Nothing fades faster than freshly learned knowledge.
When I sail with inexperienced crew, I start with the basics: knots. They’re simple to learn and, when done right, impossible to forget. Yet two learning postures always appear.
The first group gets it right after a few tries. They’re pleased, call it simple, and move on.
The second group keeps going. They tie the knot while talking, while waiting for coffee, while looking at the horizon. Repetition that doesn’t need instruction anymore.
By sunset, both groups feel confident.
By the first strong wind, only one remains competent.
This isn’t a story about sailing but about learning. The sea just happens to make the difference visible faster.
Closure vs. Curiosity: The Two Postures of Learning
Every new crew divides almost automatically into two postures of learning.
Posture 1: The Closure Learners
They approach the knot like a quiz. After a few successful tries, they declare victory with a smiling “Got it!”. The crew cheers, drinks are handed out. Their focus was on reaching the correct outcome once, not ensuring they could reproduce it under pressure.
Posture 2: The Continuous Learners
They don’t stop at success. They test variations, tie the knot behind their backs, while talking, while looking elsewhere. They don’t seem to be chasing the one time success. Instead they’re exploring the edges of the skill.
To the casual observer, Posture 2 looks almost inefficient. To a degree slow, repetitive, slightly obsessive. Why should you practice the same knot over and over again when it is so easy!? Yet when the first strong wind hits, the hands of the Continuous Learners act before thought intervenes.
Psychologist Barry Zimmerman calls this self-regulated learning: setting goals, monitoring progress, and adjusting strategy when the brain wants to quit. These learners don’t just do the task but study how they’re doing it. That difference is what psychologists call metacognitive activity. It’s the ability to observe one’s own learning and keep practicing beyond comfort.
And beneath that behavior sits what Carol Dweck described as a growth mindset (often quoted online but rarely practiced), the belief that skill is built, not revealed. Closure Learners tie a knot to prove they can. Continuous Learners tie it again to improve what they can.
Most education and corporate systems still reward closure. They celebrate speed, completion, and visible success. Teams often behave like the learners too. They celebrate closure, reward speed, and forget that collective competence decays just as individual skill does.
The Brain’s Favorite Lie
Cognitive science has spent decades dissecting why Posture 1 feels good and Posture 2 works better.
The illusion of competence explains the trap: once something feels fluent, our brains mix up ease with mastery. Fluency gives a false sense of stability. A “done” signal that switches off attention. But in learning, comfort marks the start of decay.
Research by Robert Bjork and Nate Kornell shows that performance during practice is a poor predictor of retention. Tasks that feel harder (the so-called desirable difficulties) lead to stronger memory formation. The very friction Closure Learners avoid is what consolidates the skill for Continuous Learners.
Then comes retrieval practice, the act of recalling or performing knowledge under slightly altered conditions. The brain strengthens connections when it must reconstruct. That’s why the sailor who ties knots while chatting or blindfolded remembers better than the one who just repeats in silence.
Finally, automaticity. Broadly speaking: With enough spaced and varied practice, the skill moves from the prefrontal cortex (deliberate control) to procedural memory (effortless execution). It becomes available under stress. What once required thought now operates as autopilot.
The same principles apply beyond sailing. For cognitive work (such as strategy, decision-making, and also leadership practices in general) repetition means revisiting ideas from new angles, testing them under different assumptions, and challenging your own fluency. The mechanics change, but the psychology doesn’t.
So, when the meeting turns chaotic or the market shifts suddenly, it’s not intellect that steadies people but the practiced mind that has rehearsed discomfort.
Posture 1 learners experience the satisfaction of knowing. Posture 2 learners cultivate the security of being able.
Science confirms what the sea makes visible: learning that feels easy rarely lasts, and learning that lasts rarely feels easy.
The Willingness to Rehearse
The difference between knowing and performing is rehearsal. The unglamorous act of running through the same steps long after you “shouldn’t need to”. On a boat, this is obvious. You don’t rehearse a knot because you forgot it, but you rehearse it so it will hold when it matters.
Most people, unfortunately, underestimate how quickly unused skills degrade. Cognitive and procedural abilities begin to fade within days if left unpracticed. Rehearsal slows that decay by renewing existing competence. It’s less about learning more and more about staying ready.
This willingness to rehearse demands humility. It means admitting that mastery is temporary, that no skill is permanently stored, and no competence is permanently stable. Psychologists call this metacognitive awareness: the ongoing self-check that asks “Do I still know this well enough to trust it under pressure?”.
Those who rehearse regularly rarely need to relearn. Their competence stays alive because they keep it in motion. This can be manifested by deliberate reflection: rehearsing past decisions, questioning outcomes, refining instincts. Not in a postmortem way, but in a professional one: “What did I actually learn here that will hold next time?”
The willingness to rehearse is the most overlooked form of preparation. It’s not about fear of failure but respect for uncertainty. The sea doesn’t care what you knew last week. Neither does the market, or your team.
Competence fades.
Rehearsal prevents it.
Learning That Holds
By the end of a sailing day, you can tell who practiced and who didn’t. The ones that did act unbothered by noise or the chaos caused in the tight marina. And that’s how learning that holds should feel when it matters: unbothered by the conditions.
Competence exposes the quality of your preparation at inconvenient moments. When the environment turns unstable, rehearsed competence becomes visible. In those moments, we don’t rise to our level of ambition but fall to our level of practice.
That’s why the willingness to rehearse is not just a learning habit but a competence discipline. It transforms what we know into something we can rely on. It’s what makes decisions calmer, communication clearer, and judgment faster when pressure removes the luxury of thinking twice.
The best learners rehearse skills until they no longer require attention. They repeat not because they enjoy it, but because they understand what fades when they don’t. You can’t store competence in a notebook or a course certificate. You can only preserve it through application. By doing what you already know often enough to keep it alive.
So when you think about your own learning, ask: What have I stopped practicing because it once felt easy? Ease is not the finish line of learning.
Knots, conversations, strategies… they all work the same way.
Competence isn’t what you know. It’s what holds when the wind picks up.