Dan Erwin

Top Ten Books for College Orientation

Many students heading off to college for the first time this fall already have a college-level assignment. In preparation for their first year, they’re expected to have read a book over the summer and come prepared to discuss it in class.

It was not just any book, but a “common reading.” It was a specific book selected by their institution to not only create a shared experience, but also planned to be the subject of discussions by college freshmen and their teachers. As you look through the list, compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education, you’ll notice that many of them are intended to help raise awareness of social issues.

The term “occurrences” refers to the number of colleges using the book in the “one book, one campus” program--not to the fact that I lost the six-grade spelling bee by misspelling “occurrence.” And that’s another fact, jogging my 76-year-old memory. Ha!

Here’s the list of the top ten books, in order of selection numbers. I’ll also add a comment or two about each of the books.

1. Just Mercy: A story of justice and redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (73 occurrences). Bryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware, the great grandson of slaves. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. After graduating from college, he went on to Harvard Law, and then began representing poor clients in the South.
2. Educated: A memoir, by Tara Westover (57 occurrences). If you thought Hillbilly Elegie was great, it’s tame in contrast to Westover’s story of going to college with no education. Her ignorance of the Holocaust, and discoveries of Napoleon and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as the fact of learning that Europe is not a country is all excruciating. Yet soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor exclaims upon meeting her: “How marvelous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion.’”
3. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nahisi Coates (35 occurrences). The well-known writer and commentator delivers his book in the form of a letter to his son. It overflows with insights about the embodied state of blackness and the logic of white supremacy. If you’re an avid reader you’ll know that a lot of his insights about being Black in a White world are being strongly challenged, making it still more important for the reader. 

Why Is It So Hard to Learn?

There are at least ten or so reasons that tend to make learning difficult for most of us.

Less than 10% of professionals are agile enough learners to quickly process an experience and apply their lessons to new situations. That's a spooky statistic. In today's economy where innovation, skill development  and learning are the only means to circumvent  personal obsolescence, why is the number of agile learners so small? In other words, why is it so hard to learn? Max Bazerman of Harvard  suggests three basic obstacles to learning. In this brief summary I add eight more insights gleaned from both research and face-to-face experience with hundreds of clients. 

The need for balance
If you’ve achieved some level of professional success, the idea that your skills could be lacking won’t compute. In fact, as Bazerman reminds us, balance theory emphasizes that we want consistency when we organize our thoughts and think about our expertise. To maintain our cognitive balance—our need to believe we’re consistent--we are nearly certain to avoid hard or painful truths.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Generally, most of us reach a level of competency between four and six years into our vocation—then we slow down and eventually stop learning. Partly, that’s because we’ve been praised in the past for our work prowess. According to reinforcement theory, we tend to continue behaviors (skills) that brought positive rewards such as raises and promotions. If your professionalism has rewarded you, you’ll tend to resist information suggesting that your judgment and your toolbox could be systematically improved. 

Mistakes were made, but not by me
You’ve probably relied on your way of doing things for years. When you receive negative feedback about your performance, that will mean that you’ve made some costly mistakes in the past—and that will be unsettling. Interpersonal studies suggest that getting negative feedback causes us to avoid the person who gave it, filter information to him in the future, and constrict our  thinking. It’s no surprise that most of us will try to discredit the truth about our deficiencies, and become impervious to self-correction.

Missing the big picture
When learning new competencies, some people are so wrapped up in the detail and concrete specifics of a new skill that they miss the big development picture. Our education, whether business, law, architecture or engineering is highly specialized—making us all "Incrementalists." As a result, we fail to fully integrate the new skill into our toolkit, thinking that learning is merely an item-by-item matter. Without integration, our learning results will be nothing more than mediocre, barely moving the needle.