Learning starts with desire

Learning starts with desire

link: https://www.stewfortier.com/p/learning-starts-with-desire

Excerpts

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was the Michael Jordan of learning.

For him, learning didn’t start with the teacher nor the lesson. It started with the student — specifically, the student’s desire to learn.

From his notebooks:

“Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.”

Kobe Bryant

Kobe Bryant once said you can’t improve a player by just giving them feedback on their free throw technique. Instead, you have to start somewhere else.

“What you have to do is you have to get them emotionally to want to be better. You have to get them to an emotional space where they wake up every morning driven to be the best version of themselves.”

He’d figure out which emotional buttons to press with his teammates at practice. Some players were hyper-competitive, so he’d insult them to piss them off. Others just loved the craft; for them, he’d use encouraging words.

Tying it together

No new knowledge can enter an unwilling student. To me, this has a couple of implications.

First, if we’re teaching something our first task is to get the person to want to learn.

Secondly, when we’re a student, “could I learn this?” might not be the most useful question.

Maybe it’s better to ask, “do I want to?”