I have been reading a lot of books for a long time, especially since 2018 when I challenged myself to read one a week for the whole year, and I have come to collect valuable advice that would have changed everything for me and my way of learning if I had given it to myself when I was 15 years old, for example.
These tips for learning, succeeding in your studies, your career, at university, or simply being more fulfilled, could also be useful to you, especially since I will mention the references each time.
And know that no matter your age or your project, they will be just as precious to you!
From the moment I entered middle school, I knew that math was going to be difficult for me. I hated anything to do with geometry and I simply wasn’t cut out for calculus or equations.
I would say that I was just not as good as others in this subject and that my family continually told me that it was also one of my weak points.
Conversely, in other areas, I was gifted. In English, for example, I didn’t understand why my classmates considered themselves useless while I found it amusing.
Again, there was no real evidence that I was better than anyone else, because I wasn’t particularly hardworking even in this subject.
I was terrible at music, terrible at art. I was good at writing and sports. I ran fast, but since I was told that those who ran fast had endurance problems, I wasn’t good at long runs.
Without knowing it, I had developed an “entity” learning strategy. That is, one largely influenced by those around me, my family, my friends, and the lack of observation of my way of learning.
In his book The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin shows that there are two strategies for learning: the entitative one, the one I developed like many others, which was a bit fixed and based on feeling, and the incremental strategy, which consisted of seeing oneself as an eternal beginner, more concerned with progression and improvement than with presuppositions.
And Josh Waitzkin knows a thing or two about learning strategies. Quickly hailed as a chess phenomenon, he became a multiple junior champion before dropping everything and becoming a world champion in Tai Chi Chuan, a martial art, two years later, thanks to the incremental learning strategy.
In a very interesting experiment, also recounted in the book The Art of Learning , Josh Waitzkin explains that two groups of students were given math exercises.
One who naturally adopted the entity strategy and who found themselves naturally gifted at math, and a group who considered themselves eternal beginners, but who were keen to progress: let’s call them the incrementals.
When the teachers gave both groups of students easy math exercises, everyone managed to do them. The integers were faster than the incrementals.
Then, the teachers continued by giving both groups of students exercises that were deliberately too difficult and too advanced for their level.
Unsurprisingly, neither group of students managed to complete the exercises. But where things got interesting was when the teachers returned a third time to offer the younger students another set of exercises, again very simple.
And at that point, they realized that the students in the entity strategy, who were more gifted than average in math, had great difficulty completing the simple exercises.
Many have failed.
As if the previous failure had lastingly influenced their perception of level and their own value.
Meanwhile, the incremental students completed the exercises, obviously with flying colors, even improving the speed of their responses in the process.
If simple setbacks in math can affect the performance of young students, then imagine what it can do as an adult if you grew up with this perception of learning.
This is how you end up with a lot of adults who feel bad about a subject without having really tried to make progress in learning.
So how do we adopt an incremental strategy?
As you may have guessed, it is essential to consider yourself a beginner and to try to master the most basic things perfectly before moving on to the next step.
By gradually expanding your level of confidence and competence, you can approach more complex concepts without being intimidated and with much more serenity.
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