Seth Godin Quote on Learning and How School Can Get In The Way Of Our Education

“As soon as we associate reading a book with taking a test, we’ve missed the point.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

Beyond the Quote (Day 384)

Forcing yourself to learn is like trying to force the last of the ketchup out of the ketchup bottle. You can shake, squeeze, tap, and torture the bottle all you’d like, you simply won’t be able to get all of it out when in a rush. A lot of the ketchup will be stuck throughout the container and will only come out with time. This is why you flip the bottle upside down when you put it back away—so that gravity will move it down for the next time. Learning works the same way.

You can try and force knowledge out from its source all you’d like—the reality is that some aspects of knowledge can’t be forced. Superficial thoughts, for example, needn’t travel far and are easy to retain; thoughts of depth, however, need time to travel to the depths of your thinking. You might also consider how new ideas require time to properly synthesize with already established ideas—you can’t do that when you’re constantly trying to pound new information in. Radically new ideas apply pressure to the boundaries of your mind—and it takes time for your mind to expand.

Have you ever wondered why you sometimes need to step away from an intense session of learning? Or why you push your hands against your head like you’re trying to keep it from exploding? It’s because your mind is telling you it needs more time to sustainably expand. For, if it expands too fast, you’ll end up burning it out which will result in forced mental shut down. And it doesn’t matter how much you try to force learning when your mind has shut down, nothing can be retained.

Maybe this is why so many people stop doing any kind of formal learning after school—they’re burned out. Their minds shut down after they graduate, when they realize they no longer have to cram, and they proceed to build their life around a routine that doesn’t involve any formal learning as a result. After all, why would anyone want to continue formal learning when all it ever was for them was bottle shaking, squeezing, tapping, and torture? I know I felt that way. It took time for me to look at formal learning differently. I eventually adopted a more patient approach. I simply took the bottle that I was used to physically abusing and flipped it upside down.

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