The best advice I have.

My first winter in Japan I went skiing in Nozawa. It was really beautiful and remains one of my very good memories in Japan. I might mention that it was my second time ever to ski. I'm from Florida. On the ski lift on the way to the top of the mountain, where all of the trails start, including the "beginner's," I thought no way does any beginner's course exist on this mountain, because it's way too big. I soon found out I was right. There were courses labeled beginner's, but beginner's they were not. I'm a beginner. I was a beginner. The courses were not for beginners.


So keep that in mind when I tell you that the friend I was with basically tricked me onto an intermediate course, by "mistake." By the time we were on the intermediate hill, we had already gone down a kind of small hill and there was no way to go back. I was going to have to go down the very large intermediate hill. I was genuinely scared, I mean really. This was probably one of the top 10 scariest times in my life. Maybe top 5. My life hasn't been a very dangerous one.


So my friend was trying to teach me how to zig zag down the slope. But on the sides of the hill you had to turn around, and to turn around you had to face down, and that meant gaining an enormous amount of speed. So to prevent this speed gaining, my friend tried to teach me how to turn around without facing down. First both feet are facing, say, left. Then you turn, say, your right foot towards the right so that your feet are facing in exactly opposite directions. Like a ballerina. My friend showed me how to do it and I said no no no no no. I'm not flexible in that way, I can't do it. He said yes you can, just try it. I started to try and then immediately wanted to stop, because I was right, I'm not flexible in that way, but he actually tried to push my leg into the position. With skis, skis are kind of stronger than your leg. So if skis go in a direction that your leg doesn't want to, your leg has no choice and you can get pretty injured. This was a situation like that. Luckily I yelled at him loud enough to make him stop and my leg didn't get hurt. Crazy though, absolutely crazy. Never do that to someone. I finally ended up just zooming straight down the entire hill at an enormous speed.


So I want to say that everyone is different. And advice that's good for some people is not good for everyone. And the advice that you get from any one person is only the advice that is good for them. So you may luck out and be similar to the person your getting advice from, but in many cases that won't be true. So my friend's advice was very good for him and anyone flexible like him, but had I followed it, it would have resulted in some serious damage to my leg. So I was smart enough to say no, this is not for me.


Please do this with your studies. You'll get lots of advice from lots of people, and all of it is really valid for the right type of person. But you have to know yourself and what is good for you, how do you learn best, what are YOUR SPECIFIC weaknesses, and then make wise choices about what advice to follow. It'd be crazy if you always just blindly followed the advice of others. You're life would probably suck.


There's a conclusion that follows pretty naturally from this idea: you may not always be able to find a person similar enough to you to give advice that's applicable to you. In that case, you WILL have to think of your own answers. But you're capable of it. Just try. Think of your own study ideas, study strategies. People are always asking my advice for different tests. And I give them my advice. But I feel like, just from the odds of it and all the different kinds of people out there, my advice will only apply to definitely less than 50% of the people I give it to. So this is actually the best advice I can give: THINK OF YOUR OWN!


Why don't you try it now? Think of some weak area you have. First figure out why you're weak there, what is YOUR SPECIFIC problem, maybe why you have the problem, then try to think of a way to fix it. And... go.


▼▽▼▼【講師】Amberly先生のバックナンバー━━━━━━━━
・【learning the right lesson.】2009.08.12 (Wed)