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I observe a lot of things which seems analogous to – ‘feel entitled to pick the low hanging fruits but get frustrated a lot when there is hard work involved in picking the remaining fruits’. Growing distractions & instant gratifications have begun to tune us into thinking that if we are destined to land far and high and need to just get the right thing happening. Social media is also only a window of the highlights, nobody puts their tough paths to success thus creating frustration and envy.

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

If we look at some of the ads in the newspaper and tv, especially the weight loss related ones; they play according to the weakness of the people who want to get fit and look great but don’t want to eat right, exercise right and sleep well. A lot of people fall for it, for the promise of getting a lot for doing nothing.

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Of course there are few entitled individuals who have a lot due to inheritance, but that is a small number. For a majority of us who have a success story to tell, the path would have always been tough. There is no overnight success, it takes time; we should put in our due efforts.

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I came across this sentence ‘Regression towards the mean’ in the book ‘The drunkard’s walk’. It means that if something bad, unusual or extraordinary happens then it mostly followed by an average acceptable one. It mentions that people are often fooled by this phenomenon, it gives a false sense of control over situations and outcomes. People think that rebuking someone for bad behaviour results in good behaviour, but according to statistics acceptable behaviour always follows bad behaviour irrespective of getting yelled at or not.

A flight instructor’s example is given, the flight instructor thinks that yelling at a pilot making a serious mistakes makes them fly the plane better next time and praising a pilot for a good flight results in a mediocre flight next time; so the instructors resort to only yelling and no praise, but studies show that irrespective of an instructor’s reaction the behaviour of the pilots always fluctuated, a good one was followed by an average one and a bad one was also followed by an average one.

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This shows that we should learn to respond to situations than react to it, if there is something not acceptable it is better to express the impact on us and leave it, than to do something to make sure the person repents for the mistake. It is a tough habit to leave as rebuking and a good behaviour following is very much a positive reinforcement, but if achieved it creates a good atmosphere to allow natural fluctuations take its course without worrying too much about it.

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Knowledge of group learners grows multifold than lone learners. This is understood by many college students where group study is common. I as a student, part of a group, divided subjects among ourselves, study the reading materials, understand it, condense it and present it back to the group. In this way every one understood the crux of what is to be learnt in a short amount of time. Somewhere I read ‘the moment we get a job, we stop learning’. That is because, learning is a conscious activity and when we don’t learn together, it becomes too tough to continue learning and many just don’t learn anymore.

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Majority of the books have some fluff, it is to comply with the publisher’s mandate for the thickness of the book to justify a price. It is difficult to sift through the pages and mine the wisdom we want from it. It takes time  and speed reading is not easy for a lot of people. In a group setting it is ideal to read a book, summarise the learnings and present it back to the group either as a summary or the application of the learnings. If it evokes enough curiosity, then people will make some time to read it in detail.

The above applies to videos, courses and any other learning form or material. What about the blogs, they are short, can we just forward the links? There are lots of ways in which we receive links; twitter, hacker news, reddit so on. If we merely forward the links that interests us to our groups, it has no bigger impact than people who have already subscribed to the feeds. What will be beneficial to people who receive our link would be, a short description of what it is, how did I apply (or can apply), why this would be beneficial, next steps if possible.

By making it easy for people to understand many topics in a condensed form, we improve the breadth of the knowledge of the whole group. If anyone is curious then they can deep dive for the depth in a particular subject. It is impossible to get out of date in a group that is continuously learning.

Birds that flock, seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly

Learning together requires effort, it won’t happen if we don’t do it consciously.