Prompt Yourself

There were many ways I was a terrible student at uni

My willingness to sack off lab sessions to get an earlier train home

My ability to convince myself ‘I won’t be good at this module because I don’t find it interesting.

My eagerness to see a ‘5 Jägerbombs for £10’ as an invitation to order 40…

But by far my worst trait was my inability to learn from lectures.

I did try - but I spent most of my time in a lecture trying to write down everything that they said, in case I missed anything

And although I captured everything, I actually missed every bit of information - because I didn’t learn anything from it.

When you think about learning, it’s actually your ability to understand the information, not memorise it. And the way we do that, is by tagging it onto frames of reference we already have.

What do I know about this - and what does learning this make me think about what I already know?

The best way to learn is by being in conversation with the speaker, the podcast, the book or whatever source you’re using.

I was at an event yesterday with several amazing speakers - And I probably wrote down maybe 15 things they said all day - which sounds like I didn’t get much from it.

But what I also did was write down 64 questions throughout the day.

While AI can be useful for teaching us a completely new topic - that’s still hard. We still can’t pin it to something we know that well.

Because the areas covered yesterday were within my wheelhouse (like most learning we do, is) - I was able to learn by asking, by thinking further, and by using their key points as ‘prompts’ for my own intelligence to create questions to ask artificial intelligence

Learning is a conversation - don’t absorb like a sponge, actively ask more questions