Anyone can learn to learn better, faster, and enhance their memory and comprehension.
Unknown (often attributed to Jim Kwik)
The meaning of the quote
In 1981, Barbara Oakley left the US Army at 26 and decided to study engineering, even though she had flunked her way through math and science in school.
The Army had taught her Russian at the Defense Language Institute, so she tried the same study habits on equations. They worked. She went on to become a professor of engineering, and in 2014 she co-created Learning How to Learn, which grew into the world’s most popular online course. She tells the full story in the book A Mind for Numbers.
Oakley kept the same brain and changed her methods. The quote treats learning as a skill, like cooking or driving, and skills get better with the right practice. So do memory and understanding.
Most of us spend 12 years in school being told what to learn and almost no time on how to learn it. So when a chapter won’t stick or a test goes badly, we decide we’re just not smart. The quote says that conclusion is wrong. A slow reader or a forgetful student usually has weak methods, and methods can be swapped out.
The quote is often credited to Jim Kwik, a brain coach who has built his whole career on this idea. In 2013 he told Singularity Hub how his own skills came about:
“I’m not special. I didn’t naturally have these superpowers. They were learned. And if I can learn them, anyone can learn them, regardless of age, background or education.”
Action steps
You can test the quote on yourself this week with 4 simple methods Kwik and Oakley teach.
- Know why before you start.
Before learning anything, Kwik asks 3 questions. Why must I learn this? How can I use this? When will I use this? A clear answer gives your brain a reason to hold on to what you learn. - Study in short bursts.
Oakley teaches that your brain keeps working on a problem after you step away from it. Study hard for 25 minutes, then go for a walk or wash the dishes. The answer is often waiting when you come back. - Turn facts into pictures.
Kwik says we remember what we see. To remember a new friend called Rose, picture a giant rose growing out of her head. The sillier the picture, the better it sticks. - Teach it the same day.
Explain what you learned to a friend, a younger sibling or your phone camera. The gaps in your understanding show up the moment you try to put it in your own words.
None of these steps needs a gift. Pick the subject you gave up on, try one step on it for a week and watch what changes.
About Jim Kwik
In kindergarten, Jim Kwik fell off a chair headfirst into a radiator and was rushed to the emergency room. His parents said he was never the same. He struggled to follow his teachers, and it took him 3 extra years to learn to read.
When he was 9 and slowing down the class, a teacher stepped in to stop the other kids teasing him. She pointed at him and told them to leave him alone because he was the boy with the broken brain. Kwik carried that label until he was 18.
College didn’t fix it. Then a friend’s father asked Kwik to write down his dreams, read the list out loud and challenged him to read a book a week. Kwik told Jay Shetty that he read himself to exhaustion, collapsed and woke up in hospital.
A nurse brought him tea in a mug printed with a quote credited to Albert Einstein about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Kwik stopped asking how to study harder and started asking how to learn.
Within 30 days of new learning habits he could focus better, read faster and remember more. By day 60 his grades were up, and he was studying less.
Soon he was tutoring other students. One of them, a slow reader, read 30 books in 30 days on health and wellness because doctors had given her mother 60 days to live. 6 months later her mother was alive and getting better, and she credited the advice her daughter had found in those books. Kwik says that was the moment he realized learning is a superpower.
He founded Kwik Learning in 2001 to teach those methods, and today it has students in 195 countries. He shares the same techniques on his podcast Kwik Brain, in episodes like Learn ANYTHING Faster.
Like Barbara Oakley, Kwik spent years sure his brain was the problem, until he found out nobody had taught him how to learn. In his book Limitless, he lays out the methods behind the quote’s idea and tells the full story of how the boy with the broken brain became a coach whose mission is “no brain left behind.”
Resources
- Limitless by Jim Kwik (Book)
- A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley (Book)
- Learning how to learn by Barbara Oakley at TEDxOaklandUniversity (YouTube)
- Learning How to Learn, the free online course on Coursera (Website)
- Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster and Become Limitless with Jim Kwik on The School of Greatness (Podcast)
- Learning To Learn Faster: The One Superpower Everyone Needs (Article)
- Jim Kwik (Wikipedia)
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