7 Pitfalls Of Learning (Learning 101 - Part 2/2)
I learned about music theory and songwriting for 3 months straight and couldn’t write better songs! Here are the mistakes I made and how you can avoid them altogether.
It’s another Thursday evening. I sit down under the shine of my small desk light. I start my computer and a blue hue radiates from my monitors. Tired from work, I logged in to my account for the songwriting course I bought 2 weeks ago. Excited to become a better musician, I watched the whole chapter on harmony and wrote down what I learned. I felt good about myself, like I leveled up as a musician. For the following weeks, this repeated:
got home from work
worked through different courses
wrote down what I learned
As I finished all of them, I thought I was ready to write music again. I grabbed my guitar and started writing. I felt stuck, but this was to be expected. “After a long pause, that normal. I'm a bit rusty!” I said to myself. Struggling through the song, I managed to complete the first draft in 1 week. As I listened back to the result, I was devastated!
The song sounded like my previous ones. It sounded like the songs that made want to quit and pushed me to learn more about music to begin with. It felt like I didn’t learn a thing in the months I spent studying music.
If this story reminds you of yourself, I want to tell you that not all hope is lost. You did not work for nothing. We only need to unlock the knowledge you gathered.
This is part 2 of 2 of Learning 101. Last week, we learned about the most effective way we can learn. You can read it at currentmindset.com. This week we will talk about the pitfalls of learning. Avoid these to get results from your learning sessions.
A Brief Summary On How To Learn
I want to take the time to summarize what we found out about learning last week. The most effective way we can pick up on and remember information is by engaging with it in an active way. Active means we interact with the knowledge that gets presented. As musicians, we can do this by practicing. We write songs or song sections that use the lessons we've learned. Many stop at taking notes. Of course, it's important to write down what you learned, but won't be enough. Note-taking is a passive and doesn’t train our abilities.
To summarize the summary:
Passive learning is like watching videos about working out. Active learning is doing the exercises that the video demonstrates. You can’t expect to get in shape if you don’t train. So don’t expect to write a better song, when you don’t use what you’ve learned.
Or even shorter:
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. - Confucius
Pitfalls Of Learning
Now, I want to point out 7 pitfalls I fell victim to, and you should watch out for.
1) The Infotainment-Binge
Like with Netflix, it all too easy to sit down and binge videos about a topic that interests you. Most of the time, one video leads to another and to another and to another. Every next video seams to be more interesting than the last one. This is what I call the Infotainment-Binge. The term Infotainment is a combination between information and entertainment. Or in other words, it’s information structured and presented in a more engaging way.
The problem with this is that it keeps us from the most important thing. Writing music. When we let information entertain us, we don’t engage with it in an active way. We let it pour over us passively. This hinders the amount of information you can pick up at a time. Think back to the last time you've watched a National Geographic documentary. What did you remember of the 90 minutes long film about the African desert? Not much? I thought so!
Create the habit of stopping after each video / section of a course. And practice what you've learned. You need to be disciplined. Watching more is the easy way, doing what you learned is the hard one.
2) Excitement And Impatience
This is all about controlling your excitement and patience. As we engage with new material and practice what we learn, it feels like we make little to zero progress. It's like our car can only drive in second gear. And then we need to stop after every mile as we need to practiced what we learned. Often the lesson will be shorter than the time it takes to practice it. But it’s with these actions we will grow the most.
Our excitement and impatience will work hard to convince us to only take notes and move on. Don’t give in to this feeling. You’ll need to shift your perspective from:
”I’m excited to learn something new!”
To:
“I’m excited to apply something new!”
3) Learning Too Much At A Time
This one is linked to excitement and impatience as well. When we are most motivated, it’s common to go all in. We cancel all plans for the weekend to study from morning till dawn. This motivation might be well-intentioned but will slow down your process.
The lessons we learn take time to process, especially for more complex topics. It takes days of deliberate practice to wrap the brain around it. When we move on too fast, we run the risk of not understanding the topic. As we learn more, we force our brain to juggle more information as it can handle. It won’t catch all the balls and only remember what was easiest.
You can test if you understood a topic in an easy way. After a practice session, explain what you've learned without looking at your notes. Then check your notes and compare how well you managed to reproduce the information. If you didn't capture the topic well, you need to spend more time with it.
Lastly, take your time and plan small daily learning sessions. Learning in big chunks only at the weekend won't give you more results. Like the stock market, small habits compound over time!
4) Take Breaks
Learning is like building muscle. In contrast to popular belief, muscles are only built while resting. The act of lifting weights damages the body and sends signals to the brain that more muscle is needed. As you rest the body, it uses its resources to recover the damage and strengthen it.
As you learn, your mind holds information in your short term memory. To make sure the information stays with us, the brain requires rest. In particular sleep. While we sleep, the mind builds new connections in your long-term memory. That’s what we want. So make sure you get enough rest and recovering sleep.
5) Not Everything Needs To Be A Song
It’s not necessary to write a whole song after every little technique you’ve learned. Often it's enough to write a song part that uses what you learned. Most of the time, the technique you’ve learned won’t / shouldn’t be used in every part of a song. You need to decide for yourself what your goal is. It can be to move through the course fast to gather all the pieces before you start your next song.
If you struggle to write songs on a regular basis, I will encourage you to write entire songs. The body of work you will create whilst studying is unreplaceable.
6) Ignoring The Fundamentals
Before we can learn advanced material, it’s important to study the fundamentals. These are the techniques and principles that more advanced skills build on top of. Why is this so significant?
It makes sure you’ve got the best requirements to understand what you're studying. A starting medicine student can watch a lecture about the latest disease, but won’t understand anything. This is because he doesn’t understand how diseases work and how they spread.
As a musician, it is hard to understand how modal-interchange works if you don't know the basics of harmony. It's requires that you learned about diatonic chords and chord-functions to understand it. Study and master the fundamentals, then move on to the more advanced materials.
7) Learn With Full Attention
This point should be obvious, but it all too easy to lose attention. Like when writing music, eliminate all distractions when you learn. It only you, your online mentor and your notebook. If you're not focused, you will degrade the quality of your learning. Create an environment that helps you concentrate. If background music, like lo-fi, helps you with that, go for it. But don’t play with your phone while you “learn” about music. That's not learning!
Wrapping Things Up
Today we learned about 7 Pitfall of Learning that you should watch out for. I hope you can learn from every mistake I made. So pick up your instrument and use what you’ve learned. I excited, because I know the potential that slumbers inside of you. Learn something small every day and become a songwriting machine!
If you got something out of this, share this with someone who you think can benefit from this advice. We all need to watch out for another.
BECOME A SONGWRITING MACHINE!
— Max of Current Mindset
