HOW DOES SMART STUDENTS OR PEOPLE STUDY

They don’t.

You think I’m joking, but I’m serious. Smart students don’t study.

Or rather, they don’t study the way the rest of us think studying should be.

When we refer to studying, the vast majority of us think of reviewing by going over notes and terms, and memorizing them.

That’s not how the pros do it.

I go to a school where I interact with a lot of these extremely smart kids. You know how much time they spend reading over their notes and memorizing stuff?

Very close to none.

You see, studying simply means preparing yourself for a scenario in which you would demonstrate your knowledge of a given topic.

Memory is organized as a link-based storage of events and information such that any one bit of stored memory is accessed by links to and from other information and events.

All memorization will do is create more of these areas of information stored in memory, without doing anything to actually produce a way to retrieve the information.

The best way to study is to find out the best way for you to retrieve the given information.

That is precisely what the smart kids do, even if they don’t realize it - they figure out how they can easily access the stuff they know and then show that they know it.

So how do you find the best way? It varies from person to person. There’s no cookie-cutter best way for everyone.

What will work, however is to connect the information to stuff that you already know well. For example, if you can build the stuff you learn in this unit to the stuff you learned in the previous unit, you already have most of it down.

Another good strategy is to make sure you can connect everything in the unit to everything else in the unit. Drawing maps for all the terms and how they relate to each other can be helpful for this. That way, you only have to retrieve one piece of information from memory for everything else to immediately follow and come to you.

Finally, make it as easy as possible to retrieve this path of information via repeated practice. The more you practice demonstrating your knowledge, the easier it will be to come up with the information you are trying to demonstrate.

It’s really as simple as that.

It’s also why all the super smart people seem to be able to fool around all day and still get better grades than you - they’ve just figured out how to easily retrieve the stuff you’ll be tested on.

Once you do the same, you’ll be able to fool around all day without having to “study” so much too. For the matter of fact, what I'm trying to say is that imagination is important than knowledge 🤓