It’s never too late to start studying

Understand once and for all that there is no set time to start studying. So, it’s never too late to start, it’s never too late to learn. Once you’ve learned it, if it’s for a real reason, you’ll have learned it forever.

Hello friends!

If you are reading these words, it means you can read. If you can read, it means you learned to read. And what difference does it make if you learned to read at age 4, 6, 7 or 30? I mean, once you learn something, it doesn’t matter how long it took you to learn it, or how old you learned it. You just know and this knowledge is useful to you.

It was using this same principle that I began to study German. Everyone says that German is a difficult language. But they say that Portuguese is also a difficult language to learn. Well, I can read, write, listen and speak in Portuguese! Why couldn’t I learn German? So I started studying and today I understand the language of Freud and Jung. I didn’t start learning since I was a baby, nor when they say it’s the ideal time to start (as a child). I started at age 20. And currently this dating has no meaning. Just as I don’t think when I learned Portuguese, I don’t think when I learned German. Both lessons are useful. And they will be useful going forward.

I don’t know where this idea that there is an ideal age to learn comes from. To learn to read. To learn a foreign language. To go to college…

I entered college at 17 and was the youngest in my class. The average in the class was 24, 25 years old. But I also had brilliant colleagues who were over 40. One dear colleague was 54 years old. Today, we are all psychologists. No one asks me when I graduated. I’m not saying I graduated at 22. Just like my colleague who graduated at 59 doesn’t go around saying he graduated at 59. Why? Because it doesn’t matter. That simple.

Once you learn new knowledge, you will have learned it. After you graduate, you will have graduated. And this is all regardless of age. The big question is not whether it is early or late to start studying, but why. Why do you want to learn? What moves you?

What moves you to learn?

Unlike German, I started studying English since I was little. But it wasn’t out of parental obligation. On the contrary, I insisted on getting started right away. The reason was that I wanted to understand what people said in movies. After all, how is it possible for another people to use different words to say the same thing? I was stuck with it. And that was the first reason. Over time, the pleasure of learning became a motive in itself.

But this is my reason! What is your? Do you want to learn a new skill to have more self-esteem? For example, learning to dance to feel confident? Learn to do math in your head to look smarter? Learning to teach literacy to help children? Learn how to do brain surgery to save lives? Learning to calculate to build bridges?

Anyway, why?

According to Simon Sinek, who wrote the book Because? How to motivate people and teams to take actionwe tend to start thinking what (what), then how (how) and only at the end we think why (why) to perform an action such as learning.

However, what will motivate an action in the long term is the ultimate reason, why. That’s how thousands of people enroll in English courses, sit in chairs for 4, 5 years and then leave without knowing how to speak a word. The problem is that they learned which they were supposed to learn: English – through the job market. Afterwards, they learned how they were supposed to learn (going to take classes in preparatory courses) but never investigated the reason for learning English, the ultimate, profound, existential reason for them to learn. In this way, they pretended that they learned even if they had the condition of having really learned.

This type of situation, unfortunately, is quite common.

The person enters college because he heard that going to college will represent a better salary. hear about which should learn (which college gives the most return), be it medicine or computer science, marketing or dentistry. They discover that to work in the area, they need a diploma and as have a degree? Going to take classes at a college. But during the whole process many do not know, do not find out, perhaps do not even want to know what because of learning. The real reason, the reason why a short-term memory – memorizing to take a test – becomes a long-term memory.

It is interesting to know that our brain is economical. What really matters, he will keep, what doesn’t matter, what had a reason just to pass a test, will be forgotten. And this explains people leaving college with a degree. However, they know nothing of their area. Because they don’t know anything – after all, they don’t remember because they’ve already forgotten – it’s likely that the diploma will be shelved. In all professions there is competition and the tendency is for the market to select those who really know.

That is why the ideal in a professional orientation is to start with values. There is nothing wrong with having the value of getting rich, as long as it is a deep value that will move you to study and memorize what you have been taught.

Conclusion

This text was suggested by a dear reader, Raquel. She asked me to write about the theme “it is never too late to learn”. I totally agree with this sentence, because there is no determined time to start learning.

For me, anyone who says they are too old or too old to study is just giving an excuse (tattered by the way) not to study. Maybe you haven’t found the real reason, the reason that will move you and will therefore give you motivation to start, continue, conclude and use that knowledge.

Finally, I would like to pay tribute to my mother. For over 10 years she has helped hundreds, thousands of people as a nurse. But she could only study after I was a certain age. It was even curious because we studied at the same school. If she had thought that she was too old to study, she would not have studied and would not have helped these thousands of people, simple and poor, who, in recognition of their dedication, gave small gifts with the little they had. Once, she was given a live chicken in return for lovingly tending to an injured man in the fields.

She, like so many other people, did not impose an arbitrary limit on herself: “I am x years old and that is why I wasted my time studying”. In fact, when this false justification is given, the person who loses is the person himself, who stops learning, as well as society, which loses a professional, a technician, a specialist, an expert, a scholar…

I also suggest reading the text – Does age influence entering the job market? (Read the comments and also watch the video)

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