Learn More, Study Less!

Introduction
What makes somebody smart?
Is it raw brainpower? Accumulated knowledge? Is it just academic learning or
does it also include your experiences, people skills and intuition?
Intelligence is difficult to define. Although IQ tests and various exams try to
measure it, deciding what makes somebody smart is hard to do. I prefer to avoid
universal definitions and focus on a more practical one:
Being smart means being able to learn quickly, remember a large amount of
information and be able to sort that information in a way that achieves your goals.
This is a much more personal definition. Learning goals can differ from person to
person. You might just want to get A’s in all your courses. John might want to
become a master at computer programming. Susan might want to retain more from

the books she reads in her spare time. Another person might want to be able to apply
concepts to business situations.
It’s up to you to decide what being smart means.
This book isn’t about reaching an arbitrary definition of intelligence. Rather, it’s
about giving you a strategy for learning. From this strategy, called holistic learning, I’ll
provide a set of different tools to put that theory into practice.
Some of these tools won’t fit your learning style or goals. That’s fine. My hopes is
to provide a large assortment of tools that, with the backing of the holistic learning
strategy, you can use to tailor your own approach. With practice many of these
techniques can become powerful weapons in your learning arsenal.
This book has two major goals. First, the holistic learning strategy should give you
a model for how to learn better. Without an easily understandable theory of learning, it
is difficult to make improvements. By seeing the holistic learning strategy you have a
basis for identifying your weaknesses and improving the way you learn.
The second objective of this book is to provide a variety of learning techniques.
Throughout the book I’ll explain what these techniques are and how they fit within the
holistic learning strategy. Included with this book are exercise printouts so you can

practice these methods.
I wish you the best of luck in all your learning efforts and hope you enjoy the book.
It took a great deal of effort, tweaking and experimentation to write. Hopefully that
effort has been well invested and you can improve the way you think.

My Story
I’ve always been able to learn quickly. Getting A’s and A+’s with little studying
before tests wasn’t a challenge for me throughout school. While in University, I’ve
maintained an average that sits between A and A+. Despite this, I don’t spend more
than the average person on homework. In fact, I might even spend less.
Once, I wrote an inter-provincial test (I’m Canadian) for chemistry. The only
problem: I didn’t know I was supposed to write the test until a pencil and bubble sheet
were sitting in front of me. On top of this, the test was on material I wasn’t familiar
with and topics that were never covered in my class. I was given an hour and a half to
write the exam. I left after forty minutes because I wanted to eat lunch.
I won first place and received a check for $400.
Self-learning has also occupied my time. I’ve taught myself several programming
languages, business and writing skills and my bookshelf has hundreds of books I’ve read

in just the past two years. I’ve also dabbled in graphic design, musical composition and
anything I could get my hands on.
Learning has always come easily to me.
Up until this point, I’d just be another smart kid. “Gifted” might fit as well,
although there are people whose mental feats would put my small achievements to
shame. I’d be just another kid who got a more favorable genetic cocktail, had pushy
parents or some sort of glandular accident.
And if you read this far, you could probably slap on arrogant and boastful.
Until recently I probably would have agreed with you. But then something strange
happened. I began to notice something different about myself and people even smarter
than me. It wasn’t just that smart people learned better or faster.
They learned differently.
Smarts requires a different strategy. Smart people had picked up different tactics,

sometimes intentionally but usually completely without awareness of them. It was
these different strategies that made the difference in understanding.
That different strategy I called holistic learning. I call it holistic learning because it
challenges you to view learning as a comprehensive whole, instead of a list of
memorized facts. Smart people tend to make fewer distinctions between branches of
knowledge and can easily relate one set of understandings to another.
By learning holistically, smart people are able to quickly integrate new
information. More importantly, this information sticks. They actually “get” the
concepts and see how the concepts relate to far more than just the problems given.
Once I was told a story that demonstrates this point perfectly:
Once upon a time, a student was in a physics class. He had achieved an otherwise
perfect score, but the marker had graded him poorly on one question. The question had
asked him how he would measure the height of a building using a barometer.
The student had written down, “Go to the top of the building. Drop the barometer
and count the seconds until it smashes on the sidewalk below. Then use the formula for

acceleration by gravity to determine the height of the
building.”
Of course, having referenced a barometer, the
tester expected the student to use air pressure as a tool
for measuring height. Since this answer did not
demonstrate that the student knew how to solve
questions about air pressure, he couldn’t pass that
portion of the test.
When the student brought up that his answer did solve the question being asked,
the professor made a compromise. He said that he would let the student answer the
question again with a different method. And if the student solved the problem again, he
would award him the marks for the question.
Immediately the student responded that he would use the barometer to bang on
the door of the landlord in the building. When the landlord answered the door, he
would ask, “How tall is this building?”
At once, the professor saw what the student was doing. He asked him if he knew
of any other methods to reach the answer. The student said that he did.

He recommended tying a long string to the barometer and measuring the length of the
string. Or swinging the string as a pendulum and inferring the height by the motion it
created.
The professor decided to award the student the marks. As the story goes, the
student was a young Niels Bohr, later becoming the famous physicist and discovering
the nature of electrons inside atoms.
This student didn’t just know how to get the answer. He also understood the entire
scope for which the problem existed. Instead of seeing the problem in the same terms
he had been taught, he could easily view it a number of ways.
The goal of holistic learning is to replicate this process with the information you
want to learn.

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