Specialists are brittle. Great learners are flexible.
If you know how to learn then you can do anything you want — given enough time to build up the skill. If you’re tied rigidly to a specialism with no inherent ability to learn fast then you can’t react to changing situations or environments. And you especially can’t react when YOU change and your goals and desires shift.
But how do you become a great learner?
The answer is not in the theory — but in the practice. The people who learn foreign languages the fastest aren’t those who are ninjas in the classroom, picking up perfect grammar and the longest list of obscure words. Instead, the desire to be perfect holds them back. Because what really gets you progress is doing the reps — talking over and over again with native speakers… Getting it horribly wrong most of the time… And getting that feedback and learning as a result.
The key skill here is the ability to course correct. Those who desire to find the right path before setting out get stuck. They never do enough reps to really build the skill. Those who aren’t precious — who dive in, happily making huge bloopers from the get go — are the ones who ultimately achieve fluency and excellency.
This ability to course correct is sadly overlooked, though. It’s a superpower hidden in plain sight. Almost every successful person (whatever your definition of ‘success’) has operated this way. But we insist on glossing over that aspect on their journey and skip ahead to the one time they got it right — while the true value of their story lies in their response to the many times things went ‘wrong’.
There are two main parts to deliberately practising the craft of course correct-ology: ignoring your discomfort and diving in in the first place. Then noticing and adjusting as you go along.
Noticing and adjusting is relatively straightforward providing you commit to it. But it’s the diving in before you’re ready that’s really tough. Theory is no use here! You’ve got to build this muscle by doing it over and over and over again.
You’ve got to let go of the need to be right. You can’t rely on each experience to confirm you as ‘successful’ — quite the opposite.
Instead, you’re open to possibility — always curious and actively keen to update your skills. See it as a game where the scoring isn’t related at all to final results. Instead, you get points when anything forces you to update your understanding — the bigger the shift in worldview, the better.