Learning Outside the Academy (and Outside the Box)

Too many people think you need permission to learn something or that difficult things have to be learned in school. However, the prevalence of this attitude is much lower among entrepreneurs than practically any other group.

Although going to school to learn things seems to have worked quite well for some of my friends, it's never really been my first choice, so hopefully by explaining alternative strategies for learning I can help out other people for whom schooling isn't an option.

How To Learn "Outside The Box"

In August of 2008, I decided that I wanted to do my undergrad degree at Peking University (PKU) in Beijing, instead of applying to schools in the States. I had spent an incredible summer in Beijing as an intern in a lab at Peking U, and I was determined to get in. My idea was that I'd spend the five months before the admissions deadline in an immersion program and pick up enough Chinese to pass the admissions tests.

Learning Outside the Academy (and Outside the Box)As it turned out, there are no immersion programs except the Defense Language Institute (only open to military members, oops) that will teach you Mandarin in that span of time. I decided I'd learn it on my own, and here are some notes (cleaned up a bit) that I wrote after I was admitted to PKU and managed to pass all of my first-semester classes.

I've since found that these lessons are applicable to more than just studying languages:


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1. Make a curriculum.

Breaking a big concept like "fluency in Mandarin" (or "learning to program in Lisp" or whatever) into concrete pieces is step one. Often what you choose to skip is as important as what you learn. I asked my mentors and friends exactly what I would need to make it through my first year at Peking University, and the consensus was that I could skip learning how to write characters and how to read classical Chinese, in order to focus hard on speaking, listening and reading. I've ended up going back to the things I skipped, but the order was really important, and trying to do it all at once would have been disastrous.

2. Make practice as close to the real thing as possible.

Instead of using materials intended for students, I played a game where I'd enter all the characters I encountered in daily life into my phone, and they'd all get dumped into a flash-card program at the end of the day. This meant that every character I learned was a character I had run into on the street, with absolutely no time wasted on esoteric or outdated stuff taught in classes.

To practice listening, I watched movies and paused at lines I didn't understand. To practice speaking, I talked at every opportunity (and there were many.) As a side note, the effect that the attitude of native speakers toward foreign learners of a language has on one's ability to learn quickly can't possibly be overstated. For this reason I think Mandarin Chinese is easier to learn than French or Japanese; in Beijing, coming off as unfriendly or aloof is considered extremely rude, which is not the case to the same extent in either Tokyo or Paris.

3. Genius doesn't have much to do with it.

Schools and parents in the US emphasize intelligence over effort in a bunch of subtle ways, whereas in Asia, effort and diligence are the focus. Regardless of what side of that debate you come down on, if you've decided to learn something, deliberating about your own natural talent for that thing does absolutely nothing for you.

Tanaka Ikko, one of the founders of Muji and a graphic designer of extreme skill, told a student complaining about his own lack of natural design sense, "First is strength. Second is strength. There is no third or fourth. Fifth is sense." This isn't machismo, it's just a better understanding of how mastery is actually acquired.

4. Find something you can pour yourself into happily.

Don't bother trying to learn anything you aren't truly interested in. When I was learning Mandarin I didn't think twice about spending hours in front of a flash-card program drilling characters; this sounds strange, but it really wasn't unpleasant at all. Each character brought up many associations, and the thrill of being able to read a little bit more of the newspaper each week kept me going. Obviously there will be difficult periods, but if you find yourself miserably plodding forward for any significant period of time, quit and go learn something you actually enjoy.

5. Find teachers.

Not going to school for something does not mean you should go without teachers. Accomplished mentors are usually delighted to take motivated students. Finding a really good teacher for something will let you learn way faster than you could otherwise, and no matter what they charge per hour it'll be cheaper than paying tuition at a school. Good teachers are actually really undervalued monetarily, especially in the United States (not so much in places like Hong Kong, where top tutors make seven figures), so spend as much as you can on good instruction whenever you find it. Skillshare is a great way to find solid teachers, and you'll benefit also from meeting lots of other people studying what you're studying."

Quite a few other tactics are useful for people learning outside of the academy, such as book selection, peer groups and the discipline of time management. The trick is to keep looking until you find what works for you.

This article was originally published on Shareable.net

©2012 CommonSource.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New Society Publishers. http://newsociety.com


This article was adapted with permission from the book:

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis
edited by Malcolm Harris, Neal Gorenflo.

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis edited by Malcolm Harris, Neal Gorenflo.As a call-to-action, "share or die" refers to finding the common sense ideas and practices needed to not only merely survive, but to build a place where it's worth living. From urban Detroit to central Amsterdam, and from worker co-operatives to nomadic communities, an astonishing variety of recent graduates and twenty-something experimenters are finding (and sharing) their own answers to negotiating the new economic order. Their visions of a shared future include: * Collaborative consumption networks instead of private ownership * Replacing the corporate ladder with a "lattice lifestyle" * Do-it-yourself higher education.

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About the Author

Eric MeltzerEric Meltzer is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco and Beijing. He dropped out of Peking University, where he was studying synthetic biology, to learn interaction design by doing a series of small projects and internships, with a focus on the communities he lives in (Dongcheng District in Beijing, and SOMA in San Francisco.)

About the Editors

Malcolm Harris is the Life/Art channel editor and a writer at Shareable.net and managing editor at The New Inquiry, a criticism site devoted to collecting and promoting the work of young, unaffiliated writers.

Neal Gorenflo is the co-founder and publisher of Shareable.net, a nonprofit online magazine about sharing.