Studying is not memorizing. Studying is not reading. Studying is something else, but what exactly is it? Surprisingly, most people go through years of schooling as children and into adulthood and never learn how to study. I dare say that many people have not even pondered this as a concept, much less learned how to study. This seems to be reserved only for those who have to digest complex and rigorous material in order to achieve significant career advancement, such as becoming board certified after medical school or passing a bar exam as a new attorney. However, it seems to me that the act or practice of studying is vitally important, especially if we hope to enhance or improve ourselves.
In researching this topic, I realize that the process of learning something is highly nuanced and complex, so I am not going to be able to provide a comprehensive essay on this topic. However, I think I can provide some encouragement to make active study a part of your daily pursuit. Most successful people I have met include a legitimate course of study as part of their regular life, much like they would incorporate physical exercise. I have also learned that you can only become good at studying with frequent practice and an intention to improve your process as you go. Learning can never be passive; it must always be highly active, in terms of learning something to the point that you can use it in your day to day life and business.
The first principle to address is that of outcome. I do not think you can label an activity as “studying” unless you have an actual outcome in mind. Think of this as a verb. What is it that I am doing this for? If the verb is not clear, then you are not really studying with purpose and therefore are not learning at all. Some good verbs might be stated like this. I am studying this topic so that I can explain, derive, diagnose, prove, or design. Those are good verbs because they highlight a potential outcome. If you are studying something because you want to prove that a theory is correct or accurate, then you are indeed studying with purpose. My favorite study verb is transform. I am studying this topic so that I can transform my approach to business. That word has a lot of import to it and focuses me on learning ways that I can engage the business in a unique and transformative manner.
From this point there are many different mechanisms for learning that you might employ. I took several courses on learning modalities in graduate school, so I can still pull some of these from memory. One of the popular approaches in the educational psychology world is active encoding. If you can connect ideas that you are learning to what you already know, that allows you to elaborate on your current corpus of knowledge. This is an active methodology that makes learning more relevant to you. Also, you can learn to organize the material by mapping the concepts out visually, or by breaking the material down into simple chunks that you can understand; this is one way to encode what you are learning. Some theorists suggest that when you do this, you should represent these chunks in more than one method of display, often referred to as dual encoding. Think of it like this. After you learn something, break it down, then reassemble it into a presentation. Then do so again, but this time make a small video on the topic. This is encoding through different means and is considered to be highly effective in helping people process new material and learn it.
Once you think you are starting to understand something, you can start practicing retrieval. This is not just flash cards and memorization; rather, produce problems, outline proofs. These are things that you really need to struggle through as you apply the new material to hypotheticals. When you are in these scenarios, which is most common in a classroom environment, then you are actually studying. You are taking what you have encoded and trying to apply it to a problem domain. When you can start doing this consistently, and your retrieval has fewer errors, then you can start to say that your study is effective.
Of course the process gets more complex from here, but one thing that is certainly true is that those who learn faster and better are the ones who are consistent. If you do not do this on a regular basis and follow a similar pattern each time, then learning will feel foreign and upsetting to you. You will want to avoid it, and one day when learning something is important, you will discover that you are not as capable as you thought you were. Learning is a practice that experiences rapid entropy, so you must stay on top of this as a regular, habitual practice in life.
Luckily for me, I have always put myself in a position in life to be way out over my skis. I am always pretending to be something I am not, so as a consequence, I am always spending a ton of extra time trying to quickly learn something that I am only aspiring to understand. Over the last five decades, that has caused me to learn a significant amount of things, and because my learning methodology forces me to capture and then encode that material, I have a solid ability to recall it when needed. What has happened over the course of many years is that my constant pressure to learn new things has resulted in actually knowing a thing or two, which is a relief after spending a lifetime in constant impostor syndrome.
Being organized, consistent, and constantly pressuring yourself to learn are the key ingredients. One thing that I have gotten excited about is how much easier this process is now with modern learning tools and AI. The research process has been reduced to a fraction, and I can spend far more time actually studying rather than collecting materials, which has always been half the battle. So you have no excuses now. Becoming better at whatever you want to do has never been easier and more accessible than it is today.
