The Friday Brain Upgrade

How to eliminate mental fatigue, amplify cognitive performance, and become an unstoppable learner

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From Stuttering to Checkmate:
Shattering the Myth of Learning Limits

At age five, I couldn’t speak. I spent weeks recovering from cleft lip surgery that left me unable to pronounce words. After some time, my lips healed, but I had to learn how to pronounce an entire language from scratch. I remember stumbling through the alphabet with my mother, her kind hands holding mine as I stuttered.

When I think back to this time of intense learning, I wonder, did I think I was stupid for not knowing how to speak? Did I think that I couldn’t learn this because I was already supposed to know German? Did I feel stupid for not knowing how to pronounce basic German words?

While the answers to these questions are gone—or at least deep inside my five-year-old memory—what I do know is that just a few years later, I was able to speak AND I had learned a new skill: how to play chess. Not bad, in fact. This was remarkable, as chess is considered a smart person’s game, and I had been struggling with basic pronunciation of my original language just a few short years before.

How? My grandfather taught me chess strategies. I learned strategic moves to develop pieces like the knight early in the game, creating a protective structure around the king. With more strategies under my belt, I learned how to checkmate my opponent in just a matter of a few minutes. Just as in chess, where early strategic moves compound into a winning position, in learning, the right strategies can lead to exponential growth in knowledge and skills.

This early experience with chess proved invaluable when I was transferred to a smart kid elementary school. These kids were the best of the best in town. Deep down, I think I was afraid these other students would find out I used to struggle with speaking and that these new kids might think I was stupid.

That never happened. Instead, I showed a few new friends how to play chess, and they all thought I was so smart. The truth was, I wasn’t any smarter than them; I had just learned a specific skill and learned methodologies that helped that skill thrive.

What was true in elementary school still applies today: Intelligence is not innate; it is a measurement of the success of your strategies. Intelligence is not born; it is developed.

This is a roadblock for people. As a learning coach, one of the most common obstacles I see is people’s belief that they are born with their intelligence levels.

This is a false belief. I can say with certainty that people are not simply born smarter than others. “Smart” people just have access to different. More effective strategies.

Think about this: I wasn’t born less smart because I had a cleft lip. I just had to have help learning to speak again. Students at my “smart school” weren’t dumber than me because they didn’t know how to play chess. They just hadn’t been taught.

I offer you these stories because I want you to believe my next sentence: How smart you are is not genetic. It has everything to do with your skills for acquiring and retaining information.

If school was difficult for you, you likely did not learn well from memorization and hearing information orally. You might have needed other tools to acquire and retain information. It’s a shame you never got this help as a child, but it has nothing to do with your innate intelligence level.

If you had negative experiences in school as a child, these feelings about your intelligence have likely followed you your whole life. You may have inaccurate negative beliefs about learning.

What if that all could stop? What if you could learn strategies to help you learn quicker and retain information with ease?

How could this change your life?

That’s what we will discover in my upcoming program. We will learn which individual strategies are best suited for you, how to implement them in your daily life, and how to retain this information so it’s at your fingertips.

By working on your specific learning strategies, you will learn your intelligence level is not something you were born with; rather, it has everything to do with your skill set. And your skill set, my friend, can be enhanced.

Want to get a taste? Join me for free at my upcoming workshop, Learning That Pays Dividends workshop, next Wednesday.

In this workshop, you’ll:
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→ Turn scattered notes into an organized, accessible knowledge hub

→ Make every bit of learning count, just like those early chess moves

→ Build a system where your expertise grows and compounds over time

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By the end of our session, you’ll have concrete strategies to turn information overload into organized wisdom, setting you on a path to exponential professional growth.

See you next Friday!

Learn Smart, Basti

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I will publish my newsletter every Friday at about 13:00 o’clock CET. See you next Friday.

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