Bottleneck to Learning

Tie a knot in a hose and the flow of water becomes constrained. Try and go through a revolving door with too many people and you will not fit, the door will stop. Tip a glass bottle upside down and the liquid will not instantly fall out, it has to flow through the bottleneck. The bottleneck is a constraint that hinders flow and bottlenecks exist everywhere.

Bottlenecks are interesting because they typically have singular, identifiable points which prevent the proper flow of material. Forgot an ingredient for the meal you are cooking tonight? Bottleneck. Cannot find your keys and need to leave your home? Bottleneck. Need to upload a file but your internet is moving slowly? Bottleneck. When a company struggles to fulfill order demands, there is normally an identifiable bottleneck. There could either be supply chain issues where delays are presented or the employees can simply be overwhelmed by how many orders have come in. In either case, fix the bottleneck and solve the issue. Almost anything can have a bottleneck.

With learning, the bottleneck is curiosity, not access to information. Access to information may have been the bottleneck 30 years ago, maybe even 20 years ago, but in an age where we have supercomputers in our pockets, and nearly any of life’s mysteries a couple of clicks away, that bottleneck has been overcome. Now, the limits to learning are purely on an individual scale and are all about our individual perspectives and interests. Do not want to study for your history test? Think about it less from a results perspective, the grade, and instead choose to think from a learning perspective. If you are interested in the topic, learning will flow seamlessly. The process of information is once again streamlined.

Studying and framing how you learn in school is just one small piece to the lifelong quest for learning we should all be after. When there are no limits to the amount of information accessible to us, why should we let curiosity in our individual minds be the limiting factor? Break out of these bottleneck traps and follow what excites you. Follow where your curiosity goes. If you don’t think you have any hobbies or things that interest you, think a little harder, there are absolutely things you do in your life that you can choose to learn more about. Love drinking a glass of scotch or wine to wind down after a long day? Learn more about how scotch is aged or what makes a good wine a good wine. Choose to seek information in any field that excites you. Where and what you choose to be curious about can be anything!

By choosing to fix bottlenecks in our own minds, the flow of information will return to its uninterrupted state. As information flows, we grow and evolve. Eliminate the bottleneck and dive back into learning, the limit is not on our access it is on our desire to access.