YOU HAVE AN AMAZING BRAIN TO SUCCEED IN SCHOOL
As a teacher, life coach, and motivational speaker, I have come across many students who have expressed serious frustrations in their academic journey. Delving deeper into their academic lives, I realized their frustration is not because they have poor brains that cannot deliver amazing results for them. Instead, they have conditioned their minds to believe that academic success is a product of luck, intelligence, and supernatural grace and that they cannot do anything to increase their performance. By working with them as their academic coach, I have succeeded in transforming many of them into extraordinary students through simple action exercises and training on study habits, study skills, and test-taking skills.
One of my cherished mentor in life, Dr. Ben Carson, once made a powerful statement about the incredible potential of the human brain that reads “One of the things that has really inspired me and pushed me on is learning about the human brain and realizing the incredible potential that lies there—but also recognizing how few people use it.”
The stories of Dr. Ben Carson and many great achievers today show that every student can grow and become extraordinary. As a young child in primary school (Grade 5), Dr. Ben Carson was called by his classmates and teachers “the dumbest kid in the world.” He was always the last in every subject, and Dr. Ben Carson believed at the time that his brain was not just good to learn and understand like the other kids in the class. As a young boy, Dr. Ben Carson was addicted to watching television most of the time. His mother, Sonya Carson, worried about the bad performance of her son, introduced a new rule that the habit of watching television most of the time be dropped and replaced with the habit of reading two books a week from the library.
Within one and a half years, young Ben Carson moved from the bottom of the class to the top position. His teachers and classmates were surprised about how the person they called the dumbest kid could suddenly become the most intelligent kid in the class. The very classmates who insulted him and called him the dumbest kid in the world started running to him to teach them. In his final year at the high school, the same classmates even voted him the most likely student to succeed in life.
Ben Carson still went on to shine academically at the university and later became the first medical doctor in the world to successfully separate two twins who were joined together at the head. Hard work, effective time management, and self-discipline turned someone who was regarded as the most stupid and unteachable by his classmates and teachers into an academic genius, a history maker, and a great achiever. Like Ben Carson, who initially never knew the power of his brain to do great things in school and life, many students are going through the same problem, believing that they do not have a good brain to achieve great things in school. Your brain is like a viable seed. Every viable seed has the potential to germinate and become a small plant and later a big tree that can produce multiple fruits. You have what it takes to get your dream results in school.
One important discovery by scientists is that the brain is more powerful than any machine ever invented by mankind and that we are using between 2% and 10% of our brain for higher thoughts and problem solving. This applies even to individuals who are performing exceptionally well in school or life. Scientific discovery over the past fifty years has proven that the brain can record information continuously for three hundred years with still abundant space left if it is used for recording like a video or sound recorder. That is serious, and that applies to every human being, including you, since the size of the brain does not differ between people, according to countless research and experiments.
Your brain has the potential to learn and understand any complex thing, just like other outstanding achievers you admire. You just need to learn how to use your potential to get what you want in school and life. You have more natural potential than you could use in your entire academic and professional life, and what you’ve done so far is only a small fraction of what you can do. If you are not achieving the results you desire in school and frequently forget much of what you study, it is not due to a lack of capability in your brain. It is rather a combination of other factors, like limiting beliefs, a poor attitude, a lack of goals, poor time management, poor study habits, poor test-taking skills, and others on your part.
YOU CAN MAKE IT. JUST START DOING TODAY AS A STUDENT WHAT OTHERS WILL DO TOMORROW, AND NEVER GIVE UP. ACADEMIC SUCCESS IS A PRODUCT OF SELF-DISCIPLINE TO DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO AND SELF-DISCIPLINE TO WORK EXTRA SMARTER THAN YOUR COLLEAGUES.
Success is not a gift reserved for a lucky few—it’s a reward for those who train their minds, manage their time, and believe that their brains were built for greatness. Rise, learn, and lead—your success story is just waiting to unfold.
