Detours to Learning: Mimicking vs Mastering

We go through various stages of our lives believing that we’ve gathered an abundance of knowledge. And although that may be true, this ‘knowledge’ usually takes the form of random pieces of information gathered from literature, lectures, and media.

I used to sit in class and remember feeling envious of the people around me, often younger, being able to spout off every war that’s happened in the past hundred years. I took this enigma of information as quick wit and brazen intelligence.

Now, what I recall from most of my education is a form of learning that more resembles mimicking, as opposed to mastering. I say this because I’ve always had a hard time genuinely transferring the ‘knowledge’ I gained from my undergrad onto my resume for relevant positions.

So what’s the difference between mimicking a skill as opposed to mastering it?

Well mimicking, as it implies, it’s as if you’re copying an action to get a result. Imagine you’re learning how to perform an amputation. From the video, you see a surgeon carefully mark up the area slightly above the patient’s knee, make a thin slice, and then proceed to gnaw through the leg (sorry for the bloody visual). You believe that by mimicking the action, you will thereby, achieve the same result (a clean amputation). Now, what happens when you attempt to amputate a human leg from one video? You can guess the rest.

Now let’s say you’re trying to master the procedure of amputation. You might first spend time studying the human body, including all the ligaments, bones, and nerves. Then you might practice the technique over and over again on a dummy until you feel confident. You will also study the human body’s response to shock, and therefore, prescribe the right type of anesthetic.

I would argue we go through a majority of our education mimicking our knowledge from cramming textbooks and not actually getting into the state of deep learning. What else is unfortunate is that instead of allowing students to go into more depth on a subject, our education system is designed to have students disperse their attention across multiple classes (sometimes totally bogus filler classes) to design a “well-rounded academic.” 

If you really want to master a subject, you’re forced to do it on your own time. Take being an athlete in school. You must train for the sport early in the morning or late in the evening, day in and day out without complaint. Whereas, that Calculus I course you have to pass as a prerequisite, it’s a one-shot deal. You study hard for three months and you’re (hopefully) done.

I used to hold so much esteem for my degree and education, but after getting into the ‘real world’,  I realized that much of my learning up to this point has merely been an appetizer. I can longer hide in the safe bubble in which being a student afforded me, but I truly believe now in being a student of life, except you must also become your own teacher.

If you truly desire to go from a place of mimicking to the mastery of skills, you need to become disciplined in deep learning. Now studying is absolutely not obsolete, but it is only a prerequisite. The important thing is that you experiment and apply what you learn to real-life situations. It’s only through an application that you’re able to test reactions and outcomes and make adjustments as needed.

You can read all day about how to be a good “occupation” but if you don’t start acting in ways that reflect the responsibilities of the job, you’re never going to become what you want to become.

You can attend as many seminars as you want or read as many books on leadership or sales, but if you never start trying to influence the people around you, you’re not a real leader or a salesperson.

Why Most People Prefer Mimicking

Simply put, you can mimic most things—even personality traits. In order to appease certain people and institutional standards, we tend to mimic what they want from us, in order to pass through to the next step or get what we want in the short term. How many of us have felt astutely uncomfortable during interviews or even dates. It feels uncomfortable because we’re always trying to “optimize” and tailor ourselves to fit the ideals of others, rather than genuinely be ourselves. We think that by being a certain way we will magically be the best fit for the job or the potential ‘mate’.

If you’re naturally anti-social, you can read literature on how to be incredibly persuasive, people pleasing, and charismatic and win over people temporarily. But if you don’t truly adjust your own destructive behavior from the core, or want to, eventually people will find out that it’s an act.

Most people prefer mimicking because it’s the more comfortable route. It’s easier to memorize and recite something once, instead of taking three months to deeply learn something. It’s easy to copy an action, rather than actually change and adopt it. 

The Simplest Way to Move Towards Deeper Learning

Start asking questions. Not those same questions you rack up in your brain for participation marks, but questions you genuinely have. When you start diving deeper into a subject, a lot of questions may arise. If you disagree with the main view, even better.

Now of course it’s easy to glide through life with no obstacles at all. Sometimes when we have questions that we don’t have the answers to, it provides a sense of obstruction.

But you have to remember that in order for deep learning to occur we have to come across challenges. We have to work our way through them until we’re able to carve out another viable pathway, which leads to the solution. When we create the pathway on our own, it’s a sign that we are entering the territory of deep learning.

The Benefits (and uncomfortable truth) of Mastery

Mastery is quite a paradoxical term because rarely do masters of a subject refer to themselves as such. To get to a place of mastery almost seems like an endless marathon. Because you’re always trying to get better than you were yesterday. Why do you think Olympians don’t stop after one gold medal?

There’s no proper metric for mastery either. But the benefits of even infringing on this level of aptitude are colossal.

The number one benefit of mastery is efficiency. The second value. The skill or action it precedes would take most people a significant amount of time to do; whereas for the master, it would take a fraction of the time to do even better. When you’re a master of something, your accuracy rate is high, and your expense is most of the time lower. 

It doesn’t hurt to gain mastery of a subject because you can always teach others this skill to further elevate your value. In my last post, I mentioned the benefits of moving away from the producer category to the leadership category, which you might find helpful.

Now the con of mastery is that rarely do number #1s like losing their spots or titles. We can make an argument that Tiger Woods is a master of golf, but to him, it’s no longer about mastery, it’s about winning or retaining his title as the world’s best golfer.

There’s a difference between mastery and being the best that often very highly skilled people have a hard time grasping. They may have already mastered a skill, but in their minds, they can’t afford to stop improving or someone out there will claim their spot. For an extreme example, look at the WWE. By no means is constant improvement a bad thing, but it also means you’re locked into something for life. The reasoning behind this might be because a person’s belief around their identity has morphed into the subject they’re keen on mastering. The other is sunk costs. If you’ve spent ten years training as an athlete, it’s hard to change into a different occupation because you feel like you sacrificed so much time for that. This is why sometimes sports injuries can be devastating for athletes, not just on a financial level, but it’s a blow to everything they know.

Conclusion

The essence of mastery is that you’re not copying someone’s roadmap, but instead you’re forging your own paths and techniques on how to learn a given subject. It’s a far cry from mimicking patterns or someone else’s behavior that can be useful in the beginning or help you pass some tests, but is not necessarily conducive to deep learning.

Deep learning is not the same as autopilot. You can get to an autopilot state by mimicking a behavior repeatedly. But rather, deep learning involves a more complex understanding of a subject.

Because you understand the intricacies of a subject, you’re better equipped to find solutions to some of the problems people encounter, as well, as build on top of the existing repertoire of information to come up with new inventions in your field.