The Simple Joy of Learning New Things
We should never forget that at the heart of mastery is the simple joy and fulfilment one gains from learning new things.
I take great interest in getting under the hood of the human side of things, our motivations, and the philosophy of existence, and exploring our many quirks and failings. But I must continually remind myself that the quintessence of the idea of mastery is the simple joy of learning new things.
I’ve been told in the past that I have a tendency to overthink things, and for me, that can spill over into negative rumination that takes me to dark and miserable places. I envy people with a more playful, happy-go-lucky, spontaneous personality. Those, who like kids in a sweet shop, will grab whatever is in front of them and go for it with a curious, adventurous and jovial spirit. That cheerful ‘devil may care’ appreciation of the simple wonders of life and in-the-moment joy. Instead, I tend to think things through before taking the plunge, I like to explore the why of things, and I will deliberately avoid more vivacious people who I find a little overwhelming. To my detriment, I sometimes miss the simple joys inherent in learning.
I’ve been working quite hard lately, doing lots of research and thinking as I am fleshing out some deep ideas for developing my proposed ASPIRE Mastery Coaching Model. This model will be a framework to explore the deep elements of the human experience, how we relate to the world, and how we can use the idea of mastery to point us in the direction of lifelong learning and development. This is work that I want to take pride in, and there is my own ego at play too - my ego wants to appear credible and sincere - but over the last couple of days, I realise that sense of inner joy has been quite elusive as I’ve got tangled up in the weeds of it all. Hence writing this now, and keeping it deliberately succinct, playful, and fairly surface level. A sharp reminder to myself not to lose the joy.
Sucking the joy out of learning
Look at our wider ecosystems and it’s easy to see the joy being sucked out of learning.
The workplace can often suck the simple joy out of learning. If learning becomes overly structured, or overly tied to performance, something that is only done in the allocated ‘Learning and Development’ slot, shoehorned into a busy calendar, it risks becoming a joyless chore where very little learning can take place. When we wrap SMART goals or poorly thought-out OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) around learning to make it more accountable, more results-driven and performance-driven, we risk draining the activity entirely of its natural joy.
Likewise, our institutionalised schooling systems, as I hear anecdotally from my own children, are still so overstretched, under-resourced, and so highly constrained by government curriculums, that the pure joy of learning and discovery is as elusive as it was during my days at school. We never really did listen to the witty and wise articulations of the late Sir Ken Robinson and his advice on How to Escape Education’s Death Valley. We are unable to tend to the diversity and variety of things that interest and excite young children as we push them through conformist systems that suck the curiosity, energy and joy out of learning. Children are natural learners, and curiosity is the engine of achievement, and yet our standardised systems of education, and our overemphasis on standardised testing, so readily stub out the sparks of curiosity in young minds. Instead of a culture of joyful curiosity, we have a culture of compliance in schools. No wonder my children feel as I did at school, ‘Just another brick in the wall’.
“When you’re in your Element, your sense of time changes. If you’re doing something that you love, an hour can feel like five minutes; if you are doing something that you do not, five minutes can feel like an hour.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life
The uber-motivator
So at the heart of it all, and something I must not forget, is simple human joy and fulfilment. I can get fancy with words and call it eudaimonia, I can see it as a source of existential meaning, or as answering a call to a higher purpose, but fundamentally it is simple human joy. That is what I want, and that is what I expect other people will want too. Appreciating the simple joy of learning new things is the very essence of mastery.
Strip away all of the philosophy and neuroscience of human motivation and you will find the rewards of the simple joy of learning as our uber-motivator.