Studying Isn’t the Problem — Your Approach Might Be

Are you one of those people who doesn’t like studying? Well, you’re not the only one. Me included, that is, when I was in school and the first couple of years of university.

To put it into context, the reason why I didn’t like studying was because in those days, no one told you how to. As long as you were able to regurgitate the information you were give, you were doing okay. I remember how little I read and how much memorising I had to do. This is going back to when there were generally and most commonly two places to do all your studies, the library or at home. Now you can imagine the level of motivation when you had to pick yourself up, take yourself to the library, look for books that would serve your purpose, sit in a corner, and study. And if you spoke or even whispered loudly, you might have been asked to leave. And not only that; you were allowed to borrow the book for 2 days and you would get fined for late returns. In the meantime, you have this book or a few books that are your only source of information and if you didn’t find what you needed, you’d have to go back to the library and look for something else. I mean, compare that to today’s study culture and tell me if that’s not tedious, intimidating, and off- putting.

If you’re a student reading this blog, you have no idea how lucky you are to be given the study opportunities that generations X and Y didn’t have. You see, while you were born into a world of reachable information, those generations had to work so much harder to find them. It’s no wonder that youngster nowadays are grown up by the time they’re in their early teens. I mean the knowledge of a teenager of generation X and Y isn’t even comparable to today’s teenagers.

Still, much like the last generations where studies were forsaken for anything but having to memorise information on a subject they had little knowledge and interest for, today’s generation of students forsake the opportunity to use all the knowledge at their finger tips for gaming, social media and the likes. Do you see a pattern here? The behaviour pattern somehow repeats itself even though the context changes.

The question is why?

If you are one of those whose studies fall somewhere in the bottom of the list of priorities like mine did, then you would probably understand what’s coming.

Here’s the problem. In fact here are 3 problems that stand in the way of us and our studies. Firstly, it’s our obligations. Obligation takes the zest out of doing anything. It’s the extrinsic motivation that drives us but when we don’t get the satisfaction of having fulfilled that obligation, the motivation wanes until one day, you make a conscious decision of abandoning it for something that will give you the satisfaction you want.

Secondly, your study techniques has a great deal to do with it. If you are one to practice passive learning strategies like simply going over slides in preparation for an exam, then your engagement with the task is likely to be so boring that, once again, you will probably go looking for something more exciting to engage with. And this is closely linked to the third impediment.

It’s allowing yourself to be distracted. Unfortunately for you, boredom can do that. Think of the last time you were bored with a task. Your mind might have wandered off to something more desirable. Or you were so bored that the smallest movement or sound gave you a reason to abandon the task.

But what if you translated the task into something empowers you as a person. What if you started to see the task, not as something that is your obligation? What if you looked at it as something that empowers you as a person?

Knowledge helps us solve problems, knowledge helps us interact, knowledge us build wisdom, knowledge is something that no one can ever take away from you. That’s the value and the power of knowledge. Building it might be hard sometimes but once you have it, it’s your key to everything. Mark my words.