UNLEARNING IS THE REAL ART OF LEARNING

To know how to learn, you must learn how to unlearn first.

Overview

Un-learning means quickly adapting to a new world by getting rid of old concepts. It is more relevant to your professional career and personal growth. The older beliefs about the world are no longer useful as we can distinguish millennials from the 70s and 80s have different definitions of interpersonal skills and communication than the z and x gen of today’s time.  

If one were to apply old theories and principles in today’s innovative time, it is doomed to fail. Unlearning is leaning towards futuristic thinking by getting rid of old and redundant concepts. Success is based on modern-day information and not what lies behind in history. History is a great place to introspect our moral wisdom but not the perfect time to go back and start living in it.

Main Body

Learning is a life-long process. Each event in life has something to teach us. It is the real process of human intellectual evolution from the deep darkness to the 21st century’s greatest internet revolution. Based on previous data, we humans analyze and take the actions that will determine our future. 

Some of us would succeed while many don’t. Success will bring us humility and inspiration to move forward in the same direction whereas failure offers us an opportunity to learn, improvise, and move ahead. See, there’s always an active learning process involved in every circumstance.

But what if I told you that people who are successful in their lives, it’s because they have this unique ability to unlearn quickly before they learn new things.

Didn’t get my point?

Don’t worry, I got your back!

Pandora Box for thoughts

Consider this box as a thought box in which you have collected all the thoughts ever since you grew up. Human thoughts are always in clutter shape. You can see positive signs inside the Pandora box because over time as we grew up, we focused on collecting new thoughts in the form of stories and myths. 

Still today, we collect the thoughts either from random Facebook posts or any other source. What is more than surprising here is that this box doesn’t have any filter. It means everything we learned and listened to; has been collected inside this box. The box is powerful, thoughts and perceptions collected inside it, whether deliberately or involuntarily, now define our belief system. It has somehow become our personality.

Let's say if someone collected a random conspiracy theory inside a pandora box from a viral Facebook video. Now the thought is inside the box. Due to overarching power, this box will force that person to express his opinions based on the conspiracy he collected from a random Facebook video without any verification.

The box is powerful. Initially, you have the choice to fill inside this box the thoughts you want. Once the box is filled with a thought, you will have to fight your throat off to kick that thought out of the box. More importantly, the thought inside the box has the power to decide our behavior and future actions.

How to get rid of random thoughts from getting inside the thought box?

Well, this is a very hard question. But the answer is obvious. A human can do anything because he is born to be a warrior of change.

Unlearning process

You don’t need to delete all the information from your thought box. Without thoughts, we can’t be normal humans. However, there is a way out in which we can take charge of our thoughts. Install a filter at the opening gate of Pandora's box of thoughts. 

It means, starts measuring the information you are consuming on the daily basis. Take charge of what you want to get into your Pandora box and what not to. This is called filtering out the important information.

The plus and minus signs in the box are all you need to focus on for a while. The plus sign shows the thoughts that you have collected over the years as you grew up. But you have realized that many thoughts are influencing me negatively. 

These are impacting my productive career. So, simply use the filter and replace them with the minus ones (minus and plus are ideal symbols for explanation purposes only). It is not simple and a short-term goal. Instead, you will have to face lots of consequences in the way of getting rid of those random thoughts out of Pandora's box.

Filtering the Pandora Box of Thoughts

Filtering the old concepts that are no longer applicable to modern-day scientific knowledge society is a sign of productivity. It increases your chances to achieve greater success in a short time. Surprisingly, this is what it’s called the “Unlearning mechanism”. 

The will to change and adapt must come from within, it cannot be forced. That’s why many of us won’t be able to learn to unlearn quickly. And the consequence of not adapting to the new world by getting rid of older and redundant beliefs is much higher than one can imagine.

Ending lines

Unlearning is a cognitive thinking behavior of humans. It gets into action when we start learning new things. When we learn new things it means there needs to be some space inside our head.

Hence, getting rid of old concepts and replacing them with new ones is the true essence of the unlearning process. Moreover, to move forward, we need to leave behind redundant information that is no longer applicable in today’s time. 

Without cutting off from old concepts, one cannot learn new information which resultantly would add more into the misery of moving forward in this competitive environment.

Author: Waqar Ahmed

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