I’m an information junkie, but I’ve noticed that unless I take action I end up forgetting everything in a matter of days. I’m also a pretty slow reader so if the information finally goes down the drain, it’s really nothing more than a waste of time. And if I’m simply wasting time, and not even amusing myself, then I’d probably be better off digging holes in a bog.
Unless you’re reading a teach-yourself book for mere entertainment (which I sometimes do), it helps to put the book aside for a moment and actually apply some of the tips and techniques…
“…true education means mind development; not merely the gathering and classifying of knowledge.” ~ Napoleon Hill
Compulsory education does many things well, but it fails to genuinely communicate the most important lesson to young students—that education is not the memorizing of dates and formulae, but the development of the mind.
Anyone with a healthy brain can cram data into his or her organic repositories. It just takes time and effort to memorize information. But if we look at memorized information, it’s actually not that much different from having reference books on the bookshelf (or your iPhone). It’s considerably faster to search for the quadratic formula in your brain than it is to find the correct page in your high school math book, but unless you want to become an expert at math, it could be wiser to know where to retrieve that piece of information.
I hope you read my last Tuesday’s post on measuring true skill through improvisation, because today I will be sharing some tips on how to develop the ability to spontaneously apply your knowledge. To summarize, improvisation is the ability to take what you’ve learned in theory and put it into use with minimum effort. So to get started with improvisation, try to follow some of the following tips.
I am taking a course on developing graphical user interfaces, and the topics we cover span from HTML and CSS to PHP and MySQL.
Let’s pause for a bit. These abbreviations sound awfully geeky so I’m warning you, but once again, the fundamental principles apply, and these examples can be applied to any other subjects you might be working with. I want you to be able to apply the principles in any field or skill.
Teaching is an effective way to measure how much stuff you’ve internalized. And it is a good path to hop on when you want to learn something thoroughly. The technique is to get out of your head, and teach others what you have absorbed. Simply learn, teach, and internalize.
It’s often very demanding to keep absorbing concepts—especially abstract ones—that you’re unfamiliar with. I remember having this problem repeatedly in high school, when I had to study for math tests. I would go over one part, make some sense of it, go on to the next section, and soon notice that I’d forgotten how the previous method worked. I didn’t have this figured out back then, but I now know how teaching can boost our learning speed tremendously.
Self-Learner is a blog about self-education and self-improvement based lifestyle design. Goal? To become the best "version" of yourself, and feel excited to jump out of your bed every morning.