Please ask yourself:
- How much of what I learned in school and university I still remember ?
- If the amount of time and money spent at school/university was used on something else, what could I achieve?
- What percentage of learning was life-changing, exciting, or simply interesting?
- Should I learn something new in real life, and to what extent my academic knowledge will help me?
- To what extent the teachers were mentors and role models, and to what extent a computer could do a better job?
If you are frustrated, you are in good company. We were frustrated as well. In fact, we were frustrated enough to find, compile, and invent a whole new set of tools that upgrade the learning experience at school and in real life.
These are the most common fallacies preventing our progress toward better education and self-education:
- Passively and mindlessly following the teacher. This is our automatic response from the earliest stages of education. It is the most ineffective learning method you see everywhere. If you do not personalize the material you will forget it. If you do not generate deep understanding, you will not know how to use it. If you do not research the material you will not be able to ask good questions. Effective education is active, creative, and deeply personal.
- Using grit to fight boredom. If education is boring, this means you should change your perspective. Our learning methodology is highly visual – creative and entertaining, we constantly ask questions trying to build up curiosity, and we try to generate a dialogue with the author in our heads. Creativity is the weapon of choice to fight boredom and learn better.
- The slower we learn, the better we remember. Repeating the same material at a slow rate generates information hunger and your brain will probably phase out. There is an optimal learning speed, which is actually quite fast, usually faster than we talk. There are also scientifically sound methods to optimize repetitions of content. Fast learning is not only fun, it is also more productive both in terms of how fast we learn and in terms of how much we remember.
- Waiting for some magic to happen. Learning involves a great deal of work. If this work is properly organized it is a very pleasurable and rewarding experience, yet it is a major effort. No skill can be properly mastered until we train it for a sufficiently long time in many different situations. In most cases, the progress is gradual, with occasional lapses and mistakes. Rigorous training is required for successful learning.
The key that opens the study-skills universe is our imagination. We can visualize and connect the information in a way that is very fast, very memorable, and extremely rewarding. Once we use our imagination properly, we can learn phenomenal memory, speed-reading, inventive problem-solving, and basically any other skill we need. These skills form our toolset, and this toolset enables us to manipulate any field of knowledge we want to focus on.
Do ask yourself: what if I could
- Learn things that are meaningful and useful
- Read x5 times faster
- Remember everything I read
- Never be bored again
- Have meaningful communication with authors
This is not a dream, but a reality! You can craft your own key to study skills.