Supersmart- A session by Dr. Nicholas Correa

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How to become Super smart? A session By Dr.
Nicholas Correa Resource person, Ratnasagar
Publication
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People arent born smart. They become smart. And
to become smart you need a well-defined set of
skills.
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Here are some tips and resources for acquiring
those skills.
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7 Skills To Become Super Smart
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Memory If you cant remember what youre trying
to learn, youre not really learning.
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The secret to remembering is this memory comes
naturally once you understand what youre trying
to learn and organize it effectively in your
mind.
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A valuable resource for getting the filing
cabinets of your mind in good working order is
Brian Walshs Unleashing Your Brilliance Tools
Techniques to Achieve Personal, Professional
Academic Success .
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If you want to amaze your friends with
remembering faces, names, and numbers, look to
the grand-daddy of memory training, Harry
Lorayne. His How to Develop a Super-Power
Memory is a classic. The problem with Harry
Lorayne type memory courses (popularized more
recently by Kevin Trudeau), is that they focus on
mental tricks and gimmicks to memorize trivial
stuff that really doesnt make for a deep
understanding of important subjects.
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In ancient times, without the help of
teleprompters or PowerPoint presentations,
speakers did need to memorize a lot of material
verbatim and used various memory tricks to do so.
But this has become less important in our day.
Still, its worth knowing about these tricks to
memory. For a thoughtful book on memory and
forgetting by an academic psychologist, see
Kenneth Higbees Your Memory How It Works and
How to Improve It.
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Reading Good scholars need to be good readers.
But who is a good reader? Often when we think of
good readers, we think of speedgood readers,
so were told, can fly through material. But
thats not necessarily the case. Woodrow Wilson,
president of Princeton University and noted
historian before becoming U.S. President of
America was dyslexic, so it took him forever to
read through material.
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Theres an old Saturday Night Live routine
(season 3, episode 5, November 12, 1977) that
parodies speed reading courses. Back in the
1970s, Evelyn Woods speed reading course was all
the rage (its still being taught and books on
speed reading with Evelyn Wood in the title
remain widely available). Heres the SNL parody
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Writing Writing is an essential part of
scholarship. Some great scholars have been
terrible writersthe strength of their ideas
carried them to the top even though their writing
style was abysmal. But these are the exceptions.
Clarity and precision of expression can only help
you as a scholar.
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Every writer needs to have read Strunk and
Whites The Elements of Style. To this Super
Scholar would add two very practical books on
writing William Zinssers On Writing Well and
William Stotts Write to the Point. Finally,
every writer, professional or not, would profit
enormously from having a copy of The Chicago
Manual of Style. The latter is an incomparable
reference work on all aspects of going from
thought to word to printed page.
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Writing isnt just about filling up a pages with
text. Its also about persuasion. Scholars are
not just in the business of thinking up great
ideas. They also have to sell them. Indeed, you
are selling yourself and your ideas when you
apply to college, graduate school, your first
teaching position, and especially when youre
trying to get tenure.
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Speaking Among the worst fears that people have
is public speaking. Yet as a scholar, you will be
called on to discuss your ideas. Public speaking
is therefore part of the scholarly life. Here are
some books we at Super Scholar have found
valuable in this regard. Dale Carnegies How to
Develop Self-Confidence And Influence People By
Public Speaking is a classic.
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The most effective means we know of dealing with
speaking phobia is Emotional Freedom Technique
(abbreviated EFT).
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Numeracy Scholars need facility with numbers.
Some scholars such as mathematicians, physicists,
and engineers tend to score high on the math
portions of standardized tests and have fewer
problems dealing with numbers. Other scholars,
often on the humanities side, prefer to have as
little to do with numbers as possible.
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But numbers are a part of life, so we better
learn to live with them. Numbers are often
abused. Joseph Stalin once remarked that paper
doesnt care whats written on it. Likewise,
numbers dont care what you do with them.
Consequently, they are easily abused
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Its also useful to hone your arithmetic skills.
Often when confronted with the supposed outcome
of a calculation, its good to do what engineers
call a sanity check
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Empathy Empathy is about connecting with people.
It is about understanding and tracking other
peoples emotions. Aristotle stressed the desire
of people to know.
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But people are not just about knowing. They are
also about feeling. We are not just cognitive
animals but also social animals, and feelings
drive most of our social interactions.
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Thats why many scholars are regarded as nerds or
geeksthey are seen as reducing everything to
knowledge, to pure intellectualism, forgetting
about the feeling element in people.
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The classic study on empathy was by the towering
British economist Adam Smith. Before his great
work on economics, The Wealth of Nations, he
wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Both books
bear careful study to this day.
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Smiths ideas about empathy and moral sentiments
have been updated. Today these tend to be
identified with people skills or emotional
intelligence.
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Daniel Golemans Emotional Intelligence Why It
Can Matter More than IQ has become a modern
classic in this regard. Some scholars think they
can bank entirely on mental horsepower, running
circles intellectually around their peers.
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But scholarship is itself a social enterprise.
Princeton University mathematicians, for
instance, hold an afternoon tea where faculty and
graduate students meet informally.
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Some of the best work in mathematics at Princeton
(and Princeton has for decades now had the
strongest mathematics faculty in the world) gets
done at these social gatherings.
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Peoples emotional lives tend not to follow
strict logical principles. People are not just
rational utility optimizers. Instead, they are
full of twists and quirks.
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Human interactions also have a dark side, as when
the culture of rational discourse breaks down, so
that instead of resolving our differences with
civility and reason, we engage in power plays.
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Time Management The word scholar comes from the
Greek word for leisure. Being a scholar means
having the leisure time to engage in intellectual
pursuits rather than in other forms of labour.
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It follows that, as a scholar, time is your most
valuable asset. How you make use of your time is
therefore critical to your productivity as a
scholar. We tend to waste an inordinate amount
of time. The television is on in most homes 6
hours a day. We look for unproductive ways to
fill the day.
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