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Ass-Kicking Email – Learn it Once

Hey,

Is it possible to pass exams without studying?

When I started writing about holistic learning several years ago,
the biggest and most controversial claim was that it was possible
to ace final exams with little or no studying.

I still hold to that claim (although I wouldn’t say it’s ideal)
mostly from following one principle I’ll summarize as:

Learn it once.

This is the idea behind a lot in holistic learning and it has
several implications. No, it doesn’t excuse you for not putting in
the work to really understand your subject, but it is a different
way of learning than most students are used to.

Learn as You’re Taught

One of the biggest disadvantages I see in the current academic
mentality is that students are often encouraged to do most of their
actual learning right before an exam.

This is an incredibly ineffective way to learn.

By following “learn it once” your goal becomes to learn things as
they are taught. So whenever you’re given a reading assignment, sit
through a lecture or are given new material, your immediate goal
becomes making the connections to foster a deeper understanding.

Studying should only be a brief review, resparking the connections
that you had laid out throughout the entire course.

Learn Deeply the First Time

If you don’t “get” something when you first see it, make
understanding your primary goal.

Another implication of “learn it once” is that you don’t leave
learning unfinished. If you’re taught the chain rule in differential
calculus and don’t understand it, you don’t wait until three
lectures later to start working through it.

How do you get that deep understanding? Well metaphor,
visceralization, diagrams and other holistic techniques work. But
sometimes the key is simply finding a better explanation online or
sitting through the problem sets until you can see the pattern.

You know the difference in feeling like you get something
completely and when you don’t fully understand what you’re being
taught. Cultivate an obsession to push through the latter feeling
and not to procrastinate on it.