Prolific Learning Principles Overview

An Overview of Prolific Learning Principles

Prolific learning is based on learning being both enjoyable and effective. Here is a summary of principles which empower enjoyable and effective learning.

Learning needs to be both enjoyable and effective. When it is, it lays the foundation for prolific learning. You will see satisfying results and be able to have pride in what you’ve accomplished. There are a set of principles to follow which will help make your learning more enjoyable and effective.

Here is a quick overview of prolific learning principles. When I put these together, I settled on a pragmatic arrangement rather than a theoretical one. I wanted these principles to be easy to understand and fairly relevant. Of course, putting them into practice will take practice. But an initial starting point is to start to become familiar with them.

Uniqueness

You are a unique person. Your interests, strengths, experience, knowledge, and goals are different from everyone else’s. Your purpose in learning something will be different from others. Your approach to learning something will need to be different in some ways to other people.

Adapting

You need to learn to adapt and change what you are doing. Things that work well when you are a beginning will not work as well as your skills advance. Things that work well with advanced skills would not work well as a beginner. Part of being a prolific learner is evaluating where you are and how well something is working for you.

Brain Operation

Your brain is an amazing thing. It adapts to the patterns and rhythms of the world around you. It naturally internalizes information and skills that let you interact easily with the world. The best learning methods will have similarities to the patterns and rhythms of the world around you. The worst learning methods are those that are artificial, isolated from the world around you, and require you to force yourself to memorize and work hard at trying to learn.

Different Methods give Different Results

Any particular method of learning is going to give some type of results. The question is whether or not those are the results you want. You need to carefully choose your methods of learning to give the results you want.

Learning Actual Skills

When you learn actual skills, they will stay with you for a long time. When you memorize a bunch of facts about something, you have to keep reviewing or they will fade away. Things like riding a bike stay with you for a long time. Unlike formal education where there is often a premium on remembering facts, those things that most enrich our lives are often those things that we can actually do. You need to focus on acquiring the skills you actually want to use.

Progress Occurs on a Continuum

In formal education, progress is usually measured by deadlines, schedules, tests, standards, and goals. In prolific learning, progress consistently occurs at some rate as you put in time and effort. You slowly get better and better. When you add deadlines and tests to your learning, you will often sacrifice longterm learning for the sake of urgent short term needs. Instead of measuring the quality of your learning by test scores, you need to measure the quality of your learning by what you can take pride in and are satisfied with.

Positive Attitudes

It’s a well-established fact that strong negative emotions change our body chemistry. Anger, frustration, boredom, depression, anxiety, and the like reduce our ability to learn. Being relaxed and in a good mood when studying or practicing significantly improves our learning. In addition, the more we enjoy doing something, the more we are going to do it.

Learning in Context

When learning new information or skills, we want our brain to have them closely tied to related information and skills. We need to learn information and skills in context. When we break something up into many unrelated details or practice isolated sub-skills, we run the risk that our brain is not going to associated those things with the rest of the context we are learning. We often feel like learning things in isolation is faster and easier. In practice, for short-term learning, it is more effective. However, prolific learning is about picking up long term skills for life. We need to learn how to learn in context rather than the much more common approach of breaking things into small chunks.

Overview

These principles are not so much recipes to follow but a way of thinking and approaching learning that will make it more enjoyable and effective. We need to learn to see how these principles can be used in our particular situation. For example, what is stressful and frustrating for one person might not be for another. Two people approaching the same thing might have different goals for it and need to use different methods of learning.

One way to start learning and using these principles is to see how much you have seen them used in your life. Think of a few of your favorite and a few of your least favorite classes, or perhaps skills you learned well or failed at. Consider how much each of these principles was or was not used in those situations. That is a first step toward understanding how they can apply to what you are doing in the future.

When we start using a few of these principles, we will see some improvement in what we are doing. However, it is when we start to apply most or all of them that we will see the biggest improvement. Individually, these principles are capable of causing minor changes in what results we are seeing. It is when they are used together that we can start to see radically better results than we are used to.