The article author is a woman. Also, a lot of people are missing that she is talking about children, not university students. She teaches A-levels, or the equivalent to AP classes here.
In addition to the whole thing about young people learning faster, there is also the part where they have much, much more free time and less responsibilities they have to take care of. However... Did your friends do the tactics and analysis? I have a feeling that's what really helped. Brains need repetition so that thought patterns can form habits and more complex neural networks can be developed.
Is anyone else really bothered by these pullout quotes? They are repeating basically 25% of the content on any given page. I'm reading the article, you don't have to lure me in like in a magazine. If you want to summarize, can't you just do it at the top of the page?
The villagers don't have cheaper food... First of all, if they were villagers, they were self-reliant and gathered, grew, or hunted their own food. Second of all, do you really think this asshole got rich selling fish to -villagers-?
Well, there was more oxygen in the air back then, which gave animals more energy. The largest pterodactylid was the Quetzalcoatlus, with a wingspan of about 40 feet. I understand it was mostly a glider. It was also very, very lightly built.
And no, we haven't thought dinosaurs were cold-blooded since the 70s or something.
Problem is, once you're rich and your safety is guaranteed, what's there to keep you in line? Where's your incentive to act in a certain way? You could be pulled in a million different directions over a year, try a million different side projects, and succeed at none of them. It wouldn't have any effect on your longevity if you were that rich. You'd just be wasting your time floundering around. You'd probably get pretty miserable if this happened. You'd feel like your actions have no effect on your life, which they wouldn't have to.
This sounds like it's straight out of Dan Ariely's "The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty". Well, the experiment. Not the lackluster description of the experiment.
All of you reading this have a dramatically high chance of having Asperger's Disease. It's why you've always been so emotionally/socially disconnected and logical. It's why you have habits that seem odd or eccentric to others, and why you have trouble reading body language. It's why you excelled in school instead of wasting your time socializing. Not that you would have been very good at it if you had tried to - which is why you learned to stop trying.
Of course, this description won't fit even 50% of who reads it. But if it does, you probably have Asperger's Syndrome.
You are totally right. People attribute skills they learn naturally as totally inborn. They say Bach was a genius at piano because he was able to play at age 4 - but honestly, that's reversed. He was only such a good musician because of all the practice.