Embedded in every post is something profound. The process has already begun. You are already in it. How exciting!
Remember, you must think about what you are reading and generate insights. Don’t forget!
You may have noticed how much time we are spending on the process of learning. Anyone who understands the human condition knows how important this is. There are so many barriers people have to learning, and so we must always focus on teachability. It is the only way you will have a shot at absorbing the information you need to create the life you desire. The ability to unlearn is just as important as being able to learn because from time to time we become filled up with information and so there is no room for more.
You should absolutely love this conversation. You can create great things in your life just with the information you have already been given but you may not realize it yet. You should be excited about this information because this is the good stuff. You may be starting to feel full or impatient or overwhelmed. If this is the case, just acknowledge it and take a breath. You must learn to empty your mental cup so that you can pour more knowledge into it. You must learn to trust a process. This process works and you can do it if you are willing to generate yourself as teachable and apply your insights right now.
Next, we ought to have a conversation about the way in which the learning of principles and axioms will occur for you. I already told you that your path to true success is all about building and strengthening your foundation of principles and axioms but let’s consider what that actually looks like in your life.
Linear vs. Non-Linear Learning
Most people are used to a process called linear learning. Linear learning is important. If we want to be able to read a novel, we must first learn the letters of the alphabet. Once we have mastered this, we can move on to learning individual words and then learn to read and construct sentences. We don’t need to go back and keep focusing on learning our letters because that learning is complete. You are not going to forget what the letter B is, so you simply move on to learning the next thing in the linear sequence. As I said, this kind of learning is important. However, creating the life that you truly desire and becoming the master of your own destiny requires a different relationship to learning. An understanding and application of non-linear learning is necessary.
Let me give you a simple way to think about it. See if you can abstract the true meaning of the example I am about to give you.
Imagine you are reading a book about how to create success in your life. Any one chapter, let’s say chapter 2, may cause you to have some new thoughts and insights that are important to you right now in your life. As you continue to read, moving on to chapter 3, 4 and 5 you will continue to have new thoughts and insights. In linear learning, the material in chapter 5 is a logical conclusion to the first four chapters. However, in non-linear learning, once you have read the material in chapter 5 and have had new thoughts and ideas, you may now return to chapter 2 the very next day to have brand new insights and realizations. The new ideas that you came to in chapter 5 can unlock new ideas about the information in chapter 2 that you did not grasp the first time you read it. Then, once you have re-read chapter 2, the new ideas and insights you gain from reading chapter 2 again will unlock new insights in chapter 5 or chapter 7 or chapter 8 and so on. When you understand this phenomenon, you come to an understanding that you are never done with the information. Instead, you are deepening your understanding of the information and how all the principles and axioms relate to each other, and your own life experiences.
In addition to this, whenever you reread any part of a book in a new unit of time, you will be a different person. You will have a different perspective. You will be in a different head space. You will be in a different mood and you will have had different experiences in your life to which you will be able to relate the information. If you read the book again in one year, it will certainly occur to you as an entirely new book. Because you have changed, your experience of the exact same text will have changed. Its meaning will have evolved for you.
When thinking about the book in a linear way, you may think that since you have read half the book that you now know half of the information. However, from a non-linear viewpoint, a person who has read the entire book 15 times may only have understood one one-thousandth of the information in the book while someone else who has only read one sentence of the book may have gained more insight in a single reading. This is not an exaggeration. The readiness and willingness of the student is crucial in non-linear learning, which is why I have emphasized the importance of actively reading and participating in the process of reading in the previous posts.
There is an enormous difference between reading a book to get it done and studying a book to master, absorb, and integrate its knowledge into your being. The return you get on reading and studying an axiom-rich book (or blog in this case) over and over again is infinite. Finishing the book is not the end goal. The end goal is to know the information inside and out, back and forth and side to side. The goal is to master the information. It has been said that mastery is the difference between doing something because you know it and being something because you are it. Mastery is when you go beyond using the information to the point where the information uses you, because you have fully integrated the information into you such that it is a part of you. If at first you don’t like learning this way, do it anyway and eventually you will find the joy in it as you see the difference it makes in your life and the way it elevates your experience of yourself.
If a very successful person writes a book, assuming they actually wrote the book and not a ghost-writer, it is likely that they will have deliberately chosen every word of every sentence to accurately convey their intended meaning. They will have spent a lifetime absorbing information they have learned from their own mentors, books they have read, and events they have attended. If they have used this information to create success in their lives, they will have developed a system of thoughts and ideas that caused or enabled them to create that success in their lives. Their goal in writing a book will likely be to take this elaborate system of thought patterns in their own mind and put them into a book for you to absorb. Reading the book of someone whose success you would like to emulate is a powerful process. Until you can regurgitate the entire book word for word (which will never happen) you always stand to get new insights from that book… so keep reading.