Previous Learning Affects Learning Speed

The person who’s already a good surfer and skater has a foundation in board sports to transfer into snowboarding, which will make him learn the new skill faster.

In an oversimplified way, our mind works as a scaffold—everything we have already built serves as a base to build on top of. Here’s where comparing ourselves to others can be misleading. We don’t know their background or what they’ve learned in the past.