How to Apply What You Learn
The problem of applying what you've learned isn't a uniquely ADHD problem - there's the joke that if self-help books actually worked everyone would be in shape, rich and happy.
And this applies to all of our learning from books to podcasts to videos to lectures to conversations we're having with friends. Information goes in one ear and then... well it definitely doesn't go out the other, but still, nothing really happens. We want to make these changes happen, but well, we still find ourselves doing the same old same old. And so our real question here is where is the disconnect from learning to doing - what are the stumbling blocks that are keeping us in place?
Somewhat ironically, our first stumbling block is that we're just trying to go too fast. We're not spending enough time with an idea before we're moving onto the next one. A big part of our culture now is the go go go of always doing something new and this is especially true with ADHD. I mean, why aren't we applying things, well because we didn't take the time to do it. But of course, it's more complicated than that as well, because we're also not taking the time to process what we've learned.
This part is hard. It's not always fun to slow down and apply the process - we want to see what's coming around the corner. We just want to be experiencing the things that the book promised. But our problem becomes that we don't remember what we were supposed to be doing. We don't remember that there were specific actions that we were supposed to take in chapter 1... and then we reach the end of the book and hooray, it's time to start a new book and... wait what was in that last one?
Our solution here is that we need to be taking note of the changes that we want to make happen. Now going through school I picked up that the best strategy here is to highlight in my book as I'm reading... because... I guess... highlighting means I'm paying attention? But actually highlighting is not our best strategy... at least not by itself. In fact, studies have found that studying where you are just highlighting can actually reduce your recollection of the text.
Part of the problem with highlighting is that we often don't know what the important bits are when we first read through something - and I'm sure we've all seen people who basically highlight an entire page of text because well it all looked important. Now to be fair, I still use a highlighter as I read things because it can help me identify particular things that I think are really interesting, but I also know that I'm not just going to be highlighting.
And this applies to what I'm reading online as well - I use a couple of programs in conjunction with this, the first is important most of what I read into a reader app called Instapaper - in Instapaper, I can highlight particular bits of the article. This is great on its own, but I can also get more out of these highlights with another program I use called Readwise which I can use to aggregate all my highlighting. And the great thing about Readwise is it can also import highlights from places like Medium, my Kindle, and even a new podcast player I've been trying out called Airr that lets me create audio snippets from podcasts... so basically highlights from what I was listening to. (And that podcast player was Airr (and sorry only out for iOS right now)
But as I was saying earlier, highlighting on its own isn't going to do much for us - yeah, with Readwise it's easy for me to go through and re-read my highlights, but if we really want to solidify what we've learned we've got to actually take some notes.
When we're writing our own notes about something we've learned it means that we're writing what we learned in our own words. This is a critical step because when we're able to write something in our own words it means we're starting to be able to understand it. Now, this can be a bit of an issue when we're first starting out on a subject because maybe we don't really understand the concept, but we still want to explore it more. And that's okay - go with what you've got now, plus it lets you see where you've still got questions. You'll start writing and go, "wait, does that really mean this... and how does this part work?" That's fantastic. Asking questions is an essential part of the learning process. If I've just read something new and don't have any questions it usually means that I didn't really understand what I read - not always, but it's a good indicator that I need to delve in more.
Now this is all well and good, but it doesn't matter if we're trying to read/listen/watch everything - we want to be discerning infovores.
As I've discussed in other episodes, there is simply too much content out there for us to consume it all. So part of this is just that acceptance that we're not going to get to everything and another part is being choosy about what info we're consuming - and for those of you that missed it earlier, infovores are people who have a voracious appetite for information. I feel like most of my podcast audience is going to fall into that category.
So the question is how should we be discerning? What should we choose? Well, this is a hard question, because there are a lot of angles that we could take here because there is no one right answer that is going to fit everyone. While researching this I saw an idea that we should treat the information we're consuming like food, that if we're just letting ourselves consume anything we see that's the equivalent of eating junk food. I think there is some merit to this idea, but I also know that I wouldn't have ever come across so many different ideas if I didn't let myself wander off my initial track. Part of it is that I don't always know what I want or need... but I think we can still create some metrics to help us identify the direction we want to be going. And this is simply about reducing our exposure to those lowest-hanging fruits and creating a more curated list of topics that we want to explore. For me this is about limiting the number of subreddits I'm subscribed to - it's about checking the news less often - it's about unsubscribing from the newsletters that I'm not really interested in.
But it's also about latching onto key ideas when I find them and going deep on them. On this podcast, I dive into a ton of different ideas, but I never want this podcast to be your last stop in exploring those ideas because I'm generally only giving an overview. And so when you find an idea that you really resonate with, I want you to explore it more. This will mean listening to more podcasts and reading blog posts and book so that you can create those detailed notes I was talking about. In nearly every episode I look to distill ideas down to their more component parts and combine them in various ways... but this also means everyone one of those ideas could be an episode in and of itself. I mean in the first section of this episode I talk about taking notes and that could absolutely be its own episode, but for now, it's just part of this one.
But again we've only got so much time so we have to be deliberate about what we're going deep on - with ADHD there are dozen of topics that I currently have marked to checkout, but there is no way that I can devote enough time to all of them at the same time. When we're trying to go deep on a topic we want to try and limit ourselves to one topic - sure we can also go a bit wider here and look at ancillary topics as well because that's also another way of gaining a better understanding of the topic you're looking at.
For example, just take this episode, we're looking at ways to apply our what we've learned in all sorts of different mediums, but I've already talked about a number of topics here and while we could choose to go deep on just one of those topics we're also probably going to want to look at how they connect to our other areas of interest.
Part of the reason to be discerning here is that we can't act on all the ideas we hear. I can't even act on all of the ideas I present in this podcast. Take the automation episodes I did a few months back - part of the idea for me was to create some more automations in my life. And I did, but I also presented a ton of different ways that you could create automations in your life, waaay too many to apply at one time.
That's okay. We don't want to change everything about our lives all at once - that absolutely wouldn't be sustainable. Instead, we want to focus on one change at a time. Now some of these things are going to be simple. Things that are really easy to implement -
For example,. while listening to one of the ADHD reWired Live Q&As before I joined them I remember hearing about how someone was having trouble with their kid's stuff just getting strewn everywhere when the kids came in the house. One of the suggestions was creating a landing pad for the kids to put their stuff as they came in, and specifically have actually places for the stuff to go. Like the shoes for example... shoes while shoes were supposed to go in the closet they ended up everywhere and eventually started migrating out of the closet into the hallway. This was a problem that I had at home... the kids just threw the shoes in the closet and it was a mess. And even worse than the shoes in the closet were the shoes by the backdoor. The idea was that they'd just have a pair of shoes by the door so they could slip them on before going out... in reality, the shoes were all over the floor by the door. The solution ended up just being a shoe bin for the kid's shoes. It served as both a specific place for the shoes to go and a way to keep them corralled.
Just getting a bin was a simple solution and very actionable. None the less that was one change that I took on at a time, but it only took a trip to my garage to find an unused bin to make it happen. After that, I was ready to make the next thing happen - but only after I had closed the loop of the first change. And bigger changes are going to take more time - if you're trying to start a new habit you're not going to make that happen overnight or even in a couple of weeks. That's going to take sustained effort and if you're spreading yourself thin by trying a lot of new things you're less likely to cement that new habit.
And I know, we've got ADHD, we're impulsive, we're going to want to try all the things at once. As I was saying with the Automation episodes, there were things that I wanted to try and implement. One of the things was implementing some better lighting for my office and using some automated plugs. Well, there I things I bought back in early December that I haven't tried out yet... also I got two lights set up in my office that are on smart plugs... but those are still called Christmas Tree and Christmas Lights in my automation app.
The point is it is easy to get excited about something without giving ourselves the time to make the changes happen.
And that's going back to that first point - we need to give ourselves the time to make a change happen. We need to slow down on making everything happen and focus on making fewer but more sustainable changes. It's okay that we don't have everything together all at once. It's okay for us to hear about an idea that we know would be good for us to do, but not implementing it right away or even at all. We can't do everything and we're only setting ourselves up for failure if we try.
It's important that we remember that change takes time and that we're not going to do it all at once - but this is also really hard because we get excited about things. I know I've latched onto the new shiny idea more times than I can count, and usually, when I do, those other ideas that I've been "working on" get left behind. What's usually happening is that I never gave those ideas a proper amount of attention. They were things that I was "going to do" but never got around to.
And I think this is the crux of this issue. We're moving onto the next thing before we ever get established on our "current" thing - and I'm going to be hesitant about using current here because if we're not actually dedicating time to something it's never going to get off the ground anyways. For example, I started reading this book called Storyworthy - it's about how to craft more compelling narratives from the stories in our lives. I thought it would apply some nice synergy to this podcast... but I never really got going with the book. It had some exercises that I gave a halfhearted effort at, but I didn't stick with them. And then I kind of petered out on the book, relegating it to my ever-growing pile of books I've started but have no plans on finishing. And let me be clear here, it is absolutely fine to not finish a book, sometimes they don't turn out to be what we were really looking for - but in this case, I still think this would be a good book for me to go through. But I can't pick it back up right now because I'm actually working my way through another book - that one's on taking better notes... I know I do pick the most exciting reads, except I'm a huge nerd and did legitimately get excited while reading my note-taking book.
Anyways, the point here is that grabbing the next thing before we finished the last thing creates this cycle where we're not making progress and we feel bad about what we didn't finish.
We've discussed our first step here is to try and work on just one thing at a time, but our next step is creating some accountability to finish what we've started. Think about the things in your life that you've completed - those things you saw all the way to the end? We want to take the formula from how we finished those things and apply them to what we're trying to work on now.
For me, often what led me to completing something and applying it to my life was having some sort of accountability system. Take the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups - this was a huge undertaking for me. The course is pretty intense, but I had my small accountability group with me and so I did all the exercises and I made it to all the sessions. And because I did the work I got to see the results. And I can see this in a lot of the other places - if I'm reading a book with someone or I'm taking a class with someone else I'm way more likely to get to the end. For one it's nice to have someone to discuss the material with and for another I feel like I'm letting down that other person if I don't do my part.
Compare that with my completion rate for all the various online courses I've signed up for that have no accountability and I'm way farther ahead on the things that had at least a small amount of accountability. And I want to make it clear, accountability isn't about the other person - it's about holding yourself to your word. It's about taking ownership of your action. When we have accountability in our life it helps give us the realization that we always have a choice and that there are no real "have-to's" - although there can always still be consequences. And while it seems like we should just be able to create our own accountability without having a team or a partner, it comes so much more naturally when we're working with someone else - and again, that person isn't someone who is giving us some sort of consequences, they're just there to be our sounding board. When I tell my accountability team that I didn't do something, there's no berating me, instead, we might look at the "why" behind what I didn't do. Was it because there was a problem with my plan, or maybe I just had the "I don't wanna's" - and we can work on a way that I can approach the problem differently.
For more on accountability check out episode 9 Compassionate Ass-Kicking for the Win
And really that's what change is all about - giving it the attention it deserves, creating a plan to follow through on the change, and then doing the damn thing. It sounds simple, but I know it's hard and that's okay because as Eric Tivers always says, we can do hard things.
This Episode’s Top Tips
When writing notes from books, podcasts or videos create summaries and write them down in your own words to solidify your learnings.
Be discerning about the media that your taking in so that you don't overwhelm yourself with too many topics. We can only work on a few ideas at any given time, so you've got to be choosy about what you want to work on.
Create a plan to follow through with what you're learning and use an accountability system to help you stay on track with your plan.
