You’ve probably heard the expression “like your life depends on it”. The interesting thing is that if you double-click this expression, you’ll find a blueprint for learning virtually anything you want, perhaps with some limitations concerning time and complexity.
Our brain is an interesting and controversial animal: being, on the one hand, capable of producing incomprehensible outputs like scientific breakthroughs of Einstein or music of Mozart, in which respect, by the way, for the life of me I can’t even begin to understand how something like that could have been created by a human being, or created in the first place, it is, on the other hand, remarkably incapable of performing a seemingly simple operation of distinguishing between suggestion and reality. For instance, although the famous meditation technique of Buddhist monks known as “g Tum-mo”, where they use the power of their minds to significantly increase their body temperature and dry wet sheets placed on them in a cold room, is infinitely more complicated than just self-suggestion used in all kinds of “western” versions of meditation, self-suggestion is exactly what it is fundamentally based on. And, although meditation is argued to be a different world and in effect “another reality” and just using self-suggestion in isolation isn’t going to bring you anywhere near that “reality”, or actually that state of mind, it is known to be surprisingly straightforward for anyone to learn to increase their body temperature by, simply put, “suggesting” to yourself that the sun is blasting and it is absolutely unbearably hot. Although it takes quite some time and a proper method must be employed, starting with the tip of your index finger and then moving on to other parts of your body, it is a well-known fact that anyone can eventually learn to manipulate the temperature of at least some body parts in the range of as much as 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (not quite the mind-blowing 15 (!) degrees Fahrenheit like the Buddhist monks).
What I am trying to say is that with an open mind and enough creativity you can actually capitalize, for lack of a better word, on this feature of your brain in a number of different ways, one of the most important of which is enabling yourself to learn, as I mentioned earlier, virtually anything. The thing is that if you pursue some activity with great dedication, “like your life depends on it”, your brain simply doesn’t know that you are driven by willpower, focus and determination. According to its default genetic settings, our brain automatically interprets that it’s your living environment that forces you into pursuing this particular activity and, by implication, that this particular activity is absolutely essential for your biological survival. At this point your brain links this activity to your self-preservation instinct, and as soon as that happens, almost to your own surprise you suddenly develop a burning interest toward this activity and an unsurmountable urge to pursue it literally around the clock. The reason your brain pulls this stunt on you is that things like willpower, focus and determination can’t possibly be older than we are as a species, which is in the ballpark of 200 thousand years, whereas the self-preservation instinct is one of the earliest genetic mechanisms on the Earth and therefore at least hundreds of millions of years old, so take a wild guess which one wins.
So, if employing a seemingly simple technique allows you to learn and master virtually any skill, then what’s the catch? Well, the catch is that to get yourself over the hump and to that point you’ll have to exert a tremendous amount of effort, and for some time you’ll have no choice but indeed rely on your willpower, focus and determination. Although a sufficient amount of determination is very individual and therefore hard to universally quantify, I would express it as h * e / b², where h is the number of hours you practice every day, e is the amount of energy you invest in your practice, and, most importantly, b is the length of breaks you take – not in minutes or hours, of course, but in days. The reason b is so important is the fact that, when learning a new thing, just one day of not practicing somehow manages to erase most of what you’ve learned during a whole week before that day, and this is also the reason why studying full-time actually goes so much easier on you and feels more natural than evenings-weekends or any other format of part-time studying.
Perpetual learning is an amazing phenomenon. A curious example: people who immigrate into the US in their late teens – early twenties usually learn English quite well and speak it very fluently in their forties, fifties and even sixties, but by the time they reach their seventies and especially eighties their English becomes almost non-existent – they lose most of it, as if it somehow “evaporates” from the surface of their consciousness. But that absolutely does not happen if they keep learning new things, especially new languages; instead, they completely retain their fluency in English for as long as they live. To me it means that learning a new thing goes far beyond the thing itself and makes a profound and permanent impact on everything you already know. More specifically, learning new skills ingrains your old skills deeper into your spine bone and prevents you from losing them.
In conclusion, what could be a practical take-away from all this? It is, of course, a matter of taste and personal preferences; generally speaking, any information, no matter how useful, is always interpreted by us depending on what we want to achieve in life and what we actually set out to do to achieve it. And although not every piece of information is necessarily intended for being distilled into some sort of an advice or recommendation, if I had to do it in this case, I would probably say something like “for as long as you live, keep learning like your life depends on it”.