If It's Not in Your Mind, It's Not Yours

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Picture a young student walking home across the dry land of Persia, in what is now Iran. It's the eleventh century.

He's carrying everything he owns: a few clothes, a little money, and the most valuable thing in his life, his notes. Years of study. His books. Every lesson from his teachers, written down by hand.

Then a group of robbers stops him. They take everything.

The young man is devastated. But he doesn't run away. He follows the robbers and finds their leader.

This is a true story by the way.

"Please," he says. "Keep my money. Keep my clothes. Just give me back my notes. They're worth nothing to you, but they're my life's work. Everything I know is in there."

The leader laughs. Then he says something the young man never forgot:

"How can you say you know it, if we can take it from you and leave you knowing nothing?"

The young man is stunned. The robber is right. His knowledge wasn't in his head. It was in a bag.

The leader gave him the notes back. And the young man made a decision: “from now on, I will memorize everything I learn and write.” He spent the next three years memorizing all of his notes, so that nobody could ever take his knowledge from him again.

That young student was Imam al-Ghazali, one of the most influential scholars in Islamic history. People still call him Hujjat al-Islam, "the Proof of Islam."

He wrote hundreds of books that we still read today, more than 900 years later. His most famous work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, begins with a whole book about knowledge, The Book of Knowledge.

And he didn't learn to impress people. He learned to understand, to become a better person, and to help others, to spread knowledge. Later in life, he said that the robber's words were some of the best advice he ever received.

Now let's talk about you.

How many English lessons have you saved on your phone?
How many videos are in your "watch later" list?
How many screenshots of grammar rules and vocabulary lists are sitting in your gallery?

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

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It feels like learning. But if someone took your phone away tomorrow or if your phone breaks, how much of that information would still be in your head?

There are two kinds of learners:

Saving a lesson doesn't make it yours.
Repeating it, reviewing it, speaking it, and using it does.

Here's the simple version of the method I use for learning English:

Speaking practice

Answer these out loud, in full sentences:

And if you know someone who collects so many lessons without improving much, forward this email to them.

Thanks for reading.

Ziyad
The English Zone