Quotes About Learning

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same.

patience is a skill—it does not come naturally.

Chess contains the concentrated essence of life: First, because to win you have to be supremely patient and farseeing; and second, because the game is built on patterns, whole sequences of moves that have been played before and will be played again

Although we might enter these situations with excitement about what we can learn or do with our new skills, we quickly realize how much hard work there is ahead of us. The great danger is that we give in to feelings of boredom, impatience, fear, and confusion. We stop observing and learning. The process comes to a halt.

Daily Law: Embrace negative experiences. When was the last time you failed, felt embarrassed, got criticized? What were you doing? What did the experience teach you? The Laws of Human Nature, 13: Advance with a Sense of Purpose—The Law of Aimlessness

you must begin with the assumption that you are ignorant and that you have natural biases that will make you judge people incorrectly.

The same is true of adults: it is through your battles with others that you learn what works, what doesn't, and how to protect yourself. Instead of shrinking from the idea of having enemies, then, embrace it. Conflict is therapeutic.

You will also want a degree of flexibility built into the process. At certain moments you reassess your progress and adjust the various goals as necessary, constantly learning from experience and adapting and improving your original objective.

You want to embrace negative experiences, limitations, and even pain as the perfect means of building your skill levels and sharpening your sense of purpose.

It can be valuable to analyze what went wrong in the past, but it is far more important to develop the capacity to think in the moment. In that way you will make far fewer mistakes to analyze.

The same should apply to an entrepreneurial venture. Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.

The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

The Blame Bias I learn from my experience and mistakes. Mistakes and failures elicit the need to explain. We want to learn the lesson and not repeat the experience. But in truth, we do not like to look too closely at what we did; our introspection is limited. Our natural response is to blame others, circumstances, or a momentary lapse of judgment. The reason for this bias is that it is often too painful to look at our mistakes.

Avoid the Counterforces to Mastery

The model goes like this: You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality.

you must think of three essential steps in your apprenticeship, each one overlapping the other. These steps are: Deep Observation (The Passive Mode), Skills Acquisition (The Practice Mode), and Experimentation (The Active Mode).

Piénsalo así: hay dos tipos de fracaso. El primero resulta de no poner nunca a prueba tus ideas, por miedo o a la espera del momento adecuado. De esta clase de fracaso jamás aprenderás nada, y tu pusilanimidad te destruirá. El segundo tipo resulta de un espíritu intrépido y osado. Si tropiezas por esta razón, el daño que hagas a tu fama será muy inferior a tu aprendizaje.

Two Kinds of Failure A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE GAY SCIENCE

To learn requires a sense of humility.

Poor is the apprentice who does not surpass his master

In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

Learning never exhausts the mind.—Leonardo da Vinci

Daily Law: Are there people whose work affects you in a powerful way? Analyze this and use them as models. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life's Task

To go along with this self-control, we must do whatever we can to cultivate a greater memory capacity—one of the most important skills in our technologically oriented environment.