How to Learn in the Real World

The following are a few ideas and thoughts on how to learn in the real world — when your life no longer revolves around four-year increments but spans decades. You won’t find any generic platitudes or other filler. This is straight from me and my expe

“I think that a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.” - Charlie Munger

We measure significant chunks of our young adult lives in fours. Four years of high school. Four years of college. Four years between elections. Four years between the Olympics. Four years between Leap Years. Four years between half-hearted attempts at a new Star Wars trilogy. Okay, maybe not those last two, but you get the point. Four is a magic number in our lives. 

But what about the things we do for over four years? Things like work, relationships, exercise, and the list goes on.

I remember feeling weird and uneasy in the days following my college graduation. Ask my family and they will tell you it was like the spinning wheel of death was whirling away in my brain. No end in sight and in need of a hard restart to get booted up again. 

But when you think about it, these kinds of feelings and reactions make sense. Suddenly, it feels like everything is over. The driving force (or should I say fours) for the first 22 years of your life is gone and you have to blaze a brand new trail. The guide rails are gone. Now, your life is now fully yours and you have the credential (aka your degree) to prove it. 

The following are a few ideas and thoughts on how to learn in the real world — when your life no longer revolves around four-year increments but spans decades. You won’t find any generic platitudes or other filler. This is straight from me and my experience of working to learn in a non-school setting. As always, take what you need and leave what you don’t. 

Get a dedicated reading device

I’m putting this one first because I absolutely wish I would’ve learned it earlier. Having a dedicated reading device (like a Kindle or other e-reader) has been an absolute game changer for my volume of reading. Before I got my Kindle, I used to read either from my tablet or from a physical copy. Both were good, but there’s something about the combination of the E Ink in the Kindle and that it can’t receive texts/emails that makes it the perfect reading tool. Plus, it’s lightweight and small, making it ideal for traveling or keeping by your bed for some reading before bed. 

Features aside, the reason I think having a dedicated reading device is a huge unlock for post-grad learning is twofold. One, it reinforces a reading habit. And two, you can start reading anywhere in seconds. Let’s start with point one.

A dedicated reading device builds and reinforces a reading habit in the same way our phones reinforce a social media habit. I’m not proud to admit it, but I could probably navigate to Twitter or TikTok on my phone blindfolded. I just love to watch the cat videos on my For You Page and my muscle memory knows how to get there instinctually. It’s just what I do when my phone is in my hand. But, the same is true for my Kindle. When it’s in my hand, I can’t help but scroll to a book and crack it open. Seeing how far I am through the book motivates me to keep reading. Once I get to about 70%, you can guarantee I’m going to clear the rest of my night and try to finish it too. 

In some ways, it’s like the folks who have a crack phone (lots of social media apps) and a kale phone (work, books app, etc). A dedicated reading device puts a barrier between business and pleasure. Each habit, for better or worse, gets reinforced independently. And you don’t have to give up memes, in-depth breakdowns of Challengers, or valuable reading time. Not a terrible deal at all. 

Treat your learning like a series of venture investments

If there’s one thing you need to know about venture investing, it’s governed by a Power Law Distribution. You might ask yourself, “What is a Power Law Distribution?” Well, I’ll tell you.

A Power Law Distribution (as it relates to venture investing and what we’re talking about here) means that in a set of venture investments, a few will fail completely, some will have modest returns, and a tiny, select few will have extraordinary returns—10 to 100 times the investment, creating massive upside. Essentially, the success and majority of returns of a fund are driven by less than a handful of companies, while most others break even or fail. In theory, you can double down on your massive winners because they more than compensate for the duds. The key takeaway is to treat your learning similarly.

In a real-world learning environment, you are the person who sets the structure and curriculum. Want to learn about architecture? Knock yourself out. Interested in t-shirt screen printing techniques? Go for it. Want to understand how LLMs work? You got it. All the learning, exploring, and knowledge seeking are up to you. Because there’s no predefined structure, it’s easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis. After all, in a world with infinite things to learn, how do you find what’s going to excite you the most? The answer is by treating each potential path as a venture investment and letting that Power Law Distribution work its magic. Here’s how to make this work for you and get past your paralysis in three steps.

First, think about what content you’re already consuming, topics that might be interesting, and subjects you feel would be worth exploring. The key here is to focus only on your interests. Don’t add something (like AI, crypto, or whatever else is trending) unless you absolutely, 100% want to know more about it. If you do, excellent. If not, don’t worry about it. I’ve started and failed too many times at learning to code because I just don’t have a burning passion for it like others. That’s okay. Blaze your own trail and scratch your own itches.

Second, watch, read, listen, and learn about the things you’ve listed. Think of this as a buffet for your brain. If you see something you like or a path you’d like to continue down, go for it. Don’t overthink it; just let your curiosity guide you. At this stage, we’re letting our little bets run wild to find what could lead to outsized mega returns and what might fizzle out like a poorly constructed sparkler. A key thing to keep in mind here is not to invest too much of your time and money. Don’t spend $200 on a pack of yoga classes if you think the idea of sweating your brains out won’t be appealing. Don’t commit to a 12-week coding bootcamp if you’re worried that learning Python will give you hives. Take small, actionable steps, and most importantly, if you don’t like something, stop doing it.

Finally, after a period of time (it could be weeks or months depending on your schedule and free time), step back and take stock of what you disliked, liked, and loved learning. By this point, you’ll know what your 10-100x winner(s) are and what has just been “meh.” That’s the goal. Reflecting on what you loved learning is important because it makes it concrete. From here, it’s quite simple: keep learning about what you loved learning about. Which brings me to my last point.

Tinker and test endlessly

While it would be wonderful to just run this test once and call it quits, the reality is that to continue your learning, you’ll have to do it for the rest of your life. Actually, I should rephrase that: You get to do it for the rest of your life.

Let your curiosity guide you to keep tinkering and learning. In the very worst case, you lose a few hours and learn something that could make a dinnertime conversation more interesting. In the best case, you find a lifelong hobby that you’ll enjoy forever. Here’s a personal story to bring this home.

Hitting the links

Like a lot of folks during COVID, I took up golf. As someone who grew up in a golf family where my dad played D-1 college golf, my grandfather played on the PGA Tour as well as was a club pro his whole life, and my younger brother is a few strokes shy of a scratch (aka very good), I was massively late to the party.

Still, I dragged my hand-me-down clubs to the driving range and sliced ball after ball and loved every second. After trying a lot of different potential hobbies (i.e.; coding, graphic design, podcasting, etc), I had found my outlet. Yes, I sucked, but I loved chasing down a score and having it be the summation of my effort that day. It’s also led to some of my favorite trips and memories. Since then, I’ve gone on three golf trips with buddies and my brother, met a lot of interesting people, and put myself outside my comfort zone on more than a few occasions. To say it’s yielded a 100x return on my life would be an understatement. The funny part is that it’s not because I feel like I’ve gotten an order of magnitude better. 

The forever game

But that’s what we’re going for here. Learning in the real-world is about finding the things that you could learn forever and never lose your fascination. That doesn’t mean there won’t be moments where life gets in the way or your interests wane for a moment. Other parts of your life will get busy and you might not get to spend as much time on these things when it does (my golf game suffered last year from a busy work schedule). But that feeling of getting back to your practice (whatever it may be) will feel like playing catch with an old baseball mitt or slipping into your comfiest t-shirt: pure nirvana. 

And the best news of all is that you have the entire rest of your life to experience it.