It’s late afternoon in Tampa, and the light has that syrupy, amber quality it only gets right before dusk. The kind that makes even your to-do list look poetic for a second—before you remember it’s still a to-do list. I’m sitting at my small desk, a cup of cold coffee beside my laptop, surrounded by the debris of what I like to call “productive confusion”: notebooks, sticky notes, three open tabs on cognitive load theory, and a half-finished wireframe for a new learning app my team is building in collaboration with mobile app development Tampa.
For weeks, I have been researching “how people learn” – readings, quote-harvesting, PDF annotation – and yet it feels like I learn nothing. Or rather, unlearn clarity itself. Every time I believe that I have a good handle on something regarding attention, another theory pops up in challenge to it. Every article comes with another five attached. I’m stuck in some sort of ‘knowing too much’ feedback loop.
Maybe it isn’t ignorance, it hits me, all at once, in that soft Tampa light: maybe it’s abundance. Maybe, in the age of infinite access, the best thing we can do is know just a little less.
Paradox of Overlearning
We live in a time when answers are said to be just three clicks away, access to information is easier than ever. But the more we know, the less we seem to understand. I’ve felt it in my own head—how quickly I can confuse “familiarity” with understanding. I’ll watch a video that talks about some complicated concept and say, Yeah, okay, I get it, only to then realize I wouldn’t be able to actually explain it.
Psychologists dub it the “illusion of competence.” We store information so readily that we assume we have absorbed it. To be aware of something is not to know it, though.
Childhood comes back to me, when learning was more about curiosity than accuracy; when you could marvel at how the moon seemed to follow your car without having the faintest clue about the physics of perspective; and when imagination filled in the gaps knowledge had not yet claimed. There’s something powerful about that, isn’t there? Not ignorance, exactly, but openness.
We build whole adult systems to stuff our minds with information and forget to leave room for wonder.
Real Cognitive Clutter
In my work designing for learning, I think a lot about cognitive load. Every interface, every layout, every word that we expose to the user either makes room or makes noise. I’ve seen how easily a ‘well-intentioned’ platform can drown the learner in features: tabs, resources, tips, progress trackers. More features equal more worth, we believe but mostly just mean more distraction.
It applies to life, too. We hoard ideas the way we hoard apps, never wanting to delete anything in case “what if I need it later?” But cognitive clutter is real every matter nothing does.
So lately, I’ve been trying something new: purposeful forgetting. Closing the extra tabs. Writing one idea per page. Letting thoughts breathe before layering on more.
It can feel wrong in a culture obsessed with productivity, but maybe slowing down isn’t failure. Maybe it’s focus.
Zen Unlearning
I’ve read about Zen monks who practice something called shoshin—“beginner’s mind.” It means approaching every experience with openness, even (especially) when you’re an expert.
Here is a concept that has stuck with me. The more I learn, the harder it is to claim I do not know. My brain asks for closure — answers, conclusions, categories. But true learning is messy. It lives in questions, not bullet points.
Not so long ago from today, I gave this “beginner’s mind” a try in a design sprint. Typically, I’m the one who brings the structure; whiteboards, flowcharts, UX principles. But this time, I told my team “Pretend we know nothing.”
There is no jargon, no prior assumptions. We started fresh. Within an hour, we had come up with ideas that never would have surfaced under the oppressive weight of ‘‘expertise.” A game mechanic based on origami. A learning pathway that modeled after the rhythm of jazz. Chaotic, imperfect, alive.
And it made me realize: unlearning is not regression. It is reawakening.
The Irony of Beauty in Technology
When you work in tech, and particularly in mobile app development in Tampa, you live with information architecture all the time: organizing, optimizing, streamlining. But sometimes, I wonder if it’s technology itself that’s teaching us the wrong lesson: that efficiency equals intelligence.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. It’s like mapping the invisible connections in people’s minds when designing digital learning tools. But I see the irony too. We’re building platforms to teach people to learn fast when maybe the real challenge is learning to pause.
I want to create an app that’s all about being slow. One that’s like, “Shut this for a second. Ponder.” Something that gives time to thinking as opposed to getting it done. Because if it’s only a matter of checking to learn, then what’s it for?
Maybe the next thing in educational technology isn’t more but less: creation of “The Empty Space Between”
Empty Space Between
This past weekend, I went for a walk along Bayshore Boulevard. I didn’t bring headphones. I had no agenda. Just me and the sound of the water brushing against the sea wall. I tried to observe without labeling: the salt in the air, the rhythm of joggers’ feet, the pale blue-gray of the sky.
At twenty minutes, something weird started happening: I was connecting ideas I hadn’t even realized were related. Something I’d read about days ago suddenly made sense. A UX challenge that had felt impossible now seemed elementary.
Maybe that’s what “knowing-less” really means: not erasing information but giving it room to settle. Silence is underrated. It’s the empty space where learning actually happens.
The Myth of Mastery
Everyone wants to be an expert. Maybe, just maybe, expertise is overrated after all. The more one progresses in any line, the more one recognizes how much one does not know. That used to scare me. Now, it comforts me, knowing that the best thinkers I’ve known, those who really do change things, are not those who know everything but who stay curious, humble, perpetually unfinished.
I have a sketchbook and on one page, very faint and almost undetectable, there’s a quote penciled: “To know something well, know it poorly first.” I have no idea where it’s from, but it’s become a kind of mantra. It helps me remember that learning’s not an iteration, not one thing after another in a straight line to be repeated. You loop, you forget, you rediscover. It’s not a ladder; it’s a spiral.
Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe progress isn’t about filling a ladder with more rungs, but going back to it with a clearer head.
Closing Thoughts
The Tampa sky’s turned all orange now like that kind of color which is an apology for the chaos of the day. I fold my laptop and stare at the reflection of the window screen. Oddly enough, I feel tranquil; not because everything has been worked out but because I have ceased trying to do so.
To know less is not to care less but to trust more in the understanding of time. It’s knowing that wisdom doesn’t always shout but hums quietly under the noise.
I’ll open my laptop again tomorrow. I’ll be back to endless research, meetings, algorithms, and apps. Maybe just maybe I’ll take a little less surety with me and a little more room for wonder.
Maybe, sometimes, the best way to learn more is to start by clearing a bit of room for the unknown.