How to become Smart or even a Genius?

Smart people has a way of thinking that make them smart. Normal people like us can learn to be smart too by knowing the method and putting the efforts. If we put in the efforts early, it become easier for us to be smart and in the long term to be very smart or even like a genius, especially when we know how to extend our mind with the right software and computer, oops, smart-phone. The secret to a supermind is shared here.

A friend shared on Facebook the following statement written her son. It is a very wise and powerful motto for life. Here it is:

Virtue is demonstrating honesty and integrity in my life by doing what is right.   

What can we learn from it?

Confucius has such a saying:

Analects 7:8 子曰：「不愤不启，不悱不发。 举一隅不以三隅反，则不复也。」
Lack of trying result in lack of understanding. Lack of organized thought result in lack of clarity of speech. Pointing out one corner and not able to think about the other three, then there is no revision.

Smart student revise their lessons early. They spend time to see the patterns of the concepts taught, get them organized, internalized them and enable them to apply them wisely. New knowledge can also be easily captured and added to the framework. Students that are not willing to spend time to revise and reflect, reorganize, and know more, as recommended by Confucius, will not benefit much from the lesson. Such students that refuse or don't spend time to really think by organizing their newly acquired knowledge and just try to take easy way out of memorizing will eventually end up in studying very hard and long hours and yet may still fail in examinations.

The Way to Revise Well:

The way to revise well is to build a mind-map of the concepts taught. The mind-map below show the four steps:

Step 1 is the statement itself. Recall the facts taught.

Step 2 is to analyze, or break down the statements into its components. Try to find patterns, similarities or differences, the flow of thoughts, the grouping, the cause-effect and other kind of relationships among the concepts.

Step 3 is Grouping. Try to group concepts together and discover the parent-child (super-set subset) relationships. 

Step 4 is Extension of Framework.

Which the framework from Step 3, now it just to ask ourselves questions by extending from the various concept branches.

New concepts learned later can be easily added to this framework. As more and more concepts are added, there may be need to breakup or recombine some of the existing branches. There is true learning.

When we need to apply, the mind-map provides us the easy starting point to look-up and get the additional details needed. 

Hope this is useful.

One more thing for the Corporate Leaders and Managers....

Mission, vision and values are important things for any organization to create the right cultures for their business. Values like, honesty, integrity, compassion, creativity etc etc are usually listed and explained. But the best form of explaining values is to express them in observable behaviors so that they can be spotted and copied. Furthermore, values must be institutionalized into policies, rules, standard operating produces, design of office space, show rooms, demonstrated in products and services, internalized in staff and be executed by hiring and firing based on the values. The gap between what is stated on website and brochures and the actual implementation is the common problem of many not too successful organizations. Recall the statement .... virtue is demonstrated by doing .....

Lim Liat (C) 23 Jan 2013

Related Post: For more on mind mapping, follow the series Brain Storming with Mind Mapping - Illustrated with Future of Singapore.