This is going to be a brief introduction to how we learn and how you can get better at what you are dong, regardless of what it is that you are doing.

There are two main components that constitute to knowledge – experiences and theory. These are the building blocks of intelligence. If you have the experience but not the knowledge – then you will have a hard time identifying proper actions to take in order to gain the results you want. You may be naturally good at something, but you will not be able to teach it to others – let alone improve yourself. If you have knowledge but not experience – then you will be uncertain of your knowledge because you will not be able to back it all up with experience. When you combine the two though – that’s when you gain real intelligence.

Experience

We are all experiencial beings and we learn primarily from our experience. Your experience is your ‘truth’ that you live because you will usually feel quite certain and confident of the things that you have personally experienced. Even the learning process is an experience in itself.

Experience builds your perception and your beliefs. If you didn’t have any of your senses then you would likely not have any sense of reality at all. You simply wouldn’t have any material to work on when it comes to extracting knowledge and no sound raw materials to exercise your creativity upon. Everything we ever create in the real world is a composition of all the experiences that we have been exposed to during our lifetime. Creativity is the ability to piece together previous experiences in order to create something that has never been created before.

Experience is basically a sequence of impressions that that are etched upon your mind. Your mind is like a photofilm that absorbs all the experiences that come in contact with your nervous system through all of your senses. Much like the light particles permanently change the chemical composition of a photofilm, all sensory impressions permanently change the composition of your mind. And as you gain more experience, you will see more patterns that connect different parts of your experience together. You will thus have a much richer understanding of your reality.

As you live your life, you are narually exposing yourself to experience – regardless of what it is that you spend your time doing. This experience is full of patterns that can help you get better at doing the things that you do. Even when you are relaxing on your couch, you are having an experience – although it might take place within your mind. You might have a meditative experience of great value to you – but you are still experiencing something. Sitting and doing nothing is not a very rich experience though, with very few useful patterns to extract valuable knowledge from. However if you go to a party and practice your seduction skills then you suddenly have a far richer experience with many more patterns that you can use and apply in the future.

Theory

Your experiences are the raw building blocks of your reality. The way you interpret reality is determined by the patterns which have previously learned from previous experience. These patterns give you a high level and more abstract understanding of your reality. For instance, a great deal of philosophical knowledge is aimed at identifying these high level patterns so that you can see your life experience from a bird’s eye view – allowing you to better chart your course through life.

Theoretical knowledge teaches you the relationships between your actions and their effects within your experience. Often we might have a certain effect in our lives, but be completely clueless as to what it was that we did that has led to that event. You might in fact be repeating the same mistakes over and over again simply because you don’t see the pattern. And you will likely never see the pattern clearly enough to make any signifficant changes, unless you have had this same pattern repeat itself several times in your life.

Theory enforces your faith in yourself and your actions. Faith is your ability to have complete trust in the soundness of the patters you know. Your faith is gained from theoretical knowledge backed up by experience. When you are acting with faith, it means that you are acting in accordance with patterns you already know. You don’t even have to have experienced these patterns before – that’s whats cool about faith. If you know a pattern and you believe it to be true, then you will apply it and likely get a similar result as someone else who have applied the same pattern before.

Predicting The Future

Theoretical knowledge of the patterns that exist within your accumulated experience, allows you to more accurately predict future effects of your current actions. There is virtually no limit to the amount of patterns that you can identify within your experience. You can not see them all at once though because some of the bigger patterns consist of many smaller patterns that you have to learn first. Everybody needs to start somewhere.

When you learn a pattern, you will naturally see it more often in your reality and thus be able to more accurately predict future events. What you will be doing is basically extrapolating one or more patterns into the future in order to ‘see’ the events ahead based on the actions that you are willing to take. You may not always be right, but as the number of patterns in your knowledge base grows – your level of accuracy will increase.

In order for your predictions to be accurate, you need to have access to more patterns that you can apply in order to contstruct your plans. And the only way to gain such patterns is through knowledge and experience. You gain knowledge through other people and experience by doing the things you want to get better at. There is no other way. This is why we can’t cheat the concept of time. If you are doing one thing and you have someone else who have been doing the same thing and learning in similar way to the way in which you learn, but during a longer period of time than yourself, then the other person will invariably be much more skilled at the task than you are. So in order to get better at a faster pace, one must dedicate maximum amount of time to gaining knowledge and experience.

Failure vs Success

There is no failure in my reality – there is merely experience – and all experience is neutral. I don’t always get the result that I have intended and I do my own share of mistakes. However, for me, every experience has something valuable in it – a pattern to learn. The pattern might not be apparent right now, but as similar experiences repeat themselves over a longer period of time, the patterns behind them become more clearly identifiable. What success really means is getting what we want – and we do this by learning patterns and applying them.

Failure is basically when your anticipated course of events turns out to be false. You have made an error in judgement because your patterns are not accurate enough. You have made a mind map of possible events based on the patterns you already know and somewhere along the way an unexpected variable crept into this system. A variable that you don’t know how to handle – because you don’t know which pattern to apply. This simply means that you need to learn more patterns and gain more experience to back up these patterns with.

There is no single ‘right way’ to go about doing things. The right way is your way. As long as you are gaining experience and learning new patterns, you will be slowly but steadily moving closer and closer to getting the results you want. And at a certain point, when you have learned all the necessary patterns, getting the desired results will be a natural consequence of your actions. There is nothing overly magical about it. It’s how we learn and get better at what we are doing. But you need to have a desire to learn and a desire to get better in order for this concept to work.