My favorite measure of a person’s long-term potential is their ability to turn information into wisdom or, to say it a another way, to learn from experience. In this context experience doesn’t have to be lived; it can be learned through conversation, reading, and research. Everyone does this1 but the extent of a person’s ability to “learn” wisdom is directly related to the number and sources of experience they are intentional about using. These sources vary dramatically in usefulness and efficiency, and almost nobody maximizes them all.
Over time, I’ve come to categorize sources of learning into levels that help me not only identify the sophistication of my learned experience but also highlight opportunities to extend what I’ve learned from the same experience (i.e. kick it up a level.) This is not to suggest that I’m great at doing this, but being intentional about it helps me see opportunities that don’t automatically present themselves. Here are my 8 Levels of Learning Acquisition.
1) Learning from your successes
This is the most common, easiest, and least useful source of learning. It is hard wired into our evolutionary biology to repeat behavior that has been successful previously. It is the least useful because “past performance is not a guarantee of future success” or, to put it in a more academic framework, it is highly susceptible to confirmation bias. In the best case scenario you can learn a single lesson from a very specific situation that might or might not be applicable to future situations. The best learners are always humble about their successes because they know there are too many variables to make them generally applicable; and are therefore skeptical of those lessons.
2) Learning from positive feedback
Another natural learning method and one we all enjoy; positive feedback can be anything from formal recognition, to hearing a co-worker say you did a good job. Generally speaking this is a re-enforcing mechanism for level 1 and can be particularly effective as a tool to highlight non-intuitive experiences that you might not otherwise associate with learning. 2 To be most affective it needs to be:
- Specific: “Good job” is less useful than “way to keep your off hand on the ball when making that cut.”
- Timely: Positive feedback is dramatically less affective after time has passed and should almost always be done immediately.
- Genuine: People almost always know when you don’t really mean it. Worse, if they don’t know you mean it, then you can reinforce non-learning behaviors (this is the fundamental problem with things like participation trophies.)
“Praise to the undeserving is severe satire.”
– Benjamin Franklin
The most powerful way to use positive feedback learning is not to wait for re-enforcing feedback from others, but to consistently implement positive feedback incentives for you own behavior.3 Incentives are powerful tools when properly applied and exceedingly dangerous when misapplied. Rewarding yourself for consistency, instead of for results, is a hallmark of great athletes. Rewarding yourself for doing “just enough” is a recipe for mediocrity.
3) Learning from your failure
I’m a big fan of inversion thinking. Learning from your failure is an inversion of level 1 learning from success.
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
– Henry Ford
People’s first exposure to learning from failure is seldom a decision; instead it is an experience thrust upon them. The “stick” to level 2’s carrot. That said, learning from your failures is not simply a step improvement on learning from success, it’s a exponential accelerant.
- It, at least, doubles the surface area of your opportunity to learn.
- It can often provide an emotional cue for future failure states.4
- Wisdom acquired through failure is of higher quality than that learned from success because failure states are more broadly applicable to other scenarios.5
Being intentional about learning from failure is a powerful tool. Many incredibly successful people (especially people in new disciplines) have been successful by a kind of “brute force” learning model using level 1, 2, and 3. They do thousands of small experiments with small deviations and use the learned results to create a huge subject matter knowledge advantage over others.6
4) Learning from other peoples success
Learned experiences do not have to be limited to ones you have encountered yourself. Great wisdom can be found in the experiences of other, whither that come from stories, anecdotes, books, or conversations. Most people love to discuss their success and their opinions on how they accomplished those successes. Be open and attentive whenever someone wants to give you wisdom for I suspect there are few greater gifts they can give you.
The only apprehension to this advise is the same as for level 1. People who write or discuss their success are overwhelmingly susceptible to confirmation bias and their specific experience can seldom be generalized to less specific situations.7 Often it is more valuable to look at someone’s “rules for life” than specifics around their success because these are, at least, an indicator of how they prepared themselves for when success presented opportunities. Seek out and appreciate others success but always take it for what it is, one person’s opinion of themselves.
5) Learning from other peoples failure
“Wise Men learn by other’s harms; Fools by their own.”
– Benjamin Franklin
The inversion of “learning from other people’s success”. It is significantly less common to study the failures other people have had than to study their success, and seems to be done most often as entertainment rather than enlightenment.8 This is unfortunate because, just like by learning from your failures, learning from other people’s failure is both broader, of higher quality, and more generally applicable.
“Invert, always invert”
-Jacobi
My recommendation is to not only study specific cases of system/people failure (especially ones by people “in the loop” but outside the fallout9) but to intentionally focus on near failures in success stories. People are always prone to highlight achievements over their shortcomings, so invert their experiences of success. What could have gone wrong that would have jeopardized someone’s success? What decisions were made that caused someone to get to the inflection point of their story? What failures do they include in “the story of their success” that they acknowledge and what lessons did they learn? You are likely to get more value from asking those questions than from narrative they present.
6) Learning from the failures in your success
The first dramatic step increase in the learning levels. While the first 5 levels are progressively less common, the remaining levels are both rare and generally non-intuitive. Instead they have to be intentionally developed!
Evaluating success with a specific eye towards identifying potential failure patterns in that success infinitely increases the wisdom we can acquire. This is not an exaggeration! There are dozens of ways it accomplishes this but a few examples include:
- It changes how we see opportunities to learn.
- It allows you to learn from situations that have never occurred, gamifying the learning pattern.
- It minimizing the opportunities for failure by adding a “margin of safety” to any re-applied success patterns.
- It extends the area of responsibility that people take ownership over (i.e. it expands the things they think they have some ability to influence.)
- It allows you to turn planning into an effective learning model. 10
Groups like special forces teams are famous for using this learning method to increase future success. They treat every single experience as an opportunity to find failure patterns that can be used in planning and future pattern recognition. 11 In fact, they spend more time with successful operations reviews because operational failure usually end the “experience” per-maturely.
7) Learning from negative feedback
“Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”
– Marcus Aurelius
Learning from positive feedback (level 2) is easy but learning to take criticism when given negatively is not natural and requires fighting defensive reflexes. This is unfortunate because (much like learning from failure) it dramatically increases the surface area available for learning. Very few people are able to do this consistently but the payoff is significant.
Unfortunately, not everyone is going to provide thoughtfully constructive feedback; especially when they are angry, frustrated, or impatient. It is difficult when someone says something like, “you are a stupid moron” to take a minute, relax, and calmly reply with “I’m so sorry your upset, but can you tell me why am I a stupid moron?” It sounds ridiculous but some of the most productive feedback12 I’ve ever gotten has happened in these exact moments. The value of this feedback level comes from the fact that:
- It is honest, unfiltered, and direct. Three significantly valuable attributes in feedback!
- It turns a negative experience into a productive (if not pleasant) experience.
- If you can successfully absorb the feedback, implement it, and demonstrate (to the person who gave it to you) acceptance; you create an ally that will give you similar feedback in the future… only they will do it more constructively.
Fundamentally this level of learning requires humility and a desire to learn that transcends the need to protect your feelings. It is NOT easy but it IS powerful; and one of the best indicators of a person’s future success.
8) Learning from history
“There is no better teacher than history in determining the future… There are answers worth billions of dollars in $30 history book.”
– Charles T. Munger
Deciding not to learn from history is ideology and ideology is always an impediment to learning. Ideology forces us to bend reality to our perception of the truth instead of seeking out what truly is.13
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”
– Mark Twain
My favorite historian, Will Durant14, believed that history was the feedback mechanism for metaphysical philosophy. Feedback mechanisms (i.e. success/failure above) are fundamental for learning and are the primary vehicles in the success of the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.15 Meaning that if you want to learn truly timeless lessons from the successes and failures of the greatest people and societies in history, you must absolutely study history.
The mental models16 developed by seeing the repeated patterns throughout time add a breadth of learning because of the sheer number of experiences available that you will never have otherwise. History lets you see the reasons, decisions, influences, and outcomes of events that have significantly higher stakes than you are likely to ever have to consider. They are case studies in previous behavior.
Finally, studying history provides a depth of understanding that is impossible to learn any other way. The Stoics had a better understanding of learning from failure than anything I (or your teacher for that matter) could write on the subject. No company has ever had the depth of experience with success and failure compared to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, or the Ming Dynasty, or the Ottoman Empire. It is impossible to study history and not learn lessons from it; and once you start to see the patterns of history, you will see them everywhere.
Ultimately, the study of history extends the ability to “learn from other people’s successes” and “learn from other people’s failures” exponentially.
Footnotes
- Parenting is a excellent example of experienced learning. As parents we are constantly trying to provide opportunities for our kids to experience things, while making sure they learn lessons from those experiences. Thus the importance of consequences… at least this is what good parents do. ↩︎
- For example, the time my dad said, “I’m really impressed that you measured twice before cutting that board”, which would not have been a learning experience otherwise because I had forgotten my measurement and was simply doing what I needed to do to finish the job… I measured a third time just to be sure! ↩︎
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear ↩︎
- To put it another way, you only have to put your hand into fire once to learn a lesson, and your unlikely to have to “remind” yourself not to do it again. ↩︎
- Learning how to drive a car on the interstate doesn’t teach you a ton about how to drive on a track, or off-road; but loosing control of your car on ice is something you will remember when riding a motorcycle in a parking lot. ↩︎
- True perseverance is not making the same mistake over and over again but learning from slightly different mistakes to map correct paths. ↩︎
- For example, Michael Eisner might be exceedingly interesting as a leader but I doubt many will have the opportunity to walk into a business and 1) triple ticket prices due to value inelasticity, and 2) have a huge backlog of value to sell direct to customers through an untapped medium (in this case VHS tapes.) I also suspect Eisner is unlikely to attribute his success to these factors as they didn’t require any genius to identify. ↩︎
- Societies continual draw towards schadenfreude is an ancient motif that is especially true when combined with inequity aversion (or perceived inequity.) To put it more colloquially, society likes to build people up so we can watch them fall. ↩︎
- Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis ↩︎
- Planning, while important as a tool, is a weak model for learning because plans are guesses while experience provides an effective feedback loop to compare against. Planning’s primary value for learning is as a measure against expected results. ↩︎
- Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink ↩︎
- As an example, I once had a program I was running at a Boy Scout camp as a Program Director. The feedback from my program was almost universally good, but one Scout Master was disappointing, condescending, and livid. After some questioning, I got a list of things he thought were seriously deficient in the program. By the following week I had improved or implemented nearly all of the recommendations (honestly, they were all pretty valuable) and the program reviews sky-rocketed. Serendipity resulted in that same Scout Master showing up at camp again six weeks later. He not only gave us a raving review but personally reach out to thank me. In retrospect, his feedback was 100x more valuable than all the positive feedback I received combined. As a side note, we are friends to this day. ↩︎
- Worse is when ideology is used to redefine history; to bend and distort history to make it map to our biases. There can be no learning if there is no truth, and bending truth to redefine objective reality is an exercise in philosophical masturbation… it might be fun, but it has little value. ↩︎
- The Lessons of History & The Story of Philosophy by Will & Ariel Durant ↩︎
- The failure of the “soft sciences” can directly be mapped to the insanely awful signal/noise ratio of those disciplines. Generally they lack objective measures against reality, throw out (instead of dis-prove) existing models in favor of what is “in vogue” at the moment, and seldom fail to ignore cross-discipline research. They are therefore subject to ideology, inaccuracy, and misalignment with incentives. I know a Engineering PhD whose thesis was 28 pages (and didn’t quote a single member of his dissertation board) because every single member of his board could tests his thesis and prove the veracity of his claims. Can anyone even imagine a similar scenario in a sociology thesis? These disciplines far far are too important to NOT have an objective feedback mechanism! ↩︎
- I say models because history is almost always universally applicable but seldom directly so. We can learn a lot about conformism, state theory, irrational exuberance, belief perseverance, group think, and authority from the Holocaust but we are unlikely to see the rise of another Nazi Germany. </Godwin> ↩︎