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The Lifelong Learning Manifesto – Knowledge As Assets

We all dream about becoming this one person:

• One who is great at their craft, but has reliable knowledge of just about everything
• One who commands respect through demonstrated expertise, not their position
• One who works a job they love, that pays well
• One who has the freedom to choose who to work with

But you and I both know, this person isn’t built through cramming or shortcuts.

They’re built through a fundamentally different approach to learning — one that treats knowledge as an asset, not just a test requirement.

It requires a complete shift in how we think about learning.

Since 2020, I’ve helped 5,000+ lifelong learners make this shift through 3 mental models that changed everything for me — and can change everything for you:

1. Infinite game thinking
2. Lean thinking
3. Systems thinking

Let’s unpack each.

Infinite game thinking. This simply means we think in the long-term — like the person we always wanted to be. The biggest shift in my career happened when I stopped “studying for exams” but rather when I “learned like a professional”. Things just made so much sense. (Read: Finite vs Infinite Games)

• Exam scores wasn’t a “thing I optimized for” anymore — it became a lagging measure of my TRUE subject mastery.
• Learning fundamentals started to become “I expect to know this” rather than “this is hard, how to I shortcut my memorization?”
• Practice questions turned from a coping mechanism for fear of failing into a diagnostic tool for finding my weak points
• Books started to become “spoonfed knowledge” rather than boring walls of text
• Notes started to become my tools for thinking rather than a way to “capture important information” (mainly because of fear of missing out)
• Flashcards felt “too much” or “too tedious” at first — then I started to see them as assets for my future self rather than as liabilities that “I have to review”.

Lean Thinking. I get the need about doing things faster — we’re all in a time crunch. But from a broader perspective, it’s significantly more effective to just eliminate waste. (Read: Toyota Production System philosophy) My parents worked at Toyota for 30+ years, so I understood this early on. There are 5 principles of Lean Thinking:

• Value – we clearly define what value is. For a career exam, this might sound like your “scores”. But in reality, value is relevant knowledge. 
• Value stream – We adhere to what creates deep, usable retention for relevant knowledge. In cognitive psychology, this is the 3 crucial mental processes: encoding, storage, retrieval. In practice, it’s not as convenient as a linear sequence. Encoding leads to storage, and retrieval also leads to stronger storage — which leads to faster encoding. This effectively creates what I call a “Memory Loop”.
• Flow – we create our processes in a flow that closely follows this value stream. This allows us to put effort in, and get results out — simply because by defining what’s “value adding” you have also eliminated waste. Doing this reveals a few things:
  • Highlighting, re-reading, rewriting notes are totally out of the question
  • Taking verbatim notes without encoding is also out of the question
  • That you don’t need to explain things SIMPLY to someone else as long as you have encoded and retrieved it from memory
  • Understanding ALONE is not enough without retrieval practice — likewise, Active Recall ALONE is not enough without encoding. You need BOTH.
• Pull – We don’t just study what’s in front of us — we only study when it creates value. We don’t just create flashcards out of nowhere — we only create cards when we have truly encoded the information. The biggest time waster is being good at things that which shouldn’t be done at all.
• Kaizen – Strive for continuous improvement. This means streamlining the process. It’s the boring stuff that doesn’t get talked about: Improving how you create questions. Improving how you take notes. Improving how you read.

Systems Thinking. You always fall to the level of your systems. But what are systems? Russell Ackoff, systems thinking pioneer, defined it as such in his famous speech:

A system is a whole that contains two or more parts that work together to achieve a goal; each part can directly or indirectly affect the properties/behavior of the whole.

The goal = value. (You’re getting good at this, huh)

A single wheel doesn’t make a car. A single organ doesn’t make an organ system.

So it doesn’t make sense to think about “Anki” or “Feynman Technique” or “Highlighting” as a study system — they’re not. Why is that? I’ll let Russell Ackoff explain:

In any system, when one improves the performance of the parts taken separately, the performance of the whole doesn’t necessarily improve and frequently gets worse. […] It’s the way the parts perform together that determines the performance of the system, not on how they perform separately.

Let me emphasize that (if I haven’t already) — and I want you to pay close attention to this…

When you optimize a system, you cannot just consider one part and overoptimize it. You have to consider the goal of the entire system, such that the parts will work together to achieve that goal.

Get the best parts from the best cars, put them together, but it won’t make the best car in the world. (Why? Compatibility)

Combining the best players in one team doesn’t automatically make for the best team. (Read: Teamwork matters)

Likewise, simply combining a random set of tips and hacks won’t make the best learning system.

We need a coherent system that produces results predictably.

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These 3 mental models also act as a system — a belief system.

Most beliefs are wrong if you take them literally, but in reality, what matters is whether or not they’re useful in achieving your goal: To become SO GOOD people can’t ignore you.

If this resonates with you, welcome to our small tribe:

 

You can either scroll up or go to the start page from here. Or, see if what I offer is for you.

Otherwise, you’re always welcome to explore the blog 🙂

To smarter studying,
– Al Khan