What Is the Learning Loop?

Shane Parrish calls the learning loop a path from experience to action. Someone has an experience, reflects on it, creates a compression, and then acts on that compression. When people communicate, they often pass along only the compression, and in a lot of cases that is an illusion of knowledge.

A cookbook makes the gap plain. He can go home, pull out a cookbook, and make the recipe, but if something goes wrong he has no idea what went wrong or why. The chef who had the experience, reflected on it, and then handed over the recipe knows exactly what went wrong. There is too much salt, the oven is not the right temperature, or the cook did not start enough. The chef knows all of that at once. A lot of what people consume is other people's compression.

Long form is how he wanted the podcast to work. The point is to reach the experiences, show the thinking, show the reflection, and let people leave with compressions of their own.