...you sure you're learning?

There's a quote by Tony Robbins I love:

"Knowledge is NOT power. Knowledge is only potential power. Action is power."

It's been present for me, because I noticed a big mistake in my self-education journey.

And you may be making it too.

So what is it?

I'm a big advocate for learning, especially self-directed learning.

There's great power in choosing, by your own volition, to use your free time to consume educational content. And it can change your life.

But there is a point in which consuming becomes counter-productive.

That is, when you spend so much time learning, you don't actually do anything.You read book after book, watch Ted Talk after Ted Talk, buy course after course, take infinite notes, and let all this information accumulate in your mind.

Suddenly, it's so much, you can't even keep up with all of it. Much less do anything with it.

Two big problems stem from this: a ridiculous amount of mental clutter comes first. And too many open loops to count comes second.

It becomes overwhelming.

If you're learning, why do you feel this way?

Mental Clutter

You know the feeling, don't you?

When you have so much information in your mind, it becomes paralyzing. What direction do you move in now?

Let's imagine learning like a connect-the-dots picture. Every book or article you read, every video you watch, each of those is a dot. Taking action would be connecting the dots, and creating a map.

The problem is this: if you add too many dots and don't connect them, you lose track. You forget which one connects with which one.

You end up with a huge mess no idea how to organize it. Lots of possible destinations, but no map, no path, and no progress.

Everything you learned becomes a burden, more than an asset.

This is problem number one.

Open Loops

Every time you begin learning something, you open a mental loop.

When you apply it, you close the loop, and you get a release of dopamine. If you don't apply it, you get no sense of completion. The result is an open loop, which turns into stress for our brains.

Just like in the the last example, every resource you learn from is an open loop. Every project you start and abandon is an open loop, too. If you don't close them, they start to release cortisol in your brain.

You get this constant feeling that you should be doing something, and you don't even know what it is.

Now you're in an anxious cycle.

Once again, your learning process turns into a source of stress, not growth.

The Antidote

There's only one antidote to this: action. More specifically, building.

Creating.

Projects.

What do I define as a project? Something you're building, using the information you got from the books, videos, podcasts, etc., that exists outside your mind and notes.

The power in projects is that they give you feedback. Data. You start figuring out what works and what doesn't. And you can iterate upon that.

You can't iterate on the notes you took, or on your youtube watch history.

If you don't build a project, you have:

1. No idea if you truly understand what you learned

2. No way to turn that knowledge into a change in your life

3. A lot of mental clutter and open loops, which result in stress.

How to manage your projects

I see life as a series of experiments.

That's the idea with projects: experimenting. Finding what works.

There's two main pieces to this:

1. Building: taking action. What this looks like will vary depending on what you're doing. If you're learning drawing, building means actually making art, and possibly sharing it with more experienced people. If you're trying to build muscle, this would be going to the gym consistently. If you're learning video editing, this would be filming videos, editing them, and posting them on YouTube.

1. Documenting: You can't improve what you don't track. I recommend journaling about your process as a tool for self reflection, no matter what you're doing. But documenting may also be posting what you did to social media, sharing with an accountability partner, or writing down your workouts in a notebook.

A note on balance

Please, don't think I'm against the consumption side of learning.

There's so many cool resources available to us: people, books, courses, the list is endless. Keep taking advantage of those.

The reason why I write this is because many of us have a strong bias towards learning as collecting knowledge, and I'm definitely guilty of this too. And there's a reason for this: it feels GREAT. It feels like progress! You think you're becoming wiser. But that's the trap.

It gives you the feeling of progress without actually changing anything about your external reality. (There's cool things that happen when your internal reality changes, too! Not trying to minimize that either.)

Still, there's no knowledge better than the one developed by falling flat on your face, picking yourself back up, and trying again. And building is the only way to get that type of experience. I've found the best possible option is to balance both.

Keep consuming relevant information, so your mind keeps expanding. But pair that with an equal or bigger amount of building projects. This part gives you get experience and feedback from your process.

Challenge for you

What have you spent too much time reading or watching videos about, without actually doing anything about it?

Your challenge this week is to take one of those things, and start* a project around this.

*Quick note: planning a project doesn't count as starting a project.

Your challenge is to start. Take at least the first step. This may be reaching out to someone who you need for your project. It may also be starting an instagram page, or writing the first page of that book that lives inside you.

Bonus points if you share it with someone. If you think you don't have anyone to share it with, share it with me!

I'll be glad to listen.

Art rec for the week:

Wanna keep this edition short and sweet, so I'll keep it to one rec on this email:

Every single music video this band makes is WONDERFUL. I recommend binging their entire Youtube library.

But this one is fascinating for one reason: the power of a lot of cool humans building a project together. Collaboration makes art so impactful. And today it's easier than ever before to create cool things together. To me, this video is a reminder of that.

I hope the rest of your week feels like sitting in a garden in that part of the morning when the sun is only starting to warm up. When it's still a little windy, and the warmth and soft light makes it feel like anything is possible.

Big hug for you, and as always, thank you for reading!

-Vale, The Friendly Artist.