Kevin Paul - Study Smarter, Not Harder

Did you know that the rate of new information is doubling every six months? Did you know that most of what you learn today will be obsolete in two years?

Are you worried about how to keep up? Are you bewildered by the information explosion at school? At work? At home? Does it have you feeling worried? Stressed? Overwhelmed?

TAKE HEART! The solution to your problems and anxiety is closer than you might believe. The answer is already between your ears.

You already have the engine you need your brain to adapt and thrive in a world where you have to keep learning new things. All you need are the tools to get that engine running at a higher level of efficiency than it is now.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

WILL DURANT

How much room for improvement do you have? Just think of it this way. Your mind power and learning potential are like space. What you actually use is peanuts compared to your capacity. The unused potential is like the vastness of unexplored space.

No matter what your present level of learning ability and achievement may be, YOU CAN DO BETTER!

If youre failing, you can pass.

If youre passing, you can get Bs.

If youre getting Bs, you can get As.

If youre getting As, you can do even better!

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing wasto add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

MARGARET MEAD

What does it take to start down the road to achieving the kind of learning mastery that your potential promises? It takes three things:

1. Desire to be a better learner. Picking up a book like this is a start. It shows that you want to expand your horizons.

2. Belief in yourself. High self-esteem is a vital ingredient for success in any activity, and this is especially true of studying and learning. Chapters 2 and 3 will give you some of the basic foundation for looking at your learning ability in a whole new way. This foundation is meant to show that your potential to earn As in anything is not a myth. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 will show you how to build on that belief in yourself and to activate it in each study session.

3. A bottomless toolbox. Desire and self-esteem are good things, but they are useless without some ways to build on that foundation and make practical use of it. A house is only as strong as its foundation, but you cant live in a foundation. You have to build on it. The chapters in Part III will show you how to develop study tools that will build on your foundation.

Remember Thomas Edisons words if the going gets a little tough along the way:

Many of lifes failures are those people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Now its up to you to take the next step: a step away from the anxiety about your schoolwork and the eruption of information in the world, and a step toward developing the kind of mind that can handle all this with ease and fun for the rest of your life.

Congratulations on taking the first step along the path of lifelong mastery.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Mastery of what? You can master anything you want to learn. Whether its your high school diploma, college career program, university degree courses, sales training seminar, or professional licensing exam, there is no limit. You can learn anything you want if you unlock the genius inside you. The possibilities and potential are extraordinarily exciting.

1. You Are a Genius

Yes, you read that correctly. It does say GENIUS!

This book is about how to bring out the genius inside you. Thats right! You have the potential to learn and achieve learning results at the true genius level.

This is not an exaggeration. There are ways of studying and learning that are painful, arduous, and, ultimately, fruitless, and you are left worse off than before. You probably have some personal experience of this kind of education.

Conversely, there are ways of learning and patterns of study that not only help make you more knowledgeable, but also increase your inherent intelligence. Does that sound impossible? Isnt intelligence set in stone when youre born and there is nothing you can do to change it?

Think about it. Research shows that spending countless hours as a couch potato in front of the TV will actually reduce your IQ. And if it can change in a negative direction, then it can certainly be coached into the positive.

Believe it or not, you are already an incredibly efficient learner. Acquiring a language and walking are two of the most complex activities in which humans engage. It is not yet possible to get enough computing power to synthesize these basic human achievements. It takes a very sophisticated learning capability to achieve language and walking. Research shows that even driving a car takes more brain power than piloting the lunar excursion module that landed on the moon.

Just to give yourself a review of what a good learner you already are, do the following exercise. Write down all the things in your life that you have learned that have nothing to do with formal classroom schooling. Here is a list to start with some or all may apply to you:

Walk and run

Talk in at least one language

Ride a bike

Drive a car

Swim

Give directions

Plant a garden

Paint your house

Iron clothes

Babysit

Build model airplanes

Bake bread

Make your own list. It will show you just how proficient you have become as a basic learner without really trying. Imagine what you could accomplish if you worked at it with the right coaching.

Chapter 3 will give you a simple overview of how your brain and intelligences work. You will see just how natural it can be to get your mind working at genius levels. Human beings normally use only 2 to 10 percent (depending on which expert you read) of the brains capacity for high-level thought. Imagine what you would be capable of if you knew how to access the rest of that potential. Even if you learn how to activate only a small portion of that untapped reservoir, you can achieve things you only dreamed of before.

What counts is not the number of hours you put in but how much you put into those hours.

ANONYMOUS

That quality we think of as genius is not beyond your current capabilities. In fact, genius level is only utilizing a marginally higher percentage of the brains enormous potential. Genius seems exclusive and unattainable only because so few people actually perform at that level. But it is there for you with the proper kind of training. Its there for you if youre willing to work for it.