☜ How to learn ☞

To learn is to experience.
Don't put labels on things.
Experience them as they are.


Longer form, at appropriate level of details, by your request ;) :
1) To learn is to experience.
It means that you need to experience the thing to understand it.

You may object that learning can be done through many media such as reading, hearing, watching, analyzing, imaging, not just experience the thing first-hand.
Reply: They are forms of sensing the thing, thus experience it. The more forms (of the thing) we can leverage, the better understanding of the thing. Some forms are easier to gasp than the others (e.g: touching it vs reading about its surface) since they are closer to the way we present the thing in our mind than the others. But, they all have the same goal of updating our imagination about the thing.

You may ask: Then, what is the best way to experience the thing if we cannot have first-hand experience on it (in school, in stories...)?
Answer: Use your imagination based on some facts about it, since imagination is the product of our mind about the thing. Then, welcome new facts that challenge the imagination, so the imagination can be closer to the truth, so is our mind.

2) Don't put labels on things. Experience them as they are.
It means that labels can harm our understanding since they hinder our desire to experience the things.
For example: There are infinite forms of a cup, but they have the same name: cup. By labeling something as a cup, we have reduced our imagination about the thing to just the finite number of cup examples we've experienced.

Image what happens if we don't say a cup is a cup: People will want to experience it, and expand their imagination about the thing: What shape is this? Why it seems to be made from glass but soft to the touch? What kind of glass is this, that it changes the shape slightly when I squeeze it long enough? And why it's so sturdy that it breaks my hammer, not otherwise? You can see: None of them are about holding water, maybe that's the least important idea about it.

A story: I once told my new boss, who is old and experienced, a story about my workplace. Just 1 - 2 sentences into the story, he put a label on it: Oh, it's [something I don't remember]. And I stopped telling right there. By labeling it, he didn't have the chance to experience it, just wanted to attach to his old experience, thinking he knew it all, and ended the story. The label was not entirely correct too.

--Vinh