Learning is a key feature of humanity. It allows us to improve over time and learn from past mistakes. Learning (along with physical growth) is the defining process that makes us different at 30 years old than 3 years old.

Earlier this year, Reid Hoffman wrote “Those Who Teach, Can Do”, an excellent essay on the theme of learning. In it, he discusses explicit learners (the following quotes are all pulled from Reid’s essay).

Explicit learners are those who deliberately learn with the goal of improvement. In the context of a career, they seek to learn from their direct experiences as well as from others, they solicit feedback from peers and have a curiosity to read and ask around new subjects.

In my career at high-growth startups, I have found this to be true of the most impressive people I have worked with. They tend to reflect on their experience and internalise lessons. When you ask them a question, they are often able to break down the factors they would consider with great detail (whether their craft is marketing, software development or operational improvement).

Explicit learners understand the variables in given situations that they effect and often form principles that they carry forward with them.

Reid mentions the two pre-requisites for learning in the work context, experience and reflection.

First, experience. You need to have lots of new and challenging experiences from which to learn. This is why people often consider startups to be a good learning environment, as the speed of new experiences is generally fast and the variety of experiences broad.

Second is reflection. In order to pull lessons from your experience, you need to look back at it and understand what actually happened. What can you take forward?

Reid doesn’t make any practical suggestions of how to become an explicit learner, so I wanted to suggest a few myself:

Finally, it’s important to think about how you learn. A question I often ask in interviews is “what is your preferred style of learning?”. Do you like someone explaining something to you at a high-level? Do you want to just start and learn as you go? Do you like to research first? Watch a video on YouTube? The point is, everyone, learns in a different way. It’s useful to figure out what your style of learning is so that you can focus on that.

Every once in a while, you should ask yourself, am I learning in the best way for me? If not, adjust the methods you use to learn. This will improve your improvement over time. It’s the difference between production and production capacity. Yes, this point is meta. But if you can think about your learning cycle and how to improve it, this will be a force multiplier across all your learning efforts.

I hope the above thoughts provides a useful extension to Reid’s initial essay. I’m interested in how others think about explicit learning in their life. If you have some ideas, please do reach out.

This post was originally published on my site stevanpopovic.com.