The Rules

So, learning something new every day. Sounds easy enough on paper. There will, however, surely be problems in completing my mission, whether practical (more of which later, no doubt) or otherwise. Focussing on the latter, I think some boundaries are required to rein in what counts as ‘learning something new’ in a ‘day’. Well, a day would be 24 hours, from midnight to 11.59pm. So that’s the easy bit part sorted. As for the learning part, there’s are three hard and fast rules in my opinion, and they are:

1. The information that I declare as learnt each day must be something that I have become aware of that day which I didn’t know before (look, I know it’s kind of self-explanatory, but it needs to be said)
2. The information that I declare as learnt each day must be something that I can comprehend and place in context; I cannot claim to have learnt a very complicated scientific equation because I don’t genuinely understand what it means. If, however, I learn that David Beckham likes Quavers, then all well and good.
3. The information that I declare as learnt each day must be constant. This is a harder one to explain, but for example I can’t put that I learnt that Radiohead are going on tour, because this isn’t a constant, ongoing truth; at some point, Radiohead won’t be going on tour. That’s not learning new things about the world, it is simply retaining topical and fleetingly useful information.

So that’s the rules. The things I learn have to be new, comprehensible and constant facts. Come back before the 1st when I’ll go into the ethics of learning (can you tell I did a philosophy degree? I got a 2:1 which makes me clever) and start limbering up for the Quest to begin…