Never Stop Learning

Keep Your Genius on the Move

This monologue was part of the previous one and takes my view on learning to the next level.

Before I can say anything on this post, the knowledge of self is the most important knowledge you can ever possess. Allocate time to learn about yourself, in other words, the history of who you are and where you come from. Be inspired by the lives of the former and carry the torch forward with pride. Remember, a man can never get himself together until he knows who he is.

One thing about being a curious person is that one often asks simple questions, which may appear stupid, but do stupid questions exist? One does not simply ignore what one does not know and takes the opportunity to ask right there. I often find myself asking people things that they think I ought to know, that is, even though in those cases, I genuinely do not know what is expected of me. Just wondering in the maze, life is interesting.

The best way to learn in my view, is the hard way, that is, throwing yourself at the deep end and developing the tenacity and an attitude to find your way back. A case for continuous learning:

How special are you? There were thousands of graduates last year from SA universities, if you graduated 10 years ago, there are probably more than a million people who've graduated after you and have the same and maybe more up-to-date and advanced knowledge than you. I think what can make you special is going at it alone. Because what you know thus far is not unique to you unless if you are leading your field and generating new data and concepts and hiding them in your vault. Keep in mind that productivity growth equals personal economic growth. Continual improvement/optimisation is key to your uniqueness.

Learning is mostly about breaking the mould or can be more drastic to cracking a nut. Most of us don't break the mould, we just know that there's a mould. I usually follow these steps, Read/Hear/See > Think > Write > Talk > Act. That is, learn before expressing an opinion. I often get it wrong in the thinking part. Hence, on various topics, I have sought to create a model where I can plot where my thinking is exactly. I'm sure there are detailed academic models, but the one I present here is my personal experience. The steps I follow are discussed below. Reflect on the stages and suggest additional stages.

Absorption: Absorbing information without thinking. The sponge phase. In this phase, you see people who have been around longer than you as being the paragons of your knowledge of interest. This is where we get swept away by fake prophets and con artists. Everyone but ourselves seem to know more. This phase on the political side has a lot to do with people believing in communism.

Regurgitation: Saying what others have said to you. Like what does it mean to be a good girl or a good boy? In this stage, you may find yourself defending the indefensible. This is the phase where you fight for what you believe in but it's actually what you are told and never questioned. Yes. In this phase, like a shark, you are too stupid to fool.

Combinatorial: Here you put together the different things you've sponged and regurgitated in the past. In this phase, wack ideas make sense and you often contradict yourself. This combinatorial stage can make one feel smart because you'll probably be confusing causality for cause and similarity for sameness. This stage is when you manage to connect two ideas or three ideas. You are not really dealing with the complexity of the ideas. You tend to feel really smart because people around you are usually not able to combine more than two ideas into one coherent idea. The Dunning-Kruger effect hits you really hard. 

Cynical: Now you start seeing the holes and mismatches in people's knowledge and ideas but are still afraid to offer corrections. Cynicism. At this stage, you'll start understanding the saying that, if you are the smarted in the room, you are in the wrong room. And the other one is, if you are not on the dinner table, you are on the menu. To use a political example, at this stage, you realize that all prominent political parties in South Africa are not really interested in changing the status quo, they have donor interests to look after.

Critical: This stage is almost the same as the previous one. But now you intelligently attack the paragons and vanguards because their ideas just don't add up or reflect reality. You punch big holes in their consensus. At this stage, you carefully consult your literature and critically analyse it. You start entertaining and understanding ideas such as critical thinking based on Bloom's taxonomy of learning. You start being metacognitive. Now your sense of self (Self-awareness) is heightened. Remember, to build self-awareness it is important to keep your genius on the move, and never stop learning.

New ideas: Here you use your critical thoughts to punch bigger holes in people's ideas, biases, and knowledge and critique the zeitgeist. In this phase, you start creating new knowledge and findings for yourself and start developing confidence to express your ideas and become more articulate in your speech. You start having model-based structured thoughts. At this stage, you risk offending the vanguards of our industry and your own mentors. The burden of having to express yourself generally results in you offending someone. At least, when people are offended you know they are listening and thinking about what you are saying. I sometimes call this phase "The bulldozer phase". This is a very dangerous stage and requires SQ because the subjects that you anger may ostracize you and leave you to dry like towels on a rug rack. At this stage it's all philosophy, that is, the love of wisdom. Here you critically question common knowledge or society's agreed truths against factual/real truth. Now you have become a contrarian.

This learning process is best shown when one has a broad spectrum of knowledge or wisdom. If you have one narrow wisdom you usually come out as not being a philosophical person. Philosophy asks all the questions.

Reaching the last stage where you create new knowledge does not mean you are done, No, it's the starting point. It is crucial to remain humbled and curious. Always open to new alternative information for assessment and sense-making. Keeping in mind that the ability to block off ideas is not a sign of being mentally strong and knowing yourself and your attitude. Being mentally strong to me is having the mental guts to accept any idea, critically think about it, and dismiss or accept the ideas if there's evidence that supports the notions being proposed.

In this journey, exposure is crucial, the more exposed you are to ideas, the more informed you are. That's why some arguments are not worth the vapour when arguing with unexposed people. For example, an Electrical engineer or Physicist arguing about load-shedding with an accountant is really one of those like not-worthwhile arguments. Although all things and sides must be considered.

In the journey of self-induced life-long learning, your information sources are very important. The quality of your information dictates the quality of your arguments. For example, Twitter is a bad source of information, most especially the so-called Black Twitter. Prioritise peer-reviewed information from credible and authoritative sources. This is where you'll read arguments by the SMEs. These are people whose ideas are worth discussing. The network effect! Others call it the spider web mentality. Talking to people who are smart than you in your field and other fields is a great way of broadening the spectrum of your knowledge and wisdom. This basically is about having an intellectual and influential network of friends and allies. The same reason why they start secret societies like The Royal Society.

The bias of reading people you agree with results in narrow intelligence and debates. Listening and reading people you don't agree with, like in my case reading Dr H. Voerwoed's speeches and watching his videos. Or watching and reading Hilters's translated speeches. You'll learn a lot from people to we think or are told are evil and should not be listened to. Remember, history is written by the winners not losers, so you'll never hear or read anything that rationalizes or advocates for the losing side. Simply put, if you are getting the information freely as notifications and from recommendation algorithms, then be very sceptical. As a disclaimer in line with this post, never take what I say in these monologues as gospel, do your own research and refine and optimise your own way. 

To learn for sure, you have to make what you learn existential and not entertaining. That's why if I were to ask what movie was your favourite in 2007, you'll probably not remember because it was just entertainment. I think this is also the reason why video content can hardly teach you much, you have to sit, read, and think. When watching videos there's less thinking and more absorbing then forgetting afterwards. ABC (Apply Butt to Chair) is the golden rule.

And lastly, I used to be one of those people who tell others to make Google their friend, now I'm telling people to make ChatGPT or Bard their friend, most especially if you want to learn something new fast with easy explanations. It's magic. Can't wait for GPT-5.

In summary, one of my biggest fear is reaching a point where I think I know it all and stop using the phrase "I think" when I'm about to utter an opinion. And the biggest mistake I can all make is to think that I have mastered the process and thus have reached the end and stop optimising it. The idea is to never stop attacking relentlessly, everyday. Keep your genius on the move.