Why is your learning ineffective?

People who know me understand that I not only love to learn myself but also advocate for learning. I want to understand all new things and personally try them out. Although some of these innovations are eventually proven to be pseudo-innovations, the process of participating still teaches me something. These things may die in that particular innovation, but they might be continued in other forms through my other endeavors.

Learning is the best way to fight aging. When you stop learning, your understanding of the world stops, and your adaptation to the environment ceases. But here’s the question: why do many people not feel the benefits that “learning brings”? Sometimes they also want to try learning something, but afterward, they either gather dust and can’t stick with it, or they finish learning but after a while, they think, it’s almost as if I didn’t learn anything? Understand it, get it, the brain understands, and it seems like I’ve gained some lukewarm skills, so what? Life doesn’t change at all. As a result, they can’t feel the huge improvement that learning brings to life.

Where is the difference here? It’s not that what you learn is wrong, but that there’s nothing valuable being done in your hands. We always think that everything is first learned, then applied in a scenario, then found in a market opportunity—completely wrong. This way of thinking is a misconception caused by the basic compulsory education system of over ten years in school. Imagine this: if you learn elliptic curves today during the day, and tomorrow you can immediately help your boss solve a problem, and get a new phone you’ve always wanted, can you still not learn well? Would you still zone out in class? Even if you didn’t understand the lesson, would you be too shy to ask the teacher or classmates afterward?

Effective learning is tactile. You need to first find an opportunity. What kind of opportunity? An opportunity where the market urgently needs you to provide some value. Once you provide it, you get started. Even if you don’t do very well or you’ve been at it for a long time without breakthroughs, at this point, you will grow “tentacles”—what are tentacles? They are the subconscious constantly searching for solutions, even if you’re not purposefully learning something. Any new thing you contact, any business model, AI tools, even when shopping online and discovering the principles behind warehouse distribution, think about why they arrange it that way. It might suddenly inspire you to transfer applications in a certain business, product, or service.

This is what “effective learning” really means: you are already doing some valuable things, so all your related learning, your attention and reflection on life, can bring you unexpected inspiration anytime and anywhere. Conversely, if you’re not doing valuable things, what will happen? During your learning process, you will waste a lot of “irrelevant inspiration.” Why waste it? Because your subconscious tentacles aren’t receiving it. You only have a very single goal, or even no goal at all, waiting until you finish learning to figure out how to use it; if you can’t find a use, or it’s not applicable, or the thing you find requires more complex skills and resources, the chain becomes too long, and you lack patience to learn other things. Then, this previous learning process is just pure waste.

Although some people often say that what they learned before suddenly comes in handy in an unexpected place—that’s a good thing. But its efficiency is very low. More often, it’s that the inspiration you could have encountered and used, when needed, has already become unfamiliar and forgotten in the corner, causing you to miss such collision opportunities—and you might not even realize this waste because if it doesn’t happen, how could you be aware of it?

So, the key point of many things may not lie in the thing itself. Your attitude toward “whether learning is useful,” whether you are willing to keep learning, is not necessarily related to whether you are learning the right things or not, but rather whether you are doing valuable things, and once those things are done, how valuable they truly are.