Learn Like a Baby: Five Lessons in Natural Learning

We live in an age where people try hard to maximize their learning so they can stay relevant in the job market. At this very moment, thousands of ambitious minds are searching the web for information on how to learn effectively.

The irony is that learning is what we've been doing since we were babies. From the moment we were born, we unconsciously started a lifelong process of learning.

Even though babies are like blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled with information, they still offer us a lesson in the purest forms of learning. Let's look at what we can learn from them.

Watch

"Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing." – Bill Cosby

Watching is essential to learning. Seeing someone do something and then doing it yourself is a form of learning as old as the dawn itself. When a baby looks intently at something it hasn't seen before, you can see the focus and effort it puts into understanding it and observing how it behaves. With time, the baby starts putting into practice what it has seen.

With new technology, learning by watching has been taken to new heights. Recorded university lectures, such as MIT's, have become very popular online, as have computer tutorials. It's such a good way to learn that this site has an entire section dedicated to math video lectures. If nothing else, watching is a good start and will give you an intuition for what lies ahead. If video tutorials haven't been part of your learning so far, I sincerely suggest you give them a try.

Listen

"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again." – André Gide

Listening is the second way babies learn. As mentioned before, a baby is like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be filled with information. We should never stop being a blank sheet of paper, but as adults we have the luxury of looking more closely at what we hear and deciding whether to erase it from our sheets.

Surround yourself with positive and enthusiastic people, and you'll learn more than you ever thought possible, just by listening.

Ask

"He who asks is stupid for a second; he who doesn't ask is stupid forever." – Unknown

My little cousin once asked me if there were two moons. I told him no, there's only one moon, and asked why he thought there were two. He said it was because there's one moon that's only half and one moon that's full. Kids keep asking, and so should we. Don't let society tell you what's OK to ask and what's not.

To take in information from other people, it's also crucial to keep an open mind and a willingness to learn.

I once went to a seminar to see the world-famous James Randi. He told a joke about how PhD graduates know everything except how to say the words "I don't know." The moral of the story is that to learn from other people, we must stay humble and not think we're superior to anyone just because we have a piece of paper that says we have this or that education. We should be especially careful not to dismiss what our parents tell us.

Ask people, and learn from them.

Try new things

"Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have." – Unknown

Have you ever wondered why babies put things in their mouths? It's because they want to learn. In fact, the whole reason babies play is to learn and explore new things. I'm not suggesting you start putting things in your mouth like a baby, but don't be scared of exploring new things in life. Don't get stuck in your old ways. Get out of your comfort zone; that's the only way we grow as people.

Do what you're passionate about

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion." – Friedrich Hebbel

When babies play, they play with what they want to play with. When a baby gets tired of a toy, it simply puts it away. In the same way, we shouldn't force ourselves to do things we aren't passionate about, because that slows our learning.

Hard work is the essence of all great accomplishments. If you don't have a spark for what you're trying to learn, you won't put in the hard work, and your results are doomed to be feeble as well.

Be a baby, my friend. For more on how we learn, read about the learning process.