Nobody Taught You How to Learn and Live - That Changes Now

As a student I always thought grades were the ultimate measure of ability and intellect. After all, exams are where we find out exactly what you know. Homework grades measure and reward conscientiousness, commitment, and timeliness. 20 years later I now know I was dead wrong. I thought school was preparing me for the real world - but it wasn’t even preparing me to succeed in school.

Yes, a grade is still a measure, but a rather poor one. After working with countless students, I have found that the grade is nearly as much a measure of the teacher's ability as the student's. It's highly variational,  dependent on the course structure, the practice problems available, the particularities of the professor's grading style, the format of the exams, the academic load of the student that semester, and the list goes on. Most of the factors are wildly outside the students' control and yet there is enormous pressure on students to maintain high grades. Every letter grade change impacts GPA, which impacts job prospects, affecting income, the house you'll buy, even the family you want to have one day!

We will eventually tackle educational and public reforms to address our decayed and bizarrely incentivized systems, but today I want to confront - rather I want to help you confront -  perhaps the most painful oversight: no one ever taught you how to succeed in this environment. Many of your struggles are not your fault. Without the tools to actually become successful you are fighting an uphill battle, watching others lucky enough to have figure it out sail past you. However, you are not a victim and the next step is up to you; join me as I help you mark out a path that will radically transform your life from a state of disarray and aimlessness to confidence purpose and meaning.

The following is an outline for your journey, with each section following with its own in-depth article. I'll provide additional online resources, books, and my own PDFs for you along the way. Take this seriously and most importantly: take action!

The Journey

Self Authoring

We are going to start with a self-authoring program that is a structured, psychology-based writing program developed by Dr. Jordan Peterson and several of his colleagues. It’s designed to help people deeply reflect on their past, clarify their present, and deliberately shape their future - in short, to become the author of their own life.

I highly recommend the actual course, but more importantly I want you to get started, so I have a very short set of assignments that won't take long for you to engage in the process. It starts with writing about your past - your narrative, your story, all that's happened to make you who you are and bring you to the present. You'll then write about your present - who are you? What are your values? Why are you here? Finally, you'll write about your future - what is the best version of yourself 10 or 20 years from now? What is that person like? What values do they have? What habits do they have?

Everything I'm going to have you do is backed by research and good science. I'll detail the studies from Morisano et al. (2010), Schippers, Scheepers & Peterson (2015) Schippers, M. C., et al. (2020), Matthews (2007), all of which indicates that written goal-setting exercises significantly improve academic performance and retention. For undergraduates, they led to gains like higher GPAs and increased credits earned as well as making individuals substantially more likely to achieve their goals compared to merely thinking about them. But this program is so much more than that - it is the process by which you are going to visualize and capture your future identity.

Forming Identity by Forming Habits

The output of the process above isn't going to just set out goals to reach and milestones to make along the way. Instead, it will lay out your current and future identity. It might be painful to see these laid out next to each other, but necessary. The last step we need from self-authoring leads to the first step here: what habits do I need to form if I'm to become my future self?

It's even more profound than that. You are that person, you are the identity, you're just not well-practiced yet. Your future self is lean and ripped? Then you are an athlete now, you just aren't very fast and strong right now. Your future self is a well-respected business leader? Then you are a leader who cares for people and their success, you just need to learn more methods and frameworks for being effective. Your future self owns a charitable foundation? Then you are a kind and giving person, you just haven't dedicated to a particular cause yet.

We're going to steal heavily from Atomic Habits by James Clear. But this is more than just a book report - I will teach you his framework, but I'll help bridge the gap between self-authoring and habit-building. We'll also add to his ideas with more than a few of our own, especially on building the habits that provide the biggest return on investment.

Why habits? Let's use James' words here, because he describes it perfectly, "Your habits are how you embody your identity. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." If you want to be a fit business leader with a big charity, then you need the habits of a fit business leader with a big charity. That doesn't happen overnight, it happens today with the small habits you form that pay off over the next 10-20 years.

Elasticity and Spread Effects - The Highest Payoff Habits

Working through the process from self-authoring to habit building, you'll construct your own plan for transforming your life into exactly who you want to be. But there are also certain habits that everyone should form, regardless of your personal aspirations. I'll import two economics principles into habit building: elasticity and spread effects.

Elasticity is a measure of how much a change in input affects the output: leaving my shoes out on the floor is a small input, but it drastically affects my spouse's anger level, so highly elastic. Spread effects measure how a single factor impacts other domains: putting pineapple and jalapenos on pizza might seem like a small culinary choice, but now I’m arguing with friends, questioning my identity, and somehow banned from three group chats.

I've identified several life-impacting habits that are highly elastic (easy to implement with big long-term payoffs) with great spread effects (helping you physically, mentally, emotionally, etc.). I won't introduce them all here, but the big three are writing down your daily priorities and planning/executing an excellent nights sleep, and starting a mindfulness practice. Daily priority-writing is like a mini-dose and continuation of self-authoring, again shown by Matthews (2007) to massively impact goal achievement. We'll also take a deep dive into Why We Sleep by Mathew Walker and how this one habit has a massive impact. Finally, we'll address stress, focus, and mindfulness in Waking Up by Sam Harris.

With a slew of self-determined habits you've developed, along with the suggestions I'll propose, the list will likely be daunting. Don't freak out, we'll narrow it down to one or two that you can implement easily and get started. That's the key: take action. These will build over time and as you meet more success, you can slowly upgrade current habits, cut bad ones, or build new ones as you are able.

The Science of Learning

Once you've established who you are and built the habits required to live that version of yourself, we'll get more student-focused and narrow in on the science-based fundamentals that will help you succeed in the classroom, or everywhere else we learn: at work, at home, or just reading books more effectively. Several of the habits I will help you build will directly tie in to the lessons here.

This is likely where your teachers have failed you the most, not only because these principles haven't been shared with you, but also because the entire school system is structured against the best practices for learning. But we can still find success even when failure is incentivized. To map out the best strategies I've drawn from my own experiences as a student and teacher, but also from the best books on the subject: Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Uncommon Sense Teaching, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, and more.

There are several, very simple techniques you can employ that will make your studying far more efficient in the long run. The full article will cover them all, but a few to get you started are spaced practice, interleaving, and voiced explanation.

You just met someone at a party and then immediately forgot their name. We've all been through this embarrassing situation, but we're very sure not to forget it the second time around. Your ability to recall the name after asking for it again has less to do with your desire to remember it and much more to do with the fact that you forgot it in the first place. Your brain stores information in short term memory and only transfers it to long-term storage if it's really important. You forget all the time, but re-learning what you've forgotten is the signal your brain needs to retain information in the long run.

Spaced practice achieves this effect by only studying a subject for a reasonably short amount of time, somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes, then returning to it later. You may feel like you learn a lot from a 2 hour marathon session, but you won't retain most of it. It's far better to plan 4 30-minute sessions spaced apart by an hour.

Interleaving builds on the same idea. But, suppose you have too much work to do and can't afford breaks. That's ok. Still break up the subjects, but interleave them - work back and forth between subjects 30 minutes at a time. The science behind both of these processes is very well established, but rarely discussed. Even implementing only these two strategies will make huge impacts in your long term retention.

When I first started teaching professionally in the military, I was required to 'pitch' a class to a certified instructor. Despite many hours of practice I found myself tripping  over my words, or struggling to explain a concept I had rehearsed in my head a dozen times. And that was the problem - I was practicing in my head, not out loud.

Another instructor advised me to speak out loud while I practiced, and although I felt like an insane person doing so, it made an insane difference in just a day or two. Certainly much of the effect was physical, the simple practice of moving my mouth and jaw in a way that I would need to later, as well as comfort saying a sentence I'd practiced multiple times, nearly memorizing large portions of my lecture. But that is exactly the point, speaking out loud didn't just help me perfect my lecture, it actually improved my ability to retain the information I was teaching.

Later, while studying physics in graduate school, I would sit in my office and re-teach lectures I had received that day out loud like a maniac. I tried to use my own words and analogies, but even if I largely repeated what came from my professor, it stuck. Teachers will tell you they never really learned a subject until they taught it, twice. So teach yourself, or explain it to a friend, or try to teach it to your favorite AI chatbot.

These are just three practices you implement now to see massive change. Imagine the impact it will have when you've established your goal identity, started a few, simple habits to begin that journey, and seriously uplevel your efficiency in learning and memory retention. That is like depositing a big investment and then watching it compound, except this investment won't cost you.

Executing and Mentoring

The last step of the journey is putting all of this into execution. It is hard, but we'll make it as easy as possible by leveraging partners, technology (including AI), and your own psychology to maximize success. I will hold you accountable as well - I'm building a Velle Logos community that will be available at the end of this series. It's an online environment where you'll have access to materials, me, and each other. Life is incredibly difficult and although I'll make this as painless as possible, change is always a challenge. We all need support. I'm building the system you can use to change your life around and the community to help you make it happen.

You also have an obligation to teach, coach, and mentor as you progress. Maybe today you're at the bottom, at level zero. But tomorrow you'll make progress and soon you'll reach level one. You have an obligation to help the level zeros. They need to see you made it, that it's possible to progress and that level one is attainable. This is also the ultimate accountability mechanism - there is a reason why alcoholics anonymous (AA) sponsors are former alcoholics. We tend not to take it to hard when we let ourselves down, but we intensely dislike letting others down. Mentoring is a win/win relationship that helps you and someone else achieve the transformation you are looking for.

Take Action

So now you know a little bit about what you weren't taught - how to learn, how to grow, how to transform.

You’re not broken. You’re not behind. You’re not stuck. You’ve just been under-equipped for a world that demands excellence without offering a manual.

That changes now.

You have a roadmap. You have the tools. And you have someone in your corner.

It starts with a single action. Pick one habit. Write one paragraph. Teach one idea out loud. Any forward motion is a win - and it compounds. That’s how you build a new life.

So let’s begin. I’ll be here, cheering you on and showing you the way.

Next Steps

Consider joining the Self-Architecture course!

If you're not ready yet, that's ok! Start with some simple exercises. Write your self-authoring reflections (past, present, future). Don't take longer the 5 minutes on each.

Choose one identity-aligned habit to begin this week. Make it easy and to start.

Try one learning strategy: space out your studying over the day or week instead of long blocks.

Help someone else do the same by asking them to join you!