Everyone has committed to doing something new this year. It could be to learn a skill, get healthier, improve one’s financial situation, become an author, learn to meditate, etc. Most of these require one to learn something or cultivate a new habit. This cycle repeats every year.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
- Alvin Toffler, Futurist

Let me share a parable. One student who made a resolution to learn meditation went to a Zen master. The master requested them to sit down as he poured a cup of green tea. The master started pouring the tea and kept pouring it till the cup filled up to the brim and continued to pour. The student was aghast since the master was, by definition, a mindfulness guru. As the tea continued to overflow, the student couldn’t but help request the master to stop pouring the tea! The master went on to explain that if you want to learn the new stuff you need to “empty” your cup.

While there is a lot published on unlearning, I did not find any frameworks that could help me with the “why”, “what” and “how” to unlearn. I took at a stab at it.

WHY is it as important to “Unlearn” as to “Learn”?

We learn through teachers, mentors, by reading, by observing or by trying things on our own. Often, as we are beginning to learn, we may fail for a few times until we succeed. Once we figure out how to get it to work, we start building positive, self-reinforcement loops. We tried something and it worked. And, it worked again. A dozen times. Not surprisingly, lot of Machine learning techniques, esp. supervised learning is similar.

Eventually, this becomes like a “pattern”, “thumb rule” or even a “habit”. At this point, if a “similar” situation, problem or opportunity presents itself, we are pre-programmed to jump to the “solution” we know will work.  However, both in human and machine learning, the prior solution may NOT always work since a lot of things may have changed. A much cited example for problems in machine learning include data bias. For humans, here are a few examples of things that may have changed:

• People and their behavior
• Context
• Triggers
• Apriori Bias
• Comfort with the "Status Quo"
• And many more …

WHAT should one “Unlearn”?

The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. As this article from Scientific American suggests, we have nearly unlimited "memory" to store everything that happens to us over a 100 year lifespan. Just like any other gargantuan search space, one need to sample both deliberately and randomly to identify what to retain, what to prune and what you re-learn and reinforce.

In our personal and professional lives, one could do the following:

• List out one’s deep-rooted beliefs. You can even make this list by asking people what they think your beliefs, decision-making styles, or even biases are, as they perceive it. Question them by exploring the polar opposite views.
• Identify things that have “always” worked for you and question what would have to change for those things to no longer work. One simple way to do that is every time you get into "solutioning" mode, take an an extra moment to revalidate or even re-evaluate this. Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, talks about the dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. He argues that to make better decisions we need "learn" to leverage both systems, in real-time.
• Enlist approaches that you do either don’t understand or agree with, but are being successful.

HOW should you go about “Unlearning”?

Once you have a prospective list of what to unlearn, this is a slightly easier task. There are a few different suggestions:

• Meet and talk to people with different viewpoints, esp. about one's deeply held beliefs.
• Identify the triggers that lead to those these “predetermined” decisions; build a “pause and reflect” phase every time one observes such a trigger.
• Publish your points of view on an “open” platform like LinkedIn, Medium or such and solicit comments.

Learning new things is the essence to growth; however, the other side of the coin is unlearning. It may be hard to identify and harder yet to unlearn things. Research suggests that it takes about 21 days to “break” a habit and about 66 days to cultivate a new one. Here’s wishing that we can all unlearn and relearn a few things in 2019.

About the Author -

(Amit Somani is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. He tweets at @amitsomani)

This article was originally published on Linkedin