learn how to learn well..

Suddenly had some thoughts about what I have learnt so far...
I suppose if you ask me, i can summarise everything into 2 words:

"GENERAL KNOWLEDGE"

Yeah..that's a rather general statement but it's the best words to sum up my education so far..or rather the technical aspect of it.

Ask me about biology, geography, history, chemistry...anything that i have learnt in the past..all i can tell you is: "ya i know what is plate tectonic, i think i have heard of the Black Sunday and is the iron you talking about the FE in periodic table etc..." oh well..i cant even think of enough examples offhand to blog them down now..geez..but yea..these are what i remember..pathetic? no!

Here comes the main point..what i have really learnt is basically:

"the ABILITY to learn well"

I thought this wasnt something so obvious to everyone..especially if you are always under the disillusion that the education system is screwed and what you are learning are useless to you anyway in the future blar blar blar..Yeah true..but that's the for technical part..the bigger part of education lies on the non-technical part, which is non other than the ability to learn well..

And that ability to learn well comes from many many areas that you cant specifically teach, other than through teaching diff spectrum of these technical stuff. It comes from understanding your own strength and weaknesses, the nature of the different types of academics/practicals, exams, projects, seminars, discussions and all kinds of experience you ever had in learning...aka all the GENERAL KNOWLEDGE that i concluded just now.

知己知彼，百战不殆。

If you dont even understand yourselves, there is no way you are gonna excel in anything you do. And with that, here's some thing i observed about myself, and i know i will definitely learn well (Get A in academic terms, or simply progress very fast in learning other stuff..) when these factors are all present..

1. Serious Motivation
(can be from any source, but must be firm)
2. A clear goal
(dont be ambiguous here..)
3. Reasonably sufficient time

It's not that hard to find some clear goals that can be achieve within a reasonable time span available..what's always lacking is probably the motivation. There can be 101 reasons to why you might wanna work towards a goal..but it's all half f*** if you dont believe 100% in any of them. End up you will only be wasting 99% of the time trying to work towards that goal, only to realise at the final 1% or somewhere midway thinking..why the hell am i torturing myself so hard for anyway?

Well..some rather disorganised thoughts up there, but there is really only 1 key idea..

"Thou who doesn't waiver will succeed."