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Ramses Oudt

8 Jan, 9 tweets, 2 min read

School makes us lazy.

We listen, cram, and test—doing little else with our fleeting knowledge. Lots of talk, little action. How can we break this cycle?

Read my atomic essay about learning through creation 👇

🧵 Prefer tweets? See my essay in the thread.

Learn by creating.

It's easy to be book smart, but acting on knowledge and making something in the real world is how you grow.

Get more immediate feedback, discover what works, and see if what you learn is useful for you.

If it doesn't work, you adjust.

Root your learning environment in reality.

It's difficult to take what you learn in a classroom to real life. The solution? Make life your classroom.

Think with every new idea of how you could use it, and then try it out.

Make learning projects specific.

We suck at abstract thinking. The more concrete an idea, the better.

To bring clarity to the fuzzy, create examples and experiments.

Don't rely on teachers.

In the age of online education, few teachers challenge you to create, making it easy to step into the trap of consumption without action.

Don't rob yourself of learning; build something useful with your knowledge.

Ditch the training wheels.

Don't lean on learning materials for too long; go out and experiment. Avoid tutorial hell and start work on your dream project.

Do the real thing.

Challenge yourself.

Resist the temptation to check your learning materials once you start building. Work around problems to understand the structure.

Get stuck to grok.

Cultivate mental models.

Building is experimenting. Only by interacting with reality do you discover what does and doesn't work.

Reflect on feedback and find the patterns.

The world is messy—let your learning environment prepare you.

Practice like you play and you'll play like you practice.

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More from @rroudt

Ramses Oudt

@rroudt

9 Jan

You can teach yourself.

If you're reading this, you have the ultimate teaching and learning tool; writing.

By explaining things to yourself, you uncover holes in understanding—enabling you to learn deliberately.

🧵Atomic essay on learning through writing.

#ship30for30

Richard Feynman—the physicist—famously had a quote in the corner of his blackboard; "What I cannot create, I do not understand," followed by "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved."

Feynman took pen to paper and worked from memory, explaining concepts to himself in simple terms. If he couldn't, that was his cue to dig deeper.

By seeing simple explanations in his own words, he could make ideas his own and wrap his head around complex topics.

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Ramses Oudt

@rroudt

7 Jan

The best way to learn is to quiz yourself often.

You learn no skill or knowledge in one go. Mastery is only possible through repetition.

To learn, retrieve, and challenge yourself.

🧵 Prefer tweets? See my atomic essay in the thread.

What you read evaporates.

One moment you picture yourself applying all the useful ideas from a book—next, it's like you've never read it.

What's going on?

Memory runs on emotions.

When something resonates, it's likely to stay with you. But with so many useful ideas, remembering them is hard.

You need a system.

Read 9 tweets

Ramses Oudt

@rroudt

6 Jan

Build a learning infrastructure if you want to be effective.

Your mental bandwidth is limited, and your mind is like a sieve—only part of what passes through sticks.

To stop forgetting, you need a second brain and feed it.

🧵 Prefer tweets? See my atomic essay in the thread.

Your mind is a sieve.

Only a fraction of what travels over your neural pathways sticks; everything else is filtered out.

Forgetting is not a curse.

Without forgetting, everything that you ever did or said would haunt you forever. But if you're trying to learn, you want to minimize forgetting in the long term.

Read 12 tweets

Ramses Oudt

@rroudt

5 Jan

Effective learning is counterintuitive.

Most learning advice in school will waste your time and effort. Making what you learn stick is simple if you know how.

My second atomic essay for #ship30for30.

🧵 Prefer tweets? See my essay in the thread.

School is the worst place to learn how to learn.

It's not because of school you develop, but despite it.

Most learning methods you learn in school make sense intuitively but aren't effective.

Rereading and cramming lead to illusions of knowing; it may be enough for exams, but not to succeed in life.

Read 11 tweets

Ramses Oudt

@rroudt

4 Jan

Become a professional learner to stay relevant in your job.

On day 1 of #Ship30for30, I make a case to look at your work through the lens of learning. In an increasingly complex world, that's the only way to thrive.

🧵 You can also read the essay as a thread 👇

How are you going to stay relevant in your job?

In our fast-moving world, simple and complicated problems are evaporating and replaced by complex ones. Never did companies and institutions have to solve so many challenges in so little time.

You have two options in this new reality: innovate or die.

Change has killed the knowledge worker. Knowing is no longer needed—everyone has thousands of encyclopedias in their pocket. What's needed are new insights. But insights are lacking as workers still rely on old systems.

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