Only Input Isn't Enough, We Need Output and Feedback

What processes do we need in learning? Input, output, and feedback. We can't skip the input process because we won't gain knowledge without it. Yet I'd like to highlight the others: output and feedback. We should put a higher weight on the output process to get feedback. I learned from Sion Kabasawa's book about the importance of the output process and my experience. I'll tell you the importance of output and feedback in this post.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Why isn't input alone enough?

I was overweight with inputted information. Before reading Kabasawa's book, I regarded learning as the input process. Last year, I read 100 books and watched 70 films. I leave some notes about books I read and movies I watched. Looking back on these notes reminds me of what I've read or watched. I was satisfied with the number of books and films I read or watched.

The problem was that the only input wasn't enough. One day, I met an old friend and talked about the books we read. I found I couldn't explain what a book I read wanted to say when he asked me about the content of the book. Reading a book is more valuable than reading no book only when you get something from it. What did you get from the book if you remember little about it? And the same goes for watching a movie.

Output – why do we need output?

Then what do we need other than input? The answer lies in Kabasawa's book. It says we need the output process to absorb what we learn. Output has at least two good points.

The more we output, the better we remember.

We can remember what we learn better by outputting it. Our brains will only remember necessary things. Do you remember the points of all the films you watched in the past six months? Probably many of you don't. Our brains forget the information we get unless we use it.

But our brains regard it as necessary if we use what I learned frequently. Tell someone your thoughts about a film you watched. Write down what you get from the film. Then you are likely to remember those things.

The output clarifies what is unclear to me.

We can figure out which points we understand well and which we don't by outputting what we learn. As The 5 Stages Of Learning shows, explaining how to do it requires more understanding than just doing it ourselves. We need to organize and verbalize information to explain something. If we can't do that, we don't understand it deeply enough to convey it to others.

Let's think about reading a book as an example. I often find it interesting after reading a book but sometimes find it difficult to explain which points interest me to others. You may have a similar experience. In many cases, we have room to understand it more. We realize we know fewer things about the book than we think only when we try to express it.

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For the above reasons, we need the output process to absorb what we learn. That's why I sought ways to output.

First, I started writing down what I thought and felt. Leaving some notes about books that I read and films that I watched is also a kind of output. Before reading Kabasawa's book, I took notes about the contents of the books I read and the films I watched.

However, since I took too many notes for one book or film, I tended to miss the point and, as a result, could remember little. So after reading Kabasawa's book, I consciously wrote down what I learned when I read a book or watched a movie. It has worked. I remember it well for a long time when I wrote down what I'd learned.

Feedback – why should output come with feedback?

I understand we need output, then is it enough if we do output? No. Although, as mentioned above, the output process has power, we need feedback to get more from the output process. Why do we need feedback? There are at least two reasons.

Feedback boosts learning speed.

From feedback, we can find points we need to improve. If we know what to improve, we also know what knowledge to gain. In other words, feedback determines what to input. We produce output from what we input. We can get feedback after the evaluation of what we output. Here's a feedback loop. The faster the feedback loop cycle, the faster we grow. Also, from this perspective, the importance of feedback is mentioned in many contexts, such as Psychological Safety and Agile software development.

We try to be more accurate if someone watches our output.

If a person evaluates what we output, that's feedback. If I say something incorrect, some people will laugh at me, or some will believe the wrong thing. We want to avoid these, so we'll be more careful of whether what we say is correct. That will brush up our output. As a result, we can understand things more deeply or find out what points we need to understand more.

What I found by writing

Since I lacked and needed output and feedback, I started writing blog posts.

What have I found by writing blog posts?

I know fewer things than I thought.

I've started writing blog posts and experienced the importance of output. I realized how difficult it is to express what I've learned. I come up with many things I'd like to write and often have ideas of how to tell what I'd like to convey.

However, no word comes to mind when I try to put them into words. This is a real experience of the output's revealing what I don't understand. I realized I knew far fewer things than I'd expected. Knowing this let me down a bit.

More importantly, however, this is one of the most valuable realizations. It's an essential learning process, as noted as Conscious Incompetence — the state of "I know that I don't know" — in The 5 Stages Of Learning. If I hadn't started writing, I wouldn't have entered the "I know that I don't know" phase. That's what I've learned by beginning blog post writing.

Don’t Worry If You Realize You Don’t Know Anything — Dunning-Kruger Effect and Five Stages of Learning

I get feedback from myself.

I've also experienced the importance of feedback. While writing blog posts, I discover many points to improve. My realization works as feedback from myself.

For example, I realized I have to improve my writing skill. I tried to find some books about writing and found some. I read the books and then came feedback from myself, such as "It's too early to read this book considering my current knowledge level," "This tells me many things, but what I need to know right now is another," or "This is what I need to put into practice." I have the purpose of writing blog posts better, so I can tell which books to read. After reading books I need to read, I use what I've learned to write better. And I'll find new points to improve. I'm about to be in a feedback loop.

By starting blog post writing, I've experienced the importance of feedback.

As I've described, we need the output and consequent feedback processes when we learn something. If you feel your learning speed is slow despite continuous learning, why don't you review the input-output ratio and whether you get feedback?

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