Reflections
A note on this site, and why one place
Teaching, composing, writing and filmmaking look like four careers. From the inside they are one question asked in four languages.
3 min read
Writing
Ideas, written down until they are clear.
Writing on how people learn, drawn from the teaching room, and a journal that thinks out loud about education, music, philosophy and technology.
The writer
Nimai writes about one subject from many angles: how people learn, and what becomes possible when they do. The writing grows directly out of the teaching room. After more than twenty-five years watching students flourish or stall, he noticed that the decisive difference was rarely talent. It was process.
That observation became a philosophy, Learn How To Learn, which now underpins the teaching at London MADA and runs through everything on this site. The Journal is where it continues, in essays and reflections on education, music, philosophy and technology.
I have spent my working life watching people learn, and I became more interested in that than in almost anything else. Music is unusually honest: you can hear whether a method works. Everything I write is what I learned by listening.
Learn How To Learn
A philosophy of learning
The ideas Nimai writes and teaches from. Each one has been tested in thousands of lessons.
01
Learning strategies
Practice is a skill in its own right. The right method, applied consistently, outperforms raw effort every time.
02
Motivation
Desire drives practice, practice builds skill, skill creates freedom, and freedom feeds greater desire. The loop can be designed.
03
Mindset
A learner's beliefs about ability shape what they attempt. Those beliefs are teachable.
04
Memory
Why a piece you could play last week has vanished, and how to build memory that holds.
05
Consistency
Fifteen honest minutes a day beats a heroic Sunday. The system is built around what people actually do.
06
The psychology of learning
Mastery moves from accuracy to consistency to fluency to effortlessness. Technique exists to remove the barriers between intention and expression.
Journal
Essays and reflections
Shorter writing on education, philosophy, creativity and technology.