Let's face it, you can read up and study a subject all you want, and you can learn a great deal, but eventually you'll come to a stand still in your learning process unless you start to APPLY what you have learned.
Say you've been studying gardening. You may have the necessary growing season, seed depth at planting, and preferred lighting of every plant memorized, but that still won't net you any tomatoes.
There comes a point when your learning will only advance when you take ACTION!
When you start applying your education to actual doing, you begin to develop another critical learning tool. Experience. The immediate benefit, of course, is that you'll start to see the things you've learned play out right in front of you. You won't have to accept that learning on faith anymore. Through experience, you gain a knowledge for yourself.
Experience undoubtedly leads to mistakes, but even they are great for learning. Keep track of how you do things so that when mistakes do happen you'll have some information ready to help you analyze them. Often, analyzing what went wrong leads to new ideas of how to make things work better.
Applied action also helps you to better understand the expert advice you have sought out and are gaining from others. Now, as you still seek that expert advice, you will be asking more informed and detailed questions. This is the time having a mentor or expert contact can be the most beneficial. Instead of talking abstractly, you can now discuss specific situations and details.
Learning by doing creates better reinforcement in the mind. It adds the next dimension necessary to move yourself up from being educated to being skilled.
Learning NEVER takes place on a straight line either. The more you learn, the more you realize there are many more questions yet unanswered. This leads you into more discussion, including related topics, and also creates a better overall learning experience in the long run.
The next part in this series gets into the more technical issues of learning from yourself and creating new ideas that go beyond what you have been taught.
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