According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, to learn is to “gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in something by study, experience, or being taught.” It sounds obvious enough. Yet, hidden somewhere in that definition is something we tend to forget: before acquiring anything, you have to accept that you do not have it yet. Before becoming good at something, you have to be bad at it. Before knowing, you have to not know.

You have to become a student.

#1 Be a student before learning anything.

We have all been students, in schools, at one point or another. We were put in classrooms, bought backpacks, chose an ink pen, and labelled notebooks before even stepping into our first lesson.

In this sense, school was sanctuarised as the foundational, and apparently only, space in which we could be students.

In reality, we have spent our entire lives being students.

Long before anyone handed us a timetable, we had to learn how to crawl, how to walk, how to talk, how to hold a spoon without dropping its content all over ourselves. As babies, we existed in the humbling position of knowing almost nothing about the world and being completely unashamed of it.

A baby does not fall while learning to walk and decide that walking simply isn’t for them.

Somewhere along the way however, ignorance becomes embarrassing. We grow older and become increasingly attached to appearing as though we know what we are doing. We start avoiding questions whose answers we think we should already know. We become frustrated when we are immediately bad at something. We confuse being a beginner with being incapable.

Yet being a student is fundamental to being human. It is in all of us to not know, to try, to fail, to try differently, and to keep going.

Learning requires returning willingly to that position.

Become a student in your own way. You do not need a classroom, a teacher, or even a particularly respectable subject. You can be a student of Russian literature, bread-making, astronomy, chess openings, bird calls, Ancient Greek, or the precise art of keeping a basil plant alive.

Just wear the shoes of a student wherever you go.

Love to be one.

#2 Do not only love what you learn. Love how you learn it.

Now that you are a student, think back to the time when you were officially one.

Think about primary school. Think about the most memorable classes you had later on. Picture the rooms.

Maybe there were posters covering the walls. Maybe your teacher was funny, strange, impossibly passionate about whatever, or capable of making fifty-five minutes disappear without you noticing. Maybe you remember the particular light coming through the windows more clearly than anything they actually taught you.

We often think we love a subject when, sometimes, what we first loved was the feeling of learning it.

Trust me when I say this is something worth recreating.

Find ways of doing difficult things that challenge you while still making you feel warm. There is sometimes a strange moral seriousness attached to learning, as though suffering through a process makes the knowledge acquired more legitimate. It doesn’t.

Comfort does not have to mean laziness. Pleasure does not have to mean distraction. If anything, enjoying the conditions in which you learn makes returning to them significantly easier.

You will not always love what you have to learn. You can however build a way of learning that you want to come back to.

Love everything about how you learn.

#3 Make what you are learning impossible to escape.

Repetition is key, but repetition does not have to mean sitting at a desk and writing the same sentence thirty times.

Glue sticky notes throughout your room. Make something your phone wallpaper. Put books where you will trip over them. If you use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack (*wink*), or any other algorithm designed to understand you frighteningly well, make it useful.

Create an account dedicated entirely to whatever you are trying to learn. Follow people who know more than you. Let yourself fall into obscure Wikipedia holes. Replace some of your mindless scrolling with slightly more educational mindless scrolling.

I find there is something wonderful that happens when you immerse yourself deeply enough in a subject : the world starts mentioning it back to you.

Learn a new word and suddenly everyone seems to be using it. Study an obscure historical event and find it referenced three days later in a film. Learn to recognise a particular architectural style and discover that you have walked past examples of it every day for years.

For obvious reasons the world has not changed.

You have.

You have acquired the ability to notice something that was always there.

This is probably one of my favourite things about learning. Knowledge makes the world larger. The more you know, the more there is to see.

So surround yourself with whatever you want to learn until curiosity becomes automatic. It is already fundamentally in you.

Love how consistent you are.

#4 You cannot master anything in a few minutes, and that is okay.

This one is personally my biggest struggle.

I have a tendency to give up on things when I realise I am not immediately good at them. There is something deeply irritating about having a clear image of how good you could be at something while your actual abilities stubbornly refuse to catch up.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you there is a shortcut around being mediocre for a while.

So give yourself grace about not being the best.

You know more than you did yesterday. You know considerably more than you did a month ago. Progress is often difficult to see because you experience yourself continuously. You rarely notice yourself becoming better while it is happening.

This is why comparison can be so destructive to learning.

You might see someone playing a piece beautifully on the piano and compare their performance to your third lesson. You can hear someone speaking effortlessly in a language you started learning two months ago. You read someone else’s finished novel while staring at the terrible first line of your first draft of your first poem.

You compare their evidence of time with your evidence of beginning.

Learning is not a performance.

You do not have to constantly prove that you are improving. You have to improve, and some things can simply take time.

There is dignity in being bad at something and returning to it anyway.

Instead of constantly looking at how far ahead everyone else appears to be, occasionally turn around. Look at the distance behind you.

Love to look at how far you’ve come.

#5 Build a community.

In the digital age, I promise you that if you search long enough you will discover that you are never the only human being on Earth trying to learn a dead language, tie a knot using only your pinky, identify mushrooms, memorise every capital city, or understand why sea lions can reach speeds of nearly 30 mph in the ocean.

Someone else is interested. Find them.

There is a romantic, almost aesthetic image of learning as something solitary. We picture someone alone in a library, surrounded by way too many books. But picturing brilliance as solitary or worse, silent, will not et you very far.

Knowledge has always travelled between people.

We learn because someone explains something badly, then someone else explains it better. We learn because somebody asks a question we had never thought to ask. We argue. We lend books to each other. We correct each other. We send someone a eighteen-minute video with the ‘you NEED to watch this’ text, and wait impatiently for their response. Even teaching someone what you have just learned forces you to understand it differently.

You do not necessarily need someone learning at exactly the same pace as you. Find people who know much more. Find people who know much less. Find people who are simply as excited as you are.

There is something particularly beautiful about caring about something alongside other people. Curiosity is fundamentally contagious.

Love the people you learn with.

Perhaps, then, becoming a better learner has less to do with becoming better at absorbing information than we think.

Maybe it is about becoming comfortable with ignorance.

There will always be another language you cannot speak. Another historical figure you know embarrassingly little about. Another book you have not read, another trick you cannot do, another person who knows infinitely more than you about something you thought you understood.

You will never catch up. And I really do think that’s wonderful.

There is a strange pressure to eventually become an expert, as though the student is merely an unfinished version of the person they are supposed to become. We spend our childhoods waiting to know enough. We imagine adulthood as some distant country where everyone finally understands taxes, politics, love, wine, philosophy, and what all the symbols on a washing machine mean.

I turned 18 three days ago so now I can confidently say that when we arrive, we discover that everyone is still learning. I can confidently say that I am not confident about anything I have ever learned.

Perhaps the goal for anyone was never to graduate from being a student.

Perhaps the best thing you can do is remain one deliberately.

Keep asking questions whose answers everyone else seems to know. Be embarrassingly enthusiastic. Change your mind when you learn something new. Become obsessed with subjects that have absolutely no practical use. Let yourself be terrible at things. Sit in the metaphorical front row. Fill the margins. Raise your hand more firmly than everyone else. That’s when you reach higher. There is more in this world to know than you could learn in a thousand lifetimes.

How lucky we are to never run out.

Love that you will always have something left to learn.

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