Capitalize on learning by retrieval
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever — Mahatma Gandhi.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said you would never grow unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered. He meant that one should keep learning throughout your life to develop. Learning is not an easy process, even though most people who peddle advice on the internet make it seem so. There are countless blogs and articles on sites that talk about how to learn. Let me make this clear; this article is not one of them. This article instead focuses briefly on retrieving the knowledge possessed. Popular to contrary opinion, retrieval is more critical than learning via re-reading.
Growing up in India, I remember this story from the Mahabharatha about Karna, an accomplished warrior of extraordinary abilities. But his teacher cursed him that he would forget all the skills he had learned and his knowledge would fail him in the moment of need. In short, he will not be able to retrieve the information he possesses, and it, for some reason, stuck with me through all these years. Everyone in this world has had moments when they have not been able to recall things — be it a person’s name that you met the other day, a term for an exam, and so on.
There are three stages of learning — encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding is the process of…
