Learning

Have you ever taken a martial art and wondered why it seems like you do the same few moves hundreds if not thousands of times? Or you may have noticed that in role-playing games, either computer or pen and paper, a lot of what you do is the same thing over and over? Travel to point A. Fight just about everything you encounter. Loot the corpses. Then rinse wash repeat for points B through Z? Or how most songs are a few lines of verse then a chorus and a few more lines of verse and the chorus again. Repeat ad infinitum.  In school grammar and arithmetic are pretty much the same thing year after year from elementary to high school.

Do you know why all those things operate under the same general principle of repetition?
In martial arts the theory is that if you do a thing thousands of times it will become a part of who you are and after awhile you will no longer need to be afraid in dangerous situations. You will be able to protect yourself and those you care about by instinct.

Songs generally have a chorus so that there is a part that will stick in your head and be memorable.
Role-playing games have you follow the same formula over and over to simulate what happens in real life.  No you probably don't travel around in real life brandishing a claymore, slaying tons of monsters and equipping yourself with the items they drop when they die. But you do use the experiences that happen in your life to grow stronger as person just as you do in a role-playing game.

And last but not least you do the same things year after year in school building just a little bit more each time on what you learned last time, because that is how we as people learn, through massive repetition.

That's right all of these things are connected because they tap into how we accept new data into our lives. When we are children we learn to speak a language by hearing countless tens of thousands of conversations going on all around us. We learn the alphabet by being told over and over what each letter is. Once we learn what letters are we learn what words are by seeing the letters of the alphabet shaped into words again and again. And we learn to read by seeing the printed word and being told what words make what sounds repeatedly. We learn through repetition. People that learn faster need less repetition. But very few people ever learn anything all the way through the first time.

Have you ever read a book then had a couple of years go by and then read that same book again and got something completely different out of it? It's not because the book changed in any way. It is because you are not the same person that you were when you read it the first time.

When you find yourself doing some repetitive task that you think is boring and you just do not see the point, instead of tuning out, try asking yourself, what could I possibly learn or be learning from this experience?