A Prolific Learning Principle: Adapt as Needed

Adapt What You are Doing as Necessary

As you progress, you will need to change what you are doing. What was is enjoyable and effective at one point in your progress won’t be at another stage of your progress.

You need to be conscious that at various points in your progress you will need to change what you are doing. What works well for you as a beginner will likely not work well once you have advanced skills. What would work for an advanced learner will likely not work for a beginner. You need to learn to evaluate if what you are doing is indeed enjoyable and is indeed effective for your stage of progress.

One of the hardest aspects of prolific learning is knowing when to adapt and change what you are doing and when to stick with something longer. Sometimes if you are not making much progress, you need to keep pushing and working at what you are doing. Sometimes if you are not making much progress, it is a sign you need to change what you are doing. As you gain experience in prolific learning, you will learn when to stick with something and when to change. If you need to change what you are doing, pushing harder won’t help much. If you need to push harder for awhile, constantly changing what you are doing won’t help much.

It is normal to hit plateaus in your progress. There are often three reasons why we hit plateaus. The first is that we are not putting in enough time and effort. The remedy of course is simply putting in more time and effort. The second reason is that we need to change the method and approach we are using. As we progress and grow, we will often need to add new methods and practices to what we are doing. Some methods and approaches will help us grow for awhile but lose their effectiveness as we progress. We then need new methods and approaches to continue our progress. The third reason is that we are slowly building up the strength, background, and skills to make a jump forward. We might not be seeing much progress, but we are indeed setting the stage for a jump forward. In this case, we simply need to be patient and keep at what we are doing.

I simply don’t have any specific rules or recipes to offer with regard to knowing when to adapt and change. I’ve picked up a few guidelines I tend to follow with regard to this. The first is measuring my attitude. If I am not relaxed, relatively stress-free, and enjoying what I am doing, I realize something needs to change. Stress and frustration does two negative things. They reduce my brain’s ability to learn and my motivation and my enjoyment of what I’m doing decreases. The second is seeing a change in my rate of progress. If I have been making consistent progress for a length of time and that progress starts to tail off, I probably need to start changing something. These are two easier situations to identify. I either stop liking what I’m doing or I stop making progress. These are indicators it’s time for a new method or approach of some sort.

One of the challenges is identifying when a plateau is because we are slowly getting ready for a jump. Here is an example of what I mean. When I was learning to play guitar, I wanted to play bar chords. These require you to hold down all the strings with your index finger. I tried on and off to learn how to play them and never could. I finally decided to stick with it. I’d try to practice them for a few minutes at a time when I was playing. After a few weeks, I suddenly went from not being able to play them to being able to play them. In hindsight, my fingers hadn’t been strong enough to hold them. By putting in effort every day trying to play them, my fingers were slowly getting stronger. Finally, one day they were simply strong enough to hold bar chords properly. Had I given up, I couldn’t play bar chords today. This was a situation where hanging in there was producing progress I could not see. In contrast, I spent many years using poor methods for foreign language learning that were never going to produce skills. I had to change what I was doing to make any progress at all.

As you gain experience using the other principles of prolific learning, you will start to get a much better sense of what is enjoyable and effective for you. This will start to give you a better sense of when something is not enjoyable or not effective. As you get a better sense of what is working and what is not working, you develop a better sense of when you need to adapt and change what you are doing.