About 1,5 years ago, I was at an event on my university. Employees from BCG and Google held presentations where they talked about innovation in a talk called “behind the buzzwords”.
The speaker from Google had one main point: The main task of Google was to reduce or remove friction. To make tasks easier.
We see that with many of their offerings: Need to book a restaurant? On the Google search result, you can do it in 1 or 2 clicks. Need to quickly access information? Google’s there for you.
Don’t get me wrong: Removing friction from boring tasks is a good thing. I don’t miss having to go through weirdly configured websites, trying to book a table at a restaurant.
But I think we should be careful in thinking that less friction is always better. Or that friction is a sign that what we are doing is wrong.
Taking the friction out of learning
Recently, a service has popped up in Danish business schools. The concept? To have the main points from different university courses read aloud to you in an “audio book”-like format.
Then you are able to learn complicated subjects while you are on the move. And hey – you are probably able to play it back on 2x the normal speed. Think about how much you can learn that way!
While the idea for the service might be good, it has made a fundamental mistake. The same mistakes that many online courses make: They assume that you can learn difficult things in a low-friction way.
They assume that it’s useful to have bite-sized pieces of knowledge that you can consume on the road. That if the knowledge is packaged correctly, learning could be easy. Or rather: It should be easy.
Some things should be difficult
When you ask neuroscientists, however, their answer is the opposite: In order to actually learn new things, it should be difficult. You should have to work hard.
This is because learning a new skill is literally rewiring the brain. And our brains don’t want to spend energy rewiring if they can avoid it. Therefore, the only way to learn a new skill is to focus intensely.
As professor Tara Swart from MIT phrases it:
This new task has to be so challenging that you’ll feel mentally and physically exhausted after practicing the task because you’re forcing your brain to work in ways it’s unaccustomed to. This is the only way you’ll actually grow new neurons strong enough to connect with existing neurons, forming new pathways.
Your actual learning is done when you are sitting with your notes (or standing at the whiteboard) and struggling to understand something. Having to use your full attention to make sense of it.
When those moments happen, I can almost feel my brain trying to stretch itself and understand the subject. And that’s what learning should feel like.
Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity
In one of his blog posts, author and Computer Science researcher Cal Newport introduced the following formula:
Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity.
As we’ll see, it applies to learning new skills.
If learning doesn’t feel like hard, cognitive work, one of two things could be going on:
1. What you are learning is not difficult enough
2. Your focus is not intense enough
1. It’s not difficult enough
If you are learning something and you don’t have to stretch your mind to do it, it might be because the skill you’re learning is not sufficiently difficult.
For some courses, that okay, but if that is the general way it works in your university program, you need to think deeply about the following question: Am I actually learning something valuable? Is what I’m doing passing the College Student Test?
If the answer is no, then you need to find a solution for that.
2. Your focus is not intense enough
If your intensity is too low, you might be able to learn new skills, but it’s going to take a long time. In this case, try to figure out how intensely you are working at the moment.
How often do you go an hour without checking email or your phone? How comfortable are you without external stimuli?
If you want to increase your ability to focus intensely, try out Roosevelt dashes: https://minafi.com/build-focus-roosevelt-dashes
Takeaway: Learning should be hard
If you take away one thing from this article, it should be that learning is hard. That’s a feature, not a bug, as it helps you make sure that you are learning something worthwile.
