Once a month we try to publish a story about our student to show the progress and the challenges each of us faces. This is a story about my friend and colleague, whom I will call here Evgeny.
When I took one of consulting jobs I was greeted by a huge guy with a huge smile, whom we will call Evgeny. For the next couple of weeks we were sharing our Pomodoro breaks over coffee and jokes and became really good friends. Evgeny is a couple of years younger than me and holds several PhD degrees (math, biology and engineering). After a some time together we could talk about pretty much anything. After solving the project we were working on together we remained great friends and decided that we should do a project together. Since the guy is a good mathematician and I allocated a small amount of money for investing I suggested him to cooperate in stock market trading. He agreed gladly and opened a trading account. After a day he came to me and asked: “How and where do I learn trading?”. This was a bit unexpected. Apparently Evgeny had absolutely no background in economics. I used to work as analyst long ago, but trading was as new for me as it was for him. I started sending him articles on the latest trends. After the third article, Evgeny asked to learn with Anna.
Evgeny came to our home for 2.5 hours every two weeks for two months [10 hours]. After that Anna said something along the lines “I taught him all superlearning I know. I cannot tell him how to think: he has more PhDs than both of us. Suggest him the advanced course and ask him if he wants to take it at all…”. Evgeny calmed me: “No need to take further lessons. I read 15 economic articles in under one hour now”. He is practicing daytrading when he is not working, he is very cautious and accurate in his investments.
People are different. The most talented of us need to learn harder to activate our potential. New field of knowledge is frightening for some, but not a limitation for a superlearner.
