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> His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me. There's something prescient here. I can't count how many times a day just bein
by brownbat 7y ago
> His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me.
There's something prescient here. I can't count how many times a day just being surrounded other people I've seen them do or use something slightly more efficient than the way I would do it, and have integrated it into my workflow.
Isolation may be a factor in cognitive decline, we absorb a ton through fleeting social interactions.
- vidarh 7y agoThere's an attitude thing there too though (while I agree with you that you can often pick things up just by being around them), between reacting to lack of knowledge by looking for someone to tell you or teach you, and just asking someone else to do it if you're not told, vs. actively seeking out the knowledge yourself. Personally I think part of why I've learned a lot of what I know is because as an introvert I often notice that I'm willing to put in a lot of effort into figuring things out myself to avoid asking someone. As a child I was blind to my motivations, and sometimes it made me miserable because I'd stress out over how to do something that I could have trivially asked about and where figuring out the solution was a lot of effort, but learning the skill of figuring out "anything" on my own has been incredibly valuable. Today I'm aware of this tendency, and will often force myself to pick the social interaction based on a conscious trade-off of the relative pain of asking vs. doing, but I will still often choose to find a way to learn how to do something on my own rather than ask even when asking would be "less painful", both because it often teaches me more and because maintaining the skill of learning on my own is something I value in itself.