Can I confess something? The first time I sat down to properly learn how markets work, I read the same page four times and couldn’t tell you a single thing it said.
It was not that the page was difficult. I had forgotten how to learn. School had been a long time ago, and everything since had been doing rather than studying. I knew how to deliver in my job. I knew how to run a household. I had no idea how to sit with something unfamiliar, stay with it, and come out the other side actually knowing it.
If that sounds familiar, I want you to know two things. It is extremely common, and it is fixable.
You Are Not the Only One
The Learning and Work Institute runs a national survey every year on how much adults in the UK are learning, and the latest findings are sobering. Only around 21 per cent of adults are currently taking part in any learning at all, down from 30 per cent the year before. Among people who left school at the earliest opportunity, half say they have done no learning of any kind since. Cost is increasingly the reason given, cited by almost a quarter of people, up from under a tenth a few years ago.
I read that and recognised the pattern immediately, because it is exactly the one I spent years inside. Early in my working life I was stuck in a role I did not enjoy, trading my time for someone else’s money on terms I never felt were fair. I loved finance. I knew very little about investing. And the gap between those two facts was not going to close on its own.
Why the Way We Were Taught Does Not Work
Most of us were taught to learn by reading repeatedly. Highlight it, reread it, reread it the night before the test. It feels productive. It is also one of the least effective ways to learn anything.
In 2006, psychologists Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke ran a now famous study comparing students who reread a passage with students who were tested on it. After five minutes, the rereaders did better. After a week, the tested group remembered substantially more, even though the rereaders had felt more confident. You can read the original paper, Test Enhanced Learning, which is more readable than the title suggests.
The lesson was a revelation to me. Rereading creates feelings of familiarity, and familiarity is easily mistaken for knowledge. Pulling information out of your own head, even clumsily, is what actually makes it stick.
How I Actually Applied Myself
When I came back to learning, there was no classroom, timetable or teacher. That was the hardest part, and I suspect it is hard for most people returning after a long time away. Nobody was going to mark my work. Nobody was going to notice if I stopped.
So I built the structure myself. I learned in short sessions rather than long ones, usually early before the house woke up. At the end of each session, I would close the book and write down, from memory, what I had just read. Some days the list was short. That was the point. The gaps showed me what I did not yet understand.
I also started explaining things out loud. If I couldn’t explain what a bond yield was to an imaginary friend over coffee, I did not understand it yet. It turns out that teaching, even to nobody, is one of the fastest ways to find out what you really know. It is also, in a roundabout way, how this brand began.
The same approach served me when I taught myself to build this website. I had no background in web design, and there were weeks when layouts refused to behave, and settings did the opposite of what their names promised. I learned it the same way, a piece at a time, testing what I thought I knew until it held.
Competence Is Built, Not Discovered
The biggest thing I had to unlearn was the idea that some people are good at this kind of thing and others are not. Finance, in particular, has worked very hard to look like a subject for the naturally gifted. I wrote about that in Finance Was Built to Sound Harder Than It Is, and I still believe it completely.
Competence is not a talent you either have or lack. It is the residue of many small, slightly uncomfortable sessions of trying to remember something you nearly know. Nobody sees those sessions. Everybody sees the result.
Where I Am Now
I am still learning, every single week, and I am still impatient with myself about how slowly some of it goes. The difference is that I no longer take slow as a sign that I cannot do it. Slow is simply what learning looks like from the inside.
If you have been away from learning for a long time, the door has not closed. It has just been a while since anyone showed you where the handle is. Start with one subject, one short session and one blank page at the end. Write down what you remember. Then do it again tomorrow.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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