Encouraging Random Learning

Pursuing random learning has benefits that formal, prescribed learning methods can’t offer. Supplement your formal learning with random learning.

What I read: “Active vs. Passive Learning” by Morgan Housel.

I have attempted to learn using many methods. Much of my self-education journey resulted in my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling (paid link), Over time, I’ve discovered that most of my learning takes place in a random manner.

In Morgan Housel’s excellent post, he defines active learning as being when “someone tells you what to learn, how to learn it, on a set schedule, on pre-selected standardized topics.” He uses the term “passive learning” to reference what I call random learning.

You let your mind wander with no intended destination. You read and learn broadly, talk to people from various backgrounds, and stumble haphazardly across topics you had never considered but spark your curiosity, often because it’s the topic you happen to need at that specific time of your life.

I can’t be alone in realizing that most of what I’ve learned in life has come from passive learning.

No, Mr. Housel, you are definitely not alone. Author James Marcus Bach wrote, “Most of my learning is a side effect,” and that describes much of my learning too. I’m an avid random learner.

For a long time, I’ve contended that we should resist the dominance of the industrial model of education, sometimes referred to as formal (active) education.

The modern formal school system is indeed an industrial model of education. As Dale J. Stephens says, “In the nineteenth century, American schools were modeled on the Prussian school system, which was explicitly designed to create factory workers and docile subjects. Government officials like Horace Mann traveled to Prussia to learn about the system and bring it back to the United States. The model was adopted in Massachusetts and quickly spread throughout the country, where it remains the basis of much of our educational system.”

If you wholeheartedly embrace the industrial model of education without including some random learning, I suggest you won’t fully embrace your uniqueness. You’re not likely to have as much joy in your learning if it’s all formal. Your education, like everything you pursue, must be undertaken to maximize your individuality, not minimize it as the industrial model will continually try to do. Housel offers this.

Doing something your way, on your own terms, because it fits your unique personality, is night and day compared with performing for someone else’s expectations.

It’s fun to poke around various places to see what you can learn. There are times learning that has a specific objective makes sense to pursue, but sometimes (most of the time for me) random learning suits my learning needs better.

Housel offers two specific suggestions.

1. Don’t contain your learning to your own profession or major. Read and learn as broadly as possible.

2. Give employees time to think. Give yourself time to ponder.

Obviously, the second suggestion pertains to work environments and is specific to mangers and team leaders who can carve out random learning time for their employees so they will do better work when “given time to think, learn, ponder, discuss, and let their minds roam.”

We often get stuck in a learning rut. We investigate only those few subject areas in which we have significant interest. That’s logical and as it should be most of the time. However, there is tremendous power in random learning.

Random learning forces us out of our subject area comfort zones. It brings us to information and ideas we might not encounter otherwise. This broadens our horizons and keeps us open-minded.

Stumbling upon interesting facts and ideas stimulates our thinking. We never know when something will act as the catalyst for a deeper understanding of a topic or a completely new path of learning or endeavor that we might not have anticipated.

All knowledge is interconnected on some level. So, when you expose yourself to random learning there’s a good chance you’ll identify those connections in ways you would not have otherwise. That sort of holistic educational approach allows us to find more ways to interconnect our knowledge and thus make it more useful in our daily lives.

Designer, programmer, information architect, and consultant Dorian Taylor suggested to Kio Stark another way to look at random learning, which is not really random, but it's certainly not structured.

Unless the steps to gaining comprehension are well understood, like learning a musical instrument, or sport, or a topic so heavily trafficked that an elementary textbook can be written about it, the process is literally – as in it exhibits an identical behavior to – a scavenger hunt.

Bach offers another great effect of random learning, something he calls “The Principle of Peripheral Wisdom.” His principle suggests that “...most of what we learn is a side effect of something else we were trying to do. This principle works because the experience of living doesn’t just teach lessons, it teaches many lessons simultaneously. Reality demonstrates itself in manifold ways every moment, like radio waves passing through a receiver whether or not that receiver is tuned in. What learning we gather is limited only by our imagination and motivation. The more skilled I am at analyzing my experiences and recognizing lessons, the more I can gain from anything that occurs. Sometimes I even seek experiences specifically because they are likely to be rich with useful, unplanned peripheral lessons.”

Give random learning a try. However, the truth is we all learn randomly every day even if we're not overtly aware of it.

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