At the most basic level, children learn through their own experiences and by watching others when a behavior is somehow encouraged or discouraged. Each child's learning style is different, because each child is good at certain things and poor at other things. Successful learning occurs when a child can use his or her natural talents to acquire new skill sets that are needed to accomplish a goal. Too often, society focuses on improving the weaknesses of children versus utilizing their strengths to help teach them how to learn in a variety of subject areas.

A lioness fails four of five times when she hunts, yet the lion is still considered one of the world's most successful predators. Unlike countless examples in nature, schools try to define success as high marks in all subject areas, which accumulate throughout a grading period and school career, to the point that a sixty percent is only the beginning of failure. Healthy failure throughout the learning process can punish students for years. Schools do not efficiently educate students, because children are encouraged to learn what they need to satisfy teacher and test expectations. Moreover, this only encourages short-term learning versus reinforcing a drive to acquire lifelong learning skills.

Failure is an important part of the learning process, especially during childhood, because it teaches children where they are weak and what to do when they fail. Traditionally, failure is used to assess where a student needs to focus his or her greatest amount of effort for improvement; however, it is important to realize successful people are successful because they spent their efforts on exploiting their strengths. They learn how to utilize their greatest strengths to accomplish their goals instead of focusing on strengthening their weaknesses.

Using strengths to learn what is necessary means translating information into something a child with unique abilities can process. Someone who is artistically gifted yet terrible with math may perform well in geometry and statistics, because information is presented in a visual, versus abstract, representation. In a similar fashion, an academically weak athlete may better understand science if it is presented in terms of football or cheerleading. Finally, consider a child who is gifted in the sciences yet has a terrible memory; teaching such an individual a process of using context clues to trigger the memory of complex facts may be helpful.

Children learn through experience and observation, but the learning process works best when children can capitalize on their strengths. The most successful learners, those who can acquire new skills in almost any subject area, are those who can translate learning experiences into terms of their strengths. Furthermore, learning occurs when people both succeed and fail; otherwise, they never discover their limits and how to circumvent them. Moreover, children learn most efficiently when they are able to use their strengths to learn how to learn.