How to Learn Interactively from Reading, Videos and Podcasts
Increasing your effectiveness at school, work and beyond
Most of us usually listen to, or read content, and either agree or disagree with it. If we find something of value, we make a vague mental note to use it in our lives later. Most of these notes usually tend to get forgotten or lost by the wayside of life. The thing is, until what we learn is applied in the real world, it can’t be remembered and imbibed into who we are as a person.
But how do you apply long-term strategies you read about on say, entrepreneurship or finance in the next 5 seconds? How do you apply lessons on teenage parenting when your child is still a toddler? For that matter, how do you apply a lesson in a new kind of surgery sitting in the classroom when your residency is a long way away?
Interactive vs. Passive Engagement
Interactive learning is different from mere reading or listening to a video or podcast (or listening to a professor in the classroom).
You might have begun your reading or movie binges with fiction as a kid. Stories (unlike documentaries or non-fiction) start slow, they set the stage, introduce the characters, show friendships and enmities, and then insert a challenge to the hero/ heroine. Resolving this challenge then becomes the focal point of the story, ending in a happy or tragic climax (as your taste may be).
You read stories to let go, to lose yourself in the moment. You are asking the author or film director to take you on a ride and in the process, you surrender your power to question what you see or experience (unless it is really atrocious). Consequently, there is little interaction — which is great for passive entertainment but ineffective when it comes to active learning.
Choosing what you learn
If you are reading or watching videos or listening to podcasts to learn or educate yourself, your approach should become interactive…and less passive. Stop reading or listening to every piece of content you come across — decide beforehand whether it will add value to your life. Given today’s information overload, this is essential — there are simply too many courses and programs out there, many of them with overlapping content, for you to go through them all.
By choosing content that covers the basics but does not significantly repeat or overlap with what you have learnt earlier, you will spend more time learning new things, and less time feeling numbed / bored because you find the content too familiar.
Playing with the material
It is difficult to learn anything unless you actually experience what you learn practically. This is not easy in the case of say, learning physics or sales (without actually having a lab or going on the field). The only way you can engage with the content at that moment is by using your imagination:
- Go line by line or concept by concept
- Visualize what you could do with it, what you can create with it
- Visualize where it can be useful and where it won’t work
- Understand the assumptions that underlie what the author is speaking about, and what he has implicitly omitted (the invisible gaps in the logic)
Let your mind roam free — don’t constrain any thought that comes to your mind. Daydream for a bit if you need to. If you want to take a break to ‘digest’ just a single line or concept, that is perfectly fine. I sometimes find that a short nap does wonders for my mind to understand something than staying awake and breaking my head over things.
I take many short naps. You might also prefer walks alone, or just shifting to a different activity. For instance, when I reading a heavy book, I watch a TV series in parallel during breaks — this helps relax my mind (TV) before I mull over what I have read (half watching the TV show, half processing what I read). You might take a few seconds to read something, but require 20 minutes to digest it. Giving yourself time will allow you to extract more meaning from what you are learning.
What you will effectively be doing is responding to the concept exactly the way you would in a real world scenario. In the real world, you might encounter a task, or a piece of equipment and find it doesn’t work the way you imagined. You come to realize all of the gaps in your knowledge which causes you to become “street smart” — understanding what actually works and what is best confined to book theory. You will form an opinion, and end up agreeing or disagreeing with the author, either completely or partially.
The only opinion and judgment you can apply in the real world is your own, not someone else’s. Your opinion will change over time the more you learn, but an interactive process will give you a starting point, far ahead of mere passive learning. The entire process above is designed to translate the author’s opinion to your own:
- If the author talks in words and you think in pictures, this will help you form an opinion in pictures you can actually use
- If the author throws around a lot of formulae and you typically process knowledge in the form of examples and metaphors (applied formulae), this will help you remember things that way
To use an IT data analogy, this is similar to reformatting the content to fit your brain’s hard disk file format. The author’s brain may work in DOC or XLS, and your brain may accept only JPEG or PDF — playing with the content will help you reformat things to a way you can understand, and more importantly retain, without loss of data due to data migration errors.
It is okay to be a bit eccentric and crazy as you learn — that is where true creativity lies. Be a child — play with what you learn. The less you get caught up in right and wrong ways of learning, the more effective you will become at learning. Don’t judge yourself or your mind in the way it learns. Don’t fall prey to others’ opinions of right and wrong methods of learning— be bold, choose what works for you, even if no one else in the world follows that method of learning.
Take smart notes
As you go through the above process, take notes. Why? You don’t want to read say, a whole 60–100 pages again to remember what it was all about. There are high chances you will forget what you read, and also forget why you made the connections and links you made after reading all that material. Remember, your notes are not intended to summarize what you read, but to summarize the judgments and opinions you formed after reading and why you made those connections and judgments. Essentially, you use notes to summarize your thoughts, not the author’s.
There is no perfect way to take notes, despite a hundred templates out there. Find what works for you.
- Don’t worry about whether your notes are fancy or simple. For instance, I take verbatim notes at times (with exact quotes of what I read or listen to in a classroom), which comes in very useful if you want to process complex concepts later, similar to a cow chewing the cud.
- At other times, I hardly note down 3 lines of my own interpretation.
If in doubt, err on the side of more detail in note taking. Your classroom experience will then become embedded into your notes. Again, your notes are not intended to record the classroom lecture, but your experience of the classroom.
So, in conclusion, learn smartly, form opinions (without becoming fixated on the rightness or wrongness of your opinion) and take intelligent notes. No one can understand or analyze everything in one sitting or on the spot. More importantly, no one, even if you’ve been a straight A grader throughout college, can remember everything. Understand the ‘whats’ but don’t forget the ‘whys’.
