In the three months since my son was born, I’ve seen him learn at an incredible pace, each day it seems he has a new “trick”. What can we learn about adult skill acquisition and learning from observing babies and children? It’s a given that babies are learning, and children are learning, and even through university we assume people will be constantly learning. What about when you become an adult? Do you view your learning as a lifelong process? In this article, I’ll explore ways that we might learn as quickly as babies do.
As a bit of background, we consider ourselves to be a “nomadic family”. We are spending this month in Mexico as a first travel experience with our three month old, and there are plenty of challenges. From bringing our Spanish speaking skills back up to speed, trying to get Internet, renting a car for our family, figuring out how to do laundry, not knowing what certain foods are, and dealing with roosters and dogs and construction in the neighborhood. It’s put us adults on the back foot trying to figure it all out.
Babies are in a perpetual state of learning – they don’t have the luxury of having anything figured out.
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Babies are in a perpetual state of learning – they don’t have the luxury of having anything figured out. It’s amazing to me how much my son Axel learns from one day to the next. Some recent examples are learning how to smile, how to use his hands, and how to make sounds in response to us talking. Experts talk about the importance of reading and singing and having conversations with the baby, but it seems to me, he’s got as much learning as he can handle any way you cut it.
My theory is that being in new culture is the closest approximation of what it is like to be a baby. When I moved to Spain in 2007 and was training six hours a day on the bicycle, I had the combination of a mix of new culture and location and language and physical training that challenged me in so many areas at once. I would sleep about 10 hours a night and a nap in the afternoon, and eat 6000 calories a day. The first month there was especially intense because I was afraid to speak.
Your rate of learning accelerates the deeper you immerse yourself in new challenges. When Tony Robbins wanted to become a great public speaker, instead of speaking once per week like most of his peers, he spoke three times per day to whichever groups would have him. Robbins says he quickly learned to connect with anyone in any room.
Entrepreneurs who take great risks are also some of the most conservative people I know – they have great safety in many aspects of their lives, enabling them to take a big risk in their business.
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Combine an accelerated immersion schedule with activities that put you “in the zone” and you will see an even faster rate of skill acquisition. Learning is 500-700% faster when you are in a flow state. Flow is a psychological state accessed when you have a new challenge to tackle that is not too hard and not too easy. 4% harder is the optimal increase in difficulty, (whatever that means). The military has taken advantage of flow state learning to train snipers, and flow is the realm of big wave surfers and extreme sports athletes.
When learning or being creative, it helps to have the “beginners mind”. Babies don’t have their ego tied up in learning and are completely willing to try things and make mistakes, but we need to be there to love them when they get frustrated or exhausted. Similarly, as adults, people function best in teams when they feel psychological safety – allowing them to take more risks and reduce self-censorship of ideas. Entrepreneurs who take great risks are also some of the most conservative people I know – they have great safety in many aspects of their lives, enabling them to take a big risk in their business. This idea is similar to the “barbell strategy” of investing as suggested by Nassim Taleb where all your investments are either ultra safe or ultra risky (high return).
It’s worth mentioning play as another way of accelerating learning. You might be hearing more about the idea of gamification. I recommend the book SuperBetter by Jane Mcgonigal to learn more about how to apply this to your daily life. The element of play gives you freedom to try things (when otherwise you might not) and also enhances neuronal development. This happens with baby mammals of all types, including humans. It also happens with Nobel Prize winners. Richard Feynman was spinning plates from the cafeteria when he came up with this Nobel winning work in physics. Sometimes play and immersive learning can wear you out, and you just want the comfort of a predictable schedule.
We are almost comfortable with our daily routine here in Mexico. It will be hard to leave and restart the cycle of learning all over again. If you are like most of us with settled lifestyle and comfortable daily routine and you want to keep learning, you will need to seek out new ways to challenge yourself. A quote I like to use is “do one thing a day that scares you”. Derek Sivers graduated Julliard in two years instead of four, based on the advice he got that “the normal speed is for chumps”. Scott Young did the entire MIT computer science degree, by himself, in just one year instead of the usual four. You can learn as fast as a baby if you create the right conditions.
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