How I Learn

A lot of people seem to approach all kinds of learning with the same strategy they picked up in school: extract the essential information, memorize facts, formulas, and frameworks, and then apply them wherever needed.

That kind of declarative, cognitive learning works well in a lot of areas. But for the most important things in life, like your worldview, your sense of self, and the way you interpret people and situations, the things that shape how you move through life, seem to require a completely different kind of learning: affective, somatic, lived. (and these are, of course, the very things schools have zero interest in teaching, for some weird reason)

I keep hearing people say, “I don’t want to read the whole book, just give me the main points.” They go for summaries, skim articles, look for shortcuts, conflating knowing the core ideas with actually absorbing and internalizing them.

For me, that’s not how it works, especially when it comes to things like growth, awareness, and how I live.

I’m very clear that it’s not enough to know something intellectually. I’ve "known" certain things for years before they actually clicked and became internalized.

Learning, for me, is less about collecting facts and more about prolonged exposure to a specific mindset. It’s about adopting certain frames of mind, trying them on for weeks or months or years, and letting them shape me, or rather, unlock the parts of me that feel most like me. I feel like we already have all the content we need. What we lack are the ways to actually internalize it.

And if I don’t stay with a frame long enough, apply it, live through it, feel it in my body, the insights don’t stick. They stay abstract, disconnected and eventually forgotten.

I sometimes read entire books that don’t introduce anything dramatically new. Most of it is material I’ve known for years, just reframed slightly differently. But I still find value in it. While I’m reading or listening to it, the book keeps it's frame alive. And as I move through the world, it seeps into how I notice things, how I make decisions, how I relate to others.

It’s a bit like putting on new clothes, wearing them for a while, and watching how my vibe changes.

The same goes for my writing. I don’t see it as a way of delivering groundbreaking new information. It’s more like expressing a certain vibe or frame, hoping someone might resonate with it, try it on, and maybe discover something in themselves along the way.

I’ve also noticed that some people are walking encyclopedias. They can quote endless books, podcasts, theories, and concepts. But when I talk to them, I don’t really feel like those ideas are embodied. I’m thinking of someone specific... we can talk about all these topics, and he’ll have way more references and names than I do, but I don’t get the sense that he truly knows what he's talking about on a felt level.

On the other hand, there are people who may not talk about these things, they might not even have a conceptual framework for what they’re living, but just by observing them, you can tell they carry a lot of embodied wisdom.

I’m the type who can finish a book and barely recall a single quote an hour later. I rarely retain any explicit “knowledge.” But these books still somehow help me subtly shift the frames through which I see the world.

For me, that’s what learning feels like. But because of this way of learning, a lot of the “knowing” I carry feels intuitive, and hard to explain to people who haven’t internalized the same frames. It’s not that I’m hiding my reasoning, it’s that my learning doesn’t happen in a school-like way. I don’t stack formulas and axioms on top of each other.

This kind of experiential knowing feels fragile when exposed to debate culture or purely rational argument, because those modes rely on explicit logic, not lived experience. But that doesn’t make it weaker. It’s just a different kind of knowing.

Some of the deepest emotional, perceptual transformations and changes in how I live didn’t come from being convinced by reasoned argument. They came from something subtle but powerful shifting through immersion and repeated lived experience.

One of the reasons I write is to learn how to put into words the things I’ve internalized, but trying to explain that kind of knowing is like trying to describe the taste of a fruit to someone who’s never eaten it.

Maybe the best I can do is offer the scent, and hope it draws someone closer.