This article is inspired from a MOOC course – "Mindshift".

I am going to tell you why we shall be a mindset-grown, and how this could improve our learning.

I came from an Asia country, where there is an old proverb in our culture: “you should sharpen knifes before chop wood. “ Learn-how-to-learn is our sharp knife for anyone who would like to learn either new skills, society or technique knowledge. By the latest neuroscience research findings, we know how our brain work: either in focus mode or diffuse mode. This means to better utilize learning methods we shall swtich between concentrating and flowing mind, that is, thinking nothing at all. We also need to clear many bias about study, build new learning strategies and utilize some tools. If you are like me, born with curiosity of unknowns, or are under the pressures of challenged, fast changing era, or just want to make good use of spare time to improve self, you will be happy and surprised of what you can get from when you mindshift.

It is not easy to learn something new, especially those skills require a lot time and practices. I treat myself as a slow learner, used to getting frustrated and depressed when I saw someone could quickly bring up answers, but I couldn’t even completely figure out the question. The fact is, there are different types of learners: some fast as a race car, and some slow as a hiker. Slow learners might not sound smart, not cool, but they have some advantages. They take time and pay more attention and in many cases would find details that those fast ones miss. Being slow gives us more time to think diversely, reflect and correct our own mistakes before going a wrong direction too further. While in the contrary, fast learners are not easy to see or commit their mistakes when they are wrong. Instead, they could prone to deny, ignore or even try to find anything to support themselves.

Not like what we commonly thought, being a slow learner is not a terrible thing. My learning style teaches me being humbled, accurate and patient when learning new things. This helps me become more confident to have my own learning and working pace and become a deeply smart employee.

For those who just left school or being ready to walk in career market, my second advice is balancing your passions and realities. The instructor Barbara Oakley uses her own stories telling us, it might be difficult and awkward to find a proper-salaried job if only with passions but ignore the reality. She also uses a lot famous successful persons’ examples to tell us to be a pi-person, instead of a traditional “T”person. This means we need to be educated and have one core skill, but we would be better survived if also have one supplementary skill. A person who has cross-areas knowledges,  multi skills can be called a candidate with complex and systematical ability, which is more competitive in workplaces.

My experience is, it is nothing wrong to follow passions. But passion is very personal specific, valuable and sometime also fragile. A workplace in the real world is very complex, it is more than just to“head down in work”, but also includes regular documenting, status reporting, meetings, coordinating and many other things non-passion related at all. Plus the common thoughts of value are different from individual thoughts of value. When we didn’t receive the reward as we expected how much our passion and dream valued, we might even get bogged into self-doubt and drop up our passion.

All these would damage our passions if we simply think a job shall 100% equal to colorful young children’s dreams. A balance between reality and passion is not to compromise but to protect our valuable passions. This is also one of reasons to continue learning, we shall not combat or counteract to reality but learn to get skilled to utilize reality. This also helps us to work and live more smoothly in this anxious, competitive but also tedious real world.

This leads to my last piece of advice. Not all jobs are dull or would destroy our passions. Environment is very important but likely being ignored, just as fishes never feel water around them while live in it their whole life. What makes us is not only what we learnt, experienced as individual, but the people around us and the place we live and working. Positive, agile and studious friends and colleagues bring us open fresh ideas, tolerant and fearless environment that will help us to improve. While in a noisy, lousy, disordered atmosphere, we can’t be concentrated, neither study or work deeply.

Invest yourself, change your mind, you will find learning is fun and Mindshift is the begin.