LEARN LIKE AN ATHLETE

Hello friends,

Olympic is happening in Tokyo and usage of the word’ Athlete” is at its highest. When it comes to athleticism, different people have different meanings of it. To some extent, it also depends on a particular discipline, athletics are involved in. LeBron James comes to my mind and he didn’t always have thick calves, a raging six-pack, and arms like the Incredible Hulk.

Ask LeBron about his off-season training regimen, and he’ll share a detailed run-down of his workout plan and on-the-court practice routine. When he entered the NBA, LeBron wasn’t a strong shooter early in his career. LeBron built his off-season training regimen around his weak jump shot and disappointing 42% field goal percentage during his rookie season. As his Instagram posts reveal, LeBron worked for his strength, agility, impeccable history of injury avoidance, and an outstanding 54% field goal percentage during his 14th NBA season. Is this not incredible

Athletes train. Musicians train. Performers train. But knowledge workers don’t.
Joe Sehrawat

Knowledge workers should train like LeBron, and implement strict “learning plans.”__ Joe Sehrawat

To be sure, intellectual life is different from basketball. Success is harder to measure and the metrics for improvement aren’t quite as clear. Even then, there’s a lot to learn from the way top athletes train. They are clear in their objectives and deliberate in their pursuit of improvement. Knowledge workers should imitate them.

How Does a Learning Plan Look Like?

Similar to how LeBron structures his training to win NBA championships, knowledge workers should train to build skills, complete projects, and increase their productive power. Armed with an effective system, we’ll learn faster and have more fun doing it.

My case study in building a learning plan.

In 2019, I decided to learn a computing language. Two years later, I have been managing my websites without the help of an expert. The new skill propelled me into my next long-term endeavour, a personal blog. I started writing a blog post and a newsletter every Sunday. Fast forward to today, and I have published 70 posts on life skills and have sent out my Sunday Retazo every week for the past 57 weeks. Despite the success, my pursuit of knowledge is relentless. I plan to devote the next year to study Human Psychology and its effect on cerebral happiness.

Even among the most ambitious individuals, learning plans are rare. Most people are reactive. They don’t plan. Like surfers in a violent ocean, they surrender to their environment. They direct their attention towards the never-ending shouts of email, friend recommendations, and social media feeds.

What Should You Do?

Learn in three-month sprints and commit to a new learning project every quarter.

Even the longest projects are simply a collection of short term tasks. Knowing that you should break down the project into daily increments, and create a series of daily and weekly goals to learn the skills required to complete the project on time. The end goal should be clear. Start by writing down a positive vision for your future. Focus on the end goal, not the skill itself.

For example, rather than saying “I want to learn how to draw,” I focused on the end goal: “moving forward, all the charts, graphs, and images on my website will be hand-drawn.”

I like to follow the Goldilocks Principle: not too easy, not too hard. The learning project needs to be challenging enough to demand focus, but easy enough to make consistent progress. That way, you can enter the optimal state of learning.

Work on a smaller step or retreat to a manageable challenge. Otherwise, you will lose your motivation to continue learning.

Everybody loves novelty. Even if your learning plan is bounded by a strict goal, the details should be flexible. The activities should be cohesive enough to keep on track, but diverse enough to stay interesting. For example, if you want to learn about the Space Race between America, Russia & China then you can read books, watch documentaries, listen to podcasts with astronauts, and explore newspaper articles from the time period. Choose what excites you, as long as it serves the end goal.

I encourage you to share your learnings. Publish an essay, a book review, an art project, or open-source your code. Sharing your ideas will help you digest them, and if your posts are interesting, you may attract experts in your field of curiosity. Let the world know what you are doing? If you can publish your findings along the way, even better. Sharing your work is the best way to speed up your feedback loops, which will help you learn faster and improve your plan based on the feedback you receive.

If you want to learn guitar, share your music on Instagram; and if you want to improve your writing, start a blog. Sharing your work is like inviting friends to your home. It forces you to be clean and double-check everything, which accelerates the learning process.