Unlearning
Putting down the thing that used to work, once it has stopped working.
The behaviour, in one line: I willingly drop habits and beliefs that used to work once they stop fitting reality.
A pattern that used to be true keeps firing after the world stops matching it, and it fires with all the confidence it earned while it worked. Unlearning is taking those out deliberately, because they do not leave on their own.
Experience gives you patterns, and patterns are how you get fast. The trouble is that a pattern keeps firing after the thing it described has changed, and it fires with all the confidence it earned back when it was true. Unlearning is taking those out on purpose. It is harder than learning, because it means saying that something you trusted is no longer the case. The digital version is sharper, because the ground moves faster than experience can track. The workflow you optimised two years ago is now the slow way, and the instinct that a task takes a week was calibrated on a tool that has since been replaced.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| Dropping the method | Dropping the principle |
| Certainty as a place to look | Certainty as a conclusion |
| Asking what the change makes possible | Explaining why the old way was better |
| Expertise as something you maintain | Expertise as something you accumulate |
What it looks like. Someone junior suggests a thing that breaks a rule you have followed for a decade. Before you explain the rule, you go and check where it came from, and find it solved a constraint that stopped existing four years ago.
- Being experienced in a field that moved. The patterns that made you effective are the same ones that will keep you solving the old problem. Nothing warns you when they expire.
- The best practice that is now a liability. Most best practices are a solution to a constraint. When the constraint goes — the cost of a draft, the cost of a query, the week a first version used to take — the practice usually stays.
- Teaching people who learned it differently. If you cannot tell which of your habits are principles, you will pass on the dated methods with the same conviction as the durable parts.
- Treat “that is how it has always been done” as a flag rather than an answer. It is usually the first thing worth re-examining.
- Split the principle from the method. Most of what feels like losing your expertise is losing a method the principle no longer needs.
- When a rule changes, ask what it now makes possible before defending the old one. Defending is quick, and it stops you looking.
- Retire one strong opinion a quarter on purpose: take it apart and rebuild it from what you can actually verify.
- Break it into parts
Three parts: catching “that is how it has always been done”, separating the durable principle from the dated method, and retiring a belief on purpose.
- The part that carries it
The split between principle and method. Without it, unlearning feels like losing everything you know rather than shedding the expired part.
- The order to learn it in
- Get good at noticing the phrases first — “we always”, “obviously”, “that never works”.
- Run the split on each one: which part is the principle, and which is only the method?
- Then retire a strong opinion deliberately, and rebuild it from the evidence.
- Put something at stake
Name one strong professional opinion, tell a colleague you are re-examining it, and give them the date you will report what survived.
- Compress it
Keep the principle. Drop the method. Re-examine whatever you are most certain about.
- The smallest useful dose
One inherited assumption examined a week, and one strong opinion rebuilt from scratch each quarter.
- Anchor it to something you know
A cup that is already full. Nothing new goes in until something comes out.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Unlearning run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Unlearning in the course →
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