There are new advanced courses on Thinkific. These courses are a great investment for everybody in terms of time, money and return on investment. Since the courses span over multiple subjects and dozens of hours of video, I need to provide a framework unifying the ideas and coordinating the efforts. This is my first attempt to do so.
Timeframe
The original keytostudy exercises were developed by Anna around 2001 when she was only 19 years old, but only around 2010 the training was reduced from the extreme 120 hours to a manageable schedule. The original superlearning materials appeared a couple of years after. Around 2015 JL and I took different paths, with JL making the accelerated learning more available for everybody and myself focusing on more advanced training ideas.
Approximately in 2015, I published online training exercises. Around 2017 I started recording the advanced training classes. Some of them are already on Thinkific, some more are in video training. While the original superlearning course was about 2 hours long, now I have dozens of hours of training. I still need to generate smarter online training exercises for more advanced courses, and this is very high on my priority list.
Please see “our services” page for more links to available training methods.
Concept
So what is the “advanced training” I refer to? While basic speedreading and memorization are great for everybody, they offer the initial level of training. Then it is a good idea to specialize in something, complete training and specialized in something else. We offer this under the mission statement of “lifelong learning”.
Aspects of lifelong learning
In the original course we focused on personality role in choosing learning goals. Now I propose a personal development approach.
- Investing. Choosing what is worth learning. This is the most important strategic step. Learning something well enough is a huge investment of time and money, and we need to be sure that the investment is justified. Moreover, we need to have some financial resources to do this.
- Long-term memorization. The basic course focused on short term memorization. After we speedread something we will likely not remember it the next day, unless we take certain actions. Learn this, or you will need to relearn everything else.
- Productivity. Time is something all of us desperately need. In the advanced courses, we teach productivity in the same course as speedreading. The reason is very simple: the way w optimize the reading flow we can optimize the flow of other activities. Speedreading is an example of practical productivity which can be shared with all of my clients.
- Visualization. We have to deal with our doubts and other inner demons. Fortunately, we already have the best tool to do so: visualization. The skill of visualization can be easy reused for psychological training routines to improve resilience and happiness. It also allows for effective learning and work by removing unseen obstacles.
- Hands-on learning. Not all the training is theoretical. We need a different sort of frameworks for hands-on training. For example, we need to perform some sort of repeating exercise activity or build a project using the information we acquired. This “know-how” acquisition is a very different sort of learning with very different tools.
- Mentoring. Finally, once we became an expert in something, it is our job to mentor others. When we teach we learn better.
- Research. Knowing something that is known to others might be not good enough. We may want to go one step further and create more knowledge for the benefit of everybody. We need some creativity, analytic thinking, grit, and other skills to succeed.
Basically all of the advanced courses follow this framework to some degree.
Training schedule
While the basic courses are pretty short and follow very strict training routines, the more advanced courses require flexibility. We assume lifelong learning and I plan (someday) to provide enough materials for a lifetime. It would be irresponsible to schedule your life for years to come.
I plan to provide some sort of “sprints”, around 8 weeks each, to acquire certain basic skills. For longer processes, I plan to provide examples of chosen paths. This blog is full of “superlearner stories” with examples of different people in various stages of learning. Sincerely, I rely on my readers and students to take this process one step further.
Do you really need all of it?
You can definitely choose to focus on a single advanced course. This is a smart thing to do, and you may be happy doing this for three or five years. Eventually, you will start seeing the limitations of this approach. Certain things will not work, no matter how hard you try. This might be a good hint to look elsewhere, possibly in one of the other courses.
I created many courses not because I am bored. Quite the opposite: I have more entertainment than I can handle. Simply each time I was stuck in one discipline, I got “unstuck” using a radically different approach. Being a trained scientist, I feel the responsibility to put the methods that worked for me available to others and ready to reproduce my results. This is very hard for me, and the output is a large body of content.
Where should I start?
People are different. Start with what you feel passionate about. What do you want to do? Want to learn to program and build a project or want to learn to play guitar and relax? Need to research or complete a certification? Have to find inner demons before you can do constructive progress? I hope to have soon courses for the most common requests. None of my courses feel “more of the same”. You will either like them or hate them. Take the course that intrigues you and see what happens.
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