درسنامه اصلی

Masanori – Coaching Lesson

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. Our topic, one of my favorite little people in the world, Masanori. Well, in the conversation we talked about Masanori, my little nephew in Japan. He is a super fascinating little guy. In general, one of the things I love about children, is that they remind us, y’know, we can learn from children, because they remind us of things that we need to remember as adults, things that we forget.

So on one hand, children lack experience, they lack knowledge and, of course, children need to learn.

There’s a lot of things they need to learn to live in the world. And that’s great. So when we were kids, of course, too, we had to learn. We had to learn a lot of things.

On the other hand, as we become adults, unfortunately, we also forget things that are very important and one of the great things about being an adult and being around children is that we are reminded of things that important that maybe we have forgotten, that we need to remember again.

And so, y’know, we tend to think, certainly the education system is designed for the idea that adults teach, children learn. It’s one way. This is the education system. Adults always teach, the children just learn. But naturally, it’s both ways and we need to remember this.

Naturally, we as adults also learn from them. Children have many things to teach us. So we have to open our minds and not be too arrogant to think that, oh, we’re always the ones teaching them. No, we have a lot to learn from children. And that’s really the message of our coaching lesson this month.

One of the, there are many, many, many things that we can and should learn from children, but I think one of the key things is about the process of learning itself because children are natural learners, right?

And most of us have this idea, I think it’s the common idea, that children learn more easily than adults.

Why is that? Is it because their brains are special?

Well, in some ways, yes, their brains are a bit different. They’re designed to be learning rapidly. But a lot of it is also just mindset, or attitude, the attitude of children compared to the attitude of adults. See, the attitude of a child is just to follow their curiosity. This is what children do. Something makes them interested or excited or enthusiastic. It could be anything.

And if you know any children in your life, you know it definitely can be anything, right? It might be bugs, right? A child might just suddenly get interested in bugs. They might just get interested in spiders.

Maybe they see a spider in their house and suddenly they’re super interested and excited about spiders and they want to learn everything possible about spiders.

Spiders, spiders, spiders, and they’ll do this for a while. Or it might be plants, or it might be dinosaurs. It could be anything. I mean that’s what’s great about kids. Something just catches their interest and they follow it.

But as adults, often we ignore this. We’re not even aware of it anymore. We’re so used to pushing it away because we think, “Oh, that’s not important.” So, for example, as an adult you see a spider and you just think, “Oh, that’s a spider,” and you kill it, oh yucky, and you throw it outside instead of getting curious about it, interested in it.

Or you might become a little curious about something, but you don’t really follow it. You don’t try to learn more about it. You don’t get excited about it because it’s not useful, it doesn’t seem practical. It won’t help you make more money. It won’t immediately give you some benefit in your life so you just kind of push it away. And in this way adults gradually lose their curiosity.

They lose their connection to that curiosity. They become less and less and less enthusiastic about life, less and less and less interested in, curious about the incredible world we live in. That’s sad, y’know, that’s sad and that’s why when we imagine a lot of times who’s an adult, especially as they get older, a middle-aged person, an older person.

We often imagine someone, we just look around and see actually, people who don’t have much energy, who seem kind of like they’re half-dead. They don’t have that liveliness, that energy, that excitement in their eyes.

On the other hand, sometimes you will meet like an old person, someone who’s 70, someone who’s 80, but you look in their eyes and they still have that life in their eyes. They still have that energy in their eyes. They’re still curious even if their body is really old and tired and broken, but there’s still something alive inside and we admire those people, right? We can see that they have something special.

Well, we can develop that. Even if you’ve forgotten all that natural curiosity and energy, we can develop it again. This is the message, the gift that children can give back to us, to remind us. Hey, wake up!

There’s an amazing world out there. It’s not all just social media and work and boring stuff. The whole world is fascinating if you open your eyes and get curious about it.

So let’s talk about how children naturally learn because this is really the best way to learn anything. Let’s just talk about the steps. Just imagine a kid, not in school. School also destroys curiosity. Schools force people to study boring subjects in a certain order and schools are terrible. That’s the other reason adults become boring is because they go through so many years of school they learn to hate learning. They think that learning is what happens in school, that boring crap that happens in school. Well, it’s not.

But let’s imagine a child, a young child outside of school, maybe before they enter school, before they even go into kindergarten, no school at all. What do they do? The first thing they do is they just get fascinated by something. Something catches their attention, something interesting. So Masanori, for example, it’s something different, y’know, every few months it might be something different.

This summer it was cicadas, little bugs. I’ve talked about that before. He got interested in mushrooms.

He gets interested in acorns. But it just might be anything. Let’s just use the spider example. So maybe a kid sees a spider, a little child sees a spider in their house and suddenly they start, what do they do?

They pay attention to it. They notice.

That’s the first thing is they notice what’s happening. They’re not just ignoring everything. They notice, oh, look at that. And they’ll come down and they’ll start looking at it. And they get curious and it brings up some feeling of interest and curiosity. Then they start getting excited because as they notice that spider and start looking at it and watching it move around, watching it make a web.

They get more and more and more curious. They want to learn more. And if you just let them follow that, if you encourage it and you let them follow it, what will they do? Then they’ll want to learn more and more about spiders. So if you’re a good parent or a good uncle or aunt, go buy them a bunch of books or rent a bunch of books, borrow a bunch of books rather at the library.

And you can start reading about spiders and looking at different pictures of different kinds of spiders. You could identify the spider in the house. What kind of spider is it? And you can learn about webs. How do they make webs? What kind of food do they eat? How do they catch their food? How do they kill the food and eat it? It’s really fascinating and interesting for an adult or a child. If you really look into it, spiders are amazing.

So that’s the second thing they do. They have, number one is curiosity, they get interested. And the second, what I say, it’s kind of like an idiom, is they dive deep. They dive deep. So you can imagine diving into water and going deep. Well, this is what they do. They learn deeply, in other words, right?

They get excited about a topic then they want to learn everything they can about it.

So they just start spiders, spiders, spiders. For a while they’re obsessed about spiders, right?

Everything’s spiders, spiders, spiders, spiders. They get crazy focused on this one thing. And they learn deeply, deeply, deeply about it. They want to read everything. They want to see lots of pictures. They want to learn everything possible about spiders for a while.

So that’s the second step of natural learning is to go deep. First, you get the curiosity and the excitement and the interest. Second, you dive deep and just learn everything possible about this topic. It doesn’t matter what it is. Now that goes for a while naturally with children. But then eventually what happens is they might start getting a little bored. They don’t want to just keep repeating the same thing.

And so what happens is then what typically happens is that they will then, as they’re learning about the one topic, they will go on a tangent. So tangents come from, this word, tangent comes from geometry.

So we have a circle and then a line that goes across and connects with the circle at one point, that’s called a tangent.

In more general English, a tangent is a topic that is connected to another topic. I mean, it’s not the same topic but it’s connected. So, for example, spiders is the main topic but another topic that’s connected to it might just be insects, for example, or flies or beetles, right? It’s connected to the idea of spiders. It’s different kinds of bugs but it’s not the same topic.

So often what children will do is they get interested in one thing, for example, spiders. Then they go deep. They learn lots and lots about spiders and crazy about spiders. But then, they will then jump to a connected topic, a tangent. So maybe they’re spiders, spiders, spiders, spiders, spiders, lots of spiders, but then while they’re learning about spiders, reading about spiders, they see a picture of a fly, something that spiders eat.

And then they suddenly become interested in flies. Oh, well, that’s interesting. What do flies do? Where do they come from? How do they live? What do flies eat? Do they have eggs? And so suddenly they will jump from spiders. They’ll jump over and then they become interested in flies. And then the same process happens again. Read lots of books, pictures, learning about flies, flies, flies, flies, flies.

And then they do that a while. Then what happens? Another tangent. While they’re learning about flies maybe they read about rotting food and bacteria and what happens when food gets old and it starts getting yucky and smelly. They might suddenly get interested in garbage and smelly food. That’s a tangent, right? It’s a topic that’s connected to flies.

And then suddenly, what is garbage? Where does the garbage go when we throw it in the garbage can?

And then they want to know about that so, boom, they jump into that and then start learning about garbage. Which is actually an interesting topic if you think about it, right? If you didn’t know anything about garbage, well, wow, when we throw something in the trash can, what happens?

We put it in a bag. Somebody takes it. Where does it go? What happens to it? There’s a lot of interesting topics connected to garbage. There’s a lot of science in there, like the science of how things, of what happens to garbage, what happens to food when it’s rotting. What do we do with the garbage, right? There’s environmental ideas in there, recycling, burning the garbage.

What happens when we burn the garbage? Well, then it creates smoke and creates some kind of pollution. There’s a lot to learn in there. And you can see how this naturally happens with children. They get interested in one thing. They go deep and learn a lot about it. Then they, while they’re learning this one topic, they see something else connected to it, a tangent, a tangential is the adjective, a tangential topic.

And then they’ll jump to that new topic and they go deep on that. And then there’s something connected to that and they go deep on that. So they might start with spiders and then after a few jumps suddenly they’re learning about pollution, which seems like it’s not connected at all to spiders but actually there is a connection. And you can see in this way how they suddenly, they’re just learning so much about so many different topics and they’re learning each one fairly deeply.

And this is the process of natural learning that we can learn from children. How many adults do this? Not many that I know. Right, what do adults do? No, we go to a school, we go to college, and then we take courses and we just study the same thing. I will go and take my physics class and then I’ll just study physics this whole time.

And maybe, when I’m studying physics, maybe they talk about the planets and the sun, but no, no, no, I can’t start studying astronomy. This is a physics class so I will stay and keep studying, y’know, Newton’s physics.

That’s not how a child would learn. They would study physics, let’s say, Newtonian physics, but then if they started learning about the planets and how they move around each other and the sun, they might suddenly get interested in astronomy and then jump to astronomy and then learn astronomy deeply.

That’s how a child would do it.

That’s how we should do it because that’s really the natural way and then maybe you could jump back to physics again because as you’re learning the astronomy, you might want to learn more about the physics or the chemistry of planets and atmospheres and the sun. You see, one topic naturally leads to the other and in this way we become excited and enthusiastic about learning again.

This is why when I talk about English that when you’re reading English or listening to English, you should always be reading things and listening to things that are fascinating, that have interesting topics, not just focus on the parts of English like the grammar or the vocab. That’s boring and you will eventually get super bored with that.

But instead if you’re listening to English, reading English, and you let yourself jump to different topics that are fascinating to you, interesting to you, then you will just go from one to the next, to the next, to the next, going deep and jumping to the next, going deep and jumping to the next. And you will get more and more and more and more excited about each topic and about English in general. And in this way, you will improve your English so much faster.

But this is true of anything. It’s true for business. A lot of business people who think, oh, I must just…they’re so boring the way they learn English. The way I learn, I mean business rather, not English.

And the way I learned business was like a child. I just got interested in it. I just started reading about it and then I started my own business.

And then when I started my own business I realized oh, I need to learn about marketing. So I just starting learning, reading, reading, reading, marketing, marketing, marketing, and then while I was doing all that I realized, well, I don’t know how to sell anything. So then I suddenly jumped over and started learning about sales and I read every book I could find and videos about selling stuff.

And then I went from that and I had to learn about numbers and accounting. And I just jumped, boom, boom, boom, and I’d jump and go deep, jump and go deep, as I needed things, as I got interested in things. And in this way, I taught myself business. No business courses, no business degree in universities. That is useless pretty much.

So, you, you have a task this month. What I want you to do is to awaken again your natural excitement and curiosity for learning and I want you to follow this system, this way, this path of children. So what are you going to do?

Number one, I just want you to notice as you go through the world, as you read, as you think, as you do things in your life. Pay attention to yourself. Notice your own thoughts and feelings. And notice when you get interested in something, when you get curious about something. It might just be a small little thought or a small little feeling.

It could be anything, anything at all. It doesn’t have to be important. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be serious. Anything, any topic at all. It could be electricity. It could be bugs. It could be…it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It could be something like how does my oven work? How do the lights work in my house? It doesn’t matter. Just notice some little curious question pop up in your head.

When you notice that, I want you to then follow that. Don’t push it away. Don’t ignore it. Instead, dive deep. Go borrow a bunch of books on that topic. Or just get on the internet and start doing lots of searches and reading everything you can, watching videos about it. Learn everything possible about that thing that you’re curious about. Anything. Keep going, keep going, keep going.

As you do that, notice if something else makes you curious. As you’re learning about that one topic, notice if another question pops in your head. If you go, “Oh, that’s interesting.” When that happens, it will happen, jump to the new topic and again read everything you can. Watch all the videos, research, internet, library.

And then again, notice when another question comes up and then jump to the new topic. I just want you to do that for this month. See how it feels. See where it goes. Where will you end up? You might start with anything. You might start with your shoes. Hey, these shoes, how do they make these shoes, I wonder?

And then, boom, you start researching. How are shoes made nowadays? What are the factories like?

What do they do? And who knows. You might follow several interests. Who knows what you’ll end up studying and learning.

Do this this month and do it in English, by the way. When you’re searching, search in English. When you’re reading books, try to find books in English about this thing that you’re interested in, this topic.

Alright, enjoy learning. This is how you reawaken your passion for learning. See you next time. Bye for now.