Let’s begin with defining what mindless learning is. For this blog, I’ll say that it is learning for the sake of completion rather than acquiring a new skill or perspective. The problem with focusing on finishing a task, rather than actually learning from it, is that you are left with nothing but the empty claim “I have completed this course, degree, certificate, etc.” What people often miss is that such claims are heuristics to indicating that you hold a certain skills or knowledge in a subject. The hope is that, by going through a course or degree, you have either implicitly or explicitly acquired the important bits from them. Thus, the course itself is not what’s important, but what you take with you afterwards.

Every student has completed a course only to forget everything once the final is submitted. This become an issue when it occurs for more often than not. People have become very good at completing tasks but not good at retaining the value from them. This is why we often hear things such as degrees have become useless. A degree in itself is useless. You can easily coast through it without learning a single thing. It’s what you make of it that is important. The valuable thing about universities is that they provide excellent environments for you to grow both personally and intellectually. If you knew yourself well enough to not need to be guided by an institution, then of course going to a university would be a waste of time. However, you’d need a lot of introspection to achieve that, which brings us to our topic.

Discover how you think

Understanding how you think is understanding the environment and type of knowledge that you need in order to learn effectively. If you’re like me, you’ll need to adopt thought processes from more experienced people, and how they use information to extrapolate onto new ideas. Others may best learn by doing. Seeing the process occur in front of them and coming up with their own mental model. They observe and refine it as they go.

The importance of knowing how you think is that it will help you seek the right resources and the right patterns throughout your learning. For example, whenever I get something wrong in an assessment, I review what was going through my head that lead me to the wrong answer and compare it the thought process of the instructor and how they reached the correct answer. Along the way, I discover what heuristics I rely on when problem-solving, when they actually serve me and when they lead me astray.

Visualize, pictorially or not

Knowing how you tend to organize information in your mind will help you know when you’ve reached a point where you truly do understand the topic at hand. This is often what I refer to as having a mental model on the subject. I need not to literally visualize it in my head the same as I would a picture of something. Sometimes, it can be as simple as a list of steps that you take to reach from the starting state to the end state. For example, I usually know when I have a question down, whether it be to code a data-structure or solve a floating point number conversion, when I’m able to see the steps that I have to take from the very beginning till the very end where I have derived my answer. Take the time to really discern when you feel like you really know a topic versus when topics feel a little fuzzy.