Learning

Many a times I come across people, particularly fresher, who say they have / had the qualification and "trained" in the particular skills to fill a position, but they are / were not selected. In turn, they blame everything and everybody else but their own inability to show that they are "learned". So is this quality of being "learned" different from being qualified, educated and trained. One definitely earns a qualification through putting efforts and at times burning midnight oil in studies. But how much these efforts and "studies" would make him "learned", is really a question.

This reminds me of a very popular story about Albert Einstein, who was once challenged with a question that how many feet make a mile. The most intelligent person ever known, politely accepted that he had no idea, but revealed a great principle behind him being a revered scientist, even without a laboratory and no formal education, that the brain has not been made to store the facts but to analyze. The mile to feet may be known from any conversion table easily. There are a few points here -

Real Learning is not facts but it is the relationship of facts -
When you "study" any subject / major, then you are actually gathering the "facts". Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, these facts are scattered, and similarly as an individual piece of the puzzle, the fact is not a complete thing. To solve the puzzle and reveal the original form, you need to start putting those scattered pieces together, matching them by shapes and colors and thereby "discovering" the relationships among them. So that makes "learning" a post "study" process of "discovering" the relationships among the "facts". No mean exercise. You demonstrate a rare presence of "analytical skill" by projecting yourself a "learned".

Learning is knowing how to find out a thing rather than knowing the thing as it is -
How many of you remember now the table of 26? answer quickly, what 26 sixes are? But was it the same when you were in a KG class. As this principle applies to the table of 26 in this example, also applies to the concepts in the grown up stage. Know the process and understand it. Learning is not cramming the answers but knowing how to find the answers.

Learning is the end product of mistakes -
Experience is a hard teacher; it gives first a problem and leaves it to you to draw a lesson. That reminds me of another popular story of, this time, a very successful business baron, Henry Ford. He was once asked the secret of his success, the first reply was "I make right decisions". But then how he could know that the decision was right, was the obvious next question, and the answer was equally obvious - "I take wrong decisions". The principle is clear, you learn from your mistakes. You must dare to start at some point and then face whatever may come in your way, a wrong way would lead to the right way. The process of learning.

Confused state of mind is a learning opportunity -
Confusion is the feeling you get when you are trying to figure out the things and you don't know were to start and where is the end. It looks like vicious circles. Again the case of solving a jigsaw puzzle. Our mind perceives the things as may be laid out linearly. However, they are only seldom so. Here again we come across the relationship of "facts" and deciphering those relationships. The point has only been separated out, for most, who think that being confused is the exact point either to bypass the problem or leave it altogether. Actually, there is an opportunity to learn, if you take it head on.

The purpose of the post is that the newcomers and fresher always seem to feel a bit overwhelmed with the initial failure, but when an old proverb says that failure is a stepping stone to success; I say, success is way away, being not a destination but a journey, failure is first a stepping stone to "learn" and being "learned", the success is always along.

Hope everybody would like this thought. Your views are welcome in the comments, which I hope will help enrich the post.