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Gloria
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The first 20 steps to learn anything much faster, better, and more easily
Try to forget everything you’ve ever thought about education.
If school was a bore, forget it. If you dropped out early, forget that too. If you flew through college exams, fine; this chapter should help you do even better. But even if you flunked school, accept that lifelong learning is now needed. And this chapter is an introduction to simple do-it-yourself learning methods - even if you don’t have access to a teacher skilled in all aspects of accelerated learning.
If you’re a professional teacher, we still think you’ll pick up some new tips. But we handle new styles of teaching in later chapters. This is mainly for self-starters and those who’d like to be.
In brief, this chapter will help you develop new skills or abilities. It will pass on simple tips to absorb information more easily, retain it in your memory, and recall it when you need it. It will especially help you to use your new-found brainpower to achieve those results.
The 20 simple tips:
- Start with the lessons from sports
Sports probably provide a much better learning model than many schools. There are at least eight lessons you can learn from it:
- All sports achievers have a dream. They dream the impossible and make it happen.
The champion wants to break the 3 minute 50 second barrier for the mile. Or take the Olympic gold. Or be in a world series winning team.
All sports achievers, at every level, have dreams. It may be to break
100 at golf, then 90, then 80. Or to become the club tennis champion. Or to run the New York marathon at age 65.
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All have specific goals. And they break those goals down into achievable steps. So while the dream is always there, they build on their successes. You can’t become a world champion overnight; you have to tackle hurdles regularly along the way - and celebrate each success as it is achieved.
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All sports achievers combine mind, body and action. They know that their goals can be achieved when they link the right mental attitude, fitness, diet and physical skills.
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They all have vision; they learn to visualize their goal. To see their achievements in advance. To play through their next football match like a video of the mind. Jack Nicklaus, possibly the greatest golfer of all time - until Tiger Woods - says 90 percent of his success has come from his ability to visualize where every individual shot is going to land.
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They all have passion. They have an overwhelming desire to succeed.
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Each one has a coach, a mentor, a guide. In fact, we can probably learn more about real education from the success of the American college coaching system than we can from most school classes. If you doubt it, how many Olympic athletes, basketball and football stars have emerged from colleges - where the coaches are mentors, friends and guides?
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All sports achievers have a fantastically positive attitude toward mistakes. They don’t even call them mistakes; they call them practice. Even Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova belted balls into the net thousands of times on their way to the top in tennis. No teacher marked those shots as failures. They were all essential parts of learning.
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They all achieve by doing. Sport is a hands-on operation. You don’t get fit by reading a book - although that may help with the theory. You don’t develop the right muscles staring at a television set. You don’t long-jump over 28 feet in a classroom. All sports achievements result from action.
Former American Olympian pentathlete Marilyn King says all astronauts, Olympic athletes and corporate executives have three things in common:
"They have something that really matters to them; something they really want to do or be. We call it passion.
"They can see a goal really clearly, and the ‘how to’ images begin to appear like magic. While the goal may seem bold, they can imagine doing all these little steps on the road to that goal. We call it vision.
"Finally, they are willing to do something each day, according to a plan, that will bring them one step closer to their dream. We call it action.
"Passion + vision + action is our equation for success."1 Marilyn King runs courses and seminars teaching Olympian Thinking to corporate executives. She has also launched a Dare To Imagine project to pass on the same techniques to at-risk young people in her home city of Oakland, California.
So how can you apply the same principles to anything else you want to achieve and learn - and how can you do it faster, better, easier?
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