Explaining a genius's learning strategiesfrom @kolbykirschner

Transcript

Everyone talks about how great Marcus Aurelius was, but almost nobody talks about how he trained his mind to think that way. If you study people like Marcus Aurelius, you'll start to notice that there's patterns in the way they all think. Welcome to How a True Genius Learns, a series where we steal the learning strategies from history's greatest minds. Today is Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome from January to January. Almost every emperor chased pleasure because they could and it was so easy for them to. Wine, women, power. But Marcus didn't. Instead, he trained his mind and himself to be a good man better day for nineteen years. So what was his learning strategy? First, he didn't just learn ideas, he used strategic imitation. Learning specific behaviors from other people that he wanted. He would watch other people and rank, what makes them calm? What makes them strong? How do they see the world? Then he would copy them. Their habits, their actions, the way they carried themselves. He wasn't learning information, he was imitating behaviors that he wanted. This is exactly why it's so important who you surround yourself with. But the second thing was, he specifically used writing to think. Everything stays in your head, it gets messy, it gets overwhelming, or you inevitably forget it. But he wrote everything down. His good, Meditations, was never for anybody else, but it was just for him. He would even write down the smallest reminders to himself like, stay calm in this situation, do the right thing over and over again no that it would get ingrained in the way that he thought and saw the world. Writing is how he intentionally trained his mind to think in certain ways, which is why I almost always carry a small journal with me. This is how a true genius learns, not by just learning more information, but by studying real people and training their own mind every single day.