Regurgitated learning

There are countless examples of phrases that are engrained into our rule-making world.

We sheepingly follow them like commandments even though they weren't on the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

When it comes to rules. There is one constant. There are no rules. Or as Lexus pointed out in a recent commercial, "rules weren't made for the exceptional, they were written by them".

I sit in a lot of business meetings where highly intelligent people regurgitate the same rules they read in a book or learned in a classroom.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
If you conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.
It's not about the product you sell. It's about the experience you offer.

On their own, all of those sentences make sense. But so what. What is the real learning behind each of them.

Can I learn from them?
Can I expand on them?
Can I break them?

Rules are accepted until someone breaks them and makes our lives better. We then all realize the rule wasn't true.

Cars couldn't be built in 73 minutes, until Ford figured it out.
Men couldn't fly until the Wright Brothers showed us otherwise.
Cars can't fly until someone figures out that George Jetson wasn't just a cartoon.

Automated learning can be done by robots and computers. We've been taught to read something, learn about it and then regurgitate it as knowledge. We don't need knowledge. That's why we have Google.

We have to be greater than Google.

We have to ask the hard questions. We have to get deeper in our understanding. We have to come up with new innovations. Google doesn't come up with innovations. The people behind Google do.

Here's my point.

The next time you are faced with an automatic response, ask yourself one question, "Do I know this statement to be true OR am I regurgitating something I was told.