How to Study (2016)
Ideas on &quot;how to study&quot; in the context of an educational environment fail on the outset because that environment is often the greatest influence that you really can&#x27;t control.<p>Studying ability often becomes a factor of prior exposure, time availability, fluid intelligence, mental stability, and a bunch of other random factors that all need to align reasonably well. For a small fraction of the population, these things will align. For any given person, they&#x27;re not going to align all that well. For some people, they&#x27;re not going to align well at all, and they may not make it.<p>What ends up happening is that the person can&#x27;t truly properly keep up, so they end up surviving instead. And they may succeed in doing just that, but learning will be damaged. Most studying techniques fall short because they do not properly account for this survival mode and are not really the techniques that help someone, well, survive.<p>Proper learning is not rushed and hyper competitive, but what the average student encounters is.<p>Taking very dense notes, for instance, can easily backfire if it takes too much time and if it&#x27;s not truly needed. Knowing what to learn, how to learn it, what not to learn, etc., are all separate skills, and not everyone has them. And it&#x27;s not something that can easily be summarized because it&#x27;s more of a skill than a piece of knowledge, and most of it comes down to <i>your</i> personal strengths as well as weaknesses.<p>There are plenty of successful students who have broken all of these rules and I&#x27;m sure we all know a few.