Learning Things You Do Not Care About
Learning is a meticulous process. It requires concentration in order to understand, rephrase and anchor information. It is easiest when we care about the bigger picture and when we are interested in the subject. Yet it happens that more often than not we need to memorise, understand and use information that we simply do not care about.
For example, the military world is not my passion. Thus most of the learning in this space is somewhat forced for me. There are things I am genuinely interested in like improving my survival skills, but I am not exactly interested in knowing by heart every part of my firearm.
This is not a speciality of the army, the same happened in my previous two years of scientific studies and even more so in high school. In the following paragraphs, I will try to give my best advice on learning stuff you do not care about.
First of all, there are things that will just stick with time. That's the case with the parts of my firearm. I am constantly around it and have to use it quite a bit. The information about it was learnt as a side effect of constant use.
That being said, some things need genuine learning. For example, we need to learn by heart the names and models of certain military machines. The thing is, we have not once seen them with our own eyes and probably never will. But the information needs to be memorised.
In this case, what I did was create a study system (as I love doing). I made a collection of photos of the needed military machines and in their caption added their name. Basically, I created a test. You can look at a picture and try to guess the machine. Then after guessing you can directly check if you got it correctly by checking the caption.
This respects the laws of one of the most researched study mechanisms – active recall. It is not about getting information into your brain like reading over the information. It is about getting information out of your brain. Trying to remember and recognise patterns. It is more difficult than simply reading over the information but it is so much more efficient to actually master the information.
The holy grail of learning something is understanding the "why". Once you understand why you need to learn something it gets a lot easier to motivate yourself. In the army the explanation behind most things is simple – otherwise, you die. It's rather rough, but survival is a great motivator.
So to conclude, in order to learn something you are indifferent about there are a few gradual solutions:
- Choose the correct environment
- Make an active recall system
- Understand the "why"
This Week's Suggestions:
📚 Here are three videos about active recall:
- Cal Newport – "Studying through Active Recall"
- Ali Abdaal – "How my friend ranked 1st at Medical School"
- Cajun Koi Academy – "12 ways to Active Recall in 12 minutes"
🎶 "Nachts wach" by Miksu/Macloud x makko:
This is a German rap song on a bouncy dance music production. No, I do not speak German. That is not a problem though, I still enjoy this song a lot. It has a very calming sound to it.
See You next week!