A Senior UX Designer Jone Lee
based in New York, USA

Learn to Learn before you Learn to Earn.

Words of Wisdom 1: Learn to Learn

Although I don’t see myself as a person that someone should take wisdom from, but I do have a lot of opinions about life and here’s one of them. In my opinion, one should first learn to be efficient in learning before their journey of learning anything. It’s like sharpening your axe before cutting 1000 woods; you may want to learn the best skill of them all before you embark on your journey as a student of knowledge throughout life.

In my days of university, I saw people put in efforts to get good grades. I didn’t make much effort myself and did very well, while others worked harder without any luck. Why is that the case? Effort does not equal results; you have to be both smart and hardworking to win. What I did was simple: I was attentive in class and cleared all my ambiguities then and there by asking a lot of questions – a lot.

1. I used to prepare with my fellow classmates before exams and often tutored them, even if I myself didn’t know the concepts.
2. Before entering the exam, I would memorize key headings and write them down in the exam rough work section if there was time.
3. For each topic, even if I didn’t remember the headings, I would always know the number of headings for each of the topics and made sure I realized all of them.
4. While attempting each question, I would know that every answer has to have the following: Introduction, Key Points, Examples, Special Element (Story, Table, or Diagram), and Summary.

I think that was it, and pretty much minimized the waste of time where I would have to search the internet and books. Instead, I asked the teacher and maximized efficiency of time by teaching others, memorizing headings, and understanding what would give me good grades.

I did very well in my university without studying as much, and I never planned efforts to do this; this was very automatic for me. But when I see others fail while realizing I did much less to prepare, I contemplated whether it was luck or something else.

Learning to learn will help you throughout life with difficult learning situations; you’ll know how to make it automatic. Finding ways to lean process makes it efficient and waste less of your resources. Learning more with less time is like knowing more than what you will otherwise; would you not want that?

Follow me for a Part-2 where I will break down the fundamentals of learning new skills. I will share how I have learned almost every skill there is in the digital landscape.

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