Student syndrome: The literate illiterate

He has read a few books on fitness and knows the benefits of exercise. Yet he keeps putting off getting started. Each exercise has its purpose, but he is not quite sure how to do it, and a few repetitions leave him tired. Unsurprisingly, after a few workouts, he sees little change. The books offer plenty of theories and explanations of the exercises, but without results, he needs a reason. He questions his physical condition, wonders whether his methods are wrong, and returns to his books. Only when he finds a theory or an explanation does he feel he has made progress.

In practice, getting useful feedback is difficult. Calling the effects of exercise "slow" does not adequately describe the problem. Feedback is complex and takes many forms: how an exercise feels, for example, or an improvement in performance. Changes may also be happening without being easy to notice.

We keep falling into a kind of "student syndrome": we expect a theory behind everything, and assume that anything without one is not worth doing. But knowledge does not exist only in theories that can be put into words. Someone who has read widely about fitness may know less about exercise than someone who never reads but runs five kilometers every day.

There is a gap here that is difficult to cross: recognizing and accepting the unknown.

What we can put into words is only an incomplete account of experience; what remains beyond words is the substance of experience itself. Student syndrome is rooted in our desire for certainty: certain theories, certain conditions, certain actions and results. If we do dumbbell flyes, our muscles must grow. If we run, we must lose weight. We always want a definite result, yet many things in life offer no such certainty. Even the same training method produces different results for different people. These areas of uncertainty are precisely what lies beyond words. They are the unknown itself.

We place too much emphasis on the starting point and the goal, while overlooking a workable path between them. That path is bound to contain uncertainty, things we do not know, and things we cannot put into words. In engineering, we call this "know-how" rather than "know-what." We know how to do something, rather than knowing what will happen once we do it.

Certainty is tempting. There is no risk to take, no unknown to face: just follow the manual and get the result. If we never try, we cannot fail, and we need not face uncertainty or the unknown. This is a fragile sense of security, a false certainty. Yet many failures hardly deserve the name. Someone once complained to me that he simply could not lose weight. His explanation was bad genes. But he had never even trained regularly. Training regularly without seeing results may be frustrating, but it is hard to call it a loss when there is no injury and no disruption to daily life. Regular training offers almost nothing but benefits, including more opportunities to interact with others and learn. By refusing to try, we give up every opportunity.

In Antifragile, Taleb discusses how gains come from optionality and randomness. We cannot predict outcomes, but many actions allow both manageable failures and unexpectedly large successes. It is this feature that produces gains over time. Student syndrome takes the opposite approach: it demands certain results and resists actions whose outcomes are uncertain. Faced with realities and events that have no written explanation, those who have it struggle to accept that their existing understanding needs revision. They struggle to gain new knowledge and develop new plans of action by observing the world.

They are the reverse of the illiterate in the usual sense: they can read, but they do not know how to learn from reality.

This applies to almost every field: learning, education, everyday life, work, investing, starting a business. Read plenty of apparently useless books, and one day the ideas in them may connect. Even if they never do, reading a few more books does little harm. Let children try things and fail, grow plants, and take part in sports; these activities do little harm either. We might even say that trying and failing are gains in themselves. They give us experience, help us understand the unknown, and develop our ability to face uncertainty. Student syndrome is rooted in fear of the unknown, and that fear can be trained away and overcome.

Accept failure, uncertainty, and the unknown. Engage with the reality that lies beyond words, and achieve something through action. Never exposing ourselves to uncertainty, never trying, never acting: that is the greatest failure.