How To Learn- Learning To Cook

This is the first piece in a series about learning how to learn new things. First up is cooking.

Thinking about how you learn something new is very important. I spend a lot of time doing just that. Pick an entirely new skill or domain of knowledge. Pick something you have always wanted to know about. Now think about making a plan to learn that skill or knowledge domain.

How do you learn something new? If you have never considered how you learn, it’s time to think about it. It is not some mystical process. It is deliberate and thoughtful.

Depending on what you have picked, you likely have some scrap of prior knowledge about the topic, even the barest scrap. This will not be true if you were to approach something very obscure, like Jungian archetypes (unless you encountered them in a book or in school). This is likely not true about something like car repairs (unless your mom or dad or a shop teacher in high school taught you some basics). This is very certainly not true about higher dimensional geometry, for example. This is not a topic that has wide cultural currency, so you might not have encountered it, unless you are interested in mathematics.

Cooking is something that, even as a novice, you will be able to call on some prior knowledge about. After all, everyone has eaten cooked food. Everybody eats. The new…