Find and understand your reasons for a learning goal

The aim of this task is to turn vague ideas of why you want to do something into clear reasons. This helps you clarify your goal and why it’s important to you.

Often there are two groups of reasons. Some reasons arise from your specific goal. Others may come from a desire to develop the underlying personal skills along the way. As an example, the following table contains a list of potential reasons from someone wanting to learn to fly:

As you can see, the reasons on the left are potential benefits that come from flying itself. The reasons on the right are more to do with underlying personal skills you develop on the way to the goal.

For your own goals, I suggest you find reasons from both groups. Sometimes the “personal skill” reasons motivate you more than the activity reasons. Other times you may not realize you are developing personal skills along the way to a goal.

Sometimes you may have a learning goal you feel doesn’t match your personal direction. Often this is the case in a work environment. If this happens, you may want to focus on the personal skill reasons to help motivate yourself. Find your own reasons for achieving the goal. Look for what could help you achieve your own goals later.

A similar case is when you feel that you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to focus on. This could be as minor as choosing a training course at work, or it could be as major as choosing a career. My view is that it’s often better to set a direction, any direction, rather than wasting time waiting for enlightenment on what you should do. Set a direction that helps you develop your personal skills. When you do find your direction, you will likely get there faster than those who have wasted their time sitting still in one place. Many people do just this, waiting for someone else to hand them their purpose or their meaning of work or life.

If you find it difficult to find your own reasons for a particular goal, consider doing some of the next step, explore your goal. If you still struggle to find rational and realistic reasons for a particular goal, you may want to think more about why you are considering the goal. Are the motives of someone else driving you? Perhaps the motives of another individual, group or company are driving you, for example. If you feel that might be the case, be aware that allowing others to continually make decisions for you can harm your Memletic State. When you start on a goal, it’s your choice to do so. Make sure you understand your reasons!

Learning Memletics as a goal

You may be thinking about setting a goal to learn Memletics by itself. My suggestion is to find another learning goal you can use Memletics with, rather than only studying Memletics. Your understanding and learning of the system comes more easily when you apply it to different activities. For some examples of activities you may want to try, see the Overview chapter.

You don’t learn to drive a car by studying the car itself. You learn to drive by using it. I suggest you follow the same approach for Memletics.

You don’t have to learn Memletics all at once either. In the appendix I provide some tips on how to learn Memletics.