Most of the learning you’ve done in your life has been pro-active learning.
Now, pro-active learning sounds good, right? I mean, anything done pro-actively is helpful. After all pro-active medicine (preventative medicine) saves lives.
But it’s not all rainbows and sunbeams.
Before I start explaining why pro-active learning is a hindrance to your future success, let me explain what it actually is.
Pro-active learning is a method of deciding what to learn by predicting our future knowledge needs and educating for all possible scenarios. Sound like a lot of work, right?
That’s because it is.
Yet, sadly you, along with every other person in the world, have been subjected to this wasteful style of learning.
Schools stuff as much info into the minds of children as they can to cover as many educational bases as possible.
But this can’t be a bad thing, can it? After all, the school prepares people to enter the scary world of work.
For children who don’t know any better, pro-active learning is useful. But for the rest of us, proactive learning suffers from a number of issues.
Let’s take a look at a few of them.
The Problem with Pro-active Learning
One of the biggest problems with pro-active learning is the time wasted learning so many needless topics in an effort to cover all possible future knowledge needs.
I’m looking at you, quadratic equations!
Additionally, pro-active learning berths a “must learn everything first” mentality, which cripples your ability to do the one thing that leads to success: Take Action.
Pro-active learning is like spending 1 year learning the theory of how to cycle before actually taking action and, you know, jumping on the bike and learning to ride.
Also, pro-active learning can lead to motivation evaporation. This happens because you end up wasting so much time learning about lots of different topics without aim or direction.
On top of this, pro-active learning flies in the face of cause and effect.
For example:
An event takes place: Cause
We learn how to deal with the event: Effect.
Proactive learning takes this fundamental equation and flips it on to its back:
We learn to deal with as many future events as possible: Effect.
An event takes place: Cause.
You may notice that the above makes no sense. How can you possibly learn to improve action in any meaningful way if that action is yet to happen?
The idea of learning before action makes no sense. Especially in the adult world.
Ok, so I’ve established that pro-active learning isn’t the best way to learn most things.
But what is?
Reaction learning
Reaction learning, as the name suggests, is learning that reacts to a given action, event, or problem.
The idea is to put taking action front and center of your thinking and make education support and improve action.
The basic idea of reactionary learning goes something like this:
First, there is a problem that you attempt to solve with action. This can be anything from choosing a holiday destination to building a wall. For this example, I’ll keep it simple and use building a wall.
Now that I’ve built the wall, I need to assess the wall and give myself feedback. This is a vital part of the reactionary learning method as it’s this step that lets you determine what needs improving and what you need to learn to be able to improve it.
In the example of building the wall, after I’ve finished I might find the wall is not straight. So I decided to learn how to build a straight wall.
In the next step, I seek learning resources to educate myself on how to build a straight wall.
I then take action using my newfound knowledge of building straight walls, to build a straight wall.
Then the process starts all over again. You have a loop of continuous improvement.
Reactionary learning is better not just because you are taking action quickly, but because your learning is based on the actual problems you are solving.
A good example of the power of reactionary learning involves two people looking to get a job promotion.
The first knocks on their boss’s door and asks what action they need to take to win a promotion. They then react to this feedback and learn exactly what they need to secure the promotion.
The second person, instead of asking the boss for feedback about what they should learn, reads loads of books in an effort to predict what they will need to win a promotion. Though they’ve learned a lot, they haven’t learned what was needed. They’ve wasted their time and they don’t get the promotion.
Reactive learning = High motivation
Another reason to use reactive learning is that it builds motivation instead of tearing it down.
The reason reactive learning is so good at building motivation in people is simple:
Your learning about things that can directly help you enjoy something you have already enjoy.
Think about it, if you love playing chess you’re going to be a lot more motivated to learn about chess openings because it will directly help you improve on something you already enjoy.
Successful people who use Reaction learning
The Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs are well known for jumping into a business headfirst without prior knowledge of running that particular business.
They take action first, start the business, then figure out how to run the business profitably later (reaction).
There is no better Entrepreneur who personifies reaction earning than British entrepreneur Richard Branson. When starting Virgin Airlines, Branson said, “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes– then learn how to do it later!”
The Sports Professional
Footballers (soccer players to Americans) use reactionary learning on a daily basis to improve their game. For example:
- Action – a player plays a game and misses a lot of shots with their left foot
- Feedback – the player watches the game after the match with their coach to determine what can be improved in practice
- Learn – The player practices shooting with their left foot in training
- Action – The player then plays another game and put’s their newfound left-footed ability to use. And the cycle begins again.
How to Use Reaction Learning for a gaming business
So you want to take action and make use of reactive learning for your gaming business.
That’s great! Let’s take a look at how you can use the power of reactionary learning to not only take action right now but to continuously improve your gaming business.
- As soon as you have finished reading this article, pick up your phone and create something that you can share with the world on your chosen platform. If your a wannabee YouTuber make a video right now with your mobile phone’s selfy camera. It only has to be 1-2 minutes long, if that. Just make a video, now, and upload it. Start with action.
- After the video has gone live, assess it. Give yourself feedback. Ask yourself, what one way could I improve my next video. Only choose one. There’ll be plenty of time to fix everything else with your video.
- Learn how to improve the one idea that you had to improve your video. Maybe you thought you could have had better lighting. Type your problem into Google and research a solution.
- Take action. Action the solution you just learned in your previous video. Make the new video with your improvement.
- Start the process all over again.
This constant process of action, feedback, learn, action, feedback learn will ensure that your videos constantly improve.
And the same can be done for a gaming website, a pro gaming career, a streaming channel, or any other career in gaming.
Conclusion
It wouldn’t be one of my articles if I didn’t end with an easy-to-read bullet-point summary.
Here’s goes nothing:
- Pro-active learning is predictive learning
- It can lead to a lot of wasted time as you learn things you may use in the future but never do
- Pro-active learning flies in the face of cause and effect
- The opposite to pro-active learning is reactive learning
- Reactive learning is based on the idea of taking action first then learning how to improve that action in the future.
- The process involves action, feedback, learning
- Nearly all successful people, including entrepreneurs and sports stars, employ reactive learning.
- Reactive learning can be used to improve a:
- Gaming website
- Gaming youTube Channel
- Streaming channel
- Any other gaming career