I decided to take a look at the “I am not your guru” documentary of Tony Robbins out of curiosity and I was both impressed and reassured.

Impressed by his ability to craft such experience for an enormous group of people, but more importantly watching it reminded me of how it is important to “dive” into concepts before discarding them.

I have always been a learner. I learn things, I try things. When there’s something you I test it and my knowledge grows with these experiences. I know so much more today thanks to the way I am. Some people are often surprised by this, but it’s not really a special skill, rather I have a quite high tolerance for the unknown, for the chaos, for the new things.

Imagine a child on a beach, his father nearby. The child never went into water, let alone swim.
His father asks him to try and enter the water.
The child puts his feet in it, the water is cold, he comes back.

How much did the child discover of water? How much will he know?
Nothing.

When we try new things our default is to be scared, to reject the new, to discard. It’s both our instinct and our brain that tell us this.
But to know something you need to go deep. You need to be immersed, you need to stay in that water for long.
You don’t need to become skilled, but you need to spend time in it. To feel comfortable, to be able to say “I like this, while I don’t like that”.

If your answer is “I don’t like that” you’ve probably not gone deep enough because in each new thing there is something good, interesting.
The whole experience might not be your thing but you should be able to discern what you like and what you don’t like.
And when I say “Like”, I mean it. “Like” like “If it was only this I could do it for my whole life”.

I believe learning is this. Diving into something, loosing track of where you started and maybe coming back, or maybe go forward with something new, something you found along the way that you didn’t have before.