Read Less, Study More
I read to expand my knowledge. Books are everywhere in my apartment, almost like an ornament—some by the armchair, some by the sofa, most on the main bookshelf, some on the dining table, and some on the floor. I have spent many hours in those same places—in the armchair, on the couch, or on the floor—in quiet immersion, absorbing the wisdom of these books.
Or so I thought.
At times, I have convinced myself that to learn the contents of a book I had to merely read it. I would, perhaps, underline key sentences and highlight a paragraph here and there. Nothing more. I had convinced myself that, as my eyes translated the letters on a page into words and my mind translated these into sentences, the meaning they contained would remain with me forever.
I did not believe, of course, that I would be able to recall every detail from any book I had read—I am not that gullible. But as my mind grasped the core ideas and linked them together for a moment, I hoped, implicitly, that it would retain their essence—that, having made this connection once, it would remain with me forever, to be retrieved and conveyed by my mind at will.
I know now that this was naive.
Because to know something means exactly this: To be able to retrieve it and convey it. And, like any other form of learning, this can only come through deliberate practice of the thing one is trying to learn—retrieval and conveyance.
All learning is neurological. When one attempts to do something for the first time, it requires conscious effort because the neural pathways that would make it automatic are yet to be built. The body can and will build them, however. But only after receiving the stimulus to do so. The stimulus is the repeated application of deliberate effort towards a single goal—in a word, practice.
Neurological adaptations are highly specific to the stimulus they receive. Learning, therefore, occurs faster when the exact same stimulus can be generated repeatedly. This explains why, to learn something complex, one must break it down into components, practice each on its own, and then practice putting them together. Any attempt at practicing the whole of a complex skill without first learning its parts in isolation leads to too few and too varying repetitions for deep adaptations to occur.
This realisation brings both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that reading on its own will never be enough—it is barely a start. The opportunity is that learning can become a deliberate choice and reside fully within one’s control. All that stands in the way of learning an idea is the decision to practice knowing it. Instead of merely reading and hoping that my mind will retain it, I can apply myself deliberately towards this goal. And the outcome is predictable: The more I practice retrieving and conveying an idea, the better I will know it.