Lifelong learning

Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.

~ Shane Parrish

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That quote from, https://fs.blog/2015/11/lifelong-learning/ , is one of the too-rare times when, upon reading something, I want to leap to my feet knocking my chair over behind me while shouting, “Hear! Hear!”

It’s true that there is some learning which I prefer to observe, rather than directly experience. In such cases “conceptual” learning, rather than experiential learning, is just fine by me. (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtF0UlznC8 )

In general however, ain’t nothing finer than reading something, making a new connection, writing a blog post about that… or spending weeks figuring out how to bend some javascript-DOM-AJAX thing to do what I want… digging in the innards of an automobile to make a new stereo-unit work… digesting some tome from the anti-library… running a year-plus experiment just to see what happens… just generally being all like, “I’m wondering . . .” And then find out where that curiosity leads.

What’ve you been up to in the learning department lately?

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Scenes

Because they can only show scenes, …

~ Ryan Holiday from, https://ryanholiday.net/sorry-an-epiphany-isnt-whats-going-to-change-your-life/

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Check the following against your experience: Except for sleep, or fits of unconsciousness, my life is a perfectly seamless and continuous experience. It has no montages, elisions of time, “jump cuts,” nor cross fades. I’ve never experienced a rerun of any moment; every moment is the next moment found directly after that moment that was now, but is now just past.

From my point of view, every other person… every book… every movie… every image painting film story… I experience those in one, compressed form or another. I catch up with a friend over lunch; I get two weeks of their experience compressed into a thirty-second story. Rocky goes from zero to hero in a two-minute (I’m guessing) montage. That person experiences an entire year; I experience their birthday dinner.

Everything out there is a small scene from some real experience. Is it any wonder it’s difficult to understand?

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Experience

So does experience really make you an expert? What does it actually mean to be one? It turns out, we don’t learn from experience in many contexts.

~ Shane Parrish from, https://fs.blog/2012/03/does-experience-make-you-an-expert/

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You’re really good—an expert even one might say—at many things. But being really good at something… Having a lot of experience doing that something… Does that make you an expert? I think those things are not sufficient. To be an expert one must also explicitly understand the principles underlying the activity. I’m very good at sitting on chairs—but I’ve never studied chairs; their design, their mechanical structure, their aesthetics. I’m not expert.

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