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The Way I Think > Chapter 13: Style of Learning
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Some readers may have noticed that I've said to do a lot of thinks, without saying how one would go about doing much of any of them. That gap is intentional, as part of presentation; the primary audience will fill in those gaps, and would only be slowed down by an attempt to specify in detail how to think about how you think. Where most people learn slowly, from the bottom up, the sharpest minds learn quickly, from the top down. Instead of a gradual accumulation of details, from which the broader picture slowly emerges, they grasp the broader picture in flashes of insight, from which the details are filled in.
When I was in Brigade as a little boy, I couldn't memorize Bible verses at all. The people used the King James Version, which had only the haziest connection to any language I had been exposed to, and the Bible verses were to me meaningless sentences, and so I would be stumbling with the first words after the rest of the class had memorized it. Since that point, and since I've come to understand what I have been reading, people are amazed at what I can recall and even quote from diverse texts, and I once memorized an entire book without trying to. This difference in learning mechanism is also part of why I failed the Kuk Sool yellow belt test (which I haven't heard of anyone else doing), and barely passed the karate orange belt test (the instructors told me to wait another session before testing again). It's not that I couldn't learn -- as a white belt, I beat two out of three black belt instructors at sparring -- but just that my learning took a different pattern from what the martial arts training was designed around. I learn major concepts first, and then details.
Being cognizant of this difference, and trying to do what you can do instead of what you can't do, will make a tremendous difference in learning. It may also explain why, if you're so bright, you don't do so well in contexts that less bright people thrive in.
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The Way I Think > Chapter 13: Style of Learning
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