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How to Learn Anything: A real-world guide to mastering any new skill
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
Albert Einstein
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Albert Einstein
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
Daniel Coyle
"Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it."
Telling Others About Your Pursuit
It can keep you accountable, but it can also lead to a false sense of completeness. One way to avoid sabotaging yourself is to state your goal as a commitment rather than progress towards the finished product.
Planning Your Learning By Yourself
Deconstruct a skill, then select and focus on the fundaments, the most meaningful parts.
Find a mentor so he can point out what are the most important parts for a beginner to learn. To save you both time, have specific questions in mind, like what is most frustrating to learn, how do they identify an expert and what is most and least useful.
Make Sure You Love The Process
Learning is a frustrating process. To increase your chances of sticking to it:
- Pick a skill where the road to mastery is as exciting to you as the finish line.
- Reward yourself for the successes you have along the way to take pride in your progress and help to maintaining long-term motivation.
Be Specific In Your Goals
Specific goals are easier to visualize and lend themselves to a clearer path to success than their vague counterparts. To set yourself up for success, narrow your skill down as much as possible.
Ask yourself what specific problem you want to solve with this skill, what aspects of the skill are more applicable to it and what you admire most about the performance of the skill.
Choose What To Learn Wisely
To be successful at mastering a skill ensures it is applicable. Being able to use a skill to objectively better your life is a great motivator.
The perfect skill either solves a problem you’re facing or scratches an itch you have. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself lacking the motivation and perseverance necessary to be successful.
Other Tips To Better Your Learning
- Use what you learn more and study it less, do it early and often to progress faster than just studying.
- Practice deliberately and focus on specific elements of the skill until you improve. Identify the fundamental components of the skill you’re learning that you struggle with the most and focus on them.
- Get feedback fast to better evaluate yourself and fix mistakes.
- Spread out your training to avoid burnout and increase performance.
- Make a learning plan, or even a schedule, and stick to it.
- Join a group to get benefits like extra motivation, access to a collective knowledge-base and a place to vent your frustrations. Find groups online o
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Improvement with learning
From the moment we are born, we are always learning new skills. We see it in formal capacities in school or on the job, and informally, like learning from you buddy how to grill a steak.
Tony Robbins
“One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to have an extraordinary life, is the ability to learn rapidly.”
Select your skill carefully
Be very selective in the skill you're trying to masker to avoid sabotaging your success:
- Make sure it's applicable: The perfect skill either solves a problem you have or scratches an itch you have.
- Be very specific: Specific goals are easier to pursue than vague counterparts. To set yourself up, narrow your skill down as much as possible. Ask what specific problem are you trying to solve, and find out what aspects you find most fascinating.
- Make sure you love the process, not just the outcome: Pick a skill where the road is as exciting as the outcome. Then plan out celebration points along the way.
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Have a reason to study
Have an end goal in mind when you're learning.
- What do you want to do with this information?
- How is it going to improve your life?
Even if ...
Find the right instructor
Set some time aside to see what courses are available.
Take advantage of any free lessons, watch the introductions to their classes and see if the instructor will be a good fit for your skill level and speed.
Don’t binge
Watching online tutorial videos can become addictive. Keep in mind that you are trying to learn something, not get distracted.
How long you would be able to study depends on the density of the subject and the level of your knowledge about the subject.
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"One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to have an extraordinary life, is the ab..."
Tony Robbins
Don't reinvent the wheel
Mimic and get help from someone who’s already learned it to get tips and save time.
In order to achieve mastery faster, our first step should be to consult the top players in the field and model the path they have already carved out for us.
Deconstruct the skill
...into its basic, fundamental components, to find the most important things to practice first. This shows that very few things actually make a difference in any aspect of our lives, including learning.
Use the Pareto Principle: which describes a goal of generating 80 percent of results by putting in 20 percent of the effort.
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Learning how to learn
Learning how to learn is a meta-skill. It is a critical skill for everyone who needs to pick up and master new concepts frequently.
Understanding what is learning and how our memory works wil...
Learning skills
Learning how to learn is critical for everyone. Most of us have to deal with a changing world and to learn how to manage tons of new information.
However, most of our learning methods are outdated and far from optimal. It may even be giving us an illusion of learning, like re-reading and highlighting that don't provide proper feedback to show what you haven't learned.
Focused and Diffuse Mode
Focused and diffuse modes provide two models for how we develop, elaborate, deepen and broaden connections. Both methods are important.
- The focused mode of learning is about bringing related concepts together into a unit, called a chunk.
- The diffuse mode operates through a wider net of connecting general ideas across different fields. We use this diffuse mode while we sleep, exercise or daydream.
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Hack the 10,000 hour rule
This rule was developed by Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and states that we need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to succeed at anything.
This may create f...
Plus, Minus, Equal
- Plus: Find mentors, real (maybe someone from your work) or virtual (from books). Learn from someone with more experience than you.
- Minus: Explain what you are learning while you are learning it. Teach someone with less experience than you.
- Equal: Find people who love what you love and spend as much time talking about this shared area as you can.
Micro-Skills
Every skill worth learning has dozens of micro-skills.
List the micro-skills. Figure out what you are good at, what you are bad at, and how you can learn to be better at each.
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"In a fast-moving, competitive world, being able to learn new skills is one of the keys to success. It’s not enoug..."
Heidi Grant Halvorson
Check your readiness
Learning a new skill takes commitment. And there are certain limits to what you can learn. So, before starting working on a new skill, ask yourself:
- If your goal really is attainable
- How much time and energy you can give to this process.
Make sure it’s needed
Make sure the skills you've chosen are relevant to your career, your organization, or both.
Gaining a new skill is an investment and you need to know upfront what the return will be.
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An Uncertain Future
- The past decade gave rise to the 'Gig' economy, spawning one-click app-based transactions.
- Artificial Intelligence and automation are further transforming how people live and work.
Future Proof Your Career
Future-proofing your career to stay relevant isn't about learning how to code or going back to college.
It is about having a career plan with a long-term vision, taking into account the current job-market conditions, economic factors, emerging opportunities, personal interests, and family realities.
Shrinking Life Cycle of Jobs
A life cycle of a job is shrinking rapidly, and if you're not re-inventing yourself or pivoting on time, you are rendered out of work sooner than in the past decades.
We need to check our career plan and ask ourselves what skills need to be developed to pursue future opportunities, in this shifting economy.
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The right angle
Everyone is naturally curious about the world around them.
Simply ploughing through a topic and hoping it sticks is not going to work that well. Instead, approach your task by searching...
An active approach
If you not only want to learn the facts, but you also want to use what you learn, then you need to use the information as you learn it.
Actively using and applying the book knowledge has a far better outcome than only learning the theory.
Ask and answer
For every question that arises while you are trying to learn something new, do two things:
- Ask the question to an expert or mentor, or even just a friend or Google.
- Keep asking until you get the question answered. Do not allow multiple questions to build up and go unanswered.
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“The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.”
Brain Herbert
The Learning Model
The “conscious competence” learning model is a way to learn new skills in the future, having 4 stages:
- Unconscious Incompetence
- Conscious Incompetence
- Conscious Competence
- Unconscious Competence
Unconscious Incompetence
Stage One of this learning model is Unconscious Incompetence, where you are clueless and overwhelmed and don't know why.
In this stage: You don't know what you don't know.
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Remote-first Mindset
Accept that you have to put in place remote work systems, even if more than half of your employees ultimately revert to office-based work.
- If done right, a remote-first infrastructu...
Build a socially-connected culture
Intentionally design for the same interactions that would otherwise happen if people were in the office.
- Culture is what naturally happens when a group of people gets together for any period.
- A great culture happens with intentional design and influence. It's the reason you should make your company's mission, vision, values, operating principles, standards, and agreements visible.
- Culture is experienced through emotions, including how your employees feel about the company, you, other leaders, and peers. That feeling is developed through human interaction at the water cooler, kitchen, or hallway conversations.
Your leadership presence
Your people need to feel your presence as a leader as they will have fewer opportunities to see you face to face when they work remotely.
- Regularly show up in a variety of forms that can include weekly video meetings, periodic company-wide emails, or presence in public channels.
- Err on the side of more communication rather than less.
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