Learning is a continuous activity.
Here at Wealthy Affiliate, we have access to boatloads of resources that we probably wouldn’t be able to finish in our lifetime.
But there’s a challenge: Not everything we learn we can remember.
One solution is to focus on active learning.
Passive learning is the lighter equivalent of active learning, which I believe plays an important role for continuous growth.
The key is in striking the balance between the two.
A Mix of Passive and Active?
Passive learning is when you’re simply receiving information from a material, like when you read the course lesson or watch a video inside Wealthy Affiliate. It can also be when you read a book or listen to a podcast or watching a demonstration (like how to do pushups).
Active learning, on the other hand, is when you go beyond just receiving the information and are actively engaging in the material. If the course lesson tells you to search for 10 low-hanging fruit keywords on Jaaxy, you don’t just read and skip the task. You go straight to Jaaxy and run the keyword search until you find 10 keywords.
Passive learning is important because it’s much easier to do and you can even have fun with it, enabling you to sustain the task for hours, therefore giving you more exposure. With more exposure, you’ll be able to dip your toes into any new information and explore what’s out there.
But when it comes to building expertise and deep knowledge, active learning trumps over passive by a huge margin. In this mode of learning, you pay close attention to the learning material and think of ways to use the newly-acquired knowledge.
The downside of passive learning is that it’s simply ineffective, whereas active learning demands a lot of cognitive resources and can easily be exhausting for the learner.
So as you can see, the upsides and downsides of both learning modes balance each other out!
Is it then possible to strike a “balance” between active and passive learning?
In my opinion, I believe it can be done.
The way I see it, the demand between the two modes of learning constantly change with time. As a WA member who’s starting an online business, perhaps you could use more active learning as you need to “take action” on the training.
But if you need ways to diversify in strategy, going passive learning with exploring new topics can be beneficial. This is what I plan to do if I need to start marketing on YouTube, I would start to passively learn YouTube then actively implement once I’m ready to go deep.
My Activity & Action Plan
My current mode at the moment is more active learning than passive learning.
All I’m doing to convert my passive learning into active learning is to simply perform a recall after consuming the material. This requires some mindfulness to consciously do, which is why I’m not able to do it all the time.
I finish an Expert Class, then ask “What did I just watch?” I would then recall what was discussed and if I succeed in recalling, that means I learned something from the video.
There are more ways to do active learning, but that’s how I minimally perform it.
I would have to be careful not to get too addicted with passive exposure both for my target niche and my business.
Okay that’s all for now.
Good day everyone,