Learning: The Materials from Which We Build Everything Else

It may seem a bit odd to take a detour into learning as a subject on a site dedicated to rhetoric, but I believe I can justify it to you in two ways. First, more obviously, while I’m sharing what I can on our subject matter here, the very nature of the medium is that if you want to get the most of it, you’re going to have to and put in some work on your own. I won’t be standing there to answer questions, point out errors, or direct you to the next stepping stone (though, by all means, if I can help with any of that less directly, leave a comment somewhere here on the site). Our goal is to learn rhetoric, largely teaching ourselves, so it makes sense to learn a bit about “how to learn.”

Secondly, though, and perhaps less obviously, “how to learn” may not be as core to the “rhetoric” side of this site, but it is the beating heart of the “Renaissance Man” side – intellectual curiosity across a wide variety of fields is the definition of the Renaissance Man, so if our goal is to cultivate his virtues, we’re going to be spending a lot of time learning, and again, it helps to know something about how to do that effectively.

Before we go on, I should point out that metalearning (“learning how to learn”) is a big and complex subject, informed by psychology, cognitive science, practical experience, habit building, and lots more. As such, this is far from a complete treatment of the subject, more a very basic introduction, enough to get you going with. We’ll likely come back to this subject over time and build out the bits and pieces in more detail, but for now, I want to avoid overwhelming you with a deluge of tips, tricks, variations, and so forth.

Learning as the Bridge Between Values & Strategy

We’ve spent some time now grounding ourselves in our values, and all the while, we kept coming back to how a clear set of virtues, aimed at living up to our values, will allow us to set goals worth pursuing. Setting goals and working out how to get them would naturally lead us to talk about strategy, and yet, here we are talking first about learning. Why might that be?

Well, if you want your goals to be anything but the vague, fuzzy handwaving in a general direction like “be happy,” “help others create value” (good directions, but vague!), then you need to understand something about yourself and the world. What are the things that make you happy? What are the things that have made others happy in the past? What have been the snares and pitfalls that folks think will make them happy, but do not truly? And once you’ve waded through those (and other) questions, you will need to know things like “so how did they go about pursuing these things?” “What is different about those who succeeded and those who did not?” “Are there material differences between their circumstances and mine, and what do they mean?” (And, of course, potentially hundreds of more such questions).

So, learning is what gives us the “raw materials” out of which we’re going to build the structures that rise from our foundation of values. Some of that learning will go to the framing: the core mental models that shape how you view people and the world and how it all works. Some of our learning will go to the walls, floors, and ceilings: what domains do I get to know well enough to create value for others within them? How do I link them together? Where am I happy to just have surface knowledge? And some of our learning will go to the finishing touches: how do I package what I’ve created in a way that others see its value? How should I speak to this audience versus that one? Do I need to learn just enough graphic design to tell whether the designer I hired did a good job?

Whatever level of detail, as we go after our goals to live up to our values, we’ll need to navigate a lot of different challenges, and there’s no way we can know all of them before we start. Knowing how to learn, then, is a metaskill that we can call upon whenever life throws us an unlooked for challenge. Product’s taking off like crazy, and now you need to know how to build up a team? You can go find relevant books, articles, podcasts, and whatever else and learn as you go. Working with huge amouonts of text and realize you need a more industrial-strength text editor? Time to learn Emacs (But no, it’s not really. I hesitate to even share this link, as that is a very deep rabbit hole indeed. But I fell down it a long time ago, and now it’s where I write everything).

Besides learning what to do, it is often even more helpful to learn what not to do. Learning the most common mistakes in a field can save you a lot of heartache and trial and error. Seeing how someone else made a decision that worked out in the short term but hurt him in the long term can help you either avoid it, or try to get the short term benefit without setting yourself up for the long term cost. Counter-examples are often stronger motivationally than folks we look up to, thanks to loss aversion (broadly speaking, it hurts more to lose than it feels good to win a comparable amount). So, whatever topic you’re learning, be sure to ask not only “what does good look like?” but also “what does bad look like?”

The Importance of Breadth

The biggest shift we’re going to make here from what you’ve likely learned in the past is that we want to put far more weight on breadth than schools and careers tend to do these days. Instead, they have trended more and more specialized. The argument for specialization goes something like this: “in a complex and highly diversified world with an ever-increasing body of knowledge, to say nothing of raw data, you have to specialize to be able to become enough of an expert to compete, and in some fields, to be able to do anything in it at all.”

And, indeed, there is some truth to that line of thinking. There is some stuff you can’t do unless you’re very specialized. There are some fields where specialization is more useful than others. So, some amount of specialization likely makes sense, and how much will vary depending on your values and goals.

That said, breadth is the defining trait of the Renaissance Man. Science and Art and Math and Medicine and on and on. Specialization allows you to understand fewer things in a deeper way. Breadth allows you to understand more things in a shallower way. I do not understand machines like my mechanical engineer father, nor ecology like an ecologist, government structures like a political scientist, but because I’ve studied systems theory, I see some of the dynamics in each, and I see what they have in common. Thus, breadth tends to lead to more generalizable knowledge and insights which is more helpful than specific knowledge or insights when you confront something novel or unknown.

Thus, each of us will have to decide how deep to go in each field we study, and where the payoffs of knowing it better start diminishing, versus the opportunity costs of studying multiple fields and never reaching the kind of payoffs we might get from going deep. It’s an art, and we’ll discuss a bit about how to navigate it a bit further down.

Another reason to value breadth is that often new insights come when an expert in one field starts to get to know another, unfamiliar field, or when folks with two different ways of thinking about things are forced to work together. Think of a Venn diagram: we want to play in the overlap, but to do that, we have to have something of each of the circles to work with. The more circles we add (i.e. the more fields we learn something about), the greater the chance that some of them will overlap, sometimes in surprising ways. When Europeans first started noticing that Sanskrit shared some features with Latin and Greek, who among them would have thought that some of our best insights into where those languages came from and what they had to do with each other would come out of the study of biochemistry, which led to our current understanding of Ancient DNA?

Another reason to find value in breadth is the old saying “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Different fields teach different ways of approaching problems and thinking things through. Different fields provide different data and insights. And sometimes, the tools from one field can become useful in other contexts. Other times, your preferred tool might not be working (“why won’t the Engineering Problem Solving Method produce good fiction!?”), and having some other tools to hand can be helpful. The good news here is that often the mental models, problem solving tools, and other “ways of thinking” from a field are often easier to learn than actually learning the entire field in depth. I can learn the engineering problem solving method and apply it without learning calculus and physics and material properties – I just won’t be able to apply to the same problems an engineer would be able to with that additional training.

Lastly, returning to our emphasis on the virtues, different fields cultivate different virtues, and so pursuing them can help you to keep balance amongst your virtues. Competitive sports and martial arts will cultivate much harsher, more aggressive virtues than yoga or Tai Chi, even if all of them keep you healthy physically. Learning to think like an engineer will help you quantify things, figure out the tradeoffs between those quantifications, and come to a reasonable decision to achieve practical goals, all of which are, or at least can be, virtues. On the other hand, learning to think like an artist will require you to shut up your chattering mind, learn to see what’s really in front of you, how to turn this impossibly complex thing into some simplified marks on paper, and yet all throughout convey something of what it makes you feel. Also all potential virtues, but very different ones. Even more closely related fields encourage you think look at things differently, and so to get better at some things than others. Economics is great for learning to generalize and apply high-level theory, whereas Business as an academic discipline is much more about specific, tangible examples and investigating the nuances thereof. Both are dealing with how money is made and spent, but come at it in different ways.

So, we know we want to learn from and about a wide variety of fields, but how do we do that?

The Importance of Mimesis

Today we tend to recoil from what has historically been one of the keys, if not the key to learning: mimesis. Mimesis means “to imitate,” and humans are remarkably talented at imitation. Think about any time where you’ve watched someone do something, and then tried to do it on your own. Yeah, the first time was almost certainly not perfect, and maybe not even good at all, but the fact that you kinda-sorta do it at all just from watching is actually pretty remarkable when you stop and think about it.

Mimesis comes naturally to us. Little kids start imitating what they see the grown-ups and older kids around them do (my 3-year old will take a piece of paper, fold it in half, and then bang on the lower half and announce she’s “working on her computer”). We also imitate our peers around us, often without realizing it: have you ever caught yourself using certain vocabulary, speech patterns, or idioms at a time you didn’t mean to, because you’ve been around folks who do? I know that when I was a consultant, a lot of consulting jargon crept into my language despite my best efforts to keep it out. The point is, though mimesis comes naturally, we can also use it intentionally to help us learn.

In fact, in the Renaissance (and, to be fair, before), mimesis was the primary means of instruction, especially for Rhetoric. It was believed and expected that if you spend enough time trying to be like the great masters of old, you’d be great like them even when not copying them. Part of why we look down on mimesis these days is the belief that “rote copying” is not “really” learning. And sure, if that’s all you do, you’re missing out, but that’s not what our ancestors were doing. The recognized that if you start with literal rote copying, then “take this piece by Cicero and make him sound more like Caesar,” and then progress to “write something of your own, but in the style of Cicero,” you were deeply internalizing Cicero’s approach to speechwriting first, and then taking that internalization and applying it, giving you a much richer and deeper relationship with Cicero’s writing than if you just read it and talked about what kind of rhetorical devices he had.

Another value of mimesis is that it allows for us to learn just about anything from anywhere, so long as we can find a good model of mimesis to imitate. And in so doing, we can find variety, nuance, and depth in two ways: by finding other targets of mimesis (“copy Cicero and Caesar”) or by looking at our object of imitation over time and across circumstances (“copy Cicero’s speeches about the Cataline Conspiracy, and his support for Caesar, and his polemics against Caesar, and his philosophical writings”). Mimesis is especially good for bringing out the things that a teacher might not realize he is doing, but that is nonetheless important – sometimes called “process knowledge” or “embodied knowledge.”

The last reason that imitation is useful is somewhat paradoxical. We tend to deride copying as doing something without understanding it. And, hey, I agree, certainly at first, and sometimes for a long time, that’s what copying is, and that’s not the end state we want to reach. But imagine if I explain the reason to do something, and you start trying to do that thing. Maybe something like “always end with a call to action, because it’s the last part of the speech, and it will stick in folks’ heads.” So, you start writing pitches that always end with a call to action, and you tell yourself that you understand it, because I gave you a reason. But do you really, deeply understand why a call to action is useful, why it makes sense to put it at the end, what different calls to action look like, and so forth, the way you might if you chewed through hundreds of speeches and all of a sudden you were like “wait a minute, every one of these ends with him asking the audience to do something!” Likely not. In this latter case, you’ve reached the generalizable conclusion on your own, from “the inside” by getting in the heads of each of these speechwriters as you get to know their speeches. Now, there are usually helpful midpoints between “here’s a canned answer and a procedure, go do it” and “grind through copying until you reach enlightenment,” but I’ve stressed what’s useful about copying/imitation since most of us have a pretty strong aversion to it if we have learned to love it.

Core Learning Principles

Below are some broad principles that will help you to approach learning effectively, no matter what fields you want to dive into. As I said above, this is far from exhaustive, but is meant to give you enough to get going with to begin your route to master autodidacticism.

Follow Your Interest

Our first principle is that you should heed what interests you. Learning should be fun. It should be gripping. And I’m not talking about the stupid ways our teachers tried to make learning “fun” by making us arrange dominoes into math problems or build styrofoam and clay models of cells or roleplay as Caesar and Pompey in the civil war (okay, that last one actually was fun). Instead, the kind of “fun” learning should be is what it feels like when you can’t quite go to bed because you have one more blog post to read. Or you are this close to debugging this stupid code, but have to wade through multiple stack exchange posts to figure it out. Or you’re reading a book and you go “but that reminds me of…” and jump up to grab another book (or three) off your bookshelf. It’s not the kind of “fun” you have playing a game, necessarily, instead it’s being interested.

I believe that what interests us, what grabs our attention and holds it, what we can’t stop thinking about even when we “should” be doing something else, tends to very strongly reflect what’s going on in the deep places of our mind (sometimes this is more obvious than others, such as being distracted by a pretty girl). Now, just because something is in your subconscious doesn’t automatically mean it’s right or good or where you should focus your efforts, but it does mean it’s something that some part of you cares about, whether in a positive or negative way (doomscrolling is our interest getting highjacked by worries about what bad thing could happen to us). So it’s worth investigating a bit – why is this interesting to me? What about it grabs me? What does it have in common with other stuff I’m interested in? What’s different about it?

But even if we can’t figure out why we’re interested in something, provided it’s not distracting us too much from needed responsibilities and isn’t inconsistent with our virtues, then we likely should pursue it. One important reason is motivational. We want to become lifelong learners. To do that, it’s helpful to convince the subconscious motivational parts of our mind that learning is worthwhile and enjoyable. To teach it that, it’s helpful if it actually is, you know, worthwhile and enjoyable when you’re “learning” things. Following our interests helps to make sure that’s true.

Let’s imagine that you enjoy reading, but you read exclusively non-fiction because you see it as a better use of your time. On the other hand, you’ve been hearing all of these arguments about why fiction is broadening and helps you better understand other people and psychology and so forth, and so you’re like “you know what, I should start reading fiction.” If you then go find the “top 10 most important works of literature in English” or something and try to to plow through the list in order, you’re likely to have a bad time – if you already don’t like fiction, are you really going to like War and Peace? I mean maybe, but that’s a pretty big ask for yourself. Instead, a much better path might be something like “hey, I really liked the movie The Martian, I wonder if the book has anything in it not in the movie?” or “all my favorite video games are fantasies, maybe I can find a good fantasy book to start with” or even “whoah, that’s a cool cover, I wonder what’s in that book?” The point is, especially when you’re first starting something you’d like to be a habit, make it easy on yourself to stick with it, and in this case, pick up books that interest you and read those. Eventually, you’ll either find out that you can enjoy fiction (at least some of it) and then maybe want to broaden out from there (or not!), or that it’s not so much for you after all, and either way, you’ve learned something.

This rule isn’t the end-all, be-all (see below), but it’s very important, which is why I’ve listed it first.

Let Others Lead You

Now we have some Yin to the Yang of “Follow Your Interest”: sometimes, we have to let others lead us, even when we don’t much want to follow where they’re going. All of us have had times where we didn’t much enjoy a subject, but we were forced to stick with it, and then, one day “ah hah!” So that’s what’s cool about this. Not all of us reach this moment in every subject, but we wouldn’t never get there in any field if we didn’t push through the initial resistance of “this sucks.” And every new field sucks when it’s new, because it’s confusing and makes you feel dumb and you can’t get your hands around it.

Sometimes it’s not being new to the field where we meet our resistance, but trying to leave the welcoming plains of the newbie for the foothills of the journeyman or the peaks of the masters. Is it worth overcoming that resistance by choosing a guide to stick with even when you lose all interest? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and that’s a place where greater clarity on your values can help you.

If you have goals that require certain skills or knowledge, well then, yup, time to buckle up and muscle through. On the other hand, if you’re looking at something as a “nice to have” or “oh, I should learn that because I’m supposed to,” well, then maybe you’d be better off going with what you’re actually interested in – it might be a clue that that is what would do you some more good than this thing you’re trying hard to convince yourself to go after will.

Another thing that can help us here is bringing back the concept of mimesis. If someone you admire and want to be like has pursued a path of knowledge, that’s good evidence that it might be good for you, and the more central it is to what you admire about him, the more likely you’ll want to power through your own phases of lack of interest (for example, if you want to be like John von Neumann, getting through the more challenging bits of mathematics will likely help you, but learning to juggle or ride a unicycle might not). This is easiest and works best when the person you admire is someone you can interact with, such as a teacher or mentor. Then you can just ask him “hey, I’m really struggling with this stuff here, is it really worth pushing through if I want to use it for X?” and he can give you an answer that incorporates his knowledge of himself, the subject, and you. But we don’t always have that luxury, of course, so sometimes it will be up to you, and learning to navigate brings us to our next principle.

Breadth in Your Interests, Depth in Your Practice

As we’ve touched on above, learning when to go deep and just how deep to go is more of an art than a science. A level of comfort with coding that serves me well may be just barely scratching the surface of what you need, whereas the amount I value knowing about the Proto-Indo-Europeans might be useless minutiae to you. Before going a bit more into how to navigate this, I want to take a step back. Throughout the posts on this site, I tend to adopt a fairly instrumentalist viewpoint: learn this knowledge to achieve your goals. Adopt this habit because it’s useful. Be virtuous because it leads to flourishing. I tend to draw your attention to the ends because for most of us, that’s motivating. On the other hand, as we touched on in Follow Your Interests, in many ways, doing something that interests you is its own reward and is worth pursuing for no reason other than you found it compelling. Spending an afternoon reading and taking notes on something that you couldn’t look away from is flourishing, at least if it’s not coming at the cost of something that will hurt you later. “Learning is its own reward” is a cliche, but like many cliches, there’s some truth to it.

This is a bit of an aside, but I think an illustrative one. I mentioned my interest in the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Ever since I learned that most of the languages of Europe, many of those of the sub-continent, and a few scattered in-between can trace their pre-history to a common ancestor, and that along with language went cultural and religious threads that can be compared, contrasted, and decoded to learn more about what their ancestors who left no written records must have been like, I haven’t been able to get enough. Sure, sometimes I turn this to some more practical end, like trying to understand the impact language or culture might have had on various historical or political developments, or to get deeper insights out of reading the myths of these daughter peoples, or whatever else. But I haven’t been gobbling up whatever I can find on the topic for the past 20+ years in order to do those things – I just like it. Likewise, I just read an excellent novel set just as those groups were starting to spread out and grow distinct from each other, and while my knowledge of pre-history, archaeology, ancient DNA, comparative mythology and so forth deepened my enjoyment of the book, that’s not why I sought that knowledge out – I had no idea the book existed before a few weeks ago, as it was just published! Instead, I enjoyed the book because it presented a new-to-me way to explore how these various threads might be made sense of, by crafting a compelling story that happened to rely on and demonstrate some of the best conclusions folks have found about these ancient people.

Okay, so, having gone rather deep on the worth of digging in (or branching out) merely because you enjoy it, let’s talk a bit about how to navigate the right balance of breadth and depth when you do have some end in mind: you want to learn a new field because you think it will help you in some way. I sum up the rule of thumb I recommend with “Breadth in Your Interests, Depth in Your Practice,” giving us the header to this section, but what does that look like?

“Breadth in your interests” means that it’s helpful for the aspiring Renaissance Man to seek out multiple fields to be interested in. Say you’re not much of a mathy guy. Well, then, perhaps you should look for some inroads to math that you just might find interesting (here’s one that worked for me, though I’ve still got miles to go). On the other hand, if you’re all about that STEM, and you realize it might be good for you to become interested in the humanities, what to do? Maybe look for a history of science book, or even philosophy of science. Or you don’t know much about the history of the early 19th century, but you are interested in military stuff from multiple time periods. Well, find a biography of Napoleon or a military history book on his exploits.

Sometimes this will be less intentional. You listen to a podcast, or read an article, or have a conversation with a friend, and sometime you’re not familiar with grabs your interest: well, go track down something on that topic suitable for a beginner and get cranking!

As for how to “get cranking,” that brings us to “depth in your practice.” In short, this means that even when you stay shallow in a given field, it’s helpful to approach how you learn about that field in a disciplined, even intense way. Maybe you only read one book on the subject, but you take good notes on it. Or you read a handful of articles, but you find the common threads between them and link them back to another field you already know better. How to do this more tactically brings us to our next principle.

Build Up and Link What You Learn

If all you do is read a lot and pay attention while you read, you’re already far beyond most folks in terms of learning. To some degree, you can count on the genuinely interesting and useful stuff to “just stick,” but when you really want to take your learning to the next level, it’s helpful to find ways to link the new stuff you’re learning to existing knowledge, and to build up from basic concepts to more sophisticated insights. The way to do that is through note-taking.

First, a word of caution. I mentioned above the importance of maintaining the joy of learning if you want to stick with it for the long haul. There are all kinds of very in-depth note-taking approaches you can find, and I’m going to give you a teaser of one below, with links to how to learn more if it gets your intellectual motor going. But if you’re not careful (as I have not always been careful in the past), then you might end up focusing overly much on the method and not enough on what it’s supposed to be for, and then you end up feeling like you’re giving yourself homework. A rule that we’ll discuss more when we talk about getting things done is that “consistency is more important than intensity.” The idea here is that the okay thing you stick with beats the hell out of the great thing you drop because it’s too burdensome. So, you may read about some intense note-taking approach, get excited, try to follow it, and then you realize your reading has slowed to a crawl and you’re putting it off, and eventually you drop the whole thing. You might have been better off with just taking a few notes in a notebook, or even with just reading the book cover to cover and telling a friend about it.

Okay, with that caveat out of the way, first I’m going to make a general recommendation, and then follow up with a specific implementation of it you might consider.

First, the general recommendation is this: take notes by hand, on paper. As we’ve discussed before, we like doing things the old-fashioned way around here, and this is one more example of that. Analog notes have several advantages over digital notes, even if they have some obvious disadvantages (like not being easily searchable and most of us being able to type faster than we can write). First, things that you write by hand stick in your brain better than things typed. Something about the greater effort taken in writing out weird little shapes versus directing our fingers to clickety-clack certain spots digs deeper grooves in the brain. You can even pair this with mimesis: many copywriters recommend taking the work of copywriters (or really, any kind of writer) you admire and copying out passages by hand. The greater time and effort it takes versus transcribing it (or hell, highlighting it and copy/pasting it into a file) is actually a feature rather than a bug when it comes to internalizing what the passage has to teach you. Analog notes also offer great flexibility: you can draw little diagrams, add in arrows connecting a later point to an earlier one, scratch things out without utterly deleting them (showing the steps of your understanding and thinking), readily switch back and forth between bullets, prose, quotes, doodles, or whatever other format best suits each bit that you’re learning. Lastly, analog notes are much less distracting than the devices on which we tend to type up digital notes – on a notecard, the internet is not one keyboard shortcut or finger-swipe away, so you’re more likely to get your whole thought down before going on to some shiny new thing.

Taking Analog Note-Taking to Eleven: the Zettelkasten

To do full justice to the Zettelkasten would take at least a post, but more likely a whole book (that’s the book I recommend if you do decide this is a rabbit hole you want to fall down), but I’d like to give you a small taste and a way to get started that is fully consistent with going deeper on it later (so you’re not “wasting” any work by following the below).

First off, what the heck is it? Zettelkasten is German for “Notebox” (zettel means “slip” or “note,” and kasten means “box”), and it was developed by a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann. It started getting attention once folks noticed how extremely prolific a researcher and writer he was, and a few years ago, folks started pushing a digital version of the approach, and it has taken off among the “knowledge management” community. Scott Scheper, the author of the book linked above, makes a case that I find compelling that trying to go digital undermines much of what made the system work for Luhmann, and instead recommends going full analog. I tried the digital approach and was just starting to wonder if maybe analog would work better when I found his work, and so I was pretty easily sold, and the analog approach is now what I take.

I tried writing up a “quickstart” to more or less the complete Zettelkasten approach, but I quickly found it spiraling out of control (it would have made this post half-again as long), so I’ll be cleaning that up into a separate post, but for now, here’s your “one weird trick” for taking notes on what you read and organizing them in a way that will be helpful to you, while also taking care of the first steps of something more involved later if you like.

1. Get Notecards, a Box, and Dividers: I like 4×6 for having more room to actually write notes, but some folks use 3×5. Get a box that matches their size, where you’ll be able to stand them up and flip through them along with standard alphabetical dividers of the same size as your cards. Put the dividers in your box.
2. Fill Out the Front of a “Bib Card”: We’re going to call these cards “Bib Card,” which is short for “Bibliographical Card,” because they are associated with particular books or articles. On the top of the front of the card write out the basic bibliographical information of what you’re going to read, like this: Last Name, First Name. (Year Published). Title. Publisher
3. Add a Citation to the Back: Flip over the card, and along one of the long edges (I try to use the same side that’s the top of the front) write an abbreviated version of the bibliographic info, as you’d use in a citation, like this: Last Name, First Initial. (Year Published). Then, draw a little box around it .
4. Take Notes: As you read, take notes on the back of the card by turning it 90 degrees, so the citation is now in the right top corner and perpendicular to the notes you’ll be writing (you don’t have to rotate it, but you can usually fit more notes in this way). Whenever you want to take a note, write the page number in parentheses, then your thought, as briefly as you can (this is more meant to help you remember your reaction than to be a complete record of your thinking).
5. Add the Bib Card to Your Bib Box: Once you finish the book, flip to the letter of the author’s last name and slot the card in in alphabetical-by-author order.

Closing

This post is running fairly long, and yet we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to “learning how to learn.” It’s a topic I find endlessly fascinating, so I’ve had to rein in my desire to go even more into it, but I hope that what I have shared here is useful for you. Whether you find the specific techniques or principles mentioned here useful in learning what you need to know, I at least hope I have convinced you of the value of learning, and most of all learning across multiple fields, if you want to be able to have the kind of unlooked for insights that will allow you to create value for others and so reach your goals.

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