11 Living and Learning
Ready, Go, and now Steady.
I have argued so far that, to power up your mind, you need
to get yourself ready to learn. Now, I want to try to persuade you
that, however competent you are as a learner, you will not learn
faster and work smarter unless you really put your learning into
practice, reflecting, changing, and adapting as you do so. Learning
is not a spectator sport. The fourth and fifth of my 5Rs,
Reflectiveness and Responsiveness, are at the heart of this capacity
to thrive and develop.Putting learning into action
As Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species:It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but
the ones most responsive to change.
Biologically speaking, the human species is what it is only because
of its capacity to learn, reflect on that learning, adapt to it, and
change. Over a long period, our brain has grown in size and com-
plexity. Over an equally long period, we lost our tail so that we now
have a tiny stump at the base of our spine, and we moved from all
fours to the two-legged creatures we are today.
The development of language was also probably a gradual
process, moving from gestures through grunts to the articulation of
words. Sometimes things happened suddenly, however. There must