When I was first a law student I, like many other students, thought it would be a great help to purchase prepared outlines of the subjects I was studying. The logic went that if we could see the items in the comprehensively prepared outline, we wouldn’t miss any key points. The paranoia of first-year law students (and for some, the years thereafter as well) cannot be underestimated. And lots of companies make lots of money feeding on this paranoia with outlines, flashcards, treatises, and more.
The thing you come to understand later is that the process of learning, which in the case of law study and many other areas of life, is more about assimilating information, applying it to your own knowledge base, and then coming up with your personal experience of the information. Once you do that, those prepared outlines are pretty useless. It’s not the information itself that has value. It’s your experience of developing an understanding of it and knowing how to apply it that matters.
So, the outline is not the key – writing the outline is the key.
Neuroscience has even found that writing in longhand secures the connection between your writing and your brain for better long-term retention. Have you ever written a grocery or other list and then forgotten it? Chances are, even without the list in hand, you remember at least some of the items on it.
I know I do.
Writing things down is good for learning and retention. It’s also good for setting and achieving goals. One study done by Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that people who wrote down their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write down their goals. Effective coaching tools include accountability, commitment, and writing – and this has been empirically proven.
Why is this the case? Well, there are many scientific explanations that you can read to get the details. For what we’re dealing with though, it’s pretty easy. Whether we know it or not, we program our unconscious mind. That’s right. The old adage from Henry Ford is true, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.” The challenge is always in getting to that part of us that “thinks” in our deepest unconscious mind. Once we access the goal machine that lies inside our mind, we can use it to reprogram ourselves for success at whatever we “think we can.”
Most of us don’t have a specific process to articulate what we want. Lucky for you, you’re reading this! If you want to achieve your goals, you need to formulate them specifically and write them down. You need to engage in a process of programming your unconscious mind to take you where you want to go. This is not only possible, it’s easy to do – in just a few minutes each night.
Interested in learning how?
Come back in a bit and read Part 2 of this post on Achievement Accounting!