I learned more in 11 months in running for president than I did in 12 years of school.
Learn your lessons quickly and move on.
The winner of the next war will be he who learns the most and learns the fastest.
But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.
Fluid intelligence is not a Big Five personality trait: It's a measurement of one's ability to rapidly learn and apply a rule set. As an entrepreneur, you're rapidly dealing with different issues, and your ability to switch from one issue to another is very important.
One of my big, big strengths I think early on in my career was that I could learn very quickly. You wouldn't have to tell me the things 10 times or 50 times until I would understand them. You would only have to tell me two or three times.
Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question: How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?
I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly.
Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.
We are able to feel and learn very quickly through music, through art, through poetry some spiritual things that we would otherwise learn very slowly.
The thing that is probably most important is having a brain, and to be able to figure things out and learn things very rapidly.
I was not yet three years old when my mother determined to send one of my elder sisters to learn to read at a school for girls we call the Amigas. Affection, and mischief, caused me to follow her, and when I observed how she was being taught her lessons I was so inflamed with the desire to know how to read, that deceiving - for so I knew it to be - the mistress, I told her that my mother had meant for me to have lessons too. ... I learned so quickly that before my mother knew of it I could already read.
There are a lot of lessons that you learn, and you have to learn them quickly if you want to be competitive at this top level.
It's amazing how fast you learn something if they shove you out on the stage and say, 'Learn it.'
I was 18 when I did 'The Amanda Show,' and I was 19 when I did 'MadTV,' and I was in way over my head. I was just sort of a goof who could do impressions of WB stars - speaking of the Dawson Van Der Beek era - and it was overwhelming. I don't think I've learned more faster in my life than when I worked on 'MadTV.'
I'm blessed with learning easily. I've always had a good thing about memorizing quickly, and I just leave the script kind of open somewhere, and as I walk by I'll just take a swipe at it and then go on about my business and pretty soon it sticks.
The superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised.
I taught myself how to pole vault in one day. The next day I entered a meet to pole vault and won it all for the state of Alabama.
But these guys learn so fast now, they sort of soak up the information, they're fearless. Those are the guys who learn from their mistakes and come back strong the next time.
Of all the recruits in his cohort, he had learned the quickest. How to hold the spear, how to stand to spar. He’d done it almost without instruction. That had shocked Tukks. But why should it have? You were not shocked when a child knew how to breathe. You were not shocked when a skyeel took flight for the first time. You should not be shocked when you hand Kaladin Stormblessed a spear and he knows how to use it.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, my wife speaks five languages: Russian, English, French, Italian and, out of self-defense, Spanish. I watched her learn Spanish in three months.
During that year at Harvard learning with Carl Steinitz, I had the feeling that I was drinking knowledge out of a fire hose. I learned more in that year than I had learned in the previous ten years of my education.
We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.
It's your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.
