Learning and Motivation: Learning Is a Dialogue

Question Of The Day: What Is the First Phase of Learning?

---

For a very long time, I believed that the first phase of learning was membaca. but lately, I’ve started to rethink this. Lately I’ve been feeling really lazy about reading, and I have a love/hate relationship with books. on the one hand, I feel guilty because it seems like I’m not making any progress. but on the other hand, I quickly get tired and bored when reading. it feels like my energy suddenly runs out as soon as I start reading.

That’s why lately I’ve often found myself wondering if maybe my principle was wrong from the start. reading is not the first phase of learning. here I’ll try to unpack my thoughts. hopefully they’ll also become clearer for you, the reader.

Here’s the thing: everything we do must have some motivation behind it, whatever that motivation may be. even when we watch Netflix, we have a motivation, right? maybe we need something to pass the time or relieve boredom, or we can’t stop thinking about the storyline of a series we’re following (and perhaps we initially started following that series to relieve boredom too).

If everything requires motivation, then learning requires motivation too. the problem is that not every motivation is powerful enough to help us achieve something meaningful.

For example, when we watch Netflix just to pass the time, we probably won’t really focus on understanding the plot of the movie/series we’re watching. it’s different when we watch because we’re curious and then find ourselves interested in the story. if we asked two people with those different motivations to retell or write a synopsis of the movie, which one do you think would write the better synopsis?

So, motivation has different levels too.

Reflecting on it a little, I used to be able to read very diligently because, admittedly, one of my subconscious motivations was that I had responsibilities in an organization that required me to know certain things, so I at least wouldn’t embarrass myself in the position I held. Then, when I first decided to drop out of college, I was also able to diligently read programming books because my subconscious motivation was that I literally needed it to live comfortably. Because I knew I was only a high school graduate—how could I live comfortably if I didn’t sharpen my skills? So it turns out I’m not as much of a lifelong learner as I thought. and perhaps I’m not as curious as I thought either. because apparently, deep down, curiosity wasn’t what made me learn.

The problem now is that the two things that triggered my drive to learn are no longer relevant to my life. I’m no longer involved in an organization, and I already have a fairly secure and stable career. maybe someday, when my skills start becoming irrelevant to the industry (for example, when the web development landscape changes drastically, like if there’s a new standard programming language), I’ll be able to go all-out learning again.

I’m grateful that my instinct to live comfortably is strong enough that, at certain times, I can push myself to learn far more than other people. But I feel I can’t rely solely on instinct to level up from where I am now. I need consistency to keep learning and to create other motivations for learning.

So I started searching for things that could motivate me to learn. or, more fundamentally, how we can motivate ourselves to do something. then, by questioning that, I started learning and reading about learning and motivation. it is a little strange, learning how to get motivated to learn.

But it was precisely while reading those articles that I realized something. I wasn’t reading them randomly or out of nowhere. I was reading articles (or perhaps books later) because I had a question I wanted to answer. that means there’s a phase before reading in the learning process. that phase is “having a question”. in this case, my question was “how do I get motivated to learn?” which led me to learn what motivation is and why humans can be motivated.

Come to think of it, starting with a question really does make everything personal. Suppose we’re wondering or curious about a movie, perhaps after reading its synopsis or hearing a snippet of the story from a friend. we’ll feel more focused while watching it and understanding the story.

So maybe a truly sustainable learning pattern is one built around dialogue. having a dialogue with ourselves, creating a feedback loop between questions and answers.

And when we want to feel motivated to learn, perhaps the best thing to do is make a list of questions and keep asking until we become experts. here’s an example of a feedback loop when we want to learn how to build a website:

mungkin diawali dengan kita bertanya "bagaimana cara membuat website"
kita akan menemukan bahwa website dibuat dengan HTML/CSS/JS.
kemudian akan muncul pertanyaan apa itu HTML, apa itu CSS, apa itu JS ?
kemudian ketika bisa membuat website di laptop kita akan bertanya "Bagaimana supaya website kita dapat di lihat orang lain?"
dan seterusnya.

But sometimes, knowing “what the next question is” is the hard part. when we can no longer come up with new questions, that’s when we get stuck. and maybe the solution isn’t to keep reading random things, but to think about what else we can ask based on the knowledge we already have. or perhaps to read, but not theory—instead, to read the situation by following trends, whether through articles, what’s trending on Instagram, reflection, or whatever else. maybe it’s through this process of reading the situation that we can come up with new questions.

In closing, Keep asking questions, keep learning.