Hello Tim,
you wanted some success stories? Well, here's mine. Probably not the kind you were looking for, but success nevertheless.
Prologue: After reading the PR-book, I took the PR-course (with evidence of success) and afterwards fiddled for some time with PR - without success. So I dropped the whole thing.
One and a half year later, I broke my left arm. It was so disturbing, I couldn't get much sleep and for this, I even fell asleep during courses. After this, I forgot about going to the courses, concentrating on getting healthy again.
Main Story:
That year, I had to take a test in computer science and programming, covering the material of three different courses. On one of the subjects, I never went to the course. On one other, I had a little previous knowledge through my professional training.
At the beginning of my learning session,it was Thursday. On Tuesday the next week, the I had to write the test. I did, I passed. I even was better than some of the students who went to every course!
Total study time: 20 hours, spread over four days.
What did I do? On Thursday, I collected some sheets with questions of previous tests on the topics and went through the university library, taking home aobut a dozen books.
On Friday, I read the questions, previewed the books and photoread them. [One of the topics, software engeneering, was and remained total alien to me at this time.]
At Saturday, I invested some hours activating the books on programming in C, mindmapping the language, its concepts and its syntax. For the last questions remaining, I visited a friend who was an is heavily into programming.
On Sunday, I had something other to do and just briefly reviewed the questions, answering some of them.
On Monday afternoon, I activated and learned the topic I was already basically familiar with, something about hardware.
For some reason, this took a lot of time and I was already thinking about cancelling the test the next day - one topic was still missing. But I picked up the first book on software engeneering and, surprise!, the concepts in the book made sense to me! I was totally exited, and during the next four hours I went straight trough all the books and questions on this topic.
Then I got some hours of sleep and went to take this test. At first, I thought I knew nothing - but after playing(!) a little with the questions asked and simply taking brief notes of what little I knew at first, nearly everything came back to me.
So, why did PR suddenly work? In my opinion, I had for the first time a real desire, a real need to use PR. I had a *GOAL*. And since it was a hopeless case anyway, I did not pressure myself very much - I just did it.
Well, this got rather lengthy, but I hope this is the kind of story you wanted to read.
Have fun,
Jens
