All my explicit “study” habits suck. I don’t take notes, I rarely go “back to basics” to read foundational “classics”, I don’t do practice exercises unless they are like puzzles for fun (a criterion is satisfied by most math-based skills fortunately). I don’t learn “good form”
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I do have what you might call “wild cousin” behaviors to disciplined learning. I repeat good stories I’ve heard. I put a lot of direct quotes and oblique references in my writing. I tend to think about everyday contemporary topics where relevant information is socially cached.
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At a macro level, everything I do is unapologetically, even gleefully derivative in some sense. Any value comes from the risk rather than skill or imagination. Eg: using The Office to interpret management theory, without being skilled at either screenwriting or textbook MBA stuff
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This is not “making connections across fields” (which requires some depth in to/from fields. Nor is it playing “chess postman” which requires some careful systematic left-brained bridge building. It’s more like shallow right-brained arbitrage.
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This is a very lean, differential-diagnosis focused survivalist thinking style that basically surfs the learning already in the environment and/or embeddable in natural work output. A mediocre-small-brain style. It has strengths (speed being big one) but also serious blind spots.
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Interesting self-analysis.
Please join me, though, in stopping the use of "learning" and "learnings" as nouns. (Premium mediocre nouns, at that.) You could substitute "knowledge" or "information" in that sentence and it would be equally clear or even clearer.
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Can you explain the difference?
When someone learns something, he acquires knowledge and/or skill. So the "learning" in an environment is simply the knowledge accrued by others that is socially shared.
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Not necessarily. Learning can exist in forms other than explicit knowledge or individual sense of skill. I think it’s a good word. Striations of systemic habit.
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Put it this way: you can't surf the "learning" in your environment any more than you can surf the cooking. These are nouns describing active processes. What you can do is to acquire knowledge and skill.
To talk of learnings, as some people now do, is to engage in ugly buzzspeak.
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