Some time ago, I was trying to find some notes in a book I read. Revising my writings there, I was astonished to find out that some critical stuff I read and marked, had vanished from my mind. They had completely disappeared from my radar.
I was extremely frustrated. I am a prolific reader, and if I can´t remember what I read, and use the new information to produce some result in my life or my work, what is the point of all this reading?
The big problem was that I was confusing information with real learning.
How Real Learning Happens
Without going into details of how memory retention happens, let´s move straight to the practical stuff: we usually remember information that we transformed into action.
Natural selection favoured actions. Just thinking doesn´t increase your chances of survival, so your brain is configured to remember what you do, much more than what you just read or heard.
Therefore the best way to ensure that what you watched in that last TED Talk actually produce something good for you, is to act immediately on that information. So we move from knowing to doing.
Real learning happens when information becomes action.
But if you found something really significant for you, you may want to make it part of who you are.
For example, you read a book and understood that gratitude brings lots of benefits to your thinking and even to your physiology. You decide to start making lists of reasons why you could be grateful, and when you do it, information is becoming action.
But let´s say you want more than learning it. You want to become someone grateful.
If you repeat it again and again, let´s say, by a morning ritual, when you make this list every single day, this will produce an incredible result. These small actions will become evidence of a transformation happening in your life. You will start seeing yourself as someone grateful, so your sense of identity is shaped by it.
The information becomes action, and action becomes transformation through repetition.
So you first know, then you do, then you become.
These small adjustments to your sense of identity can have a profound long term effect in your life. When you repeat something for a sufficient number of times, that action becomes automatic, as when you learned to drive. You don´t have to think anymore about all the sequences to change gear, park and reverse. Those actions are now part of who you are.
Can you imagine how many benefits you could have by accumulating small adjustments like this one?
What about if you transform the information that you just got here, and turn it into action? Or even into repeated action?
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