The failure that taught me how to actually learn

I used to believe that some people were just “naturally clever,” and that I wasn’t one of them.

For years, I was stuck in this maddening cycle where I had these massive dreams, but my grades were absolutely rubbish. I thought the solution was simple: work harder, pull more all-nighters, and drink enough coffee to float a small boat.

Turns out I was completely wrong.

My journey to becoming an award-winning scientist wasn’t built on some innate brilliance or even working myself into the ground. It was built on the back of one spectacular failure that forced me to chuck everything I thought I knew about learning out the window and start from scratch.

This is that story, and this is the system that came from it.

When big dreams meet average grades

Throughout my undergraduate degree in biomedicine, I was that student who’d pipe up in lectures and get the lecturer interested, only to absolutely disappoint them when the exam results came back. My marks were consistently… well, let’s call them uninspiring. Just enough to scrape through.

It wasn’t that I lacked ambition. The problem was this chaotic mess of constantly getting distracted (something I still battle with every single day), leaving everything until the last possible minute, and having the time management skills of a goldfish.

If pulling all-nighters was an Olympic sport, I’d have been draped in gold medals. But those long, caffeine-fuelled hours rarely translated into the results I was desperately hoping for. It was this endless cycle of frustration, despair, and this growing sense that maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this.

The moment everything changed

The turning point came in my third year. I was sat in the library the night before my final analytical chemistry exam, and I’d just received an email with my medical school entrance test results.

My heart was absolutely pounding as I opened it. I scanned through all those long, polite paragraphs looking for the word “congratulations,” but it simply wasn’t there. It was a rejection.

The world just stopped. I felt dizzy, confused, and completely crushed by the weight of letting my family down, and myself down too.

A few months later, at my graduation ceremony, something clicked. I looked around at my classmates and realised we’d all sat through the same lectures, faced the same pressures, met the same deadlines. Yet here we were, all heading off in completely different directions.

As a scientist, I suddenly realised my experiment had been fundamentally flawed. I was using the wrong method entirely. It was a tough pill to swallow, but I finally admitted it to myself: I actually had no idea how to study properly.

I’d just been copying what everyone else was doing, staring at notes for hours, highlighting textbooks until they looked like rainbow explosions, and rewriting the same information over and over again. I knew there had to be a better way. That was the day the “new me” was born.

The lightbulb moment

I realised that all this “hard work” I’d been putting in was mostly passive and incredibly inefficient. I discovered that effective learning isn’t really about how many hours you spend hunched over your books. It’s about how you actually use those hours.

My entire new approach is built on this simple truth: effective learning is the process of intentionally storing information in your brain, and then practising how to retrieve it when you actually need it.

Think of it like your wallet. If you just chuck it somewhere in your room without paying attention, you’ll be frantically searching for it in the morning. But if you’re intentional and always put it in the same spot, you can grab it instantly without even thinking about it.

Your brain works exactly the same way. The brilliant news? You don’t have to be born a genius to master this. It’s simply a strategy, and anyone can learn it.

Your potential isn’t your past

Failing that medical school exam felt like the absolute end of the world, but honestly, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to stop being this passive student and become an active scientist of my own learning.

Here’s what I want you to know: your current situation, your past grades, and whatever resources you have available right now do not define what you’re capable of achieving. The first step to reaching your biggest goals isn’t to study harder; it’s to find a better system.

Have a great week cheers !