When I started this blog, I thought of it as a place to document what I was learning. Three posts in, I’ve realized the blog isn’t a record of the learning. The writing is where a lot of the learning actually happens.
Blogging as effortful learning
Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel argue in Make It Stick that the strategies that feel most productive, like rereading, highlighting, and reviewing notes, are often the least effective. They build familiarity, and familiarity is easy to mistake for mastery. Durable learning comes from effort: pulling information out of memory, putting it in your own words, and connecting it to what you already know. The authors call these desirable difficulties. They slow you down in the moment, but they make what you learn last longer and transfer to new situations.
Blogging builds several of these difficulties in automatically.
Retrieval practice. When I sit down to write, I don’t start with the book open. I start with what I remember. Recalling a concept from memory strengthens it far more than reading it again.
Generation. A blank page makes me produce an explanation before I’ve confirmed I have it right. The book describes generation as attempting an answer before being shown one, and the struggle to produce it makes the real answer stick when I find it.
Elaboration. I can’t write a post about learning science without connecting it to my own work. I’ve spent years in HR transformation and M&A integration, and I keep asking how these ideas would show up in an integration or a system adoption effort. Each connection gives the new idea more hooks to hold onto.
Reflection. The book describes reflection as a combination of retrieval, elaboration, and generation: looking back at what happened, what worked, and what I’d do differently. That’s basically what a reflective blog post is.
Blogging also exposes my illusions of knowing. I can read a chapter and feel like I understand it, and then try to explain it in writing and find out I can’t. That moment is uncomfortable, but it’s useful. It shows me where the gaps are while I can still fill them.
The Blundering Gardener
The example that stuck with me most from Chapter 4 is Bonnie Blodgett, who calls herself the “Blundering Gardener.” She didn’t become an expert by mastering the rules first. She learned by trying things, one at a time, and figuring out what worked through trial and error. For her, blundering means starting before you’ve worked out the “right” way to do something. She sees that as a strength, because a lot of people never start at all. They look at how big the task is and freeze.
What I love about the name is that it gives her, and her readers, permission to make mistakes and keep going. That’s generation in action: attempting something before you have the answer, and letting the struggle teach you.
The part that matters most for this post is that she doesn’t stop at gardening. She writes about it. The authors point out that writing adds learning processes beyond the gardening itself. She has to go back over what happened, explain why something worked or failed, and connect it to what she already knows. Her mistakes become lessons because she takes the time to make sense of them on the page.
I relate to this more than I expected. My career hasn’t followed a textbook path, and much of what I know about integration and change I learned by doing it, sometimes getting it wrong, and then figuring out how to do it better. This blog is my version of her writing. I’m working through ideas in public, including the ones I don’t fully understand yet, and that process is exactly what makes them stick. I’m a bit of a blundering learner myself.
What about AI?
This is the question I care about most, because AI readiness is the focus of my program and my career.
If I used AI to write my blog posts start to finish, I’d lose most of what makes blogging powerful for learning. The benefit doesn’t come from having a finished post. It comes from the effort of producing it: recalling the ideas, struggling to explain them, and making the connections myself. If AI does the generating, I skip the generation effect. If AI writes the reflection, I haven’t reflected. I’d end up with a polished post and a more convincing version of the illusion of knowing the book warns about.
That’s not how I use it. I test myself first. I write my own response from what I remember and understand, and then I bring AI in as a double check.
The most useful thing AI does for me is read my work the way my audience would. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel describe the curse of knowledge: when you know something well, you lose sight of what someone newer needs explained. I run into this constantly. After years in HR transformation and integration work, I skip steps without noticing because they feel obvious to me. AI will read a draft and point out that I never explained something, or that I jumped from one idea to the next without connecting them. In my head it was understood. On the page, it wasn’t there.
In Make It Stick terms, that’s calibration: an outside check on whether what I think I’ve communicated matches what I actually put down. It shows me the gaps in my thinking and in my explanations, and then I do the work of filling them.
So I see AI as a thought partner, not a ghostwriter. The line I draw is this: AI can challenge my thinking, but it can’t do my thinking for me. If I hand over the hard part, I lose the learning. If I do the hard part first, AI helps me see what I missed.
That’s also what I’d tell any organization adopting AI. The tool doesn’t replace the learning. People still have to do the effortful work of building understanding, or they end up with output they can’t evaluate, explain, or defend.
Where I’ve landed
Blogging is a desirable difficulty I chose on purpose. It’s slower than reading and highlighting, and sometimes it’s frustrating. That’s the point. Like the Blundering Gardener, I’m learning by doing, getting some of it wrong, and writing my way to a better understanding.
Reference
Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
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