You Are Not Stupid. This Is How You Can Master Anything

And boost your career

Axel Casas, PhD Candidate, 03/22/25

"I can't learn. I'm not smart enough."

Stop saying that. You-are-smart. And you love learning something new. This could sound counterintuitive, as many people in school would say they hate studying. But this is wrong.

Everyone loves learning.

But we disagree on what.

For example, you may hate your science lectures but love learning about new sports. Or you may hate the history of your country but love learning about the Cold War.

Learning is part of being human. Our powerful brains evolved to learn things quickly. That's why you're smart and capable of learning anything. So, take advantage of our evolution.

And start learning new things now.

Effective Learning Is Science, Not Magic

Let's understand what learning means.

The APA dictionary of psychology defines learning as "the acquisition of novel information, behaviors, or abilities after practice, observation, or other experiences, as evidenced by change in behavior, knowledge, or brain function."

One question worth asking is when does learning occur. In other words, how can you know when you learned something or not?

For example, you may have experienced forgetting or feeling your mind blank before an exam. You studied so hard for it. What happened? Well, the answer is that you didn't learn effectively.

This means you didn't link information from your short-term to long-term memory.

* Short-term memory: lasts seconds, minutes, hours, or days.

* Long-term memory: last days, months, years, and even a lifetime.

* To learn more about the psychology of memory, read this.

So, effective learning happens when you link data to your long-term memory.

The key difference between successful and unsuccessful students is that the latter learn with ineffective methods. That means they use strategies that keep information in their short-term memory. This also creates a cognitive illusion, the illusion of learning, that happens when you believe you learned something when you didn't.

Here are some examples of bad strategies:

* Rewatching: watching your lectures repeatedly gives you a false sense of understanding. You may struggle once you try to recall or do what they taught you. This happens a lot when learning programming.

* Rereading: same as rewatching but reading your notes and textbooks. The key problem with this method and rewatching is that they are passive. To learn effectively, you need active methods.

* Highlighting: although it helps to find key information to practice recalling better, many students think that highlighting their books alone or rereading them is enough to learn.

I wrote a post about them here.

Better strategies:

* Retrieval: flashcards, free recall, etc.

* Spaced practice: space out sessions to give your brain enough time to consolidate information.

* Interleaving: combine different but similar topics. Study topic A and B for 10 minutes separately. Then, when studying A or B, again, combine topics you learned from A or B.

* Interrogative elaboration: ask and answer how and why questions.

* Concrete examples: analogies, examples, etc., to better understand the topic.

* Dual coding: visualize topics with memes, mind maps, etc.