As a human being, learning new things is something that we have to do every day.

It is a by-product of how we evolved.

Our hunter-gatherer forefathers had to constantly learn something new about the plants and the animals that they lived with, just to be able to survive another day.

Fortunately, we are at a better place. But that brings its own set of challenges.

We have to learn new things, not to survive, but to thrive.

Learning – A tool for Competitive Advantage

In the past, people who thrived had one big differentiator with them, which gave them a strong competitive advantage. The differentiator was Access.

In the agricultural era, the most important commodity was land and the people who thrived were the people with access to land. In the industrial era, the most important commodity became the factory and the people who thrived were the people with access to factories.

Of course, the know-how of farming as well as manufacturing was equally important. But the primary differentiator was Access which became the enabler to thriving in a society.

But what happens when you take that primary differentiator and make it ubiquitous?  

How do you thrive if you commoditize access?

We live in a knowledge economy, which means that the most important commodity for us is information. We also live in the age of Internet, which means that access to information is equal for all, irrespective of who you are and where you come from.

If the primary differentiator is neutralized, then of course your secondary differentiator of know-how which consists of the ideas, tools, techniques and processes gains a lot of significance.

It becomes your enabler to thrive in a knowledge economy. It becomes a tool to achieve a competitive advantage because the faster you learn the know-how, better are your chances of earning the right kind of opportunities in your personal as well as professional life.

So how do you learn to thrive in a knowledge economy?  

Approach to Learning New Things

In order to understand how to approach learning, let’s go back to the institution whose primary job is to enable and provide learning to human beings: The School.

One of the first things we learn at schools is language. It makes sense because in order to understand anything else, we need a common language that allows us to communicate with each other. So how do we learn the language?

We start with the vocabulary.

The first few classes for a new kid in any school on earth would be characterized by loud chants of children reciting their ABCs.

The alphabet is the primary building block, which enables us to form words and associate meaning to those words. The knowledge of these words then enables us to form sentences and these sentences enable us to form paragraphs. Eventually the collection of paragraphs becomes a blog that you are reading now, a book that you might have read and that assignment you wrote.

The same is the case with math. You start with your numbers and then you go on to study trigonometry and calculus and other mathematical concepts that give you nightmares in your sleep.

And this is not just the case for children in schools.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning author of the International Bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow talks about vocabulary for medical students and doctors.

“To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. 
Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine.”   

Cognitive Ease – Our Brain’s Ultimate Fantasy

During my second year of MBA, we had a subject called “Industry Analysis”, where the objective was to understand various business industries and analyze various business elements such as growth drivers, challenges, trends and so on of that particular industry.

On the very first day of the first class of that subject, our faculty who was an IIM Calcutta pass out made the following comment:

“In order to understand a particular business or an industry, always start by understanding and learning the key terminologies and concepts that are used in that industry. Once you understand that vocabulary, it will become a lot easier to make sense of what is happening in that business.”

The most important consequence of learning the vocabulary of a particular field or subject is that it makes it easier for our brain to label things and our brain loves that.

Our brain is a big sucker for labeling stuff because of something called cognitive ease.

The idea of cognitive ease simply states that we are fundamentally wired in a way that in everything we do, our natural tendency is to go for something that gives “Maximum Benefit at the Least Effort”.

With the help of a label, our mind can associate an entire complex process to one particular word, without having to observe, relate and understand each part of the process every single time. This means that it achieves cognitive ease and does not have to put a whole lot of effort.

Let’s understand this better with the help of an example.

Understanding Cognitive Ease through Cricket

Think about the game of cricket. It’s a complex process. Our mind has to understand each and every individual thing that is happening on the field and what it represents. But the whole process becomes easier with labels.

Bowling is a label for a man running down the ground with the bowl in his hand and releasing it at one particular point towards another man standing at some distance having a bat in his hand.

Similarly think about batting, catches, wickets, runs and so on.

And the entire operation is then labelled Cricket.

So, when someone says “The are playing Cricket”, our brain does not have to go through the entire operation of observing, understanding and relating information again. The word Cricket acts as a trigger and our brain easily associates the entire operation with that word. We understand what is happening.

A richer vocabulary in a particular subject allows our brain to identify patterns, ideas and concepts easily and since there is an instant availability of labels in our brain for that subject, it makes it far easier to anticipate, recognize and understand the things that are being talked about that subject.

Leverage

The process of learning the vocabulary of any subject is indeed a demanding task and there is no other option but to put in a certain number of hours. However, as anyone familiar with the concept of leverage will understand, it is a small investment in effort that will generate a disproportionately larger return in learning in the long run.  

 A richer and more precise language to discuss subjects that we deal with in our daily life not only provides an accurate diagnosis of where we can improve ourselves but also ensures that we develop the necessary depth and know-how to identify what is happening around us.

If the act of learning is something that we rely on a daily basis to thrive in the competitive world of ours, the least we can do is to start in the right direction.