People often talk about learning being an advantage in the future, yet when hasn’t this been true?
The caveman that first learned to avoid the lion survived longer, and still today rapidly adapting is the key to thriving.
The faster we learn in school, the better grades we get, the better opportunities that are available to us.
In the workplace those who quickly learn the rules of the game and keep learning the fastest are most likely to accelerate.
It’s also true in our hobbies and sports. The faster we learn, the more fun we have, the more likely we are to keep playing.
Do You Know Why Reading Is So Boring?
Because nobody ever teaches us to read fast enough, our brains get bored.
It’s a Ferrari designed to suck in a massive amount of information, yet because we’ve never been trained to read beyond a fifth-grade level most of us read like driving Miss Daisy.
When you understand why, it’s no surprise that on average we read at the same rate we speak, some 250 words a minute.
The cause is subvocalizing, which means instead of taking in information with our eyes as you do in say reading a traffic sign, we repeat the words eveeeeerrr soooo sloooowly in our heads.
If I had trained Evelyn Wood in high school, I would have bought myself thousands of hours of wasted study and repetition, and the first secret to learning fast is to train yourself to more rapidly input information.
But, that’s just for starters, because we learn little from reading.
Reading Isn’t Learning
Sadly, even few smart highly successful people are continuously learning, and even many who pretend to be are merely listening to podcasts or reading books.
Often when I suggest to people great books like How To Win Friends and Influence People, they tell me something like, “Yep, I read that.”
I then ask questions like: How specifically are you using it? What is your process for reviewing what you learned? If you were tested on it, would you get a passing grade?
When I first began this journey, how we learn seemed pretty obvious.
Of course we know how we learn. We’re learning all of our lives, but I soon realized that us adults are conditioned to be terrible learners.
At the recent Tony Awards Robert De Niro used his star power to promote Trump.
For years I sought better ways to characterize the pursuit of success.
All the time we wish we could get more insight into what people are thinking, and here a little knowledge can go a long way.
