Monday, May 10, 2010

Maximize Career Discovery - What Are Your Rapid Learning and Synaptical Super Highways?

The technology is advancing quickly and we may one day be able to send you in for a quick brain scan to discern where your learning super highways are. In the mean time the best approach is to pay a lot of attention to the topics where you learn rapidly. If you’re struggling to learn something it may be a clue that you’re going down a narrow synaptical country road instead of a synaptical super highway with regard to your brain design. You actually have a few choices:

1. Ditch the country road quickly. This may involve something as radical as dropping a class at school, quitting a job, or asking for a departmental transfer.

2.  Drive slow. Grind it out. Get a tutor. Invest the extra time and effort to shore up a weakness.  In my area we sometimes have to drive in the fog.  We don't like to... but sometimes we have to.

3.  Delegate. Find someone else to learn it or do it for you. Collaborate with someone.

4.  Do what comes easier. Stanford University Professor Michael Ray has a whole chapter on this in his book Creativity in Business. He writes that we live in a world that often tries to impose a credo of difficult, distasteful, and depressing but suggests that we spend more of our time on what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable. Ironically, Ray suggests this actually requires a fair amount of discipline.

The main thing is that you figure out ways to stay on the Super Highways most of the time. Pay attention to the things you learn quickly. What were your favorite subjects in school?  I liked English in High School. It wasn’t a super highway but it was at least a major thorough fare. Even though I got a 3.6 grade point average in High School it wasn’t until College that I found a couple of roads that could really travel fast. Psychology was fast. Some counseling classes came very easy. In High School, math and science were country roads with big pot holes for me. Intuitively I got off them as quick as I could. I did high school biology and geometry and called it a day.

This is quite counter-cultural actually on two points. One… we are taught to not give up. Even Billy Ocean tells us “When Going Gets Tough… The Tough Get Going”. There is a definite place for this but I think it makes more sense to push yourself very hard in area of strength.  Secondly, hardly a week goes by that I don’t read a newspaper article declaring that we as a country need to get our math and science scores up. Here’s a news flash!  If we want to get our math and science scores up, how about we focus on teaching those who are already gifted in those subjects and help the others discover and develop their unique strengths.

Get Out Your Notebook and make a list of the subjects you have learned quickly in your life:
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