How to Apply the Knowledge that You’ve Learned
Knowledge is power. It is highly unlikely that you haven’t heard it before. But what if we told you that the modern world of the internet has robbed the wisdom out of the statement? Knowledge certainly used to be power. But then this world introduced to the internet. With Google at everyone’s disposal, gaining a sufficient amount of knowledge about pretty much anything and everything isn’t an issue anymore. Some would call it a blessing while others may even think of it as a curse. But wait, how can the provision of information be cursed for anyone? The simplest of the answer is because the knowledge gained is of no use unless you know who to apply what you have learned in real-life scenarios.
Failure to find a balance between learning and applying is a matter of concern for all of us. Thanks to the internet, knowledge is always available at our disposal. This is what makes it fascinating to keep on learning things, something new, something exciting, something curiosity invoking, each and every single day. But it doesn’t do us any good since we fail to find sufficient opportunities to apply what we have learned. As a fair estimate, it won’t be wrong to state that of everything that we learn through the course of our lives, we hardly get to apply more than 20% of it.
If you have are currently facing this dilemma, you are not new to the associated frustration. Taking this into consideration, we have taken the liberty of highlighting the top strategies which can help you find the balance between learning and applying. It is time for you to transform your knowledge from passive into active and see for yourself the difference that it creates in your life. Without further ado, let’s take a closer at our list of tips for the aforementioned purpose.
Pre-define Your Resources
Here’s the problem. The internet provides you a myriad of resources that you can make use of in order to learn something. Say, for instance, you want to learn about fixing your car’s engine that has been making weird noises lately. A simple search on Google will put literally hundreds of pages on your screen all of which are talking about the ways to fix a similar noise that is coming from your car’s engine. What’s more, is that the information you are receiving is not being provided in a single format. It is catered to your individual requirements. If you are more interested in textual information and find it easier to learn from it, you can find various web pages which provide information in the form of articles. If it is the visual content that is more appealing for you, there’s Youtube at your disposal.
A simple solution to finding the balance between learning and applying is to limit the resources from which you intend to get the information. For instance, of the thousands of Youtube channels which are focused on delivering content related to your car’s engine, you can choose a single one and stick to the information that you find from there. This will enable you to free a considerable amount of time that you can utilize on actually applying whatever bits and pieces of information do you get to learn off the internet. Instead of scrolling through hundreds of channels, building upon your theoretical knowledge and never finding the time to actually apply any of it, limiting your resources can help a great deal in balancing the learning and the application of what’s been learned.
Dedicate Your Time For Application
Dedicating time to apply whatever it is that you have learned is a tried and tested strategy to activating all the knowledge that you have accumulated inside your brain. For instance, if you are a blogger, it is given that reading about tens of social marketing strategies aren’t going to help you in getting more traffic or making your content go viral on the internet. Therefore, a practical solution is to confine the learning to a single strategy per day while the rest of the time is spent on actually applying the strategy that you have learned that day.
By dedicating time for application of the knowledge that you have gained, you would be able to get a better understanding of its outcome. You will familiarize yourself with the possible challenges and also a way around it. Once you start to apply the information that you have, you get to see how the process of implementation can be optimized to get the maximum and the most favorable outcome out of it. This is especially crucial since things barely work in exactly the way as told in the books. In order to be an expert at anything at all, therefore, it is important to have hands-on experience.
Why Do You Want To Learn?
There is no argument over the fact that the simplest way to finding the balance between learning and applying is to reverse the process. It usually comes naturally to all of us to first focus on learning and then only pay any attention to finding an opportunity to what has been learned. But have you ever tried focusing on the application first and determining what you need to learn on the basis of what you are required to apply? This will require you to have a deeper understanding of why you are learning whatever it is that you are learning.
For instance, you can spend months on learning Adobe Photoshop with hopes that someday at work, you’d be able to apply it. On the other hand, you have recently gotten a job as a Data Analyst in a multinational company. You know that the statistical software is certainly going to come in handy throughout your career. You are already an expert at SPSS, but wouldn’t it help if you started learning the other relevant software as well like STATA. That way, you would know the very reason why you are learning it and considering the nature of your job, you will be faced with sufficient opportunities to apply your learned knowledge on day to day basis.
Take It Slow
Last but not least, a common issue that people experience while attempting to find a balance between learning and application is the failure to properly multitask. Remember that it is not a matter of guilt or embarrassment if you find it hard for yourself to focus on learning as well as applying at the same time. People are different. Some are good with multitasking while others need to focus on one thing at a time. If you find yourself in the latter category, it is recommended to take your time with each of the steps. Rather than giving both a go simultaneously, you can choose to spend some time entirely dedicated to learning and then quit learning and dedicate all of your time into applying what you have learned so far.
For instance, imagine that you are determined to learn a new programming language. If it’s hard for you to multitask, you can dedicate a week entirely into learning the syntax and the fundamentals of programming in that language, while the next week can entirely be dedicated to applying your learned knowledge and trying to write a code, a program, an application, or a software in the newly learned programming language. This is effective since, through the week of application, you are essentially getting to revise everything that you have learned as well which helps a great deal in improving the information retention over a long period of time.
All in all, commitment is the key for this strategy to be effective. Once you are done with the learning phase and have entered the application phase, you must put the books aside and close the learning resources to remove the noise to make sure that your entire focus and attention is on the application of the learned knowledge.
Final Note
Knowledge can certainly give a charming touch to your personality. But it is only effective in doing so if it is active and not passively lying in some empty compartment of your brain. What’s more, is that it is humanly not possible to retain the information forever unless it is applied. So you can invest all the time into learning every possible thing that there’s to learn about a particular subject and it will still manage to slip out of your mind if you fail to provide the opportunities for its application. Remember that time when you graduated and felt like knowing nothing that you studied through the four years of your degree? It was primarily because the system put all of its efforts into providing quality information to you but never focused on its application that eventually made the knowledge fade away. As such, finding the balance between learning and applying is the very solution that can reform our education system for the good as well.
Bonus Video
