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Three strategies for learning absolutely anything

By Administrator | 11 August 2017

Company founders are no strangers to getting a crash course in a new idea, but according to one education expert, how well you learn new skills depends not on your genetics but on your approach.

Speaking at Google HQ recently, Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of Learn Better, explained recent research into learning has moved away from the idea that some people are pre-disposed to pick up new abilities quickly.

Instead, Boser says your success is more likely to be dependent on how you practice and how you form connections and context.

Here are three ways he suggests will lead to better results.

1. Reap the benefits of being wrong


Most people think of the brain like a computer, Boser says, but evidence shows that’s not the case. For example, humans display a “hyper corrective bias” tendency, which can mean the more confident you are in an answer that turns out to be incorrect, the more likely you will be to retain the correct information when you’re proved wrong.

He advises people to think about learning as “sense-making”, rather than a linear process of learning one fact, then another.

Ultimately, you shouldn’t be afraid of being incorrect, because “the more wrong that you are, the more that you learn,” he says. Read more

Emma Koehn - Smart Company - 3 Aug 2017

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