Key Ideas of the Book: Limitless Mind. Learn, Lead, and Live Without Barriers. Jo Boaler

Jo Boaler, a professor at Stanford University, an educator and math teacher, reveals six key skills needed for continuous development.

For several decades, Jo Boaler studied how stereotypes and bias affect students’ and university students’ achievements. The conclusions she reached are shocking.

Forget everything you’ve heard about learning and how the brain processes new information. There is no innate predisposition to one subject or another. It’s an illusion. Neither genes, nor race, nor gender determine your outstanding success, and they don’t define your mediocre results.

Our brain develops throughout our lives; its capabilities aren’t a constant set once and for all. And, paradoxically, the brain is helped to grow and develop by the errors we make: it learns from them, thanks to them it absorbs new information and connects it with what it already knows.

Mistakes are a good thing. Don’t avoid them or try to escape them, because only overcoming difficulties helps our brain grow. It’s active and tirelessly weighs alternatives in search of the right option. If you do everything correctly, your brain won’t develop.

Our achievements depend not so much on innate abilities as on a particular kind of preparation that stimulates the production of a myelin sheath covering nerve fibers. Thanks to it, the speed and accuracy of transmitting nerve impulses increase. The more complex the task, the more tension it requires—the stronger the myelin sheath becomes, and the more impressive the results.

To act effectively for the brain means to push yourself to the edge of your abilities, make mistakes, correct them, and move on.