Welcome to Learn Like Einstein, where the good become great, the great become legendary, and the mediocre become less mediocre!

That may have sounded like hyperbole, but I assure you it’s not. Learning how to learn is one of the biggest superpowers anyone can have under their belt. You might not realize it, but learning to learn will unlock just about everything you do in life.

Why? The simple reason that we aren’t born as experts ? in anything!

When you entered the world as a baby, you didn’t know anything on your own, so you first depended on social learning to pick up how to eat, drink, walk, and talk. Everything that we take for granted is something that we learned from others.

The first five years of life are a wash because everyone learns out of necessity. Everyone learns to walk, talk, swallow, and tie their shoelaces 먹튀검증. But what about after? You start to see people separate themselves from the pack. Josh can do the multiplication and division tables faster than his teacher, so he gets to skip a grade. Josiah, however, is still having trouble with subtraction so he is held back a grade.

Is it because Josh is inherently smarter? Not necessarily. In fact, that’s something we’ll address in this chapter and throughout the book.

It’s all due to learning, and how each child learns to learn. Then, as we grow older, we start to see people become outliers and separate themselves even more as a result of their talent in learning, not necessarily talent in the underlying subject.

Being that this chapter is about learning myths, that’s a good place to start.

Myth #1: Innate intelligence matters in learning.

This took some careful phrasing, because there are indeed some outlier geniuses such as Einstein and Newton that simply think on a different level. However, they are so rare that if you took a minute, you probably wouldn’t be able to come up with more than a handful of famous “geniuses.” What about the rest of us?

Intelligence is a very, very hazy term. For example, IQ tests claim to measure intelligence (it’s right in the name, after all), but they only measure a small set of very specific metrics that they think translates into intelligence. Classic IQ tests measure things like ingenuity, thinking outside the box, seeing patterns, and making connections.

These are good qualities, but as you can see, not quite what would qualify someone to be categorized as intelligent. They don’t take into consideration a whole world of factors.

For the purposes of learning, no one is more intelligent or better than anyone else. Learning is something we’ve all done since we were children, and it’s really a matter of work, attention, and some of the principles in this book that take your learning ability to the next level, not your innate talent or intelligence.

Your overall intelligence and learning ability is truly measured by far more factors that can ever be seen in any test results. You can learn just as well as anyone else, and if someone else appears to understand something more quickly, they are simply seeing it through a different perspective, not dissecting it like a genius.

If you don’t believe that you are can do something as well as someone else, then why try at all? It’s actually a very dangerous assumption that others are simply innately better at something, because it will cause a very real sense of discouragement and pointlessness.

Myth #2: Failure is bad.

Actually, studies have proven that failure is one of the best things that can happen during the learning period.

Allowing someone to fail, even when you can easily help them, is great for learning as well. This concept is called “Productive Failure” that a researcher from the University of Singapore coined. There were two groups of students, and teachers helped the first group find answers to their set of problems. Meanwhile, the second group was given no help, but was instructed to collaborate and work with each other.

The second group didn’t actually answer any of the problems correctly, but as a result of working together to come up with different approaches, they had a far greater understanding of what solutions could and should look like, and what was involved in generating it. When the groups were compared in terms of what they had learned, the second group “significantly outperformed” the first.

What does this tell us about learning?

Simply giving someone the answer and making sure they never fail is massively detrimental to their learning. It robs us of the critical thinking and analysis that we need to learn better. The struggle for answers is what truly aids our sense of learning.

The Singaporean study also identified three specific conditions that promoted productive failure. First, failure is best when it promotes a sense of challenge and engagement versus frustration. Frustration, of course, is the feeling that you are going nowhere at top speed, so there has to be a sense of progress and achievement. You can’t just hand a child a calculus equation and expect productive failure. It has to be within their capabilities and they have to be able to see improvement.

Second, failure is best when learners have the opportunity to elaborate on what they are doing and thinking, as was done in a group setting during the study. When you can narrate what you’re doing, instead of toiling away in silence, it can help shed light on your efforts because you’re actively thinking about what you’re doing and analyzing it. Often, thinking out loud leads to solutions that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise.

Third, failure is best when learners have the chance to compare solutions that work, and solutions that don’t. This is what happens when you aren’t shown the exact path every single time. You recognize the red flags of failure and gain intuition when something seems right or wrong.

You could call this a “tough love” approach to learning. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish (while letting him struggle with it himself for a bit), feed him for a lifetime. Allowing failure is when you teach the skill of problem solving, which is another way to define learning at large.

Myth #3: If you forget, you lose.

We have a conception of memory and learning that if we forget something, even momentarily, it’s a sign that we didn’t do a good job learning it in the first place.

That’s not true. In fact, forgetting is an essential part of the process of creating new memories. It’s a filter for unimportant information: we forget what we don’t use or need. Everything we hear or see is headed towards the road of forgetting until we realize that we need or want the information ? then we access it from our memory banks.

What makes us realize that we want or need the information? We rehearse or access it repeatedly. It’s this accessing, sometimes called active learning, that actually cements the information into our memory. When the brain has to work hard to retrieve something that may be half-forgotten already, the strength of that memory is correspondingly increased.

Myth #4: More is better.

You’ve no doubt seen this in action with people who study all day and night, and cram the night before the exam as well. Is the greater amount of hours spent studying a better method of retaining information? Not always.

It’s just too much, and while it may not necessarily be detrimental to your learning and memory, it sure isn’t helping. Studies have shown that a concept known as spaced repetition is far more effective for learning and memory than daily rote memorization.

This means the brain is like a muscle, and it simply needs time to recover and make neural connections for the information that you’ve consumed. It also means that if you overdo it and burn out, you are wasting time by attempting to learn more than your brain can handle at the time.

Then, you encounter the phenomenon where you are reading the same paragraph over and over and don’t comprehend it.

Finally, it places an emphasis on memorization versus understanding and analysis, the latter of which is what will help information stick in your brain the best. More isn’t better; smarter is better.

Myth #5: “I’m just a left-brain person!”

There is a myth that since the brain hemispheres do have certain proclivities towards creativity versus logic, that people should target their learning to cater to these differences.

For example, right-brain people are supposed to be more creative, free-flowing, and carefree, while left-brain people are supposed to be more logical, analytical, and deliberate. It can certainly be a romantic myth to buy into, but it doesn’t mean you learn with just one side and that side should be appealed to exclusively.

Both brain hemispheres are involved in almost every single mental process, and studies have demonstrated that people do not have dominant hemispheres whatsoever. What does this mean for you? Just because you’re more artistic or more analytical doesn’t mean that you should ignore the other parts of life! You can be equally as good at those parts, if not better, so don’t let the myth of the dominant hemisphere prevent you from exploring other areas.

Imagine the problems that occur when you focus too deeply on one hemisphere’s proclivities: you may be cutting yourself severely short, and you may not diagnose yourself correctly.

Now that we’ve gotten a few myths out of the way and hopefully feel a bit more empowered and encouraged as to our learning abilities, it’s time to dive in and learn the foundations of learning better.