How To Learn Stuff Good!

I see so many of people consuming copious amounts of information. The sheer volume of quality intellectual material on the internet is beautiful and daunting. Then someone tells you to listen to this podcast or read this book and you don’t want to be mean so you switch what you are doing and do that. Ohhhh….shiny…new…important. You’re like a hummingbird in a hurricane and you feel like you need to cliff dive into something new every hour to make sure that you don’t miss anything.

But that’s not how you really learn. That’s not how you retain information. You don’t download facts from the internet into your brain. You aren’t your computer and let me say one other thing you probably don’t get on podcasts by only listening to podcasts.

You have to take all different mediums of information, chew it, digest it, and then do something uniquely your own with it.

I am about as left brain as it gets. So I have found I learn best by reading textbooks and primary research (I know nerdy – I don’t fight it anymore). After, I jump into my right brain and I write about it or draw diagrams to lace it together. It takes way more time but in the end I own the material. And then I have the honor to practice that material in consults in my daily life so it sticks. Over time it ruminates and I begin to come up with ways to make extremely complicated topics comical, more personal, or more succinct and then the material finally starts to do what it needs to do – move others to action.

Don’t be shaken by what others tell you to consume. Have a plan.

Don’t worry about how much content you consume. Focus on how much you can actually maintain and dare I say it – use.

Don’t think that any way you learn is wrong. If you have to create an interpretive dance to understand the hormonal regulation of digestion. Fantastic – please send me that immediately.

“Some people are more left-brained, more analytical, they need words, they need text to learn; some are right-brained, they need diagrams. But true learning comes in when you integrate left and right. So if you’re a left-side learner, you still need to integrate it with right. If you’re right, you still need to integrate it with left.”

-Datis Kharrazian DHSc, DC, MS, MNeuroSci, FAACP, DACBN, DABCN, DIBAK, CNS