It’s always something new. Yesterday, it was cryptocurrency. Today, blockchain. Tomorrow, NFTs. Wait, no, NFTs was yesterday, we’re floating bits of pixels in the metaverse now.
The list of ‘emerging technologies’ grows ever longer, ever quicker. In the last five to ten years, we’re constantly told that we live in a time of ‘unprecedented growth’, of ‘revolutionary change’ — a ruthless treadmill whose speed only increases. From gamification to design thinking, AI to cybersecurity, there’s always some new skill to hone, some bleeding-edge technology to harness, and some avant-garde mindset to adopt.
No wonder we are burnt out. It’s not just the teetering work-life integration, the overbearing managers, and the solitude that arises from working remotely — it’s the information overload that both employers and employees are expected to learn and learn quickly. While the tech industry is hit particularly hard, everyone in an office is in a similar place. As the saying goes, today, every company is a tech company.
Researchers call this information overload: “the difficulty in evaluating and selecting relevant information increases as more and more diverse sources and content is available.” The study found that younger people with less information-seeking self-efficacy were more susceptible to experiencing information overload.
Creating a robust mental laboratory
As you grow older, learning also becomes more difficult—research has shown that neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age. This makes tasks like learning, multitasking, or remembering difficult.
This is why it’s important to develop an experimental mindset. To have an experimental mindset is to accept risk and the unknown, it’s creating habits that are biased towards exploring what is possible, not simply an endless grind of rote learning that is based on the traditional sense of what is impossible.
After all, to experiment simply means to try—to come up with a hypothesis and test it. For instance, if every article claims that blockchain technologies will liberate, democratise and bring riches to the masses—then experiment with it. Whether it’s actively investing in cryptocurrency, going into in-depth research, or learning about it through a course.
Also Read: Are you ready to put on a Founder’s hat?
It’s important to remember that it isn’t about experimenting with whatever is deemed important at the moment—it could be AI, crypto, or NFTs. What’s important—and will help with burnout—is creating the mindset to learn.
By looking at everything through the lens of experimentation, learning about different technologies ceases to become a chore or an overwhelming tide threatening to drown you. It becomes another method to explore, a different tool to use, allowing new opportunities to emerge and critical unknowns to become known.
It’s important to explore what it means to have an experimental mindset in the digital age by exploring new tools, ways of doing, thinking and working. The focus here is developing key habits and mindsets that will set you up to be comfortable with experimentation. To create a mind laboratory and see yourself as the zany scientist tinkering with the various tools of your trade, concocting the imaginative chemical reaction through experiment, experiment, experiment.
One should know the value of their experimentation to be able to identify actions and behaviours that help or hinder experimentation; apply prototyping, testing and feedback as a way to learn and iterate solutions further; involve stakeholders and team members in experiments; select and apply effective tools and techniques that support experimentation.
There is an art to experimentation, and learning it will open up many ways of learning other things. It’s like learning how to walk: with the ability to walk, one can learn how to dance, jump rope, and ride a bicycle.
Not a sponge, but a sieve
When there is an infinite amount of knowledge to take in, be a sieve, not a sponge. A sieve takes everything you put in it but filters out the unnecessary stuff. Take time to set up your mental laboratory, configure it to your liking, move the furniture around and optimise it to your interests and skill sets.
Be experimental within the limitations you set for yourself in order not to get overwhelmed, and remember that learning can simply be trying by experimenting.
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