How to learn effectively.
Some Learning Principles that help you success:
1. You can learn anything if you have a goal that requires it. This implies that you must connect what you are learning to your personal goals in a credible way. Trying to learn because of some second-order benefit (getting a credit or a credential) will seem very difficult.
2. Learning how to learn is the core skill. This is probably the one skill that was never explicitly mentioned in all the years that you've spent in school. But it's the one where there's the most reward for the smallest investment.
3. Anyone can learn faster by structuring the information. This is another one of those common trade-offs - getting right into it can feel satisfying, but taking some time to organise can increase effectiveness, even if it doesn't feel so satisfying in the short term.
4. Intelligence is not fixed. You probably know that the idea of a single monolithic thing called 'intelligence' is in disfavour right now (see Martin Gardner's work). There seems to be some evidence that what we might intuitively think of as intelligence (e.g. the ability to get things done cognitively) can be increased by several kinds of mental activity.
5. Learning more means earning more. Those who learn more, and do it continually over their lifetimes, do much better in whatever career they have chosen.
6. Knowledge and skills overcome obstacles. Improving both are survival skills no matter what your situation.
7. Everything to which you were paying attention, either consciously or unconsciously, will be remembered permanently. What seems to get lost is a way to access these memories. So effective learning requires you to be there, in the moment, and to make the things you learn memorable, i.e. easy to access. Anything that makes what you are learning different helps to make it memorable. So does the emotional content you associate with the material.
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”-Albert Einstein
