Make It Your Own

How to Learn Anything You Want by Internalising That Shit Like It’s Your Childhood Trauma

BABY SHOES AND BIG ISSUES 

One of the best nuggets of writing advice that I have ever come across popped out at me from amongst a dizzying array of Pinterest text posts, and I’ve kept it in my head for years without really understanding it. It was deceptively simple - it went something like “the bigger the issue, the smaller you write”. Meaning the more profound, complex, and broad the topic you’re discussing, the tinier the detail you need to hone in on, in order to make this big complex thing land properly with your audience. The original poster went on to give an example of a writer writing a scene about the aftermath of a city bombing. Instead of writing about the horrors of war (large, abstract), you write about the abandoned baby shoes you see poking out beneath a mountain of rubble (small detail, brings this massive abstract topic down to the level of the individual person). 

Now, reading this, you might have the same visceral reaction I did back then when I first came across it - it makes sense, intuitively. You can feel the impact of talking about the baby shoes instead of talking about the politics behind the war. You can see how it’s much more emotive to show the reader, at least implicitly, a broken family. A shoeless child, walking around in a city of rubble. But why does it work? What makes this good advice? Why do I understand it only now, after carrying it around for years in my head without truly being able to appreciate it? More on that later. First, let’s talk about my GCSE History exam.

WHY YOU DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING YOU WERE TAUGHT IN SCHOOL

So, my GCSE History exam. I don’t remember much about it, but I can tell you that it would have been essay-based. I would have been given a set of essay questions, allowed to choose one, and left to crack on with it. Not particularly exciting. What is exciting is what I do remember about my GCSE History exam. Specifically, what I remember about the practice essays we wrote in class, in the months leading up to the exam. We did a lot of those, but the final one before the exam is the one I remember most clearly. I don’t remember what I wrote about, but I remember my teacher’s comment on the paper. I remember vividly seeing, written in his messy, scrawled handwriting, in red ink, on the front page of my essay right next to whatever grade he gave me for it: “You can do this. I believe in you.” 

Now that, I remember.

That’s an emotional memory that is completely unique to me, and it reminds me that someone whose job it was to teach me things once thought i was smart and capable - a fact I’ve fallen back on many times in the years since, when my self doubt has tried to make me believe I am in fact stupid and incapable. 

That little emotional anecdote, that personal relatable story - that’s what we call a hook, in the world of writing and storytelling. James Clear, a very successful blogger, advises that every article a blogger writes should open with a hook like this - a short, relatable anecdote that serves to draw the reader in and to give them an emotional reason to stay on the page - to keep reading. The hook is crucial to remembering information, because it’s the equivalent of the teacher who believes in you, or the one who makes their lessons genuinely interesting, or the one who knows just how to frame the importance of knowing all the different ways to construct a question in French, to make you want to learn them. 

The hook is an invitation- it’s the large white rabbit holding a pocket watch and making his way down his rabbit hole - he isn’t pulling you down there with him, but he’s intriguing you enough that you want to follow. You take the journey because you want to. 

Most of our schooling, unfortunately, does not do this. With the exception of a few particularly dedicated and skilled teachers, most educators fail to provide any hooks for their students to latch onto, meaning students never end up wanting to learn the material they are being presented with. So they never actually learn it. There is simply no emotional resonance between the student and the material they are being taught. The successful students mostly just do a good job of memorising the right facts and problem-solving processes long enough to get them through the exams. I did well in Maths, but I couldn’t tell you what the quadratic formula is now, nor could I tell you why any of us should care.

OLD-TIMEY BLACKSMITHS

Formal education wasn’t always devoid of hooks. I believe that back in the day, when the only accessible way to train in a field of expertise was to apprentice under a master of the craft, apprentices were creating their own hooks all the time. This is because if they didn’t make hooks, they didn’t learn their craft. And unlike the modern school system, where it’s pretty easy to float through without ever learning anything, a blacksmith’s apprentice in Ancient Rome couldn’t really have bullshitted their way through making, say, a shield. Their faulty understanding of their craft would have been discovered pretty quickly, like when all their customers died of stab wounds, for example. 

So the blacksmith’s apprentice had to become adequately emotionally attached to the quality of their work, quickly and effectively - because if they didn’t, people died. So their master, the blacksmith, had to create some emotional resonance (or point out the existing high stakes) around the bronze plating so that their apprentice could remember the plating process and make shields that protected people and not end up an unemployed failed blacksmith’s apprentice - because then, they probably would have died. 

Now, this emotional link they had to create was their hook - their invitation that said, “Hey, you might want to learn this. No pressure, but if you’re interested, follow me down this rabbit hole.” The stakes were naturally high, so nothing had to be fabricated here - people’s safety was already tied to the apprentice doing a good job with the bronze plating. It’s worth noting, though, that the hook could have been as simple as “do this properly or you’ll be un-apprenticed and no one will ever teach you anything or look after you ever again.” If it worked, it worked. 

WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH LEARNING THINGS BY INTERNALISING THEM LIKE MY CHILDHOOD TRAUMA?

So here’s the thing. In most applications of learning nowadays, we don’t have masters to teach us our crafts. So we need to take ownership of our own hooks. We need to create our own emotional resonance for the things we want to learn. We are the apprentice, but for the most part, no one is showing us how the world works and making an effort to make it make sense to us. Formal education is mass produced and the hooks are non-existent. We’re expected to just care about high-level physics, even though, until Christopher Nolan did it, no one took the time to explain to us the emotional importance of this intense science as it relates to, say, one of the most horrific single events in history. Scratch that. We’re supposed to be able to learn these difficult things without caring about them at all. 

This is also why many of us prefer learning through documentaries and novels rather than through textbooks. The arts acknowledge our emotions and treat us like human beings. The textbooks see us more like computers - something they can input information into to achieve a desired result. They’re trying to get the job done, but they don’t care about the substance behind it.

It’s the emotions surrounding an event or topic that internalise it in our minds. If you want to learn how to cook a beautiful meal, it’s all well and good to watch the YouTube tutorial or read the recipe, but that’s not really going to give you any lasting knowledge. Watch your love’s face light up when you recreate their favourite childhood meal, and savour that feeling. Then you’ll never forget that recipe, ever. It’ll be etched into your heart, right next to the face of the teacher who believed in you, and the kid who made you feel worthless on the playground - it’s all there, the good and the bad, adding its own colour to everything you do. If you want to learn anything, you have to find a way to care about it. Make it yours. Then let those new colours bleed into your life and become part of you.

Many thanks to Camilo Moreno-Salamanca for helping me edit this piece.