Strategic Exploration: Reflections and milestones turn curiosity into courage

Noting progress is precious in a never-ending journey

The appetite for knowledge is quite similar to the appetite for eating (you may eat fast but digest slow, eat often but constantly feel hungry, eat too much and feel sick etc.) — always check your attitudes to learning :) Source: Unsplash

For the past two weeks, I’ve embarked on a learning journey where I got to explore aspects of my experience as a learner, thinker, and doer through different lenses in an async conversation with Oliver Ding to see where this takes us — no expectations placed at the beginning to narrow the project, no attempt to go into one direction more than in other. Every topic emerged quite effortlessly from one step to another.

Now, as Oliver pointed out in TALE: The Field of Meta-learning (V1.0), it’s great to actually reflect for a moment on how far we’ve come and celebrate our current position.

I will highlight the key lessons I’ve learned so far:

1. Exploration is meaningful in itself because it is a first-hand experience of how we as individuals connect with a knowledge.
2. Learning something complex takes a toll on you, and the feeling of abandoning the path can creep in if the right queues are not in place. For me, two things helped tremendously: the prompts from Oliver that kept the “iron” hot to strike and the acceptance of imperfection in my documenting of the journey since I couldn’t always dedicate time for this exploration.
3. Collaborative Learning is a very empowering activity. You learn together differently.
4. Our attitude changes in relationship to why, what, and how we learn as we actively do it. Certain knowledge serves only as a stepping stone and may even be disposed of to grow to the next stage.

The outcome of the thematic conversation here sums up quite neatly the dimensions of learning as form (meta-knowledge), content (knowledge), and activity (work).

Oliver: How can we consistently discuss various issues of Building Meaning within the Field of Meta-learning? The Field of Meta-learning in structured in three zones/spaces.

I find now that aligning the three spaces brought a certain clarity to how curiosity can be better channeled into projects such as these. Giving your curiosity a medium of exploration and, more importantly, of expression is key to building the courage to commit to your projects.

This has actually opened a new way of dealing with a learning pushback I struggled with: whenever I tried to learn something that I couldn’t validate in any way because it was too removed from my habits, social circle, work environment, etc. I found myself in a position where I would spend a terrible amount of energy just to sustain the thought “that I need to sit at my desk and learn that.”

Now, I can look back and see that the moments when I made any valuable progress in those side projects were due to the involuntary show-up of that courage to commit further. It might seem a bit paradoxical since curiosity entails some form of courage, but to stay with the object of learning even after that initial burst of curiosity has died out, takes quite an advanced level of mental courage.

Oliver’s diagram inspired me to test some possible ways to lay out the practice of Meta-Learning on a concrete use case (Curiosity in the context of the Strategic Exploration).

I found it to be a really useful framework for applying different methods to cultivate the relationship between learner, learning and knowledge. Courage in the Working space is a powerful activator for different practices and projects.

This type of courage is a sense of appreciation for knowledge and its impact on me as a person. What I learned is bound to change me deeply, and sometimes there’s bound to be some level of resistance to change since we’re not tabula rasa.

A better analogy to the appetite for learning is the appetite for eating. We may prefer one food over the other since it’s easier to digest or tastier, but if we consider our long-term health, we may begin to eat more consciously — adding in new types of food, trying out new recipes, and observing how they affect the body. The same works for the knowledge we absorb. For the most part, we take what we’re used to digesting comfortably, and unless there’s a deeper motivation, we simply cannot build the courage to learn something new and sustain it as a skill.

So far, I’m proud to say that this has become a bit clearer to me as a learner. The series of Strategic Explorations has proven quite useful. I have yet to explore with important dimensions of the learning experience that I wasn’t able to distill to a point of satisfaction:

Creation (as a theme)

Connection (as an activity/experience)

We will see what comes next and in what shape.

These are the previous 4 parts:

Personal Project on Strategic Exploration: Thinking differently requires doing things differently

Strategic Exploration: Peeling onions without shedding tears

Strategic Exploration: Breaking Symmetries

Strategic Exploration: You can’t swim in the same river twice