Table of Contents
1. Routine
🏫What School Taught
Everything needs to be done at a specific time, for a specific period of time, in a sequence, for a purpose, and with complete focus and attention. The routine is not changed for a year.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Have you written down your 8 hours of the daily plan, timings, a timeline of the tasks you want to do, subtasks, and why, and follow them like life for 6 months?
Doing anything at any time, or not doing something are all decisions that a brain needs to take. Every decision drains the brain of its energy. Routine eliminates the need for taking microdecisions. When the brain knows the routine, it can allocate the energy and produce necessary hormones accordingly. When your food timing is the same every day, the brain produces the hormone Grehlin(the hunger hormone), and saliva 30 minutes prior to the food time.
If your brain does not know your routine, then you will end up doing far lesser than your potential.
2. Rituals
🏫What Schools Taught
Belongingness needs to be reminded through daily rituals. Assembly, prayer, class, short break, tiffin, play, bells, and so on.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼 Did you continue the habit?
Do you have family rituals, where you start the day with assembly and joint rituals, then go back to your respective tasks, meet at the end, disassemble, and end the day?
3. Homework
🏫 What Schools Taught
Every day needs preparedness on the previous day. One has to spend 2-3 hours preparing for the next day. Homework prepares the brain for tomorrow. It allows the brain to rewind the learning of the day and review the learning. It allows the brain to improve cognition by thinking about the answers to questions that were not learned in class.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you give yourself homework for the next day, or do the homework before completing the day?
Irrespective of the profession one is in, one always learns something every day. There are new problems, discussions, human interactions, readings, observations, and so on. Unless one sits with a pen and notebook, writes a note of the day, and review what one learned, the brain doesn’t get a closure of the day, and can not organize the information properly.
4. Multi-discipline
🏫 What Schools Taught
Life is diverse. You have to learn all subjects, different dimensions to pass the exam of life.
No great innovators in the human race have ever been limited to one field.
Vinci:- Art,
Einstine:- Violine,
Pericles:- Drama,
Without art, literature, history, and music, no one can connect to life, and without connecting to life, no one can solve the problems of life. Over 85% of the Nobel Laureates have Polymath and Polygloth in their biodata.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you in your daily professional life use:
a) Literature
b) History
c) Mathematics
d) Science
on a daily basis? Do learn each of these on a daily basis to benefit from multidimensions?
5. Questioning
🏫What Schools taught?
Focus on 45 mins, learn first, listen, think, analyze, process, understand, memorize, and correlate to develop a curiosity. Do not unnecessarily question everything. Become curious first. Contextual listening and learning create continuity in the brain. While learning a subject, or listening to a story, if the brain doesn’t understand something which it thinks is important to know in order to remember and understand the topic better, then it becomes curious about the missing piece of knowledge.
Then the children must take time, to frame the question in his/her mind in a structured way, raise hands which prepares the teacher to answer a student’s question, and then the question is asked by changing the posture(often standing up).
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you spend 60 minutes with a subject before asking any questions? Have you ever spent 30 minutes learning, teaching, and discussing a question?
Most often or not, once one becomes an adult, you tend to forget that questioning is a protocol. You can not simply ask a question to anyone. You must first patiently listen to the other person. Then you must organize the information in your brain. Finally, you try to understand and comprehend what you listened to and learned. And after this, you take permission to ask questions. Then you change your posture to ask the question.
6. Learning
🏫 What schools taught?
One subject has a fixed source(book), one fixed teacher, a predefined set of syllabi to learn, and exercises to complete, exams to pass before you know a subject.
Schools also taught one of the most important learning skills, which is group learning. Our learning ability and efficiency depend upon the context. Humans are social animals and something that is relevant for many others is also relevant for us. When a lot of children learn together, their hormone Oxytocin secretion gets higher, which increases neuroplasticity, thereby increasing learning efficiency.
Hence, when many children learn together, discuss the topics after the class, and share their ideas, the learning is much higher than learning anything alone.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you give yourself one year to learn one subject, from one teacher that you follow, and from one source?
Most importantly did you continue with your group-learning habits where you exchanged ideas and learnings with others?
7. Patience
🏫What schools taught
Irrespective of how big an Ape one is and the IQ, completion needs 10 years. You learn that one level of learning takes at least one year to complete. You do not try to learn the syllabus of class X in class V, you go through the process, year after year patiently.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼 Did you continue the habit?
Have you planned, pursued, focussed, and prioritized for 10 years in one job, one skill, one relationship, and one mission? Have you planned life and its parts for the next ten years? If you have not given yourself one year to learn something, and then upgraded the same over the next year, and repeated this for ten years, then your brain can not use the learning in solving your day-to-day life problems. In reality, no brain cares for anything that you have not continued for a significantly long period of time.
8. Practice
🏫What schools taught
Your success doesn’t depend upon the money your parents have, the nutrition you eat, facilities you get, it’s all about how many times you have practiced a subject.
You practice a subject every day after coming back from school while doing homework. You practice the subject during class tests. You practice before the exams. The more you practice a subject, the better you get at it.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you revise and practice your skills, and knowledge daily before going to work and after coming back?
Irrespective of the years of experience, one has to practice the skill before a performance. Sportsmen spend 80% of their time practicing, and 20% in playing. This is true even for musicians. They practice every day (called Rewaz) whether there is a performance or not. When you were in school as a student, you studied every day whether there was an exam or not.
9. Exams
🏫What schools taught
Everyone learns the same stuff, and gets the same exam, but scores differently. Mind your own exam, don’t move around your head. Schools taught you to prepare for the exam, not only during or before the examination but throughout the year.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Have you taken all decisions in life independently and taken accountability for the results without blaming someone?
Life throws exams every now and then. Such exams come in the form of a dilemma, the probability of a loss, some challenges, and so on. If you succeed in the exams, you get rewards from life, else you get punished. Your probability of succeeding in the exam depends on how much have you prepared throughout the year for the exam.
10. Eating Habits
🏫What schools taught
- Eating at a fixed time.
- Sit together in a group while eating your tiffin.
- Eating a fixed quantity of food every day (because your tiffin size is limited).
- Sharing stories and remaining happy while eating.
- Sharing food with others.
- Focussing only on eating and not doing any work while eating.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you still continue the habit? Do all of you in your family sit together while eating? Do you share each other’s stories while having food? Does all of your mobile stay away while you eat? Is the amount of time for which you eat every day, and the time is same? Do you eat a fixed quantity of food every day?
11. Writing Habits
🏫What schools taught
- Take notes in every class. Have a separate notebook for each subject.
- Read the notes after going back home. Have a separate fair notebook where you prepare your own notes by incorporating your understanding, and learning, and by referring to school notes.
- You write in a different notebook while practicing.
- When you sit with a book while reading, you also sit with a notebook to write the things you are learning.
- Exchange notes with other students.
Schools teach us to write anything we are learning for the day and frequently review and revise these learnings.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Do you carry a diary to work and take notes during meetings? Do you take down notes after seniors taught you something? Do you go back home and review and revise these notes? Do you find appropriate books, or online resources to study more about the notes? Do you share your notes with your colleagues?
If you are not learning every day, taking notes, making the notes fair, and practicing them, then you have not really learned anything in the day, and that day doesn’t add to your long-term success.
12. Playing
🏫What schools taught
- There is a separate playing hour.
- You play team sports for an hour.
- Children also create their own games and play together.
- Playing doesn’t attribute to overall marks in the exams or does not help anyways to become a better student, but they provide healthy competition every day which increases testosterone, which is a growth hormone.
When school children play sports and games, they compete and want to do better, but losing or winning doesn’t make them sad. They learn to enjoy competing, worrying less about winning or defeat. Games and sports teach coordination, collaboration, and rules, besides the competition.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
In professional life, you compete daily. You compete with the market, peers, within the team, and so on. However, this is a core competency, just as how students compete to be the best student in the class. This has nothing to do with playing sports to live competitions every day.
Do you play competitive sports with your mates daily? Have you mastered the skills of collaboration, coordination, and skill enhancement while competing?
13. Attention and Focus
🏫What schools taught
- Paying attention in a class for 45-60 minutes.
- Listening to the teacher for 45-50 minutes.
- Trying to remember and take notes while listening(again attention).
- Focussing and channelizing all your energy into that specific moment.
- Keep all the threads in your brain closed and open the threads related to the current subject only.
👨🏻💼👩🏻💼Did you continue the habit?
Studies show that in modern times the attention of an average person is less than that of a goldfish, and is less than 15 seconds. If your attention and focus at the moment are limited to only 15 seconds, then you will invariably become a failure in life.
Just consider reading this article. This entire article would need about 12-15 minutes for any average individual to read(just reading) and probably 20-30 minutes to comprehend, learn, memorize, and revise. Have you been able to read this article from the first letter till this point without any diversion? Do you at this point remember what you have learnt in this article?
The Similarity Between Life and School
Life is a school that teaches hard ways, and exams have no grades, but life-death. Schools taught you everything to succeed in life. It takes only 21 days to form a habit and 10,000 hours to master a skill. Did you learn life skills in 10 years?
In modern times, we have learned one skill above the rest of the other skills. This is the skill of victimhood and Aloplastic defense, by means of which have learned the art of taking credit for success and blaming others for failure.
Life isn’t magic or surprise. Life is a discipline, of doing the same thing repeatedly, every day, over and over again, and over a decade. If one sits with a notebook and pen and assesses the things one learned, including eating on time, eating together, group learning, preparing daily, preparing for exams, managing different aspects of life, sharpening memory, improving cognition, just about every fundamentals.
Schools also taught the power dynamics of one teacher and multiple students. Schools taught that not everyone is equal and that we must follow the seniors, compete with batchmates, not hate competitors, becoming role models for the juniors.
However, most grownup forgets every single bit of it and searches for leadership lessons in a cricket match.
Conclusion
When one is not good enough(or doesn’t care) to carry forward the 10 most important learning years of life, the root cause lies within.
Schools fundamentally try to drill down most needed habits to succeed in life into one’s habits, but because of the lack of willingness to remain a student, the urge to practice the habits and continue the habits reduces with age. Life habits are the only good things that school gives and also end up in the trash bucket.
If we closely study any of the master’s life, be it in any field, we can find the same fundamentals being followed by most masters. Just follow what you learned in school for 1 year, and see if grow in life or not.
