liability. On the one hand, it is easier for us to understand the world around us—and, as you’ll see later on, to create powerful connections between our memories. On the other hand, holding on to our beliefs makes us less open to new information—even when it’s correct.
What does this mean for us as adult learners? Put simply, it means that we should actively leverage our prior knowledge and experience when learning. We must compare and contrast the things that we’re learning to the information that we already know. How is it different? How is it the same? How can the information and experience we already have contribute to our understanding of this new and exciting topic? Far too often, we approach a “new” subject as if it’s completely foreign, when in fact, the whole of human knowledge is connected in some way. By making this powerful mindset shift alone, you will almost instantly become a more effective learner. (Especially when combined with the memory techniques you’ll soon learn).
We’re all familiar with the age-old questions asked by generation after generation of bored students: “Why do I need to learn this? When am I ever going to use ________?” You’ve probably asked it, and you’ve almost certainly heard it.
Have you ever noticed, though, that it’s almost never young children who ask these questions? As Knowles understood, something changes in the way that we learn as we mature. By the time our brains reach adulthood, we become much more discerning. We are no longer willing—or able—to sit down and memorize information because “teacher says so.” Suddenly, as we reach puberty, we want to know: Why? Why is this information relevant to our lives? And no, some lofty, philosophical answer is not enough. Have you ever tried to tell a teenager to do their algebra homework because it will make them a “more well-rounded person”? The reply is generally some variant of “No, thanks.” Instead, as our brains mature, the “why” that we seek is more practical—more functional. We not only want to know why this information is valuable; we want to know how we’re actually going to use it and whether or not it will help us reach our goals!
Once again, this is a simple mindset shift, but one that produces noticeable results. By simply considering the ways in which you will apply a piece of information, you increase your ability both to focus on and to remember it. Later on in this book, when we learn the powerful skill of pre-reading, we will leverage this exact principle to great effect.
Adult learners want to know how they’re going to apply the information that they’re expected to learn. Unfortunately, even that is not enough for our highly discerning brains. In fact, in addition to knowing how we are going to use that information, we want to know that it’s going to happen soon. Again: try telling a flippant teenager that learning history will be useful when they have children of their own. Good luck! Most adult brains don’t want to learn something unless they have a pressing and immediate need to. This was true in Malcolm Knowles’s day, and it’s even more so in today’s era of information overload and endless busyness.
Luckily for us, most of the things you’ll learn as an adult are things you need to know now, for work or some practical application. With that said, it’s still important to consider the logical consequence of this principle. Adults learn best through active practice and participation. Design your learning experience accordingly! After all, there’s no better way to convince your brain that this stuff is immediately useful than by, you know, immediately using it! This is why piano lessons rarely start with boring music theory, and why the best computer programming courses start by building something useful. There’s hardly a “pressing need” for another useless “hello world” application.
Because adult learning is so much more pragmatic and practical, it’s logical that it should be centered around problem-solving. Adolescents tend to learn skills sequentially as they build up their body of knowledge. In adults, however, Knowles found that it’s best to start with a problem and work towards a solution. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. As adults, we want to know that the things we’re learning are immediately useful. What better way to do this than to solve actual problems or challenges? This way, practical application is “baked in” to the learning experience.
For this reason, as we go about our own learning, it’s important to pay attention to the orientation of problems versus solutions. When in doubt, it’s always best to look at our learning through the lens of problems and solutions. Manipulating the information and considering realistic applications is necessary for effective learning. In fact, research shows that it leads to longer lasting and more detailed understandings of the things we learn.4
Alongside the importance of prior experience and practical application, adult learners have yet another requirement: we need to be involved. Have you ever sat back and passively watched a video or course on YouTube, only to forget everything you learned? Or read a book where the author told you everything you needed to know, but somehow, it’s still not enough?
As adult learners, Dr. Knowles argued, we have much more established identities. In addition to trusting our own experience, we trust our own judgment. And why shouldn’t we? After all, we’ve been living with ourselves for decades! Who knows us better than we know ourselves? For this reason, when we come to the table as learners, we want to be involved in the planning and evaluation of our education. We want to make decisions based on our own situations, compare our experience with that of others, choose our own adventure, and get our hands dirty.
This is why, even in our structured online courses, we give students plenty of choices along their journey. They can choose to dig into the supplemental resources on any given topic or limit themselves to the required course materials. They can choose to go at the pace we recommend, or, with our full support, slow things down. They can share their experiences in the course forum and see what paths others are taking. Furthermore, we encourage students to skip certain lectures if they don’t have a pressing need for a specific application. In doing this, we empower the learner to feel like an equal partner in their learning experience. We do away with the hierarchy of “experts” and “students” and instead compel them to take ownership over their learning from day one. We know that simply giving learners this responsibility has a massive effect on their enjoyment and their success.
The next time you find yourself stuck in a rigid learning environment, such as a normal online course or a highly structured corporate training, take a step back and think. How can you customize your path, make decisions, and reclaim some ownership over your experience? Later on in the book, when we discuss the concept of “brute force learning,” you’ll discover a great way to do just that.
Finally, let’s talk about the most dreaded subject of all when it comes to learning: motivation. As we’ve mentioned before, adult learners are rarely able to muster the energy simply because someone else tells them to. It’s not until the stakes are real, like a big promotion on the line, a degree we’ve dreamt of, or a skill we need to keep pace with our peers, that we’re really able to learn.
Why is this?
Well, in addition to being highly discerning and practical, adult learners respond better to internal motivation. The external motivation of someone telling you that you “should” do something might be enough to get you to see a movie or try out a new restaurant. But it won’t be enough to get you to commit your precious time and energy to learning something new. In short: you can’t expect educators, employers, or even friends to motivate you to learn something. Instead, the drive to learn must come from within you—from the principles of learning we’ve already established. If you want to build up the motivation to learn something, dive deep into your why. Why do you want to learn it? How will you use it? Why will your life be better once you have? Do this simple focusing exercise before and during your most challenging periods of learning. You’ll find that it’s a useful way to motivate yourself, even when no amount of coffee will.
***
Now that we’ve been introduced to Knowles’s six principles of adult learning, I’d like you to think back to a time when you truly struggled to learn something. For me, this was freshman year algebra. In your case, how many of these principles were being leveraged effectively? Chances are, the answer is one—or fewer. Besides leveraging your prior knowledge of other types of math, I bet your algebra teacher rarely connected what you were learning to your prior experience in the real world. It’s also safe to say that you had no pressing need or practical use for figuring out the values of X and Y. So much for internal motivation. I’m sure you had plenty of opportunity to learn in a problem-centered fashion. You did it night after night! But I’m guessing that nobody invited you to help create the lesson plan.
This is the unfortunate but true reality of most educational environments today. What works for us as learners individually rarely works for the group as a whole. In a traditional classroom, it’s impossible for even the best teacher to check off every requirement for every student. Imagine how much time it would take to ask each student about their prior experiences or how they plan to use the information. Even worse, imagine the chaos of allowing each of them to customize their own unique curriculum. It simply doesn’t scale. And like it or not, our current educational system was designed for the mass production of good little worker bees. Anything that doesn’t scale, doesn’t fly.
Fortunately, you, reading this book, have a choice. Now that you know the rules, you can create your own conditions. You can learn the way your brain wants to learn. And it all starts with a little preparation…
4 John Clement, “Students’ Preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 50, no. 1 (1982): 66, https://doi.org/10.1119/1.12989.