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The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster
Go Long
Although it’s important to know when to quit, many potential winners don’t reach success because they quit before the dip.
There’s a sense of euphoria we all experience when we begin something new. Once the honeymoon phase fades away, we experience the “dip” and our progress begins to plateau or diminish. This is when most of us quit.
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Key Ideas
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.
Stop multitasking
Many of us aren’t able to dedicate the time it takes to learn a skill because of the countless new projects that come our way.
Once you have deconstructed the subset skills that will give you the maximum amount of results, focus solely on improving those skills and avoid learning anything else until you’ve mastered them.
Repeat, repeat, repeat
Expert-level performance is primarily the result of expert-level practice, not due to innate talent.
Learning requires frequency and persistence in performing the same skill over and over again, until you can do it subconsciously, without having to think about it.
Seek immediate feedback
The most effective learners actively seek feedback to enhance their performance.
Feedback is necessary for a learner to confirm that s/he is on the right track.
Go Long
Although it’s important to know when to quit, many potential winners don’t reach success because they quit before the dip.
There’s a sense of euphoria we all experience when we begin something new. Once the honeymoon phase fades away, we experience the “dip” and our progress begins to plateau or diminish. This is when most of us quit.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Know your outcome
Figure out your “why.” Consider these questions.
- What opportunities will become available by learning that new thing?
- What would you do if you could use your desired skill right now?
- Will you have a deeper relationship with your family/friends? Grow your business?
Model the best
No matter what you want to learn or accomplish, there’s someone in the world that has already achieved what you want.
You have access nowadays to endless resources in the form of biographies, books, videos, online classes and so on. You just have to search.
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T. D. Jakes
John Updike
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Speed and transfer
Consider at what speed you should try to do things in order to improve performance.
We can often learn something quickly, but without attaining a master level (like getting good at esti...
Failing to Reach an Ideal
There are two problems you can encounter when you're trying to learn something.
- You have a clear understanding of what you'd like to do and how you're going to do it, but you're unable to implement the approach you've chosen. Slow things down so you can pay more attention to every aspect of the problem.
- Speed learning is effective when you're not sure what the ideal should be and need more information to work it out. A good example of speed leading to move closer to quality is in entrepreneurial fields. Many fail because they picked the wrong problem to solve and wasted too much time trying to solve it.
Going faster vs doing it right
The balance between going faster and doing it right depends on what you're trying to achieve.
- Faster feedback means more information to find out your key challenges and possible solutions.
- Slower helps you focus on a strategy you've chosen, allowing you to execute it correctly.
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The Feynman Technique
... is the perfect strategy for learning something new, deepening your understanding of a concept, enhancing your recall of certain ideas, or reviewing for tests.
The process t...
Richard Feynman
... the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was recognized as someone who could clearly explain complex topics in a way that everybody—even those without degrees in the sciences—could understand.
While studying at Princeton, Feynman began recording and connecting the information he knew with the things that he either didn't know or didn't understand.
This resulted in a complete notebook of topics and subjects that he had disassembled, translated, reassembled, and written down in simple terms.
The Benefits of the Feynman Technique
- It helps you gain a complete understanding of what you're learning.
- Use the Feynman Technique if you are struggling with tough subject matter.
- It helps to improve your teaching skills.
- It increases your capacity to use critical thinking skills.
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Becoming Reasonably Good
Deconstruct the Skill
- Break the skill into various small parts, remembering that every big skill is a collection of many sub-skills.
- Identify the essential sub-skills needed to give you the maximum advantage.
- Practice the most important part that you have discovered, using the 80:20 principle in your learning.
80/20: Pareto's principle
The Pareto principle states that 20% of your activities (even lesser) deliver 80% results (even more) in almost every area of your life.
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The modern polymath
... is someone who becomes competent in at least 3 diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set.
In another words, they bring the best of what humanity has discov...
Leonardo Da Vinci
"Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
Famous polymaths
Polymaths have existed forever (they are often the ones who’ve advanced Western civilization more than any others ) but they’ve been called different things throughout history:
Philosopher king: Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Archimedes.
Renaissance person: Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei.
Gentleman scholar: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams.
Polymath: Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Theodore Roosevelt.
Modern polymath: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.
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"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much an..."
Albert Einstein
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.
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Meta-Learning
It's knowing how to learn. Learning itself is a skill, and knowing how to do it well is an incredibly valuable advantage.
Merely acquiring information is not learning....
Learning has 2 phases
Learning is a two-step process:
- Read/listen: feeding ourselves new information.
- Process and recall what you’ve just ‘learned’: connecting new materials to what we already knew.
Remembering the right things
You should not waste your time by committing unimportant details to memory.
Your focus should be on understanding the bigger picture, on how things relate to each other.
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Re-reading and highlighting
Both of these study strategies are relatively ineffective. Passively reading the same text over and over again won’t do much for recall unless it’s spaced out over time.
Different learning styles
Systematic studies of learning styles have consistently found no evidence or very weak evidence to support the idea that matching the material to a student’s learning style is more effective.
Right or left-brained
There is no conclusive evidence that people preferentially use the left or right hemisphere.
Certain functions are processed more by one region of the brain than others, and this is known as lateralization. But we all use our entire brain equally.
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Scientific Backed Ways To Learn Better
- Learn faster and retain more by imagining that you have to teach someone else what you are learning.
- Sleeping between two learning sessions greatly improves retenti...