Step one involves figuring out what your loops are. These are the activities you repeat over and over when learning something.
Next, analyze the loop for different parts to see whether you can make improvements. It will result in faster learning.

Designing Your Practice Loop

Many loops aren’t straightforward repetitions. You may never write the same essay twice. The loop isn't writing a particular essay, but the overall process for writing essays.
In the same way, each thing you learn may have more than one loop. Drills are smaller loops to focus on smaller parts of the bigger loop.

Loops and drills

The best way to learn is not to just sit and read.
<ul>
<li>Write down what your current practice loop is for something you're learning now.</li>
<li>Give one idea for how you might improve the loop.</li>
</ul>

Taking action

Practice loops are useful as a concept to think about learning any skill. A practice loop is an activity or group of activities you repeat over and over again while learning something.
<ul>
<li>In physics: a practice loop is every problem you solve.</li>
<li>In business: it is each product or feature you launch.</li>
<li>In languages: conversations, flaschards, grammar exercises are all loops.</li>
</ul>

Practice loops

<ul>
<li>Does your loop match the skill or subskill I'm trying to improve? A vocabulary drill that is aimed to improve your words in a real conversation, but only lets you recognize words by their spelling misses the point. You may recognize the words in print, but may not be able to speak them aloud. 
</li>
<li>Can you get better, more accurate feedback after each iteration? In public speaking, you could videotape yourself performing the skill to look for mistakes later. 
</li>
<li>Do you understand the process? Repeating an inefficient technique won't make you a master. Sometimes a different method will create better results.</li>
</ul>

Analyzing the loop

All this week I've been sharing lessons to prepare for a new session of Rapid Learner. Previously, I wrote about why now is the perfect time to start an ultralearning project, and gave three different paths you can take to come up with ideas.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

strategy

Strategy

education

Learning & Education

problemsolving

Problem Solving

timemanagement

Time Management

Designing the Perfect Practice Loop

“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

Life Improvement

A special 25th anniversary edition of the extraordinary international bestseller, including a new Foreword by Paulo Coelho. Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations. Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

books

Books

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

A special 25th anniversary edition of the extraordinary international bestseller, including a new Foreword by Paulo Coelho.Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations.Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

Paulo Coelho de Souza is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. His novel The Alchemist became an international best-seller and he has published 30 more books since then.

Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist

Rate, How advanced is your skills on a scale of 1 to 10 in each of these disciplines.

Rate your expertise for each of the skills

Spot any gaps between the skills you have, and the skills required to do your dream job

Spot any gaps. 

This will help you stay motivated.

Keep the plan visible

Consider, education, training and on the job experience to improve and develop your skills.

Look at what you need to do to develop the skills

A skills audit is a written document that clearly lays out all the skills you currently have and how advanced those skills are. It will also document what skills you need for your dream career, where the gaps are in your skill set and how you gain the skills you need.

What is personal skills audit?

FInd job descriptions and identify what the requirements are to be successful in these roles.

Identify the skills required to do those jobs

List them all, it’s important to know which direction you would like to take your career in.

Write a list of jobs you would like to have

Being strict with yourself on when you would like to have achieved certain things will help you stay on course

Set yourself deadlines

Prepare a list of skills you have gained through expetience education and training.

Make A List of Your Skills 

Working on a skills audit is a great way to establish what skills you have and what your level of expertise is for each of the skills. Find out more here.

career

Career

Create your own Skills Audit

There are many general benefits of embracing new skills.
<ul>
<li>Long-term brain changes can slow the mental decline that comes with ageing. A study of adults - aged 58 to 86 - who pursued a handful of courses showed a marked improvement on more general cognitive tests - matching the performance of adults 30 years younger. The benefits came from pursuing multiple skills, not just one skill.</li>
<li>The ongoing pursuit of different interests may increase your creativity.</li>
<li>Intellectual humility - the capacity to recognise the limits of your knowledge - can open your minds to new ways of thinking.</li>
</ul>

Learning new skills: Why you should make the effort

Children are very good at picking up patterns implicitly. But after age 12, we lose some of that capacity to absorb new information.
This does not mean that adults can't learn. We still have "neuroplasticity" - the ability for the brain to rewire itself in response to new challenges.

Learning new information as an adult

Anyone can use these basic principles to make learning more effective.
<ol>
<li>Learn from your mistakes. Instead of repeating information over and over, think about what you did right and what you did wrong.</li>
<li>Practice should be varied. Change how you learn something. It forces the brain's learned patterns to become more flexible. </li>
<li>Teach others the same skill. Consider sharing the skill you're learning with someone you know.</li>
</ol>

Basic principles of good learning

Although our ability to easily pick up a new skill declines with age, harnessing a specific type of mindset can help you learn effectively as an adult.

health

Health

habits

Habits

How a 'beginners’ mindset' can help you learn anything

We need to make learning as easy as possible by setting the right environment. 
We can do this by:
<ol>
<li>Having the required materials with us at all times.</li>
<li>Setting up our workstation or working area in such a way that we can start our learning session in a few seconds.</li>
<li>If we have only 15 or 20 minutes a day to learn, we can try batching together any unpleasant pre-learning task beforehand, to avoid friction.</li>
</ol>

Frictionless Learning

Most of us believe we are killing time when we play video games or watch Netflix, or simply scroll through the endless doom feeds of Facebook.
It is imperative to know that we cannot really kill time, which is eternal and which eventually kills us. We could make use of our limited time and do something productive, but it is hard as we are spoilt for choice.
Finding time is ultimately the question of motivation, and if something excites us enough, we will find time for it.

The Myth About Killing Time

<ul>
<li>Most adults who are juggling work, parenting and self-care find it hard to set aside time to learn anything new.</li>
<li>The desire to learn is there, as one knows the importance of upgrading one’s skill sets. The challenge is to find the time to learn.</li>
<li>The most fundamental strategy is not to spread ourselves too thin, and have only one project at a time. If we want to learn tennis, painting and coding, we need to pick one first.</li>
<li>If multiple projects are important to us, we still need to focus on learning one project at a time and pick the second one after progress is made on the first one.</li>
</ul>

Finding Time For Learning

The hidden reason our learning projects don’t see the light of the day is that we don’t align them with our existing work, social pursuits, family time or other sources of meaning in our lives.
Example: Learning a new language becomes easy if we are teaching it to our kid daily.

Integrating Learning With Life

When distraction is just a click away, it is hard to learn something. Time is a huge barrier to progress, but it is our choices of where we put our attention and effort that really impacts our learning.
The way out of this is to suspend all activities we normally spend our time on, like the TV, smartphones, games, and social media. Then slowly reintroduce the ones we cannot live without. This way we will have plenty of time to accommodate learning.

Distracting Alternatives

How do you find time to learn in a busy schedule? Here are four strategies I use to find time between work and family life.

Designing the Perfect Practice Loop

The Alchemist

Create your own Skills Audit

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

How a 'beginners’ mindset' can help you learn anything

CURATED BY

Designing the Perfect Practice Loop

The Alchemist

Create your own Skills Audit

It's time to Read like a Pro.

How a 'beginners’ mindset' can help you learn anything

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.