How to Make the Hard Thing Easy
Recently, my daughter came to me with very poor grades on a couple of spelling tests. We discussed the problem and I could see the hopelessness overwhelming her as she sat on the bed.
I continued to look through her ‘send-home’ packet that showed the grades she had gotten in other subjects. Her Latin test was a 100%. I pointed this out to her and she dismissed it. “Well, that’s easy for me.”
I pressed her a little bit on why Latin was easy for her, and reminded her that last year she was getting poor grades in Latin.
“Well, I do Grandma’s trick.” Grandma was an elementary school teacher for 30 years, and has all the learning ‘tricks.’ The one that my daughter was referring to was one in which she would start writing each word one letter at a time, writing on the next line for each additional letter, until the process looked like stairs descending across the page.
We talked about the opportunity that struggle or failure gives us.
She was still discouraged, as though the Latin and the spelling were diametrically different for her to learn. We talked a little more, and I encouraged two things in her: The first is to remember Jocko Willink’s “Good” video. (While she doesn’t understand all of his examples, she does understand not getting a promotion, because she wanted a special ‘job’ at a choir performance and didn’t get it last year.)
And then I told her something that took me a long time to recognize:
Not only do you have to learn how to learn, but you have to know (i.e., observe and understand) how you learn.
The two takeaways at that moment for her were this:
1) Humbly apply lessons and tricks that others have learned before, and have given you advice on.
This means that she had to listen and put into practice a trick that Grandma told her. I remember when Grandma showed her how to do it. She was not all that interested the first time. At that time, I knew that she was just going to keep doing what she was doing, and she would hope that something would change. But soon after that interaction, I needed childcare, and Grandma had her again, when she was studying Latin. I noticed a few days later she was applying the learning strategy for her Latin, which resulted in the 100% on her Latin quiz today.
What advice have others given you? What advice in your financial, personal, or professional life that you didn’t think would work, ended up being the thing that changed your life for the better?
2) Counterintuitively to the previous lesson, Lesson #2 is: Know how you learn (the processes that are effective for you), and how long it takes for you to retain and utilize the knowledge.
This can seem as though it challenges number one: Because if we all learn individually, then we must all have to find our own path forward, right? We have to figure it out uniquely for ourselves. Well, yes and no.
Yes, some ways that work for some people just won’t be as effective for you. For some students, cramming the night before works, but for others, looking at the information every day and reviewing it bit-by-bit works better.
Personally, I can’t keep my task and responsibilities straight if I don’t spend an hour or two on the weekend looking ahead to the next week’s events, tasks, and commitments. If I don’t spend that hour or so planning and preparing, I’m pushed around by the tyranny of the urgent. At the end of these kind of weeks, I’m not sure what I accomplished. I’ve had to learn that this weekly planning session is essential to keeping my world calm and progressing.
There are a myriad ways of applying a strategy that works, but listening to others who have gone before and figured out a way that works, and then testing, changing and adapting it to yourself are two necessary steps to really mastering a skill or mastering knowledge.
What does any of this have to do with Financial Therapy? Keep this in your back pocket, because next time, we’re going to apply these lessons to your financial life.
