I know that we usually fly over webpages just scanning text for keywords and structural bits and pieces of information, with the least amount of attention we can spare. We often don't really read anymore. But today I would like you to slow down, take a moment, get your favorite beverage and sit down to actually read this, because a part of my current work presented a perfect opportunity to go into learning, knowledge transfer, inspiration and of course the misconception of originality as well.

When I was a small boy, I was often asked by grown-up's what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always answered: I will study cybernetics. The kicker is, I just said that because I knew it would please my mother, so she could enjoy showing off, what a smart and ambitious son she had. But as it turned out, I obviously wasn't smart enough for that :)

For the past couple of weeks I've been scrambling like hell and to get some of the work done I had to create an army of slaves to do it first. So I've been busy building robots of all different kinds. Some of them are made of real hardware. Others exist in software only and one of those creations shall be used as an example, to reflect the learning process involved.

When I look at today's ways of “learning” in school and universities I am not surprised that we are breeding generations of mindfucked zombies, endlessly repeating the same mistakes, trying to use the one tool they've learned for everything (even if completely incompatible). Pointless discussions about originality, plagiarism and unique revolutionary ideas. Patents. Intellectual-Property. Bullshit. Many people with that kind of background I meet cannot even say “I don't know”. They will scramble and come up with a bullshit answer for everything, only to appear knowing. Why? Because they have been taught that not knowing something is equal to failure. And failure will lead to become an unsuccessful looser, who will not get laid, right?

But how should anyone's brain be able to really learn something when it believes (even when just pretending) that it already knows it? You cannot fill a cup that already believes itself to be full. When you pretend to be an expert, you obviously cannot even ask questions that would help you to really understand something, because then your “expert status” would fade away. So better make your heads empty, because the more you learn, the more you realize, that you don't know shit.

Which turns our focus to failure. From all I could learn about efficient learning, failure was always the biggest accelerator for learning. If everything went smoothly and I didn't have to do much to learn/realize how or why something worked I didn't learn anything about it, because I simply didn't have to. Only failure and deep engagement with whatever I tackled really let my brain comprehend things to a level where I can say I've learned more about it.

This is a little drawing I made modeling how my personal learning process works and after looking at a lot of history, it seems to me that we can apply it over all ages and societies as well. Only that we've managed to carry cultural ballast with us, which tries to pretend that the right half of the circle doesn't exist or when not denied is always associated with negative educational/social metrics/values (grades/recognition).

Before we had Internet, it was easy to travel somewhere, copy what other people did, come back and pretend it's one's own “original” work (simply lie about it). No one could really check it. Especially not on individual mass scale. It was easy to sell the illusion of revolutionary and “original” work. But then, why are so many “original” pop-songs (not the countless covers of these songs anyways) basically based on the melodies of countless local folk songs from all ages from all over the world? Or why were the Americans so eager to pull off Operation Paperclip after WW2? Why has there been and is so much industrial/military espionage to get the secret plans of “the other guys” if they were all so original? Well they weren't, because…

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