Humble Beginnings
I love cooking. I mean why wouldn’t I? Fresh, delicious food. An unlimited menu, catered to your own individual taste. Cooking’s the best!
But for some reason, I didn’t always feel that way.
I remember when I first moved away from home and into the university dorm. That version of myself hated cooking. He grew up with parents that would work a full day’s shift, come home and then make the kids dinner. Lunch was provided by my school and breakfast was a simple cereal or sandwich occurrence. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who had to call his expert friend to figure out how to cook pasta (not my brightest moment but in my defense, there were no instructions on the container).
The first thing I learned at university was that I had no clue how to make a respectable dinner, apart from the odd tuna salad. I was afraid of the stove and oven. I didn’t want to burn my meat or not cook my chicken thoroughly enough. And to top it all of, I felt intimidated by the 5 other guys in my flat who cooked regularly and appeared to have been doing so for years. Occasionally I would be lucky enough to score dish duties when my flatmates were cooking in exchange for a fair portion.
Otherwise I spent my first 3 months binging on fast food and delivery chains. Eventually, I had had enough fast food. I did not realize this at the time, but my reluctance to cook undoubtedly drove me to start cooking.
The Best Way to Learn Anything
After those 3 months, I hadn’t learned a single recipe. It was time for me to learn to cook. I began taking a more active part in the cooking duty by chopping, frying, observing and looking up simple new recipes.
Now I love cooking and I do it everyday. How did that happen? Surely not over night. I realize reading and speaking to people contributed more to my learning than anything else. This is the basis of my learning method.
Elon Musk takes a similar approach to learning. He became a literal rocket scientist by reading Soviet era rocket manuals and surrounding himself with the right people to discuss what he’d learned. In other words, this method is Musk-approved.
The 3 Step Process to Learn Anything
The process is simple:
1. Read everything you can find on the subject.
This has become much easier with the rise of the Internet. Information has been disseminated at a historically unprecedented rate, so recipes aren’t the only thing you’ll find online. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few Rocket manuals floating around at your disposal. Free online courses like edX and Khan Academy have also become incredibly popular in just the past few years.
No matter what you’re interested in, if you take the initiative, Google is an amazing resource. Now that the power is in your hands, how do you reinforce what you’ve learned?
2. Find people that are experts on the subject and discuss the subject.
At this point, you’ve read articles on the subject, and you’re ready to apply what you know so far. By discussing with experts, you will discover an untapped well of knowledge, compressed into an interesting conversation at your level.
By expert, I mean they are at least more knowledgable than you. When you were growing up it was your Mom and Dad, at school your classroom teacher and at work your boss. The world is full of relative experts just ready to be contacted.
Luckily, people are generally quite keen to talk about their area of expertise. Networking events are great places to talk trade secrets, but make sure you’re at least offering a pleasant conversation. A bad reputation is the last thing you want at a networking event.
3. Apply your newfound theory to practice
This step of the process is when you finally get to see the return on your learning investment. This was when I finally began to make entire meals myself and noticed that soon all of my meals were edible. And over time, my meals actually began tasting good!
Of course, this process is more cyclical in nature than it is linear. When you’ve begun applying your knowledge, don’t settle for the information you have already retained. Learning is an ongoing process. It requires continuous reinforcement. Otherwise you’ve stopped learning, become stagnant, forgotten parts of what you knew and not developed it any further.
All this I now understand from having learned how to cook.
Thanks for making it this far. I hope you’ve enjoyed a Nick thought-of-the-day.
Until next time…
-jnickmount-
jnickmount 