This Completely Changed How I view Concepts

As we were kids- even babies, we began developing certain patterns of thinking about the world, by observing the environment around us.

One of the first patterns we learned was the Cause and Effect pattern

Imagine the following scenario:

You throw food on the floor and see your mom get angry at you. Then from that point forward, you learned something new:

Throwing food on the floor makes mom angry. Maybe you still kept throwing on the food, but either way, you learned a pattern.

And here’s the interesting bit. These patterns aren’t just learned in our early years they are occurring much more frequently than you might think.

If you’ve studied any subject somewhat extensively you know that our minds are pattern recognition machines. We immediately try to connect new information to previously learned patterns of thought. This is why it’s much harder to learn a completely new subject than one that you are already familiar with.

So… With that in mind.

I want to share with you a learned pattern that made learning a diverse set of fields so much easier for me.

It’s called the Problem-Solution Pattern.

The idea behind it is that we can think of concepts as solutions to problems.

You see a problem and try to find a corresponding solution. At the end of the day, you’re learning the concept to solve something right?

But why is this so useful?

Its usefulness comes from the fact that it’s:

• Intuitive

• Usually categorizes concepts into two big boxes (i.e it’s general)

• Can be used in several diverse fields

So…

How can we leverage this?

Well…

The next time you find yourself learning a new subject.

Ask yourself:

What are the problems we need to solve?

What are the corresponding solutions to those problems?

Asking yourself these questions will point your mind in the right direction, and you’ll notice your retention and intuition go through the roof once you find the answers to them- and group them.

Until next time,

Diego “The Problem Solver”