Yes, You Can Train Your Brain

I’ve always been fascinated with how we learn. It started when I was young, because I really just wanted to spend as little time on schoolwork as possible.

I’d wait until the last minute to do my homework, so I needed to figure out techniques to let me get by (and to make “the last minute” even later). Luckily, the brain is a muscle, and everything that goes through it can be organized. So if you’re really motivated, you can invest in training yourself to learn faster.

“Faster” really is the key with the internet. When I was a kid, we still had to go to a library. Wikipedia wasn’t around when I was writing essays in high school. Now I like to play a game with my nieces and nephews, I’ll pick some obscure topic like how toxins from deep-sea fishes are used in the pharmaceutical industry, and they’ll do a presentation on it. The crazy thing is that they’ve always managed to come up with a presentation that’s super interesting, they always sound like experts (at least for a few minutes).

And they love finding stuff like this.

With so many barriers to knowledge having been destroyed, the only one that’s really left is your own level of motivation.

So developing your potential is a question of time. If you start really young, you can be pretty impressive by the time you’re 20. That’s especially true if you find topics where you’ve been gifted with the ability to understand them quickly. Nobody’s completely incapable of understanding a given topic; it’s just a question of how much time it’ll take. The people that we see as geniuses in their field are usually just the people who have been able to take things in faster than others, and so over time they’ve developed knowledge that’s exponentially higher than everybody else.

No matter what topics you want to learn, what can you do to optimize your learning?

1. Figure out where you’re fast and where you’re slow. Don’t waste time on things you can’t stand. People need to realize that their feelings are a pretty good guide of how they should make important decisions. Learn to listen to yourself, to trust yourself, accept that there are things you’re good at and things you aren’t. There’s a link between the pleasure you feel and the effort you’ll put in. If there’s something that gives you an irrational amount of pleasure when you’re thinking about it, that’s a sign you should pay attention to.
2. Work on your memory. YouTube is a great source of help here, there are tons of videos on how to do it. For example, there’s the mental map, where you associate an object with a certain place on a road that you know really well. Your ability to remember that road is greater than your ability to just remember what you read in a book, so by linking that new knowledge to something you know by heart, things are way easier.
3. Find what motivates you — no matter what it is. So many entrepreneurs are driven at the beginning by something that’s so simple, so unimportant, and that yet becomes so enormous. Too many people think they need to be driven by big, important things, when so much can come out of futile, vain desires.

That last one is super important because you never know where something will become important. Take the example of Steve Jobs and calligraphy. For whatever reason, Steve Jobs liked calligraphy, he’d studied it in college. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Mac was the first computer that really paid attention to typography? No. Could you imagine our world, one with literally (*googles*) 200,000+ fonts, without those options? No. But it didn’t start out from that. It just started out from Steve Jobs liking calligraphy and wanting to make things pretty.

The winding road of history…

Too many of us stop ourselves from learning weird stuff that interests us because we’re afraid of being judged. In school there were always people judging us, looking at what we’re doing, telling us whether they thought it was good or bad. And we’ll always have that in some ways, our friends, our colleagues who we want to please.

But the best thing you can do to improve your learning is to make sure you aren’t driven by those outside eyes. Make sure you’re the one judging what you’re doing. It’s not easy to do that, to not be sensitive to how others see us. The world is violent, it doesn’t like people who stray from the norm. But you don’t want to live a life where you need approval from others to feel good. Move beyond judgement, and let yourself be driven by whatever is most important to you, whether it’s money, glory, pleasure, whatever — so long as it’s yours.