How I Learned To Study Better, In Less Time
Sep 10th, 2008 | By Dr Marc R. Dussault | Category: EducationHave you ever sat in class wondering how the seemingly “really smart” kids make such darn good grades, and what makes it worse, they seem to do it “easily” while still goofing around class. They seem like natural brains who just “don’t need to study” right?
The example above is very similar to the difficulties I found myself in. I tried all kinds of tricks to improve my grades– studying at different times of day, in different places, by different schedules. None of it seemed to make a difference.
There was times that I wasted almost all night trying to learn more. However as I became more and more frustrated and angry, I realized I had to come up with a system, that was a conclusive process that could be done again and again by me, or anyone else who wanted to accelerate their learning. I love to read and learn, but having a streamlined outlook, if I can learn more by doing less, with a faster success rate, then I’m going to.
So being the inquisitive person I am, I began to study how these people operated, and why they seemed to never study, but always seemingly just have fun and goof around. Because I was friends with some of these perceived “very smart” kids, I asked them one day and here’s what they told me:
1. We need to create adequate space in our lives for leisure and enjoyment. The human mind truly expands when engaged in an enjoyable experience, and understand what we study.
2. We’ve learnt to be “Lazy” because there’s more to life than just study, study, study, so you have to learn to bullet point the main things and associate those points to something funny or that stands out when you learn it, that way you anchor yourself to that learning experience.
3. Plan to split up the lessons into small pointed ones so that you could enjoy during this break, what this accomplishes is to improve our focus without things becoming boring.
After I heard some of these comments, I thought, hey I wanna be lazy too, heck I can remember spending entire weekends (10-15 hours) studying for quizzes and exams that would, today, only take me 2-3 hours? to get even better grades! And I’m not talking about going “back in time” with today’s experience.
We are motivated by the knowledge that pain can be avoided or by the irresistible desire to experience pleasure.
I put some of these techniques or rather back then, they were just a way of life or a “scheme” we’d devised as kids to make study less intense, more fun and most definitely more effective for us. But as I got older, I continued to wonder how on earth I could make these childhood study schemes more efficient as we grew into adolescence and adulthood.
Because even though at school, our little system worked quite well, when we finally got to university the increased stress and intensity of study, once again put me through massive pain, frustration and wasted time and effort, which caused me to continue developing my enhanced and somewhat more sophisticated (yet no less effective) study methods, which eventually drove me to develop the techniques in this book by myself and for myself.
Over time I discovered tricks and tips that could be helpful to fellow students and friends, but due to my lack of credibility, they resisted. At that point, I hadn’t been given the chance to prove myself. For that reason, I was denied the chance to help many desperate people. But everything has changed now.
I have gotten things done for everyone to see, so now people believe me when I say that my own experience proves these methods really work.
I have also heard an amazing number of success stories from students all over the globe who have put my advice to good use, and more of them are doing so every day. I’d love to make you another of the miraculous successes I’ve chronicled in seminars and books.
I honestly believe that these very basic techniques can be learned and used by anyone to significantly improve their situation ? even if that just means getting away from C’s and D’s and getting B’s and the occasional A. For many that would be a dream come true.
Because I was the first example that the above works, and countless others have also experienced it, you can believe that you too can be “the brain” in your class!