Expand Your Philosophy: Learn Something Daily
Short principles for long-term clarity—and occasional epiphanies.
How can micro-learning, new ideas, and breaking from routine enrich our sense of time and foster personal growth?
“Learning something, anything, from the world yields wisdom that makes your life mindful, so do it every day”
Have you ever been driving a car only to realise after the fact you made it to your destination? Or, have you ever finished the workday only to not remember anything specific occurring in it? This is because your brain is wired in such a way that it encodes habits, behaviours, and experiences into automatic processes at a critical point in time when higher energy consumption is no longer required to complete a conscious task that could otherwise be automatic and intuitive. This also means, your conscious perception of “psychological time” decreases as you become generally less aware of the things you do. As such, your life begins to feel like it is flying by.
You can combat this by stimulating your brain with novel ideas or actions. One way of achieving this is by attempting to understand something new every day – a new piece of information, a new perspective, a new skill, a new story, or a new philosophy. This can be as easy as listening to a podcast that has new guests or concepts each episode or doing 5 minutes of reading a new book each day. This does not include things like the news or social media, which are focused on pure consumption of your attention, but instead include things that enrich and expand your own capabilities or experience of life. By doing this micro-learning each day, you find (1) Your days become more notable (2) You become more interested in the day (3) You become more interesting to others (4) You have more ideas about ways to improve your life that will not have occurred to you before.
If you are hissing and showing me a cross with your fingers regarding learning, I heard this quote from Jim Kwik I quite like: “Do not let school get in the way of your education”. Physical skills, perception skills, emotional skills, and cognitive skills all manifest out of the act of absorbing from masters or experts in their respective disciplines. However, a schooling through an institution only teaches you what certain people see as culturally important – which has its place for standardisation but should not be conflated with learning as a whole. So don’t be a sheep who learns only what others teach you. Learn stuff you think is interesting or challenging to expand your own horizons. Think about it, note it down, reflect on it, and do something with it. It will bring you closer to whatever your calling is in life, mainly because you were the one who did it.
Try to steal 5-10 minutes every day to learn or experience something new, it doesn’t have to be lame if you don’t want it to be. But in the end, it is you to whom to consequences apply. But if you follow this wisdom to its conclusion, you will look back from your deathbed having lived an enriched and full life with novel and interesting memories.
Reflection Questions:
Imagine you are an incredibly intelligent alien who has landed on earth sent with a ray gun that scans people and tells them what constitutes a positive challenge you are keen to fight against, what would it say about you?
Imagine you are a playful child who gets the bug to learn a new Kungfu move, how would you go about learning it without anyone to instruct you?
Songs That Embodies This For Me:
Be Like That – 3 Doors Down
Numbers - Logic
Fight the Fire with Gasoline – Self Deception
Airhead – Honey Revenge
IKIGAI – Airworthy, Todd Tran
Resources You Could Explore:
Limitless – Jim Kwik (Amazon)
Thinking, Fast and Slow –Daniel Kahneman (Amazon)
Tiny Habits – BJ Fogg (Amazon)
Tools of Titans - Timothy Ferriss (Amazon)
Tribe of Mentors - Timothy Ferris (Amazon)
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