Scott H Young

Have you ever read through a book only to be left with only a vague recollection of what it was about? Have you ever spent months with a book on your shelf knowing that you should read it, but never got around to it? Have you ever caught your mind slipping while reading only to realize you haven’t absorbed any information in the past several pages?

In our busy daily lives it can be hard to find the time to properly learn the things we need to learn. Some of these things might be critical to our career or business. Some of them might be important in improving and sustaining our personal lives. Many people have just resorted to the excuse that they simply don’t have enough time to learn all these things.

But is it really a lack of time? A disproportionately high amount of Americans will never read another book after leaving high school. Most people end up spending a few hours each day watching television and celebrity magazines sell fast on the sides of supermarket checkout counters. Even reading cheesy romance or spy novels is popular over truly valuable learning.

I don’t think the real problem is a lack of time at all, but a lack of motivation. With the right motivation and inclination, everyone can devote a few minutes of their day to reading, practicing or studying something that can genuinely improve their lives. In the busiest time of my life I also read more book than I normally do. It is never about time but always about the right motivation.

Even if you have decided to invest in your own education, either as a full or part time student or even just in your own personal self-education, it can be difficult to truly get the most out of the material you are reading.

Perhaps there are courses you need to study to get a degree that you just can’t seem to focus on. Maybe you want to get better at a skill such as personal finance, owning your own business or getting in shape but your eyes drift off whenever you try to read the material. How can you improve your learning?

Step One: Learn With Purpose

The first step to improve your ability to learn is that before you decide to pick up a book, go to a seminar, or head off to class, is to simply decide why you are going and exactly what you are trying to get out of it. Vagueness is the enemy of results, so without knowing exactly what your goal is with each session you are just looking for poor returns.

Before you open a book, decide what you want to get out of the book. That could be learning a new skill, getting a grounding in a particular theory or even getting new ideas. Never read a book just to read it or because you ‘have to’. The reason you have difficulty studying some material is because you don’t have a reason. Your subconscious knows this and follows through by making you procrastinate.

Deciding why you are learning something also makes it very easy to decide whether it is worthwhile to continue learning it. I’ve put down books midway through because I felt they just didn’t offer any new value, but there have been books I’ve read in the past that I should have put down but didn’t because I wasn’t clear on why I was reading them.

Try to find a reason that is directly linked to the learning itself, and not just to pass an exam. Learning something just so you can get a letter grade rings false in your subconscious and you will find it painful to study and read. In all my current courses I’ve decided why I will benefit from learning the information, and it has made it far easier to learn effectively.

Step Two: Make it Fascinating

The next step to make information stick is to be genuinely interested in the material you are reading. Think about the things you truly enjoy, aren’t they also the things you found easiest to learn? When you tell yourself that something is boring, dry or uninteresting it will be very difficult to study.

Often uninteresting material is the fault of the teacher. I’ve found that even when I’ve created a genuine purpose for why I am learning something, the teacher, author or speaker is so poorly skilled at relating the information in a way that captures my attention that I find it difficult to absorb the information and stay motivated to read.

Unfortunately you can’t change this fact. Most books, speeches and classes will not hit an exceptionally high level of teaching so you need to proactively compensate for that weakness and make yourself interested in material that is likely just being poorly conveyed.

How can you make something more interesting? Start by asking better questions. Ask yourself why this book or subject is incredibly fascinating and continue waiting until the answers come to you. You might just find yourself getting engrossed in a subject you previously found painfully boring. There aren’t boring subjects, there are just subjects that are either poorly taught or you can’t find a purpose for learning them. If you compensate for a bad teacher by making yourself interested you can go a long way.

Step Three: Relate With Analogy

People relate to material through stories and analogy. Metaphors and analogies are incredibly powerful tools because they describe unknown relationships in terms of a known relationship. It is easier to understand something once it is broken down into easily understood terms.

Whenever you are presented with an abstract relationship, immediately seek to append this new information to an analogy you already understand. Creating analogies is a skill, but it is incredibly powerful for memory and retention. When I began learning programming, I had the task of trying to understand how functions work. In my own mind I related them like a pencil sharpener where you can stick in unsharpened pencils and get out sharpened versions through some concealed process inside the sharpener.

The truth is if you can’t find an analogy to describe something then you probably don’t understand it very well. Creating analogies make it very easy to retain information. Good teachers will offer up analogies, but when you are reading from a source that doesn’t do this, make your own. You are responsible for your own learning.

Think of an analogy as being like a map. Although it isn’t the same thing as the actually territory it describes, it allows you to quickly find information that can be difficult to see from the territory. Now how’s that for an analogy about analogies!

Step Four: Emphasize Through Multiple Senses

I have noticed in my own life that whenever I get a chance to absorb information through more than one primary sense, I intake the information better. So if I read a book and then listen to a speech about the same topic, I often pick up details in understanding missed from only using one. Whenever I get the chance I try to read information from speakers I’ve heard and vice versa.

Now, sometimes you will find an author who only writes and there are no audio/speech/visual substitutes. In this case, you need to take it upon yourself to reinforce the ideas by using an alternative medium. You may have noticed that some of my articles are accompanied with graphics. I find that by adding the graphics to reinforce abstract information it is easier to relate to later.

Create your own drawings, record yourself talking about the ideas or create your own diagrams. Even though it can take a little more work, so long as the reasons you’ve defined in the first step are important enough you will make it work.

Step Five: Find a Student

The best way to learn something is to teach. This simple principle has to be the number one reason I’ve started this blog myself. By writing down my thoughts and ideas, they become reinforced into concrete mental patterns. If there is one way to improve your ability to learn it is to teach someone else what you are learning.

If you have a friend that is also studying similar material, this can be a great way so that you can both share and teach ideas to each other. Many blog entries I’ve written here have been based off of ideas that came out of great conversations with friends. So if your studying for a class or a seminar, reiterating and rephrasing the information back to a friend can be a powerful way to gain knowledge.

What if you are working on your personal development and don’t have someone who wants to learn what you do? There are many ways you can get around this (getting more friends only being one), one of the best being simply opening a blog on the subject. Another solution is to join an organization like Toastmasters where you can offer speeches on the information you’ve learned.

Step Six: Follow Up With Practice

Doing is the best way to learn. Reading, listening and studying are poor ways to gather conceptual knowledge and they are horrible for gaining skills. What separates people of excellence and wisdom from those who aren’t is often the amount of practice involved. Studying Tiger’s golf swing won’t help you nearly as much as practicing your own for a thousand times.

Reading, listening and studying can get conceptual ideas, but if you want to transform them into skills you need practice. How much practice depends on the person and the field, but it is generally much longer than it takes to understand the ideas. Without practice you’re sunk.

Step Seven: Healthy Body, Healthy Mind

Once you’ve decided why you want to learn about something, become interested in it, used analogy to describe it, taken in through multiple senses and taught it to someone else, the only thing that can really slow down your learning rate is your own mental clarity. Mental clarity comes a lot through physical health.

Intuitively it is easy to understand how important health is for learning. Have you ever tried to pay attention and learn something when you were sick? How about writing a test? If your experiences are similar to mine, then sickness greatly impaired your performance. Let me offer you another thinking point, are you ill right now?

You may not have the flu or a current illness, but if your health isn’t in peak shape, learning is going to be just as difficult if you were, and since you haven’t experienced being healthy you wouldn’t know the difference. Exercising every day, eating a healthy diet and drinking plenty of water are all crucial to your mental clarity. Myself as well as many notable self-help masters such as Tony Robbins and Steve Pavlina believe strongly in a diet that avoid animal products to increase mental clarity.

If you aren’t exercising regularly, you should add exercise to your daily activities. After exercising almost every day for almost half a year now I can say that when you miss even two or three days the difference in energy is palpable. I recently missed about three days of good exercise (the local gym being closed demoted me to just doing push-ups in my tiny room) and I can tell you that I already feel a huge drain of my mental resources.

Compared with where they could be I would say most people live like they have the flu. That sounds like a harsh pronouncement, but I believe it is accurate. Taking steps to increase your health can be an incredibly powerful and positive boost to your own ability to learn. Even if it is as simple as cutting down on junk food or slightly increasing exercise.

If you’ve read to this point, all these steps may seem like a lot of work to improve your ability to learn. Fortunately the steps work in a progressive order, and by deciding why you are learning something and making it important enough, the other steps will follow. I believe it is worth it because learning and education are probably the most important factor in your growth and ultimately happiness.

Everything you do in your life will be an attempt to experience it. Even the things you do out of sacrifice, pain and altruism will be to seek it. Some great men have upheld it to be the meaning of life. Others, myself included, believe that it is the ultimate reward for meaning in life. Some would say it is simply an emotion, others would argue it is much more. Happiness.

Happiness is such an elusive treasure that in our attempts to grab on, it slips right through our fingers. Each person has their own unique view on what it takes to be happy and even more, each person will experience happiness as the result of different things. Even the way we achieve happiness changes the experience. Most people would say the feeling of winning a million dollars is considerably different than saving a life.

I can’t possibly boast to say that I have found the essential key to happiness. Personally I don’t think such a key even exists. But I have noticed that by adopting different beliefs you can substantially improve your overall level of happiness and the consistency that it occurs. Adopting these mindsets isn’t easy, as I am well aware, but even small shifts in your thinking can be rewarded with greater levels of happiness, satisfaction and peace of mind.

Position VS Velocity

If you’ve read any of my other articles, you will notice I make frequent reference to having a velocity based paradigm rather than a position based one. I think having a velocity based mindset is critical to both success and happiness. Unfortunately, this is definitely not the default belief system most people have. I have met hundreds and hundreds of people in my life and can say only a few I have come across have this unique perspective of the world.

To explain the difference between a position and velocity based mindset, I want you to think of your life as a race. Imagine you are on a track and the other racers are all running as hard as they can. If you cross the finish line first, you win. This is a positional based paradigm. This is the mindset that says your happiness and success should be derived from your position on the racetrack.

Now let’s contrast this to a velocity based paradigm that says life isn’t a race at all. There isn’t comparison between you and another person, and there isn’t even a position on the track. The only thing that matters is that you are running your hardest and that in each stride you are making improvements. With a velocity based paradigm, the growth you experience in the current moment is important and where you actually are is not.

I’ve written extensively about the differences between position and velocity in my article, Balancing Today and Tomorrow. It is a bit of a longer read but it is my personal favorite article I have ever written on this website and if there was one piece of information on this site that could improve your life I would offer that article as being it.

Now the difference between these two paradigms can seem a bit esoteric, but I ensure you that it is extremely practical. Here are a couple advantages I’ve found from using a velocity mindset consistently in my own life:

Finding Happiness Now Instead of Later

A position based mindset tends to focus on finding happiness when you’ve achieved a certain amount of status later in life. A velocity based mindset ignores this entirely and offers that happiness is available right this instant by growing.

Stop Procrastinating

Thinking in terms of growth and velocity means that any delay is really delaying your own happiness. By taking action in the moment to the greatest possible extent you avoid putting off areas of your own growth.

Happiness Despite Outcomes

I’m a fan of goal-setting, but I believe it can have hidden dangers. One of the biggest is simply that you can pursue a goal for a long time and then fail to achieve it (and be miserable) or achieve it but realize you don’t want it (and be miserable). By using a velocity based mindset, your goals are only pointers for growth, without intrinsic value themselves. So whether you succeed or fail, if you were growing at each step along the way it was a success.

Outside VS Inside

After adopting a velocity vs positional mindset, I think the next paradigm necessary to achieve happiness is the difference between an external and internal center of happiness. When you have an external center of happiness, you end up grasping at straws to find happiness only to realize it isn’t there. An internal center of happiness allows you to be happy even when circumstances are grey.

An external locus of happiness occurs when you seek things outside yourself to provide you with happiness. This can be money, power or even relationships. In any case this is a very poisonous mindset to have and it will destroy any chance you have for happiness.

Although most people are conscious enough to realize that money doesn’t buy happiness, people simply make different external substitutes. My favorite one I see is the, “I’ll be happy when I’m in a relationship.” Unfortunately as soon as this person gets a relationship they don’t feel happy and start looking for a better relationship.

The opposite is the person that is completely fulfilled by improving their own growth and by having a sense of purpose and meaning in life. These people could be broke, powerless and alone and still be happy. I feel there is actually a spectrum of external to internal beliefs, I believe it goes something like this:

Materialistic - This is the first stage where you seek happiness through money and things.
Relationship-istic - This is the stage where you seek happiness through relationships and status.
Independent - This is the first stage of internal happiness where you are no longer dependent on people or things to deliver happiness.
Interdependent - This is the highest stage of internal happiness where you not only reject the need of people and things to provide happiness, but you can now utilize these things for growth and purpose.

I can see myself traveling along this continuum in my own life. Originally I had very materialistic and then very relationship-istic desires. When I started this blog I moved into an independent mindset where I sought happiness from my own growth and purpose. Now I can see myself slowly becoming more interdependent, forming relationships for mutual gain.

Scarcity VS Abundance

In finding happiness a third distinction in beliefs that has made a big difference in my life is going from thinking in terms of scarcity to thinking in terms of abundance. A scarcity based mindset is one that believes that in order for you to get more, you must deprive someone else, or that when someone else gets something it deprives you.

A scarcity based mindset can actually be seen as a derivative of the positional mindset. When you think in terms of position, it easily invokes comparison between you and other people. As a result when you start to use comparison every gain made by another person is a loss for you.

Abundance beliefs, however, suggest that every gain you make doesn’t deprive others and the gains of others doesn’t deprive you. In fact, when seen properly, other’s gain can even be perceived as a win for yourself. This can be a difficult mindset to adopt in our highly competitive world, but I think it is crucial for happiness in society.

To start using an abundance mindset you need to start looking at the gains of others in a positive light. When I was deeply rooted into a scarcity paradigm, I found myself becoming envious or jealous of the success of others. Now it is the complete opposite. When I see someone else becoming successful, I get inspired because I now see that success is possible for myself as well.

An abundance mindset also means that you are far more willing to help others. Scarcity focused people won’t help others because they believe it will diminish themselves. Abundance focused people will eagerly help others because each improvement made by another can be translated to a gain to yourself.

If you are in a highly competitive field such as sports or business this may seem like an impossible mindset to adopt, but I have still found it to be true even in very competitive areas. Here’s why:

Let’s say you are competing and there are one hundred contestants. You discover a method to improve your performance slightly. With a scarcity based mindset you would hoard this information as a treasure and gain that slight advantage. Let’s say however, that you offer up this secret to ten other people, these people are then more likely to offer you tips when they discover them.

If half of the people you share with decide still not to help you and half of the remaining people come up with no new tips at all, you would still gain another two or three pieces of advice to help you improve. Overall you are in a more advantageous position than you were had you hidden the advice.

The only place I can’t see an abundance mentality working is in an extremely competitive field where there are only a very small amount of competitors (like a board game). Otherwise this mentality is extremely effective as it is human nature to help out those who have helped you, even in extremely competitive environments.

The reason an abundance mentality leads to happiness is simple. When you stop thinking in zero-sum terms you detach your happiness away from the success and failures of other people. In other words, happiness becomes something you can directly influence.

I’ve found in my own life that happiness results less from circumstance and more from belief. The right beliefs and mindsets can make you happy under horrible circumstances and incorrect ones can leave you lost and confused even when things should be great. Start re-evaluating the way you see your world and you might just find some happiness you didn’t realize was there.