What is Learning by Doing?

I learned more about entrepreneurship in the three weeks I spent preparing for the University of Missouri's Entrepreneurship Quest pitch competition than I had in any classroom up to that point. I was a senior in high school, sweating through a pitch deck for Skypig — the company I had just started — and trying to figure out, in real time, what investors actually wanted to hear. When I placed second, I wasn't just walking away with funding. I was walking away with a kind of knowledge no textbook had given me.

That experience is what I now think of as the difference between learning about something and learning by doing it.

The Research Behind Learning by Doing

The phrase "learning by doing" is most often credited to John Dewey, the American philosopher and education reformer who argued in the early 1900s that meaningful education couldn't happen in isolation from real experience.

 Dewey believed students learn best when they're solving actual problems, not memorizing answers to ones someone else has already solved. Modern cognitive science has largely backed him up — studies on experiential learning consistently show that when people apply concepts to real situations, even simulated ones, retention and transfer skyrocket compared to passive instruction.

There's a name for this in academic circles: Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle. The idea is that learning is a loop — you have a concrete experience, you reflect on it, you form a concept from it, and then you test that concept in a new situation. Then you do it again. Each loop deepens your understanding in a way reading or listening can't replicate. The Association for Experiential Education has spent decades building out the practical applications of this idea across industries.

But here's the part the academic literature doesn't quite capture: learning by doing isn't just more effective. It's more honest. It's the only kind of learning that exposes you to the parts of a problem you didn't know existed.

What I've Learned From Doing

When I built Products: The Card Game, my whole goal was to put people inside that experiential learning loop. The game forces players to invent ideas on the fly and pitch them to the table — usually ridiculous ideas, like a self-stirring soup ladle for cats. There's no pressure, because nothing is at stake. But something interesting happens after a few rounds: people start to relax. They get bolder. Then, when those same people are in a real pitch situation later — selling a real idea they actually care about — they discover they're a little less afraid.

I know this works because I lived the opposite. I struggled badly with public speaking when I was younger. I avoided it. I would have done almost anything to stay quiet in a room. The thing that finally changed it for me wasn't a class on presentation skills — it was repetition in low-stakes settings. Pitch competitions like Missouri Startup Weekend, where I've now been a regular for years, taught me that confidence isn't a personality trait. It's a muscle, and you build it by using it.

That's the same principle I see playing out every time I sit down with a group of high schoolers, college students, or even a corporate team and pull out the card game. It's also what I've watched happen in classrooms run by teachers across the United States, and even in classrooms, where I've helped educators bring this kind of hands-on entrepreneurship into their teaching. The setting changes. The result doesn't.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, you can read about why learning by doing matters specifically for entrepreneurship education, or look at the activities I recommend for classroom use. If there's one thing I'd push every educator, parent, and curriculum designer to internalize, it's this: knowledge that hasn't been used isn't really knowledge yet. It's a rough sketch of the thing. The doing is what fills it in.

That's why I've staked my company on it.