learning

They say as you get older, your brain plasticity decreases. It literally gets harder to learn. The good news, however, is that you can combat it, by constantly trying to learn new things.

Over last weekend, I read this book, about the science of learning. And learning quickly. Suitably inspired, I made myself a list of things I want to learn this year. I will tell you about more of them later.

But one of them was to touch type.

I failed typing in school. Seriously.

That was in the old days, when we used manual typewriters and carbon paper. And my hand to eye coordination was horrible, and my ADHD made it all worse, and I just said to hell with it. After all, how often would I need to type?

Haha. Pretty much every damned day, it turns out. Damned computer generation.

Anyway. So, I am teaching myself how to touch type. And while I am picking it up fairly well, my writing is now so slow. (I could do about 45 words per minute (WPM) by pecking, and the average typist is at about 40-60WPM. But when I am touch typing, I am at about 13 words per minute.

But I will get better. My accuracy is like 99%, which is good. And with practice, I will get faster – hopefully faster than I was before. But even if I only get back to 45 and stay there, I am better off than I was before, because I learned something new, and forced my body to work in new ways.

Because honestly, it isn’t the learning that excites me. It is learning how to learn.

In a meeting with an intern a while back, she complained that the things she was studying in school didn’t seem relevant to our work.

“After all”, she said, “how often do we use algebra here?”

I told her she was missing the point.

You don’t go to school to learn things. Not really, anyway.

You go to school to learn how to learn things.

Most of the ways people make money now did not exist when I was in college. There was no way, for instance, they could have taught me how to make iPhone apps – the average person had never even seen a cell phone, and the iPhone was years in the future.

Change is the only certainty, and in the world of the future, you have to be able to learn new things. Because if you don’t, you will get left behind.

As an example: right now everyone says the future of the internet is video. I love writing, and hate being filmed, so it would be easy to ignore them and keep on writing.

But if they are right, then I will one day be as obsolete as a computer programmer who hated all languages other than C++. People who do not change get left behind.

So I am trying to learn how to edit video. I’m not good at it, and the learning curve is steep. But I will get there.

(On a related note – I now have a YouTube channel. The goal is to get to a place where I can release a video weekly.)

Learning New Things

The most important thing to learn