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How to Learn Anything Fast? Learning by Osmosis - FutureIQ

8,395 views Wait, is this logic right? • Aug 23, 2024
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Slog Reference: Learning by Osmosis

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There is a quick way of learning anything you want and most of us are already using it. The topic of discussion at hand today is learning by osmosis. How you can absorb information and behaviors of the people that surround you. Understand how you can employ this technique in your daily lives to become a better version of yourself, faster.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Learning by Osmosis

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Transcript

there are many ways to become smart studying deliberate practice continuous Improvement but one of the easiest ways is learning by osmosis just surround yourself with smart people and absorb everything that is going on and without effort you become smart like them is that how you became so smart well let me tell you a story okay so when I got into college I was staying in a hostel and as a I saw the seniors around me they were all these amazing people they had Great accomplishments they were good at games they were good at all kinds of things they had so much knowledge right I was just in awe of them what I would do was
you know after dinner and evenings and in my free time everybody would just sit in the mess and they would have these conversations about all kinds of things and I would just sit there and listen to them I wasn't smart enough to participate in any of those conversations I would just be listening okay okay and this went on for months years and without realizing it okay one day like probably in my third year it dawned on me that I have become one of them and now the kids are learning from me oh so apparently at some point I picked up their habits I picked up their systems I picked up their knowledge and I became one of them without even also
studied and also attended classes and did assignments regularly right because we don't want students out there to say we'll sit in the canteen with the seniors and we'll learn by osmosis later on we will talk about what things you can learn by osmosis and what things you cannot learn by osmosis but first we need to also explain scientifically what is osmosis yes so scientifically right uh think of it if you take a raisin and you put it in water it will slowly absorb the water yeah and become like a grape if you put it in salt water it is going to absorb salt water correct right and that is osmosis there is a more technical
definition of osmosis but that's unnecessarily complicated so we will not go there but the English word osmosis just means learning by gradual unconscious assimilation of ideas or knowledge just by being exposed to those ideas right in this context osmosis basically means he wasn't looking to absorb knowledge but basically ended up absorbing knowledge yeah I mean the Raisin in water is going to absorb water even if it doesn't want to correct that's what happens so in fact when you are understanding what's going on isn't a prerequisite you end up learning even if you haven't really understood what's going on your subconscious brain is picking up things system one which is what I find fascinating uh just in terms
of psychology and whatnot because when you're in class you're also sitting and listening but that's somehow doesn't translate to learning by osmosis but when you're in canteen listening to seniors you just learn by osmosis in fact h two important things I want to point out right one is that in a college most of what you learn the most important things you learn in college aren't the things being taught in the classroom okay it's all the other things the behaviors that you are learning by osmosis yeah but yes we do need to figure out what things you can learn by osmosis and what things you cannot right so the classroom learning you cannot learn by osmosis right maths can't be
learned by osmosis it has to be practiced practiced right similar with physics and what those things right but a lot of behaviors and habits we do learn by osmosis right we are basically copycat monkeys okay if you look around at teenagers right they all all teenagers dress similar to each other they behave similarly they're body language that gestures are similar that is how Trends develop clothing trends and your Tik Tok Trends and all of these are all copy a trend is basically copying something else someone has done so in fact philosopher Rene Gerard has a theory called mytic desire right what he says is that fundamentally most of us do not really know what we want okay we
don't have any fundamental desires all our desires are copied from other people right if everybody around us wants something then we want something right okay desires not needs because we still have basic needs we're not talking about basic needs we're talking about the desires above our basic needs everybody needs food but what kind of food you like you pick up by looking at people around you right if you're surrounded by a certain class of people you will love eating gulab jamun and stuff in like so much ghee and if you are surrounded Ed by a different set of people you'll be eating salads and you can't even look at ghee without getting unhappy right so
that suddenly explains a lot of uh food specialities in different parts of the country correct correct wow by the way Rene jard you said and you said mimetics yeah is the word mimetics derived from the concept of a mime mime miming means copying so mimetic desire is that the desires you acquire by copying the people around you right all right uh you know behaviors and habits and that is one of the advantages of even in your job working in an office you do pick up a lot of behaviors you do learn a lot about how the organization works the uned rules through osmosis yeah a lot of office culture is picked up simply by being there and observing what your
other colleagues are doing and work from home is going to cause problems for that unless the leaders of the company take extra steps to ensure that this learning by osmosis happens right so does this mean I can use osmosis to pick up good habits absolutely in fact you must do it that way okay James Clear author of atomic habits has this to say surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself you will rise together a different way of saying the same thing is that put yourself in a Environ M or surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is normal behavior for everyone right examples so imagine you want to lose
weight okay so you want to have a healthy diet and you want to exercise surround yourself by people who are eating healthy all the time and who always refuse to have sugar with their tea and who never have Coke and so on right okay even if you keep doing that yourself after a while you will realize that you no longer want these things it becomes much easier to resist similarly if you surround yourself with people who exercise every day and go running and so on after a while you will start that's true that that is true that is true I agree why because your brain the dumb monkey brain the copycat brain it gets some imatic
desire that look at all these cool people they go running even I want to be cool so I should go running that okay you trick your brain into doing this right basically continuously your brain is getting the signal that this is the normal thing to do this is the cool thing to do and so I should be doing it it does make sense because back in school if you hung around with the smarter kids you would become smarter if you hung around with kids who played Sports you would become more of a sports person in fact uh that is why in another episode we have given the advice of how to choose an engineering college and we
said choose the highest ranked one you can go to because there you are going to be surrounded by smarter more ambitious students and you're learning by osmosis which is a major part of your education in college is going to be so much better so does that mean I can learn anything by osmosis no like I said uh there are certain things you can't learn by osmosis okay basically osmosis is a system one thing our brain the emotional behavioral brain The Reptilian Brain repan bra the front part of our brain which does logic and maths and things like that right those things cannot be learned by osmosis those have to be learned by just repeated practice right correct uh so
that's why teachers do not like this term learning by osmosis because there have been people who have tried to incorporate learning by osmosis into regular school subjects and that has failed quite badly I can imagine I can imagine the another important thing to keep in mind is you know you must have heard this saying confucious say I hear and I forget I see and I remember I do and I understand correct our teachers drilled that into us every time they taught maths actually confuscious didn't say that uh it's probably Zuni but the point is that it is largely true right uh osmosis is just you hear and see to do these other more complex things you
have to actually be doing right right in fact the best is you want to be teaching someone else that's the best way to learn something and that is why this channel exists this is my way of learning things okay so I'll give you examples right watching YouTube is easy okay writing something or recording your own episode is hard that gives you much more learning right yeah so we have a lot of people who keep commenting that they take notes after every episode of our so thank you for taking notes and absolutely that's a very good way of learning right just consuming uh is much less uh learning one of these days we'll do like a side bonus episode of navin's
anky flash card deck it is impressive but the important thing to keep in mind is that even for things where you have to work hard to learn osmosis can help right because if you surround your Yourself by people who are doing that same kind of hard work suddenly it no longer seems like hard work correct right so if you're surrounded by the right people hard work becomes easy work true so now I'm actually trying to think of skills that I should definitely definitely look to learn by osmosis every chance I get yeah so keep in mind that learning by osmosis is one of the evolutionarily older things right so whatever is needed for us in the African
Savana and a little later those are the things you want to learn by osmosis so that's definitely not maths and that's definitely not science correct so more instinctive kind of things languages uh right being consistently exposed to native speakers of a language is a far better way to learn than doing your grammar and sentences and vocabulary lessons and du lingo uh right to be fair the dualingo owl is very insistent and very persistent but not being paid by them welcome to take their money yeah the other thing is understanding of say cultures right immersing yourself in a different culture can lead to a much deeper understanding and appreciation of their Customs their systems the way they
behave why they behave uh in a certain way right so for example you would learn far more about American culture than just watching friends over and over and over again rather than reading essays about American culture that is that is true creative inspiration right artistic musical Etc all those things also come from osmosis right if you surround yourself by creative people you will have more creative ideas you surround yourself by musical people you will have more musical Tendencies right so language culture creativity there's a whole bunch leadership social skills emotional intelligence and all of them are similar thought process correct correct so anything that basically requires your system one brain to be active or anything that involves your system one
brain is something that you can learn by abely osmosis so basically this is kind of the proof of why it is said that you are the average of The Five People You spend most of your time with exactly right because what happens is that the five people you spend your time with you absorb you their behaviors by osmosis and you start becoming more and more like them right the way to change yourself is to change those five people right it's not easy because the way you are currently that is going to decide whom you like to spend time with right you want to spend time with people that are similar to you uh and You by default
choose people that it is easy for you to hang out with but this is probably not necessarily the right approach right you think about what you want to achieve in life what are the things you want to do and then try to surround yourself with people who are already doing those things right that is why you should always look to hang around with smarter people my final question is what if the smarter people don't want to hang around with me yeah so this is a very common uh worry that people have in reality it just doesn't work like this okay the most important thing to keep in mind is that smartness isn't like just one
number like IQ okay smartness is or achievements in general is multiple Dimensions right they might be smart in one thing and you are better at another another thing right so they do want to hang out with interesting people that is one second is that for even accomplished people say somebody who's 10 15 years your senior and they have achieved things in life most such people I know a lot of such people and they would love to hang out with the motivated youngster right the number of motivated youngsters who are really interested in learning is so low that it's a pleasure to hang out with them and to give advice to them very true which is why I am taking
the most Advantage out of this and I'm enjoying every single moment of it I hope you guys are to um if you want to hang around with naen please hit him up please ping him our Twitter handles are somewhere here on the screen in the show notes check it out we'll keep coming back with more of these episodes Shri Kant naven future IQ if you like this episode definitely check out our episode on system 1 versus system 2 it really helps with understanding a lot of aspects of our Behavior