“I really enjoyed this course” is a phrase that triggers me. The data are clear that having a good time during a learning experience has nothing to do with what we learn. Too often teachers want to be liked, stakeholders (parents, coaches or managers) want to see results in real-time, and students are not great at handling failure. According to Range author David Epstein, when learning makes us uncomfortable or frustrated, we are more likely to retain the knowledge or skills associated with the lesson as well as develop foundational capabilities, such as resilience or creativity. Here are five reasons why learning should be hard.
Learning is struggle
Having fun creates optimal conditions for learning. That said, enjoying a workshop has nothing to do with knowledge retention, because the most powerful learning experiences tend to be the hard ones. One of the reasons that Vancity’s Coaching Foundations Experience has such a significant impact on many participants is because of the content is novel and challenging. People learn about the neuroscience of personal growth and use real-life issues, not scenarios, to practice coaching with colleagues. They leave the classroom exhausted and often frustrated because they usually expend a lot of energy without seeing immediate results. But that’s not a bad thing! As we evaluate the impact of this experience over time, it is becoming increasingly clear that our learners are experiencing profound shifts in terms of how they manage staff and engage with colleagues.
Discovery >>> instruction
The neuroscience of what makes learning stick is clear: we are more likely to commit to opportunities for improvement when we discover them, not when a teacher or manager tells us what to do. It’s always easier to lecture at an audience and then test folks on what they heard than it is to ask powerful questions and support learners as they discover answers in highly personalized ways. We learn better when we uncover answers ourselves. We learn and grow tremendously when we get ourselves unstuck.
There’s a long-term payoff
Vincent van Gogh spent his twenties trying and failing at almost a dozen different jobs. He failed as a teacher, art dealer, pastor, and activist before becoming one of the most important artists in history. Learning from his struggles with personal identity, mismatching multiple career options and flat-out sucking at conventional art informed the style he invented. Van Gogh’s ongoing learning paid off in multiple ways – his paintings consistently retail for over nine-figures and unleashed new creative tactics on humanity. Clearly there are many benefits to being a late bloomer.
It’s in the numbers
In Range, Epstein argues that successful early-in-life-specialists, like Tiger Woods or parent-pressured-violinists, are outliers. Generalists outperform specialists in almost every field, especially in sports. Two of my favourite examples of successful sports generalists are Steve Nash and Abby Wombach. Nash grew up playing soccer (and many other sports), which absolutely influenced how we played basketball, the sport that he would dominate as well as re-invent in the late 2000s. Wombach played a variety of sports before specializing in soccer and continues to speak to parents and coaches about the value of generalism as well as how hard it is to become a top athlete in any sport.
Perspective grows from inexperience
When was the last time that you sought to solve a problem by adopting a perspective from somewhere else? I work in financial services, but every day my colleagues look to consumer products companies, digital app developers and/or indigenous peoples in search of ideas for how we might solve a problem or innovate for the future. We can find novel solutions to challenges when we look into other industries or fields of work than our own.
Personally, I often cite my graduate work in History (First World War military and societal culture) as a means of shifting our team’s approach to how learning happens in our credit union. It wasn’t until 1916 that teams of soldiers began experimenting with tactics that made better use of modern technology (for the first part of the war saw some very fixed-mindset-decision-making from generals who favoured tactics from the 1800s). “Instead of producing more of what we always have at a faster clip, what would it look like to use our tools in totally difference ways?” Looking at a problem or opportunity from completely different points of view uncovers novel options for tackling it.