The Secret to Learning Anything in Life

So i was reading a book about overcoming adversity and i came across a sentence that jolted my memory of a conversation i had at a Christmas party. 

"the brain is a muscle like any other active tissue. It can be built up and toned through the right exercises"

I was talking to this guy in his late 20s and unlike the peers of his age he wasn't studying in university. He didn't even have a job. He told me that he was learning how to play the piano and he's gonna take the grade 8 piano test, despite the lack of a music background. And in my teenage judgmental self, i thought he obviously gonna fail because he wasn't very smart or hardworking, since he didn't have a job or wasn't in uni.

So i asked him "Wouldn't it be difficult for you since you are almost 30 already? I heard that the best time to pick up any music instrument is before you are 18. It just gets more and more difficult after that."

"As long as you are willing to put in the time and hard work you will be able to achieve it. It's not a matter of age", he replied. 

At that time his words seems a bit bull crap and sounded pretty much like what every slacker would say, plagiarized from those "how to be successful" articles on the web.

And to my surprise, he really did pass his grade 8 exams! Something about this incident changed my perception of intelligence. Intelligence wasn't fixed like what i thought, but it is fluid and could be changed and improved upon through sheer hard work.

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