Introduction

Hi. My name is Ian Gray and this blog is about how to become smarter.

Let me say up front that I believe that being smart is a process and an attitude. Anyone can become smarter than they are right now. You aren't born with a fixed amount of intelligence. Rather, your life experiences, your environment, the resources you have had access to have all affected to some degree how smart you are right now.

I was quite smart as a child. I did well in primary school (although in some of the stories I will tell in this blog, you'll see I made lots of mistakes too). However I realised quite early that smart was something I could build.

By the time I hit my first year of high school (when I was about 12) I had already set my sights on finding ways of getting smarter. I read de Bono's Five Day Course in Thinking, Harry Lorrayne' How to Develop a Super Power Memory and taught myself the Trachtenberg Speed System of Mathematics.

And as I progressed through high school, I learned more and more ways of expanding what intelligence I already had. I read books about expanding my vocabulary, studied Polya's How to Solve It, books about memory skills by Tony Buzan, and books about creativity such as Adam's Conceptual Blockbusting. Since I spent five years living in Papua New Guinea with my parents where there was no TV, so I read a lot. When it came to my final year exams in high school I placed in the top 5% of the state (New South Wales, Australia) and in the top 10% in both Mathematics and English. And I achieved this by trying all different ways to expand my intelligence.

Over the years since then, I have completed a Bachelors degree in mathematics, a post-graduate degree in Medical Statistics, and a PhD in mathematics from which I have had 8 papers published in international journals. I also won university prizes in Philosophy, Linguistics and Modern Greek.

And apart from these academic achievements, I have written poetry that has aired twice on the local University radio station, learned to dance in a number of different styles (ballroon, latin, salsa, modern jive) and become a dancer that women enjoy dancing with, have taught myself a computer language and designed some amazing applications, have learned to draw quite well, as well as trying singing and acting.

I don't say this to boast but because I think that with the right process and attitude, anyone is capable of doing what I have done and much more.

I have also tutored high school students one-on-one and found the best ways to build their skills and knowledge, as well as tutoring university classes. And I have spent years reading everything I can find about learning, teaching, expertise, intelligence, creativity, problem solving and many more areas relevant to becoming smart.

In this blog, I will talk about people who I believe exemplify a powerful learning orientation. People like my mother, who orphaned at a young age, left school at 16, yet has spent a lifetime acquiring new knowledge and skills. And people like my friend Michelle, who finished high school but is one of the smartest people I know because of how she approaches learning.

So, I hope you will join me on this journey to find out how you too can become smarter through a good process and a good attitude.