Is Our Learning Pace Keeping Up with Information Growth?
Has our learning rate increased?
The volume of information available today vastly surpasses past projections, with the advent of sophisticated technologies accelerating the creation of new knowledge.
However, we seldom reflect on how this impacts us individually. If information and knowledge are expanding exponentially, shouldn’t our ability to assimilate this information also evolve?
I recently discovered that medical knowledge doubles in less than three months. For healthcare professionals, this raises the question: how rapidly must one learn to keep pace with such swift advancements in knowledge? Is it even possible for humans to keep up?
This realization is indeed daunting. It prompts the essential question: “Can humans enhance their ability to acquire knowledge and adapt to the speed at which new information is generated?”
While I believe we can increase our learning rate, catching up with the rapid generation of new knowledge remains a challenge.
To enhance our learning rate, understanding individual learning preferences is crucial. Identifying optimal information presentation formats and gauging current knowledge retention rates can guide personalized learning strategies.
Being conscious of learning speed allows for gradual improvement. However, this alone might not suffice to keep up with the burgeoning knowledge landscape.
Here, technology offers a solution. The same advancements contributing to rapid knowledge development can be harnessed to facilitate learning. Generative AI tools, for instance, can tailor information presentation to individual preferences, aiding faster assimilation.
These tools can also summarize and highlight relevant information, eliminating the need to sift through extensive texts.
In reality, our learning rate hasn’t significantly changed, as many remain unaware of this potential for enhancement. Now informed, it’s pivotal to leverage available technologies like AI tools and text-to-audio solutions to augment learning.
Personally, audiobooks have drastically reduced my reading time, allowing me to complete a week-long book in approximately five hours.
Recognizing this shift and adapting accordingly is the key to staying ahead of the curve in this era of rapid knowledge evolution.
Dr. Ehoneah Obed (Pharmacist, Software Engineer, Health Informatician, Founder)
My work focuses on identity engineering, which is the deliberate process of designing and updating who you are, personally and professionally.
Most people experience identity as something fixed or accidental. It is shaped by parents, early success or failure, education, and society’s definition of what a “good life” looks like. They adapt to it rather than questioning it. What most people do not realize is that identity is not just something you discover. It is something you can actively engineer.
Personal identity engineering is about gaining control over how your beliefs, values, and self-concept are formed and reinforced.
Professional identity engineering is about translating that internal identity into skills, work, leverage, and visible contribution in the world.
When people feel stuck, it is rarely because they lack motivation or talent. It is because they are trying to change outcomes while leaving the underlying identity system untouched. Careers stall. Confidence collapses. Direction feels unclear. The system keeps producing the same results.
I learned this by rebuilding myself multiple times.
I trained as a pharmacist for six years. While working in hospitals, I began learning to code alongside my job. That led to building real software, selling products, transitioning into software engineering, completing a master’s degree in health informatics at the University of Toronto, and now building startups and systems full time. Each transition followed the same pattern. My identity did not change because I thought differently. It changed because I took specific actions that produced new evidence, and that evidence forced a new story about who I was capable of being.
That is the core mechanism behind identity engineering.
Identity updates when you intentionally generate evidence that contradicts your old self-image, then compound that evidence until the old identity can no longer run the system.
This blog is where I document that process. I write about how to design identity experiments that are small, controlled, and reversible. How to build proof-of-work that changes both how you see yourself and how the world responds to you. How to move forward without waiting for clarity, confidence, or permission.
This is not motivation and it is not coaching. It is systems thinking applied to human change.
I also write The Ledger, a weekly record of systems and experiments for building a life you own.
And I built the Identity Audit, a diagnostic tool that helps you understand your current identity state before you attempt to change it.
I am not presenting a finished theory. I am engineering this in real time, using my own life as the test environment. If you want more agency over who you are becoming, both personally and professionally, you are in the right place.
