Learning to Learn

One of the goals of going to any school, it seems, is to learn. Funny that there aren't any classes on learning.

My introduction to learning about learning came from private one-on-one instruction while taking music lessons at 10 years old. I think music lessons are worthwhile for any child, not only for the learning of music, but simply for the one-on-one instruction that comes with it. It's almost impossible to avoid the topic of learning in private music lessons.

The next time I thought about learning wasn't until long after college, when I read "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey. This was the first book to introduce to me the idea there might be a "natural learning process"; just as humans have natural language, we might also have a natural way that we learn. Though I found the book interesting, I ultimately became distracted by other things and didn't think very hard about this subject for a while.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to save time. This has ultimately led me to trying to discover how to learn things faster. Which has led me back to Gallwey's book. It's time to read it again and seek out other books like it – since I plan to learn for the rest of my life, learning how to learn might be a worthwhile investment.

I wonder if there are other things I plan to do for the rest of my life that I haven't studied in great detail. Oh well – time to go to the grocery store.