Anatomy of Aha! Moments

I have come to define a aha! moment as an insight, a moment during which you suddenly realize something, you make a connection between something you knew and something new.  The key, as in any learning,isthat it is new to you.  A aha! moment is a personal insight.

After much consideration and one key aha! moment, I've decided to keep this blog going primarily as a reflection of work-in-progress or a venue for working out loud.  Except that these expressions, with the word "work" in them, do not really apply to what I am doing here.  I shall call it "learning in progress" and "learning out loud."

This particular decision came slowly but was consolidated as a result of reading a LinkedIn post about whether it was better to post on LinkedIn vs. a company blog. While technically,this is now a company blog (Fillip Consulting,LLC), the company is me and it will likely always be a "personal blog" in that sense.  As a result of some reflection based on that LinkedIn post, I realized that I could and probably should keep this blog for more regular, somewhat half-baked insights and ideas, and if/when I come up with something worth more attention,I could always post it on LinkedIn in or attempt guest blogging.  There is a great deal of value to half-baked insights and ideas. Capture them somewhere!  You never know what other half-baked insight will collide with them and inspire you.

Let's consolidate this approach by sharing a couple of aha! moments from yesterday:

To Study and to Learn
The question "How do you study?" is not the same as "How do you learn?"  It is not the same for two reasons:  1) you can study efficiently for a test and forget almost everything soon thereafter, resulting in very little long-term learning.  That's what cramming is all about; 2) When we talk about lifelong learning, or workplace learning, informal learning, or learning by doing, we are not talking about "studying", we are talking about a more organic form of learning [I'm not sure "organic" is the right word here]. It is that form of learning I am most interest in understanding better. 

Paradox of Knowing

I am most inclined to write about whatever it is that I am currently exploring and learning about.  It's much more exciting. The neurons are connecting.  I can almost feel the electricity.  When I try to write about things I (think I) know well, it feels boring and totally uninteresting.  Mature connections in the brain don't feel that exciting.  So,the excitement comes from learning,not knowing.  The good news is that the more you know the more you can connect new things to that knowledge.  The more you know the more you can learn.