A story from my childhood on the importance of intrinsic motivation for learning. On Sunday we had a family party at my house and invited many of the people who were important during the early years of my family. The occasion was a mix of both my parents 25th anniversary and my twin sister and me graduating high school.
I told many people about my decision to delay college and take a gap year. I began hearing many stories from my childhood about how I have always been a self-directed kid.
My mom recounted that when I was about 4 or 5 my memory of baseball statistics was phenomenal. Every morning I pulled open the front door, grabbed the newspaper off the front steps and poured over the sporting green. One time while driving with my mom in San Francisco I saw a street sign for Oak st. I said,” look mom Oakland!” At first she had no idea what I was talking about because we were in the heart of the city and oakland wasn’t the least bit visible, but then she realized that I had seen Oak St. and OAK was the symbol for Oakland in the baseball standings. I think I learned to read well in large part due to my regular morning excursions through the sporting green. I learned to love numbers and collect baseball cards. I then got a board game called Extra Bases and I memorized a good portion of the questions. My knowledge of athlete’s statistics and players names was then furthered when I first got a playstation. Steven Johnson discusses value of video games on kids cognitive development in Everything Bad Is Good For You.
My family didn’t pay for cable so my uncle wondered how I knew so much without even having ESPN?!. But the larger lesson here is if I was told I had to memorize all those statistics and player’s names I probably would have hated it. But it was easy immerse myself and remember far more information than any 5 year old should be able to because I loved it. The desire has to come from within and there has be a use for it, either in pleasure, impressing your friends or something you actually want to do with your knowledge in the near future.
Most introductory science and business classes require remember large amounts information and I find it incredibly dull and none gave me the purpose I needed to really commit. When I read laymen’s books about science and the nature of the universe I was much more engaged and my imagination went wild. But I found the dry equations in class uninspiring and while the fundamentals need to be learned the payoff for their mastery was so far away that I a lot of timing and motivation needs to come together for the learning of fundamentals to really make sense. I believe it’s way more important to first have inspiration and activities you care about before engaging on the long and seemingly endless slog of of building enough scientific chops to do anything of importance.
I was thrown into topics before I was ready. Not intellectually unready, I could have done it if I wanted to, and maybe I did want to at the beginning of the semester, but by the middle, I had much more engaging and intellectually fulfilling interests like learning how to build a company where I could make an impact immediately.
I still haven’t figured out how to combine entrepreneurial learning methods with science to make it engaging and energizing at every step of the way and in a way that pushes engineers to break ground on entirely new problems not just incrementally improve old solutions. Although I haven’t figured out exactly the process groundbreaking engineers go through I know intrinsic motivation, purpose and timing are critical pieces of the puzzle.
