Education Blog

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Sometimes times it seems like some people are just naturally smart. It seems like they make good grades while they are playing. You probably think that their good grades come easily without studying or without any hard work involved, right?

The situation, as just explained, is something with which I can easily identify. I’ve tried a variety of approaches to improving my grades. I’ve run the gamut: late-night cramming, varying my study hours, varying the length of time I study… but to no avail at all!

I spent many, many hours trying to be “as smart” as the smart kids, but it only ended in my frustration and anger. I quickly realized that I had to create another form of study that allowed me the same freedom that my smart peers knew, but I didn’t!

Now I am a very inquisitive person and I was rather curious to uncover the reasons these people never seemed to study, but just goofed-off instead. So, since I was friends with many of these so-called ‘very intelligent’ kids, one day I began asking them. Here’s what they said:

1. We want to be out playing and having fun hanging out, not studying our lives away. This has two sides to it, it allows us to relax and that relaxation converts into an open mind, susceptible to learning and retaining information.

2. We have developed lazy ways as there is more to life than simply studying. While we spend shorter bursts of study time, we then take what we learn into our fun time, and link the two together, this way we associate what we learn to an experience of happiness.

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 either driven by the avoidance of pain or by the desire to experience pleasure.

These didn’t start out as serious ideas; they were just a bunch of little ways my childhood friends and I had found to make studying easier and more fun. As I grew up, however, I started to think more seriously about putting those ideas into wider practice.

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 accomplished things that are “public” or within people’s view and I now have credibility ? I am living proof that these strategies 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!