A Year of Learning

"I would fain grow old learning many things." -- Plato

In his 2008 book entitled “Outliers: The Story of Success”, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion of the 10,000-hour rule – an interpretation of research done by Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson that found most of the accomplished violin students of a music academy in Berlin averaged 10,000 hours of practice by the time they turned 20. While even Ericsson would agree that 10,000 hours isn’t an exact number for mastery – the salient point is that significant deliberate practice is required to achieve proficiency in a particular area.

Since childhood, I’ve had an insatiable thirst for knowledge -- plowing through volumes of National Geographic magazines, encyclopedias, and watching anything and everything that came on television. As a teen I learned chess (still an addiction), and as an adult I began building up a library of books with the goal of being a well-informed parent to my two children. But like most working dads, my parental commitments, busy work schedule, TV binge-watching, and growing social media use became all-consuming – leaving no time for personal development, and a growing pile of unread books.

All that changed a year ago, when I decided to apply the concept of deliberate action to my own life – with the goal of becoming a polymath of sorts. I made the following promise to myself: for the next year, I would commit as much of my personal time as possible learning as much as I could on a variety of subjects and consume as much practical information as my brain could handle. This also meant minimizing or eliminating anything that didn’t contribute to my personal development – i.e., TV, radio, social media.

During my morning bathroom rituals, my commutes to and from work or the store, I started listening to podcasts on a variety of topics ranging from business to psychology, personal finance, philosophy and more. Because I found it difficult to finish a book in under a month, I switched from hardcopies and the Kindle to Audible – going through 90 books in the past 11 months, with the goal of completing 100 Audible titles by November. And when I’m not listening to podcasts or Audible, I’m reading articles online, going through business courses on LinkedIn, and working on learning a new language.

As I close in on one year of deliberate learning, I don’t claim mastery of any particular subject. What I’ve learned however is that I still fervidly love to learn. I’ve learned that we truly can become proficient at many things, given sufficient time and deliberate effort. I’ve learned that despite our busy schedules with life getting in the way, we still have a lot more time each day than we often think we do. And in reducing my consumption of social media and TV to a mere blip on the radar, I’ve learned that these things aren’t really that important.

This year-long process has given me a new perspective on so many aspects of life – people, work, my family, politics, time management, and much more. I’ve developed a new habit of deliberate learning that’s become so ingrained in my daily routine that I’ll likely continue this for the foreseeable future.  The downside is that I’m now unable to shut down my mind until I fall asleep. Perhaps that’ll be the next thing I learn.