Position Yourself as a Learner
Actively positioning yourself to learn from a wide range of people and trustworthy resources will serve to continuously expand your knowledge and capabilities.
We were both living in Boston in 2013 when two brothers detonated bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. All of us Bostonians were tremendously impressed by the quick action of police and first responders to help the wounded and bring the perpetrators to justice. What we didn’t know was that other of our fellow citizens were preparing to deal with a collateral crisis related to the attack.
As nineteen thousand National Guard troops began pouring into the Boston area immediately after the terrorist bombing, Carol Rose, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Massachusetts, was tasked with monitoring law-enforcement activities. There hadn’t been a police occupation on this scale in a major American city since the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles, and the group was justifiably worried that the civil liberties of some of the city’s residents could be at risk.
“I got word immediately about the bombing,” Rose said. “We were all huddled around screens in the office. We had to put our anxieties and sadness on hold because we all had a job to do. The press was reporting a total lockdown of the city. That had obvious implications for civil liberties.” Rose had the job of monitoring how ordinary people were being treated during this uncertain time.
“I put together a team and set it up as a collective process so I could hear other voices,” Rose explained. “I called the governor’s office, the Boston mayor’s office, and senior law-enforcement officials. I needed to tell them what we were hearing and open up channels to get information from them firsthand. They were in crisis mode, too—I respected that by not pouncing on them with threats or ultimatums. Things were moving very fast.”
The ACLU has often had an adversarial relationship with the police, but Rose recognized that her influence and impact wouldn’t be diminished by seeking input and help from others, even potential adversaries. In fact, she said, the opposite is usually true.
“I always talk and meet with the police, hear them out. You’d be surprised how often that’s worked in everyone’s favor.” Being an engaged listener and open to hearing others’ ideas strengthens Rose’s impact as a leader and her effectiveness to ensure the rights of everyday citizens are protected.
Agency helps us to adapt to the demands placed on us by our environment; anything that expands our ability to learn expands our personal agency.
People with high levels of agency are continually learning more, and, as importantly, they are also expanding their capacity to learn. There is a self-reinforcing quality to it—as you benefit from learning, you strengthen the skill and develop an ever-stronger hunger to learn more.
Keeping yourself receptive to new ideas, both your own and those of other people, not only increases your accumulation of knowledge but makes you a better learner by increasing your ability to make sense of new information. Taking on a project to learn something new—from learning to speak a different language or play an instrument to understanding a complicated political problem or even redecorating—shapes your mind. You become more alert to all things around you, more inquisitive about what you don’t know, and more confident about handling future situations you might be unfamiliar with. As one biology teacher told us, “I tell my students that you’re not here only to learn more stuff but to learn how to be better learners.”
Being a learner involves adopting a more open, collaborative approach to everything in life. Part of this is acknowledging that as much as you may think you know about a given situation or problem, there is always the possibility that someone else knows something that you don’t. Part of this is acknowledging that many people won’t bother to share their knowledge with us if they’re worried about being attacked or cut off—hence the emphasis on collaboration.
Depending on your personality, this may require shifting some of your behaviors and thinking. For some, it means not trying to always be the smartest person in the room. It means sometimes being less opinionated or quick to judge. For others, it means summoning the courage to ask questions even when you feel you might look foolish. It means adopting new routines, allowing yourself to feel awkward and unsure at times, and loosening up so that you move away from the safety of your usual comfort zone.
Like every other principle taught in this book, learning is about being active rather than passive. Positioning yourself as a learner requires active questioning. That means moving beyond the surface of things, pushing past what’s easy or simple to dig a bit deeper. As you ask questions, new and deeper questions typically emerge. This process, which we all have the ability to develop, can be fun and invigorating (admittedly, it can be exhausting sometimes, too!). As you learn more, you accumulate a richer base of knowledge about the world around you. You can build on this to make more nuanced assessments of the challenging situations that you face. This questioning process, extolled by Socrates (whose Socratic method involves asking question after question), facilitates effective critical thinking that enriches the quality of all your judgments and future actions. This is at the heart of building and maintaining agency. You cannot engage in deep critical thinking unless you open yourself to new learning.
Much has been written lately about the importance of critical-thinking skills. Two scholars, Michael Scriven and Richard Paul, provided a helpful definition back in 1987: Critical thinking can be formally defined as the process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication.
More and more jobs list it as a required skill. The overall goal of this ability is to see more clearly into situations by being able to discern what is real and at stake versus what is not. On a personal level, this allows you to make informed decisions in all areas of your life. In essence, it’s a system that allows you to fully utilize your mind’s reasoning ability to learn and comprehend what’s happening around you. You may hear it referred to in other ways, such as higher-order thinking, analytical reasoning, or using your frontal cortex (logical, planful) versus your limbic system (reactive, emotional).
Research is being done on how human beings form opinions and beliefs and how these influence our behaviors and can hinder our ability to learn. We discuss this more fully in the next chapter, which focuses on the principle Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs. For now, simply keep in mind that to be an effective learner, you need to adjust or at times suspend your opinions and personal beliefs, sometimes even deeply held ones, to position yourself to truly learn.
Pursuit of “Answers” Often Leads to New Questions
U.S. politician Al Gore—vice president during the Clinton administration, presidential candidate in 2000, and current climate change thought leader—came to politics by way of the military and divinity school. He enrolled in Vanderbilt University Divinity School shortly after his return from Vietnam in 1971.
In 2017, he told radio host Terry Gross that he had volunteered for the army because he grew up in a small town in Tennessee and didn’t think it was right to avoid military service. He said that after returning from the war, he experienced a personal crisis of sorts.
“When I came back from the army, I would devote some serious time investigating the questions that were really looming large for me at the time,” Gore remembered. “How do you reconcile your duty as a citizen with a moral conviction that the war your country was waging was based on false premises and triggered by a lie?”
His struggles led him to a divinity school program for people pursuing secular careers.
“When you’re twenty-one years old, those kinds of questions can really take hold of you,” he said. “I wanted to really immerse myself in the ethical systems that might give me some answers—what I found were better questions.”
In his book Why? What Makes Us Curious (Simon & Schuster, 2017), astrophysicist Mario Livio tackles some of the complex and interesting questions about curiosity. For example, what drives some people toward one primary interest, while others, like Leonardo da Vinci, the definitive Renaissance man, are interested in nearly everything? Curiosity involves not just the love of gaining knowledge but seeking to know more when confronted by the unknown and ambiguous things. That conflict, the unpleasant and perplexed feeling that we all have experienced in the face of something new that we don’t quite understand, is the driver inside us to learn more. We want resolution. We want the reward of an answer. But there are many people who turn away from that feeling and simply ignore it.
Journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson has said, “Smart people are a dime a dozen.” The trait that elevated many of the people he wrote about—Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Steve Jobs—Isaacson says, was that they were driven by curiosity and “a desire to observe things carefully.”
Why doesn’t everyone strive to learn about the world in this way? Impatience can get in the way, particularly among those who are used to constant stimulation.
But we have found that practice in sustaining attention builds the curiosity muscle. The next time you find yourself puzzled or uncomfortable about not knowing how something works or why someone is the way they are, don’t simply dismiss that moment or allow yourself to get distracted. It’s a signal that you want to know more.
You can also practice curiosity by challenging yourself to accurately observe what’s around you right now, no matter how small or large. Maybe it’s the room you’re in or something on the table in front of you. Allow your mind to observe with all your senses and think about what you’re seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, perhaps even tasting.
Open inquiry involves active questioning and careful observation. People who practice this successfully avoid rushing to judgment. They don’t shut down the learning process prematurely by rushing to conclusions or by force-fitting data into an existing paradigm. They stay open to the flow of information, and they are willing to expand and adjust their existing paradigms to accommodate new information. Rigid adherence to an ideological framework reduces agency if it limits the scope of inquiry.
George Will, conservative U.S. political analyst, writer, and commentator, embodies the practice of open inquiry. A longtime member of the Republican Party, he is committed to the principle of small government, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility (low deficits). He pays close attention to facts, analysis, and results rather than just to politicians’ words. When he witnessed his party enact a significant tax cut without the means to pay for it, he did the math and called the leaders out for exploding the deficit and thereby weakening the future financial health of the nation. By looking more deeply into the particulars of the tax cut, which was highly popular within his party, he demonstrated commitment to his most important principle—protecting the fundamental best interest of the nation. Through open inquiry, he determined he could not in good conscience support the policy, confronted the issue publicly, and let the chips fall where they may.
Open inquirers also take in other perspectives. This allows for gathering critical information that can’t come from one’s own limited field of perception. As psychologists often note, we all engage in selective perception to some degree or another. Considering a situation from other perspectives arms you with more possibilities and choices and protects you from arriving at rash, narrow-minded, and potentially self-defeating judgments. It also offers the potential to increase empathy. As Arthur C. Brooks noted in a 2016 TED Talk on the perils of polarization, “We need innovative thinking.… We need a new day in flexible ideology.”
When you see things from another vantage point—or, as the old expression says, walk a mile in someone else’s shoes—you bring yourself closer to others through increased understanding. It also gives you more leverage in addressing the challenges you face by strengthening your connections with others, ultimately empowering you further by recruiting their interest and their resources to help you to handle tough situations.
Of course, when asking others to share their opinion or advice with you, you are free to use it fully, use it partially, or to ignore it. The general idea is to combine it with your own thinking when it is additive. Soliciting others to share their perspectives helps you to arrive at good common-sense solutions. As a colleague often says, “By definition, it is not ‘common’ if it is not shared.” Don’t reject an outside perspective just because it doesn’t fit with your own view—you may need to expand your view.
Use Your Agency: Be careful about selective perception, focusing just on what you want to hear and ignoring opposing viewpoints. Don’t be so arrogant that you dismiss out of hand the point of view of others.
Consider Paul’s client Brent, a thirty-six-year-old manager within the investment management business, who was experiencing a troubling career setback. He knew he was viewed by most of his colleagues as extremely bright and full of promise, and yet one day his boss delivered some difficult feedback: He had alienated a great many people within the company, including many of the company’s senior leaders. This came as a complete surprise to him, and he struggled to make sense of it. Was there something wrong with him or wrong with everyone else? But as Brent thought back to his interactions with colleagues over the past months, he realized that he had a tendency to react impatiently or dismissively to colleagues who disagreed with or challenged him. He knew he was strong-willed, but he thought that was because most of his ideas were the best ones out there and that once people saw this, they would be grateful. But of course, they weren’t grateful at all; they resented his lack of openness, which some described as arrogance.
Brent’s confidence in his own judgment was, at times, blinding him, and in the highly collegial, team-oriented culture of his company, this dynamic, unless interrupted, was about to derail his career. Perhaps equally devastating, his behavior preempted the possibility of collaboration and the learning that inevitably comes with it.
Paul suggested that Brent work on suspending his judgment temporarily to position himself more fully as a learner in his interactions with his colleagues. Initially irritated at the idea of practicing this (Why should I when I really don’t need their advice and it will only slow things down?), he agreed to try. In the initial weeks as he attempted to put the idea into practice, the process was two steps forward, one step back. He felt awkward and forced. He said he hated it.
But to his surprise, when he took the time to ask people probing questions, he found he sometimes received useful information and advice. And Brent noticed that the back-and-forth conversations that he was starting to have sometimes generated new ideas, both from himself and from others, that had never occurred to him before. Furthermore, he started noticing an ancillary benefit: Others seemed more interested in helping him to succeed, and he found he was actually enjoying working with others in a way he hadn’t before.
While Brent still struggles at times to remember to position himself this way, he has come to recognize that it has added to the quality of his business judgment and his overall effectiveness as a leader.
Many benefits are derived from positioning yourself as a learner. They include:
• Improved listening skills
• Better control of strong reactions that lead to impulsive decisions and actions
• Staying more levelheaded during conflict
• Stronger aptitude for empathy
These skills are critical to developing agency, especially when you are attempting to share your own ideas and influence people, because this requires learning where other people are coming from—appreciating and considering what they need, expect, and believe. This principle sets the groundwork for developing better interpersonal negotiation skills. Positioning yourself in this way also sets the stage for effective critical thinking, an enormously important aspect of agency discussed in depth in the principle Deliberate, Then Act in chapter 7.
At the outset, learning involves gathering information—basic data, facts, statistics, and real-time observations as well as the thoughts and perceptions of others. Being a deeper and more independent thinker requires understanding the vast difference that separates information from true knowledge. Think of information as the building blocks that can create something larger. For information to lead to actionable knowledge, you have to become very familiar with that information and come to understand it on a deeper level and ideally see it from multiple perspectives.
According to Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, adopting a belief that your true potential is unknown, not fixed, encourages you to continually learn and grow. Adopting this mind-set, you will be forgiving of yourself as you make mistakes along the way and likely will persist when challenged. If you believe that your potential is set or limited, you have what Dweck describes as a fixed mind-set, and you will likely close yourself off to new learning opportunities. Dweck has decades of research to back up this powerful observation. We, too, have seen this play out in our work over the years. It applies to a CEO navigating through a complex business situation as much as to a fifth grader struggling with drills on the soccer field.
Pinpointing your actual mind-set may sound somewhat elusive. If, at times, you have felt discouraged or highly anxious when faced with something new—Why bother trying? What’s the point?—that’s a fixed mind-set moment. With a fixed mind-set, your effort, persistence, and tolerance for the errors inherent in learning new things will plummet and opportunities to learn will be lost.
Failure Really Is Part of Life (and Necessary in Learning)
Many young people have been raised in an era of hypercompetitiveness, to be not only their best but to try to be perfect in every way. When young people reach college or their first jobs, they quickly learn they are just like everyone else—good at some things and not good at others. Accepting their fallibility can be a shock. Many get discouraged or give up, while others spend their energies demonstrating only on what they’re good at.
A Smith College initiative called Failing Well is one of a crop of university programs that aims to help high achievers cope with inevitable setbacks. Smith students were asked to create a “failure résumé”—something any of us could do by jotting down a few setbacks and any lessons learned—and then sharing it with others who have done the same. In short, students realized how important making mistakes or having setbacks was to their growth and future learning. Resilience was the goal here, not getting pulled down by the errors and misfortunes—the teachable moments—we all experience while learning.
When errors, missteps, and mistakes occur in your life—as they inevitably will—what you believe about yourself at that moment matters. A growth mind-set means accepting that mistakes are part of the learning process and that achieving success takes time and trial and error. People with agency face failures and even welcome them as a sign that they are actively learning.
Levi, a bright, charismatic twenty-nine-year-old native Californian, had a “personal learning story” to tell. We interviewed him to understand some of the key learning and decision points he experienced during his twenties—what psychologist Meg Jay describes as the most defining decade in life.
Committed to pursuing a career in medicine, Levi, at twenty-five, was living his dream. After a year in Kenya working in a clinic, he moved to Chicago and enrolled in a premed program at the University of Chicago, tending bar at night, living a go-go life, experiencing the best of all worlds. Offered a position on an organ transplant team at the University of Chicago—an amazing, almost unheard-of opportunity for a young premed student—he felt he’d won the lottery. Suddenly, his go-go life began moving even faster—now flying all over the country whenever a transplant organ became available. He also had a full social life, with a new girlfriend and long nights partying in his few free hours.
But of course, a pace like that is sustainable for only so long before it becomes impossible to do everything well.
Sleep deprived while switching gears fast and furiously each day began to take a toll on his level of attentiveness to detail and his attitude. His supervisor at the university, unhappy with his performance, fired him from his plum job on the transplant team. Soon things at his bartending job weren’t going so well either. Tension with his roommate escalated due to spats over basic housekeeping, leaving Levi to find both a new job and a place to live—a serious string of challenges in a short span. The only good thing was that he was nearing completion of his premed studies. Levi didn’t pause for long—he kept going. He quickly landed a high-paying job at a five-star hotel, “which I really wasn’t qualified for,” working there two years before getting fired. “During this time, I got totally swept up in working and partying with no infrastructure or plan at all,” Levi reflected. “It was all improvised. I was completely ungrounded. After losing the hotel job, I found myself biking around the city for two full days trying to gather myself, wondering, Where to now?”
Returning from the second full day of biking, he was ambushed as he entered his apartment. Pistol-whipped by a hooded man and an accomplice, his head cracked open and bleeding, he lay on the floor hog-tied alongside his roommate and watched the men ransack their apartment. Later, the roommate confessed he’d been dealing pot out of their apartment. The thieves had likely targeted them.
“Everything came crashing down,” Levi said. “It woke me up.” He needed a “hard reset” to regain his physical and emotional health. He decided to take a deep look inward to assess and open himself to new learning to get back onto a healthy life path. He rented a cottage back in California and found a simple restaurant job in a small town. Getting away from the intense stimulation to create space for reflection, he was able, painfully, to question himself on why and how he had veered so far off the path he’d most wanted to follow. Reconnecting with an old friend who was an effective sounding board, reading, long walks with his new dog, and focusing on physical fitness, Levi steadily put his life back together. He met a woman pursuing a career in medicine who would later become his wife. Now in medical school and beginning the decade of his thirties, he looks back. “I learned from all my mistakes and successes,” Levi said. “Somehow through it all, with help from my friends, I never fully lost sight of my potential.”
The twenties are an important time to experiment, to try new things. A critical part of developing greater agency is making meaning of and learning from our mistakes—maintaining a growth mind-set through setbacks and failures facilitates this.
Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
—Neil Gaiman, author, in a post on his website, December 2011
Recovering from setbacks, both large and small, isn’t easy but is essential to personal agency. Do you have a particular approach that you can rely on? Do you recover quickly when you swing and you miss, whether it’s a baseball bat or tennis racket—or when you don’t get the promotion, the callback, the invite to the party, or whatever it is you were expecting?
Keep in mind that setbacks always create an opportunity for recovery, and the act of recovery builds confidence and agency. To use a baseball analogy, immediately following any setback, your focus should be on getting ready for the next ball to come sailing across the plate. What you do in that moment—recognizing and seizing upon the next opportunity—is paramount to building agency. By virtue of being able to say to yourself, I can overcome a difficult setback, you develop confidence that you’ll be able to handle other future setbacks.
The best athletes understand this. They have much to teach us about how to recover from setbacks because they confront setbacks continually while practicing and competing. The most successful athletes don’t ruminate over mistakes because they’ve learned that their performance will surely suffer. An incomplete pass, a missed free throw, or a bad stroke must be seen as a separate event that is disconnected from the next potentially positive action. Imagine the power it gives a person to see himself or herself that way and to see the whole world operating that way! Each moment is fresh and untainted by what just happened. It generates a sense that new possibilities are always within reach.
“It’s history—why bother thinking about it?” one college wrestler named Sam said. Alongside strength training and perfecting his techniques in duck-unders and takedowns, Sam rehearses that phrase in his head in the days and hours leading up to an important match. During a match, he doesn’t want any setbacks to linger in his mind, not for a second. He’s got to endure a grueling seven minutes of intense physical and mental battle against a strong opponent, and he can’t afford to let negative thoughts intrude because it would be like letting a psychological gremlin into his system. If he does so, he’ll become distracted, his reaction time will slow, his hand-eye coordination will be off, his balance will lessen. Becoming overly self-conscious and hesitant allows an opening for his opponent to rush in and take him down. Instead, Sam needs to be in a state of mind that athletes call being in the zone. He needs to be squarely in the present moment, automatic and fluid in his motions, and in a nonthinking mental space. This is nothing more than the sports version of mindfulness.
Mindfulness helps you to stop judging and appraising each action you have. It allows you to experience life more as a constant flow of experiences. Setbacks are acknowledged and let go of. There’s not always a need to stop, to consciously evaluate, and to fix. That can come later if necessary.
Practice mindfulness and related techniques, such as meditation, focused breathing, or positive imagery to help you stay more in the present moment and focused on pleasant thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. You’ll find that each moment can be slowed down, disconnected from the previous (or the next) if you allow yourself to see it that way. An intense, pleasing focus will ensue. Time will seem to slow down as you enjoy being lost in whatever is happening or whatever you are doing. A deeper, richer, and more fulfilling experience can be had once you let go of moments that are, as Sam says, “history.”
Many top athletes insert a positive emotion into their minds immediately after a failure or mistake. They wedge it in there fast. Try this yourself: Tell yourself after a misstep that you’re doing great. Sounds strange to congratulate yourself even after a setback, but we’ve all seen players bumping fists when their teammates miss a free throw or penalty shot. They know the power of inserting a positive emotion into a negative moment. It neutralizes the negative, unhelpful emotion that a bad play or missed shot brings about. “Shake it off,” many athletes say as if setbacks are like invisible parasites trying to cling to them. Next time you experience the negative emotions of a setback, immediately remind yourself of your worth. That wasn’t a big deal … move on … it’s history … the next opportunity to show my stuff is on its way.
Susan is an experienced executive in her fifties who has learned to practice letting go of bad moments in her high-stress job. Self-possessed and self-assured in her role as a chief financial officer for a large business, it’s hard to believe she wasn’t always so poised and confident. “I used to be the kid who never raised her hand in class,” she told us. Her biggest fear was making a mistake in front of her teacher and the other students and feeling like a failure. Years of hiding like this and worrying about what others thought of her held her back socially, too.
Fast-forward. Susan regularly gives important presentations—her quarterly meetings typically have over fifty people in attendance. “Mistakes? Errors?” She laughed. “Are you kidding? They happen all the time.” Susan told us about a problem she experienced during one of her most important meetings for the company’s senior executive team and a group of outside investors where she was presenting the company’s strategy and financials. Many of them had flown in for the day for the offsite meeting. “I was one slide into my crucial presentation when my computer crashed,” she explained. “I was standing there flooded in blinding light. The room went dead quiet. The anxiety in the room was palpable. Some of my senior colleagues got nervous, looking like deer caught in the headlights. I quickly realized it would take too much time to send for a backup computer. I decided to just keep moving. Instead of breaking momentum, I went with the moment, didn’t fight it or react to it. I walked over to the projector, turned it off, and not missing a beat, I said, ‘Well, fortunately, I’m a better CFO and strategist than I am a slide projector operator.’ Everyone laughed. The tension in the room disappeared. I just continued to talk about what I knew, assuring them they would receive copies of the slides. We had one of the best back-and-forth exchanges we’d ever had at one of these presentations. The slides weren’t why they were there.”
Take a moment and let Susan’s confidence sink in. Confidence is as contagious as anxiety. She isn’t any different from many of us who have felt shy, experienced awkward moments, and have worried about making mistakes in front of others. She’s learned how not to beat herself up and obsess when the mistakes come. She accepts that mistakes are normal, part of life, part of what makes us grow. “Never put your faith into a machine! Assume it’s going to mess you up,” Susan joked. Her confidence was contagious in that boardroom at that critical moment just as it can be now hearing her story. Let her confidence find its way into you.
If this is hard for you to do, give it a name so you understand why you have a hard time letting go of errors or missteps. In psychology, we often warn people not to catastrophize—imagining worst-case scenarios and worrying that you will never be able to fix a mistake you’ve just made. Catastrophizing is particularly risky immediately after a setback. If you catch yourself falling prey to this way of thinking, don’t buy into it. It’s history. Move on. Get ready to take another swing.
There are many ways to learn, and we highlight this variety in our work with clients. People with agency maximize the opportunity to learn by being flexible and using more than one method. They also consider which mode is best employed in any given set of circumstances. For example, you might call someone for a quick consult on a topic you know they are well versed in rather than spend fifteen minutes googling an answer or trying to fix something on your own.
These four modes we present below are not an exhaustive list, nor are they airtight categories since they frequently overlap.
Most of us learn by using some combination of the four, but each of us usually has one method that we gravitate to. As you read about each of these modes, ask yourself:
What kind of learner am I?
Do I prefer to learn alone, by, say, reading or watching instructional videos?
Do I like to learn in groups?
Do I need to daydream about an opportunity first before I approach it? Do I learn by jumping right into doing and then picking up what I need to know along the way?
Or by being tutored one-on-one, or working in collaboration?
How averse am I to failing or experiencing embarrassment?
Learning Through Classroom-Based Study and Self-Study
Early in our lives, the expectation in school settings is that we all learn from books and in classrooms. Once we’re out of school, reading books and studying become optional. In our experience, people with strong agency never outgrow books or other means of trying to educate themselves.
Reading offers terrific, deeper learning opportunities. Many people with agency we interviewed told us they regularly read both fiction and nonfiction to take them into worlds they don’t know or want to explore more deeply. Reading takes time and requires the control of external stimuli. Podcasts and narrated books may appeal to more auditory-inclined learners and can be useful, but there is great value derived from creating the quiet and developing the patience for reading—quiet and patience are two things that are always required to go mentally deeper into whatever interests you.
Beyond high school or college, classroom-based study can take many forms. Adult education programs at community colleges and local universities, workshops at libraries, and retreats sponsored by health centers are all great opportunities to expand yourself, and many are inexpensive or free. And don’t be afraid to think outside the box. People we’ve worked with sometimes sign up for a class in something completely unexpected, like the Boston cop who learned improv and acting skills at a local adult education center. In terms of self-study, some people we know keep journals of everything from dreams to creative ideas that pop up unexpectedly. Seventy-two-year-old Bobbie Gates told The Wall Street Journal that playing the flute, which she began studying when she turned sixty, “fills my body with love and with peace.” The article noted that “a growing body of research suggests that playing an instrument or singing in a choir can enhance emotional well-being, brain health, cognition and hearing function.”
Many people make it a point to take trips to places they’ve never been to. One retired couple we spoke with travel by car to small towns and villages along the New England coastline, researching landmarks before they head out for the day, while another couple who are craft beer fanatics visit new breweries. The unfamiliar environments these people experience fuel their learning. These adventures keep them in a state of constant exploration.
Gerald Chertavian, the founder and CEO of Year Up, an organization that helps disadvantaged young people succeed and reach their potential, has figured out strategies to promote learning in himself, too. “I spend an hour a day purely educating myself on things,” Chertavian told us. “Just today, before speaking to you, I ran through the business cards I collected from people who I met this week. I went online to learn more about them. I also download and assemble things to read when I’m traveling, which is several hours a week at this point. I make it a point to keep exposing myself to things I don’t know and should know. It’s a strong driving force in me. I bump into many things, and if I’m not actively inquisitive and learning, how will I possibly know I’m doing things right?”
Learning from (and with) Machines
Technology is a great tool for (virtual) class study and self-study, but as yet it’s not a full-fledged teacher in and of itself. According to a 2017 article in The Economist, it remains a challenge for machines to calculate our learning style and tutor us accordingly. Artificial intelligence (AI) is paving the way with the development of software that can customize instruction by adapting to the individual’s knowledge level and rate of learning. Many promising developments are under way. Meanwhile, here are three forums that technology offers that can help you position yourself as a learner.
• Information searches. Researching facts and getting helpful information and resources is by far the most common way many people try to learn from machines. Search engines and online encyclopedias are great examples of this. Always double-check what you read, though, by fact-checking and double sourcing. Don’t accept what you’re being told as truth without considering the source.
• Virtual classrooms/workshops. Webinars and online courses offer the potential for learning with others, either in real time or at your own pace, whenever you choose. Research is mixed on whether virtual educational experiences match the quality of real-life learning. It may be a matter of your learning style. If you learn best alongside other people, sharing the same physical space, having opportunities to easily ask questions, and engaging in exploratory back-and-forth dialogue, in-person class settings make the most sense. Still, online learning from organizations such as edX, founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, are helping many people gain access to top-level knowledge and experienced educators.
• Social media. These platforms connect us to people, organizations, and news outlets, but they shouldn’t be seen as a primary way to learn about complex ideas. Social media is designed to help us socialize in the moment, share experiences, and communicate basic information. Interactions are usually truncated, such as texting to find a location, asking a friend to lunch, or offering a supportive word for a friend going through a hard time. While learning new things can certainly be a part of the mix, beware of how much of your daily “knowledge” you are getting from these quick-hit digital sources.
With technology, to position yourself as a learner, you also have to position yourself as your own teacher.
Technology is very seductive, and on the surface, it can deliver learning experiences with remarkable efficiency and convenience (and potential low cost), but it can lead us to overestimate what we think we know.
To learn through technology tools, keep these general tips in mind:
• Prepare to be your own teacher. In the real world, where we’re not as autonomous as we can be when we’re interacting with a computer or other technology, teachers evaluate us, grade us, track our true learning, and keep us honest. You’ll have to take on that role to get the most out of the learning you do with machines.
• Actively manage what you learn. Participate in the process. Don’t let yourself passively sit back and allow screens and algorithms to dictate what you learn and what you’ll experience next. Don’t let programs automatically load new videos or modules for you to consume unless you specifically plan for that. Pay attention to opportunities you have to control the flow of information.
• Apply what you’ve learned from virtual learning to real-life experiences. Supplement online learning with, for example, groups or classes that address the same topic. Have get-togethers with other learners to explore more, and try putting into practice what you’ve learned online. Otherwise, the information you get on screens will fade from your memory quickly.
Learning by Doing
We all learn how to talk, walk, and many other things at the beginning of our lives not through being explicitly taught but through our motivation and persistence. As adults, many times we learn by doing while on the job. Beginning waiters, for example, are typically novices thrown into the task. First-time parents figure out how to calm a crying baby. Entrepreneurs quickly learn to be business savvy, considering cash flow and revenues in addition to developing creative projects and products.
Other times, learning is cultivated by doing things over a long period of time. A love for something or a hobby can blossom into a career. John is a forty-six-year-old living in southwest Florida. His love of antique clocks started with an old broken clock his grandfather gave him in his youth. Taking it apart and seeing how it was designed gave him many joyful hours spent in exploration. He became fascinated by the old, delicate analog mechanisms and got good enough to fix other people’s clocks. Today, he runs a small clock repair business and says he loves what he does.
Learning many, if not most, complex things is enhanced by actually doing them. In medical school, students often perform basic medical examination procedures on each other, which teaches them not only how to get better at their medical skills but also what the experience feels like for the patient on the other side. Through this training, they can develop empathy for people undergoing exams.
We’ve visited very interesting places to observe how tinkering with technology can facilitate great learning. Anyone who has seen a makerspace or an iLab (information lab) in action immediately sees how young people become animated and engaged standing around large worktables, creatively combining bins of materials into complex, novel objects. Using everything from Lego to wires to transistors to popsicle sticks, and sometimes aided by 3-D printers and other technologies, participants in these spaces solve problems jointly. Interestingly, there often are no “teachers” per se but helpful educators guiding students to use their thinking skills to solve problems more on their own. This type of learning by doing is highly collaborative and fits very well with our view of how agency is often best achieved when working alongside others.
When we visited the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we expected lots of computers and robotics, which there were, but there was just as much cloth, styrofoam, glass, paint, and cardboard. Each area was busy with researchers in their unique territories, devoted to invention and solving complex problems. One researcher, Tal, showed us a remarkable project that he described as computer-mediated expressions in paint. It would, among other possibilities, allow people who had lost nearly all muscle movement to create paintings using eye-tracking technology. It was evident that hands-on experimentation with many different materials was as much a part of these sophisticated projects as formal learning and planning.
People learn by doing when they take apprenticeships, both formal and informal, when they take on internships or temporary work, or when they volunteer for an organization or event. All these activities provide opportunities to try out new skills, watch others at work, and put one’s interests into action. And while some of these activities, such as becoming a member of the Peace Corps, for example, demand large time commitments, most others do not. Habitat for Humanity, local libraries, animal shelters, food kitchens—all of these organizations depend on volunteer help and offer unexpected ways to learn new skills and develop inner talents outside of traditional classrooms.
Use Your Agency: Try a new skill, a new volunteer role, or any new way of interacting with the world to cultivate some of your underutilized talents.
Working farms near suburban and urban areas provide wonderful opportunities for both adults and children who don’t live in rural communities to work with outdoor materials and see nature up close. One of them we know well. Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary, part of the Mass Audubon network, is located in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and is an example of this in action. At a preschool program there, kids collect samples from small ponds to study, identify birds, and draw pictures of everything they get to experience, touch, and collect. They watch honey being harvested from a beehive, and they later use it along with milk they’ve churned into butter to bake cakes. They plant vegetables they will later eat.
Vocational education is getting more attention in the United States these days. Like apprenticeships, these learn-by-doing education programs provide direct laboratory application of real-life work, from hospitality services to automotive techs to medical office assistants.
We’ve also seen some very unexpected examples of learning by doing, such as when businesses bring professional actors into their companies to help executives become better leaders. Especially for introverted managers, acting programs can help them become more relaxed and personable. They learn, in a tangible way, the value of stepping outside of themselves and the strictures of social roles. They get practice at the old adage “Fake it until you make it,” practicing in a safe way how to be confident and outgoing.
Learning Through Imagination and Play
When young children play, they often pretend. They may become different people or animals so that they can develop and practice new social skills. They use their imaginations to solve problems, and they’re constantly mastering how things around them go together and function—whether the end product is a Star Wars Millennium Falcon Lego model or a meal of plastic food made in a toy oven.
From the outside, this kind of play can look, to us adults, like a frivolous activity. But it is, in fact, very serious. The amount of gained knowledge and thinking skills that come from this type of play is extraordinary. The cognitive connections that children forge when learning through imaginative processes are nearly unparalleled at any other time of their lives.
Many people we know in their twenties have turned the delight of play into new learning opportunities. As the Harry Potter generation, they grew up reading the book series (which debuted in 1997) and many are unapologetic about their continued love for the Harry Potter world and YA (young adult) fiction overall. Many join the thousands of children and adults who turn out for cosplay (costumed play) events and conventions to dress up as their favorite comic book characters or anime action figures. They get to be creative in a joyful, exuberant way. They also learn the value of being nonjudgmental as they interact with others in their subculture. They explore different parts of their personalities and assume new roles of behavior, all in a playful atmosphere.
Being open to play is very much connected to being open to new ideas and approaches. “If you haven’t thought that thought before, you don’t even know how that [brain] pattern feels,” says Barbara Oakley, a professor at Oakland University in Michigan, in her online course Learning How to Learn. She highlights the need for “diffuse” thinking, rather than just focused thinking, to be able to look at challenges and tasks broadly and from a big-picture perspective.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way while growing up, most others of us stopped approaching the world playfully. We don’t fiddle, putter, whittle, tinker, or imagine as much as we should.
But this can be brought back. Cam was leaving his first job in New York City as a financial analyst on Wall Street. Those three years had been great. He’d made good friends and loved living in Brooklyn, but he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be happy staying in the financial business. He didn’t have another job lined up, mainly because he was unsure what direction in life he wanted to take next. “I don’t really let myself mentally explore and consider all options,” he told us. “I pretty quickly shut them down one by one. I don’t want to make a mistake and choose the wrong job.”
We asked Cam to practice thinking like a kid, not as someone weighing serious issues like viable career paths, student debt, and future mortgages. We asked, “What would you do if you could pretend anything was possible?”
His answers showed that he had many passions beneath the surface that were going unmet: “Ski instructor for a year … maybe teach English abroad … I’ve always wanted to learn competitive sailing … or maybe get time on one of those tall ships.”
By parking his adult expectations to the side and adopting a child’s freer imaginative explorations, Cam tried on different options and personas without feeling trapped by the strong messages (Don’t be silly … come on, be realistic) that keep most of us from playful wandering. Given some freedom, our minds can come up with creative options. We can solve problems if we give ourselves permission to imagine. For Cam, it led to the realization that there didn’t need to be a single best path at this time for him to follow. Being flexible and adapting to opportunities as they arose made the most sense.
The Challenge of Continuous Change
This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.
Actress Meryl Streep, in a commencement address to Barnard College
Meryl Streep understands the power of change as well as anyone; to be a good actor, after all, means to make yourself “new” in some way for every role. And Streep is right that becoming new isn’t just a tool for actors in theater or film. Change, and adapting to it, is a part of life for everyone.
To the extent that you resist change, you will limit new experiences and won’t be able to learn much, and you will suffer the consequences. Learning facilitates adaptation, and if you’re not learning, you will struggle coping with change. It is useful to keep a close eye on your attitude toward change; some resistance is to be expected, but if you notice yourself becoming angry or frustrated, you might want to give further thought to identifying the source of your resistance.
People with high levels of agency work hard to keep open to change and update their ideas as things around them change and as they learn more. In high-change periods where things are moving quickly, you need to update your point of view and opinions more frequently as you take in new information. This serves to promote self-renewal, which is healthy change.
Interestingly, in times of significant stress, most people tend to do the opposite. They often keep a tight grasp on their beliefs to anchor them because they’re feeling unsettled and unmoored. While this is an understandable human tendency, it also is a major inhibitor to new learning.
Learning from Other People
“For an entrepreneur, 90 percent of what you need to know is in somebody else’s head,” Waverly Deutsch, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor of entrepreneurship, has said. “And you learn faster by talking to somebody than by googling all day long. Because you can ask questions, you can interact.”
Deutsch is right. There’s a special kind of learning that can only happen while you’re in the company of others, debating a challenging topic, brainstorming creative ideas, practicing athletic skills alongside competitors. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This kind of human synergy needs to be practiced, and many things we hope to achieve can’t be learned if we are alone.
In our work, learning from other people seems to be the biggest opportunity for learning that many people neglect or need to develop. Modern work habits have us more separated, in cubicles, or working off-site or at home. We easily become isolated many hours a day on screens, and for these reasons, many people simply miss the full leverage of learning that can be gained through positioning themselves alongside others.
Vince Warren is the civil rights attorney in New York City we met in the previous chapter. Vince is also an avid jazz drummer. “Any opportunity I can put myself into musical spaces is when I’m my best,” he told us. He noted that playing jazz in a group feels very connected to his work, as it helps him be a better listener and stay more connected to others, forcing him to see things in novel ways. “The learning when I’m playing is so much beyond what I can do or what I’d learn as a drummer alone,” he says.
Millennials are known for being especially comfortable with learning through digital collaboration, and in this sense, many don’t get as isolated being on screens. They grew up with the internet and social media, so they’re adept at crowdsourcing—looking for answers from a wide variety of people—and at hashing out ideas in online forums. That’s one of the reasons that digital business tools such as Slack have proven so popular; they allow for real-time discussion on any and every topic, even from the distance of a screen and keyboard.
People in high-precision jobs often see particular value in using the skill of being open and listening to and learning from others. Pilots and surgeons, for example, use reliability checks on the job, encouraging subordinates to question them routinely. Allowing subordinates or experts to step in to confirm or challenge decisions decreases serious, potentially fatal errors. Surgeon and author Atul Gawande captured the essence of this in a New Yorker article on the value of listening to the direction of others, whether it’s in the surgical operating theater or on the tennis court. “I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel,” he wrote. “The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be. But doctors don’t.” Gawande decided to break with tradition by asking a surgeon he had trained under to be his coach, and he brought him in to observe a surgery and give him feedback.
Use Your Agency: Ask people to provide you with their thought chain. Ask them how they came to their conclusion. Ask them what their reasoning steps were.
The key is being selective about who you listen to and learn from. People you solicit advice from should be vetted—that is, trustworthy and experienced. You should know they have no agenda other than offering their helpful guidance and that they’ve been around enough to know something about what they are talking about. There is great value in finding mentors either in a formal sense as part of a mentoring program or informally on your own. We encourage clients to consider setting up their own personal “board of advisors” composed of people with different skills and backgrounds.
Again, keep in mind that these four modes of learning aren’t airtight and there’s no single right way to learn. Many artists, entrepreneurs, mechanics, writers, cooks, and gardeners started by taking up a hobby, practicing on their own, apprenticing, volunteering, or just dabbling enough for something to spark. Visual artist Paul Gauguin was a thirty-five-year-old stockbroker in Paris before committing himself to painting in the late 1800s. Respected chef Ina Garten (host of Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network) wasn’t formally trained in the culinary arts and previously worked at the White House Office of Management and Budget writing nuclear energy budgets. The point is that you shouldn’t think twice about picking up a paintbrush or a whisk. Go ahead and take on anything you desire. Have fun and see where it goes. One woman told us that learning, for her, is a lot like hiking, which she loves. “I keep going and going; it’s not always just to get to some end spot,” she explains. “It’s the unexpected things along the way that keep me wanting to move.”
Pursue the Learning Approach and the Topics That Are Best for You
Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner describes humans as having “multiple intelligences,” and he highlights eight, such as spatial intelligence (the ability to conceptualize how things move about and work in physical space, in the way a pilot or a chess player might) or interpersonal intelligence (the ability to accurately read other people’s emotions and motivations as a psychotherapist or negotiator might). Gardner tells us there are intelligences pertaining to music and sound, use of body and movement, even an intelligence related to concepts of nature.
The eight intelligence types remind us there are multiple ways that people express intelligence and navigate their worlds. Given this, it logically follows that teaching and learning should ideally not be one-dimensional. Most people, through trial and error, gravitate toward topics and learning approaches that feel right and suit them best, but some people can get turned off to learning through bad experiences. Learning, while sometimes challenging and tiring, should ultimately be rewarding, even enjoyable. If it’s not, take a step back. Consider what you are learning and if the learning approach is best for you. Don’t give up too early, but know that if learning feels like a constant fight or is complete drudgery, you may be going against your natural grain. Try a different method. Consider learning about other topics or learning through a different approach.
Remember: We’re all equipped to learn, but we need to seek the best way for ourselves.
Robert works in sales with an energy company based in California. We met him recently while traveling, striking up a conversation while waiting to board a plane. Robert told us about a simple technique he uses during meetings to prevent his attention from straying. He carries a small paper notebook with him at all times and makes himself jot down notes by hand.
Writing notes helps him recall a meeting’s details, but that’s not the main reason he does it. He explained that the physical touch of the paper and holding a pen in his hand—and the freedom from distracting screens—help him slow his mind down, help him focus, and help him benefit as much as possible from each meeting he attends. Otherwise, he says, his eyes and mind roam.
Simple note-taking like this engages more parts of the brain. Fingers move to capture the words, hands experience the texture of the paper, and eyes scan to stay within the boundaries of real pages. The physical act of moving the muscles of your fingers and hand in fluid, real ways does increase concentration. Compared to clicking keys and tapping glass, the senses must work together rather than process separate stimuli. This, in turn, reinforces memory.
Neurologically, activities like taking notes on real paper encourage what’s called multisensory learning. The more your various senses are engaged when trying to learn something, the better chance you have of getting the right information into your brain accurately, and the better chance that information has of staying there.
From our last chapter, “Respect Your Body,” we know that getting regular healthy movement improves learning and fosters creative thinking. But what about movement during learning?
One study suggests that movement while learning a new language is beneficial. The study, published in PLOS ONE, involved college students in China who were learning English. Half learned while seated, and the other half learned while cycling in place. According to the researchers, “The results of the study are clear-cut: learning a foreign vocabulary while performing a concurrent physical activity yields better performance than learning the same vocabulary while being in a static situation.”
Now, this is not to say that all learning is enhanced in this way or that it is reasonable to set up most learning environments with treadmills and exercise bikes. Further, more intense movement may actually detract from learning, as the exertion can pull resources and energy from the brain. But this is an intriguing finding that future studies can build upon. Anecdotally, many offices are using treadmills and standing desks to keep muscles engaged, and there have been positive anecdotal findings that these practices are enhancing performance.
There is an important challenge when learning from other people, and that’s the risk of being unduly influenced through our interactions. Groups are particularly powerful at influencing individuals. Engaging with the media we consume, the talk shows we watch or listen to, and the social groups we interact with all provide opportunities to learn from people, but they all come with this risk. How do you position yourself as a learner without getting misled in the process?
We explored in chapter 2 the principle Associate Selectively and how mirror neurons can make us experience other people’s emotions. We also explored how social comparison happens constantly—to some degree, we’re continually sizing each other up—and may realign our thoughts and behaviors. In fact, whenever we affiliate, we are susceptible to being persuaded by others’ beliefs, agendas, and needs. We’ve all had this experience; if a few people in a group start looking upward or in one particular direction, chances are we do, too. When people start to applaud or laugh at a joke, we tend to follow. In short, most of us are strongly wired to follow the herd as it functions from an evolutionary standpoint and as a survival skill.
Anthony’s Notes from the Office: Coach?
Who we listen to and take cues from are critical. We went into detail about this in the principle Associate Selectively. That principle can make all the difference when we are seeking specific information or guidance.
Max was a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate when I met him. He was confused over his love life. His girlfriend of two years wasn’t committing to anything long term. She wanted to explore other relationships because she was only twenty, but when Max leaned toward a breakup, she wanted to spend more time together. This was Max’s first serious relationship, and he said he had never been this much in love, but the emotional drama of the relationship was wreaking havoc. Some nights, Max couldn’t sleep.
Max came to my office looking for help with “the direction of his life.” After talking for a while, it became apparent that one of the main reasons he was so confused and distressed was because he was seeking advice from many close friends and getting wildly contradictory advice. “Break up,” said one friend. “Take her on a romantic trip,” said another. Another advised that if he loves her he should “go for it” and propose. Another said to unfriend her on Facebook.
What helped Max most was guiding him to assess which friends he should listen to and which he shouldn’t. Who among his friends had the most relationship experience? Who had relationships that to him seemed positive and healthy? Once he did this assessment, he was able to easily zero in on who would be the best source of advice and whose advice was better off ignored.
Max’s story makes an important point about considering the sources of information that you’re using to help you make decisions. Whatever the context, agency involves considering the source of information. Nowhere has the threat to agency posed by bad information become more clear recently than in the world of news, where the specter of “fake news” has left many paralyzed about whom to believe.
Access to reliable information about current events and society’s trends and challenges is vital. Without accurate and reliable information, how can you make good decisions? You simply can’t. For example, if you’re misinformed, you can’t make good decisions in terms of supporting leaders who will best represent your values and needs. Choosing to vote for a particular leader directly impacts the community you are part of. When you participate as an informed member of your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country—you ensure that better decisions will be made on issues that impact your personal agency—such as funding for training and education, cultural and arts programs, infrastructure, and of course economic opportunities.
In the information age, the explosion of new delivery vehicles has created a voracious hunger for content. The twenty-four-hour news cycle means that news cable shows, websites, Twitter feeds, and Facebook updates are always on and always churning out something. Unfortunately, there are unreliable “content providers” who dole out inaccurate, biased content designed to appeal to specific market demographics. It’s become a commercially viable industry to produce “news” that isn’t designed to reliably inform but rather to entertain and build emotional reactions—to attract eyeballs, in industry parlance. It can be dangerous to rely on this type of information.
It has become necessary to exercise great caution in terms of where you get your information. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, delivered a groundbreaking speech in October 2018 critiquing the “data industrial complex” of big tech. “Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.… Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies. Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false.” We live in high-stakes times where pivotal issues regarding standards around privacy and even what constitutes “news” need to be addressed. Until this is addressed on a societal level it is crucial for you to be as aware as possible of the personal risks and benefits of the massive intersection of technology and media. It has a direct bearing on your level of personal agency.
Beware of Deceptive “News”
Just because a website looks like news, with well-designed graphics and authoritative journalistic language, doesn’t make it news. It’s vital to know the difference between proper news organizations that follow journalistic procedures and organizations (and dubious individuals) passing off untruths and their ideologies as news.
One of the best-known recent examples comes from Facebook. It was revealed in the fall of 2017 that leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Facebook sold more than $100,000 worth of ads to Russian agents tied to the Kremlin. Some three thousand ads went out over several months targeting Facebook users in specific voting districts. Many of these posts were made to look like news, when in fact they were a mixture of fact and fiction designed to provoke dissension. Facebook says that these misleading posts reached about ten million people. Similar online ads were placed with Twitter and Google as well. The purpose was to manipulate the presidential election and undermine American democracy.
When you hear people say, “I read it on my Facebook news feed,” remind them that Facebook was never intended to be a news organization. It’s a social media company that makes money by selling ad space. It tracks the demographics and online behavior of its users. This allows marketers and companies to target their ads and products most effectively. All of us must think critically about the source of our information in the digital age.
Studies in the United States have found that a large percentage of people think all news is biased and that they may as well just pick the source that feels best to them. Problem is, it just isn’t true that all news sources are crassly biased. Just as scientists welcome critiques of their work and they seek alternate explanations for their findings, good journalists and news organizations work to be impartial and strive to get the most accurate information out to the public.
So, what news to watch, read, or listen to? Our first advice is to not get discouraged. Don’t throw up your hands in surrender because there’s too much information coming at you (even though there is) or because you’re being told that all news is false or misleading. Don’t stop seeking the accurate information that you need to make better life choices for yourself. Here are a few specific recommendations:
Use the power of the internet in savvy ways. At your fingertips, you potentially have access to all the information you need to be properly and accurately informed, but you can just as easily be misled.
• Pay attention to the source that’s listed before you click on a link. For instance, if you’re looking for medical information, click on pages from the Mayo Clinic or nih.gov, the website of the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government body. Both will provide information that’s factual and without a hidden commercial bias.
• Don’t stop at the first search hit. Instead, check out those below it and on the next pages.
• Don’t accept what’s on Wikipedia without verifying the sources. Most entries have accurate information, but because it’s an evolving digital encyclopedia with a reported twelve million edits a month, many are bound to have inaccuracies, and most are bound to be incomplete. Go the extra step and check the original sources listed at the bottom of the entry. Visit other encyclopedia resources to verify.
Many of the best news organizations use fact-checkers, people trained to verify details going into an article before it gets published or broadcasted. This is similar to reliability checks done by surgeons and pilots to decrease serious errors, and it is similar to conducting reliability studies so that researchers know if their results are by chance or if they will hold up over time.
• Start with traditional media, such as established newspapers, magazines, and noncommercial sources, such as public radio and television. These sources follow established standards of journalism. Many require that you become a subscriber to read more than a handful of articles. This is money well spent. If you immediately reject news sources because they are “too liberal,” you’ve just lost agency.
• Consider sources such as the American Enterprise Institute and organizations such as PIMCO and McKinsey & Company. If you immediately reject these news sources because you think they are “too conservative,” you’ve just lost agency.
• Remember that professional information gatherers value discourse, research, and logic. No matter what ideological end of the spectrum you fall on, you can find reputable sources that will engage your critical-thinking skills, pose important questions that you aren’t likely to think of, and challenge your assumptions.
Over the past few decades, this line has blurred. To stay informed, you generally want less flash and more facts. We strongly suggest you do not get your news from social media sites that use algorithms to curate your news feed. This will only magnify your blind spots and reinforce preexisting bias. If tuning in to cable news, notice whether the newscasters are chatting more than reporting verifiable information? Are they trying to play to your emotions by peddling a particular ideology in hard-sell fashion (if you find yourself shaking your head in agreement, you may not actually be getting real news)? Are they giving you room to think for yourself? Are their featured experts legitimate experts providing fact-based analysis? Know the difference between news and theater. If you want to be indulged and entertained, Netflix is great.
We’re more likely to follow and be influenced by people who project authority or are authority figures. These include politicians, police, judges, business leaders, military personnel, doctors, and teachers. Just how far does obedience go? Almost anyone wearing a uniform gets our undivided attention or is seen as having greater knowledge or skill. Desks and furnishings in offices are often positioned to communicate power. We’re also unconsciously susceptible based on physical characteristics, such as people who are tall or physically fit, attractive, dress elegantly or stylishly, or simply because they speak with a confident voice and manner. We need to pay attention to our human herd instincts! It’s best to look beyond the nameplate and the suit. Look beyond the setting or situation, too, such as when in a large, imposing building or posh store, if you sense that someone is expecting you to accept what they say without a reasonable explanation.
Use Your Agency: Respect authority figures, but be open to second-guessing their ideas and looking for additional ideas and opinions.
When we’re working with clients, we tell people to be on the lookout for “talking points.” These are phrases that are just a little too smooth and rehearsed. They’re phrases that have been designed ahead of time to sway. Talking points are built into product packaging, many consumer situations, and, of course, political messaging. Years back, Anthony noticed that the price of iced coffee had suddenly increased at a café he regularly visited. Why the price bump? “We take time to shake it after pouring it over ice,” the barista answered with a steady smile.
Anthony asked, “What is the benefit of having my iced coffee shaken?”
The answer came fast and well-rehearsed: “It unlocks the flavor!”
Use your critical thinking when trying to learn from others. And of course this applies to authority figures as well. Take in information as objectively as possible (Does shaking my coffee really unlock its flavor?) to reach your own conclusions. Watch for social sleights of hand that are intended not so much to teach you something but to get you to move more in someone else’s direction. Ask yourself, Is this person trustworthy, reliable? And don’t stop there. Consider all sources and ways that people try to influence you.
Don’t Completely Outsource Your Decision-Making
There is fascinating research on how people literally shut down the part of their brains that otherwise helps them make independent decisions when they are listening to an expert. A recent study by Emory University, for instance, looked at brain MRIs as people were listening to advice from a financial expert.
“Results showed that brain regions consistent with decision-making were active in participants when making choices on their own; however, there occurred an offloading of the decision-making process in the presence of expert advice,” said Jan B. Engelmann, a research fellow in Emory’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a coauthor of the study, in an Emory news release.
This abdication of focus in the face of an expert happened even when experts weren’t delivering advice that led to the best outcomes. “The expert provided very conservative advice, which in our experiment did not lead to the highest earnings. But the brain activation results suggested that the offloading of decision-making was driven by trust in the expert,” said C. Monica Capra, an economist in Emory’s Department of Economics and another coauthor of the study.
The brain essentially gave up responsibility when an authority figure was providing advice. That’s dangerous, obviously. As Emory professor of neuroeconomics and psychiatry Gregory Berns, another coauthor of the study, put it, “The problem with this tendency is that it can work to a person’s detriment if the trusted source turns out to be incompetent or corrupt.”
We all do this to varying degrees, and we do it in many situations. We tend to trust others with seniority or with more experience. On the surface, this seems logical, but we have to be careful that we don’t fully shut down our logical decision-making apparatus, no matter how much we want to trust others. Learning is inhibited when we reflexively give ourselves over to expert opinion.
Critical thinking, a term loaded with agency, is crucial to us in important situations, especially at times when our health is on the line. Research has indicated about 15 percent of medical diagnoses we or our loved ones receive can be flat-out wrong. Medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the United States, a Johns Hopkins research team reported in 2016. And yet, how often do we question our medical providers or the procedures and therapies they’ve recommended? How often do we seek out a second opinion? Before taking a trip to the pharmacy or agreeing to surgery, or before ignoring symptoms because an expert tells you you’re fine and not to worry, call up your inquisitive skills. Ask reasonable, respectful questions. Reach out to another expert you trust to see if the diagnosis or treatment makes sense. The bottom line is to be a learner in all aspects of your life, especially when speaking with experts. Healthy skepticism increases accuracy and better outcomes.
Few of us find it easy to always listen to others with a completely open mind. This is especially true when we’re under stress, when conversations get personal, or when the topic being discussed is one that inspires extreme passion or anger. Few of us find it easy to listen to others when we’re convinced that the other person is misleading us, is uninformed, is highly biased, is condescending, or is professing views we find abhorrent.
The tension that results from encounters like these produces something akin to white noise that drowns out everything else. It is difficult to feel calm and balanced and to truly hear what is being said when someone you are engaging with disappoints or offends you or when that person hurts your feelings. Typically, your protective emotional shields go up. You either shut down or counter with strong suspicion or hostility of your own. This is a remnant of the animal instinct to play dead or show teeth when threatened. Your brain thinks you may be in some kind of danger and reroutes its activities to move you into a defensive mode.
Remember that the goal in many conversations, even if they’re incredibly stressful, is often not to “be right” or “win the argument” or to completely shut the other person down. More often, it’s to expand the capacity for dialogue in a relationship to get to a better place. Think about the bigger picture. Would it be useful to form some sort of understanding or alliance, or at least to understand how the other person arrived at their opinion, to build a communication channel? If your answer is yes, then you need to do the work necessary to open a flow of valuable information.
Use Your Agency: Remember that it can be easy to win the argument but lose the battle. The next time you’re having a stressful conversation, remind yourself of your end goal. Are you looking for an alliance? If yes, then it might make sense to back off.
The best strategy in situations like this is to take the perspective of the other person. To do this, you first need to get yourself calm. Whether you’re discussing sensitive matters with your spouse or dealing with a difficult neighbor or trying to keep your cool during a heated work meeting, you effectively position yourself as a learner only when you are able to lower your defenses, take a few breaths, try to keep an open mind, and stay relaxed.
Other inhibitors to your learning include fear of failure, perfectionism, limited or no interaction with people different from yourself, closed-mindedness, and rushing to judgment.
If You Want to Encourage Learning, Don’t Kill the Messenger
Interacting only with like-minded people or exposing yourself to the same routines and situations will limit your learning options. Even people you find uncomfortable to be around may provide valuable learning opportunities that will help you grow as a person and maybe help you understand a problem from a new angle. (There are limits to this, as people who aren’t ever respectful of you should be avoided.)
Guy experienced a variation of this firsthand when roofers had just finished installing a new gutter system on his home. While they were packing tools into their truck, Guy asked how the job went. One of them said in a hostile and exasperated voice, “Well, I don’t know why you’re putting up fancy new copper gutters when your roof is in a state of failure!”
Guy was shocked. Why hadn’t anyone said anything while they were working up there? Why hadn’t the other supervising contractors on-site been told?
To Guy’s credit, at a moment of high stress, he practiced positioning himself as a learner. He didn’t show anger outwardly, although he was very upset. He stood his ground and demanded the workers remain on-site so he could ask questions. He got more details about the condition of his roof. The more calm he was, the more information he got.
The next day, the owner of the roofing company came and apologized. “Look, I don’t want an apology,” said Guy. “And I don’t want this guy to get in trouble, either. He spoke up, and I want to hear what he saw and why he came to that conclusion. He was up there on my roof getting his hands dirty while the rest of us weren’t.”
Fortunately, the roof turned out to not be in as disastrous a state as that one roofer implied, but his outburst did lead to a more thorough assessment of the roof’s conditions, and it spurred several repairs that would extend the roof’s life.
Those with the so-called alpha personality type often believe it’s a sign of weakness to position themselves to learn from others. Many people with this personality style focus on projecting a strong outward façade of power and of appearing firm, steady, and unwavering. Being open to the perspectives of others is viewed as a passive—and thus a weak—behavior. They often react emotionally to bad news, serving to discourage others from bringing it to them. These kinds of alphas prefer to be dominant and to tightly control the flow of information—top down and doled out to subordinates on a need-to-know basis. Learning, for them, is generally secondary to being perceived as tough and commanding.
How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Alphas run the risk of being misinformed but, at the same time, are invested in always being right. Research psychologists have a name for this. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. In short, it’s when a person is ignorant of his or her own ignorance. In fancier terms, it’s a cognitive bias where people with low abilities have an illusory superiority. They think that their knowledge and competence is much greater than it is.
Compare this to people with agency. People with true power and genuine confidence don’t need to keep proving it or to act superior. They know that listening to others gives them significantly more leverage in assessing the real nature of a particular situation or challenge. This, in turn, typically opens up more options for them to consider in terms of actions to take. People with agency frequently describe this principle of positioning oneself as a learner as a fundamental skill. It enhances their personal power and effectiveness, particularly in more complex situations.
Positioning yourself as a learner takes self-control. Muster the confidence to set your ego aside, keep your emotions in check, and just listen. Many people don’t realize that they increase their level of influence by strategically ceding power at times. Giving others the opportunity to exert their control can reduce tension and conflict. It can also set the stage for more learning in both directions. People open up more when they perceive you as fair-minded, and they may respect your viewpoint more. In the end, you may get, as negotiators hope to do, more of what you want.
Adam, a senior HR leader for a major corporation in a new role, was responsible for dealing with seasoned union leaders during challenging contract negotiations. This represented his greatest professional challenge yet. When he began strategically positioning himself more as a learner and an active listener by asking questions, not interrupting, and using more open body language and relaxed facial expressions, his negotiating adversaries responded in kind and became a bit more like partners. Seeing how present he was to the concerns and opinions of others, the union representatives were more willing to work with him and reach effective compromises. Adam’s influence increased when he stopped always trying to appear tough and unmovable.
Find Your Way to Being a Better Listener
Sometimes we’re happy to be listening and learning. Other times, listening is a struggle. Here are six strategies for trying to learn from people you might normally shut yourself off from:
1. Imagine yourself in the role of a journalist, interviewing a knowledgeable expert.
2. Give the other person physical space and encourage them to talk. Keep an open posture and maintain good eye contact.
3. Demonstrate that you’re really listening by not interrupting and by restating the other person’s viewpoints. Acknowledge their value. Occasionally nod to affirm that you’re understanding what they are saying.
4. Resist the impulse to challenge or defend. Don’t come at the person you’re talking to as an opponent or, worse, an enemy. Breathe.
5. Don’t one-up the person you’ve decided to learn from. Don’t talk about yourself.
6. Don’t make up your mind too quickly. Suspend judgment to prevent yourself from reaching conclusions preemptively.
7. Keep conversations time limited, and steer them back on track. Say, “We’re off course here; let’s stick to what we can be productive on.”
8. Consider taking a walk so you’re side by side rather than facing each other in an adversarial way. The movement also helps lower stress and the buildup of adrenaline.
How do others see you? What’s their experience when they’re in your presence?
These are hard questions to answer. Consider how often the people you come in contact with don’t know what informs your perspective. Consider how much—or how little—you know about what informs theirs. There’s often remarkably little data on either side of the interaction.
The business world uses “360-degree” assessments to help executives and managers gain a better perspective on what personality traits and leadership skills they project and how they are received. The assessment often looks at competencies such as how clear you are in communicating, how open you are to feedback, and whether people find working with you to be inspiring. It finds out whether you are seen as nurturing or abrasive, supportive or condescending, encouraging or overly critical. It can help you understand if people trust your decision-making or simply grin and bear it and try to work around it.
The process typically takes the form of anonymous feedback (often coordinated by a third party) from a representative sample of people at different levels who work with the person. These people can include executives, managers, peers, direct reports, and clients. Properly conducted, these reviews can help people become better leaders and managers through increasing their self-awareness, nudging them to develop new skills, and helping them blossom in new ways after being given boosts of confidence to their self-esteem.
“Your own perception of yourself is rarely accurate or predictive,” consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman have written in Harvard Business Review. “We are heartened when we see the process done well because we know that virtually every time that happens, someone’s life will indeed be transformed in a positive way. In a very real sense, it can be one of the rare activities that truly does influence careers and change lives.”
Use Your Agency: Undergo a 360 process or simply ask respected, trustworthy colleagues and friends who know you well for honest feedback to find out what skills you need to work on.
Gerald, the Year Up CEO we met earlier, uses the 360 process in his organization. “It’s the ultimate way to position yourself as learner,” he says. “We do a lot of 360 reviews and get deep and valuable feedback. With 450 people working in twelve different cities, I absolutely must get multiple viewpoints for me to be at my best.”
If it were easy to do, we would learn and integrate the perspectives of everyone around us all the time. We could use this increased awareness to help us increase our good qualities and decrease the negative ones. It would open the door to all sorts of learning. But it’s not easy. It requires that you seek out and embrace the views of others without overpersonalizing what you hear.
In many ways, doing this kind of self-investigation is the ultimate example of positioning yourself as a learner. It requires orienting yourself to receive information and subjective views that may go deep and intimate, not getting swayed by outlying negative comments or petty observations, and then reflecting on the new information to update your beliefs about yourself. Done with openness and some modesty, it will help you to become your best self.
Preparing Yourself for Success in the Twenty-First Century
Will you be prepared as things change? Should you pursue a broad-based, general education, or should you learn highly specific skills? How can you learn to learn better?
We look to educators who are on the front lines of teaching for answers. After all, educators are preparing the upcoming generation of young people to effectively learn, grow, and adapt to a rapidly changing, evermore tech-driven world. It has become crucial today to consider not only what we learn but to consider how we learn—continuous change requires continuous learning.
In short, acquiring knowledge and skills alone isn’t enough.
One helpful framework to consider and guide you can be found in the book Four-Dimensional Education by Charles Fadel, Maya Bialik, and Bernie Trilling. The authors explain, “Educational success is no longer mainly about reproducing content knowledge, but about extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge in novel situations.” In their model for twenty-first-century learning, the first two dimensions may sound familiar: Knowledge (what we know and understand) and Skills (how we use what we know). The next two dimensions are less familiar for most of us who have been taught in traditional education settings. They are Character (how we behave and engage in the world), and Meta-Learning (how we reflect and adapt).
What are the main differentiators? Critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity, among other uniquely human attributes. As Fadel, Bialik, and Trilling remind us, “The world no longer rewards people just for what they know—search engines know everything—but for what they can do with what they know, how they behave in the world, and how they adapt.”
Keep in mind that the principles in this book interrelate and build on each other. Control Stimuli and Associate Selectively provide a valuable boost when you put them together with Position Yourself as a Learner. Controlling the heavy daily volume of stimulation that comes at you is critical for keeping your mind primed to learn, and it widens your bandwidth to take in the important things. Associating selectively gets you to the right people who can provide the information and knowledge you need. It also can get you to people who will challenge you to expand your thinking by helping you see things from different points of view.
In general, you want to seek out quality time with others who also value positioning themselves as learners. Learning works best when it’s a two-way street.
Most important, positioning yourself as a learner is central to developing a critical-thinking self because using your brain’s frontal cortex for logical thought requires that you obtain good information for it to do its job. Your brain is designed to help you, but it needs factual, reliable data. It also needs discipline to stay on course. You can’t just be on autopilot all the time and assume that things will work out. Surprising to most of our clients is the fact that, left to its own devices, the human brain doesn’t think very logically. As we’ll see in the next chapter, “Stable and Grounded,” the human brain loves shortcuts and quick ways to size things up. Biases are the norm, not the exception.
The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.
—American bluesman B.B. King, speaking to Texas high school students in 1992
YOUR AGENCY TOOL KIT
SEEK KNOWLEDGE AND INDULGE YOUR CURIOSITY: Pursue new information and ideas as a way to open your mind to learning and as a first step toward effective critical thinking.
LEARN TO FAIL: Embrace mistakes as a key aspect of learning. Focus on recovery, and figure out what you need to improve.
GO WIDE: Take in a wide range of information and viewpoints to expand your learning.
KNOW YOUR MODES: Employ the learning mode that best fits your situational need.
IF YOU’RE AN EXTROVERT, SPEAK LESS, LISTEN MORE: Don’t dominate conversations, open up space for others to fill, and let uncomfortable silences exist, which facilitates the emergence of deeper thinking.
IF YOU’RE AN INTROVERT, SPEAK UP: Force yourself to ask questions, and don’t fear looking stupid for not knowing the answer. The more you do this, the easier it gets.
BE MORE OPEN, LESS JUDGMENTAL: Cultivate an open mind to allow you to truly hear what others are thinking and saying.
PROJECT CALM: Consciously focus on relaxing your muscles and projecting calmness and neutrality to encourage a higher-quality dialogue and knowledge flow from others to you.
GET FEEDBACK: Ask colleagues and friends to provide their views on your traits and skills to gain fuller access to how others experience you.
SEEK THE CHAIN: Request that others walk you through their thought chain to better understand how they arrived at their positions or judgments.
GO FOR THE FACTS: Use reliable data to inform your ideas and to make good decisions.
TAKE PERSPECTIVE: Practice seeing things from other people’s vantage points.
DON’T OUTSOURCE 100 PERCENT: Embrace your power as a prudent person by taking time to consider more critically the ideas and recommendations of experts.