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Guide To Learning. Faster.
Guide To Learning. Faster.
LEARNING. FASTER.
Discover the proven methods that can accelerate your learning and maximize your potential!
CONTENTS
LEARNING OVER MASTERY
MEMORY TOOLS
PRACTICING WHAT YOU LEARNED
OVERCOMING BARRIERS
CONCLUSION
LEARNING. Learning isn't a
way of reaching
YOUR SUPER one's potential,
but rather a
POWER. way of
developing it.
Question: If you could (quickly) learn -Anders
anything in the world, what would it be? Ericsson
More importantly, if you could learn
anything in the world, what results would
you want? Maybe…
• A higher salary
• Starting a new business
• Playing a musical instrument and creating art
• Growing a gorgeous garden
What’s more, Professor Anders Ericsson in his book “Peak” has shown that with the
right type of practice you can excel at almost any skill.
There’s also new research that shows you can learn and acquire new skills in much
less time than you’d expect. Continue reading and get the essential insight to learn
anything faster!
TAKEAWAY: Break down your outcome into only the In 1906, Vilfredo Pareto
most important and relevant pieces. Knowing just the observed that just 20% of
essential 20% will help you get 80% of the results you his town’s residents
want (see Pareto’s Principle). owned nearly 80% of the
wealth. He then realized
So, what you study is frequently more important than that this 80/20
how much you study. phenomena applied to a
wide range of areas and
For example, if you want to learn a language for a trip,
applications.
you can quickly reach a passable level by focusing on the
most common words. There’s no need to learn the word
for “snow” if you’re going somewhere tropical!
04 Your Essential Guide to Learning. Faster. Learning Over Mastery
HOW DO YOU KNOW
WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT?
To find the most important building blocks, here are a few questions to ask:
• Which parts will actually help me get the results I want?
• Which pieces will get me closest to my desired result in the least amount
of time?
• How do I break the final skill into smaller more manageable pieces?
Once you know what you should know – how do you learn it?
Once we know the context, we can then group information into sequential
chunks, which helps with learning and recall.
For example, beginning readers are more likely to understand a story’s meaning
and can recall it later if it’s presented with a clear beginning, middle and end.
Rather than say, a non-linear French New Wave style cinema, if you’re able to
order the bits of information into a logical sequence (like a three-act movie),
you can reduce the burden on your working memory.
02 CHUNKING
LAW
WHY PHONE NUMBERS ARE SEVEN DIGITS
Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for
Processing Information." In that paper, Miller
observed that our working memory is limited to
just 5 to 9 chunks of information at once.
IMMERSION
Research shows you should strive for
active learning because we retain:
5% from a lecture.
Naïve Practice is practicing without a game plan or goal. It’s how most people practice.
It’s true, any practice will get you a lot further than not. But it won’t get you as far as
you could with other types of practice. Naïve Practice is when you just swing the golf
club to hit the ball or just try to play the song.
02 PURPOSEFUL PRACTICE
Purposeful Practice is when you practice to improve a specific skill and it's
comprised of:
1) Practicing with a specific target or goal in mind.
2) Being 100% present.
3) Actively seeking out and utilizing feedback, which shows how far you’ve come and
how much further you have to go.
4)Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and learning from your mistakes.
03 DELIBERATE PRACTICE
MODELING
A less formal option of finding an
instructor or teacher is to model
someone who’s already good at the
thing you want to learn.
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However, that’s where the biggest learning opportunities and growth lie.
So, once you start to practice, be prepared to feel frustrated. It’s part of the
process. Acknowledge what you’re feeling as normal/common and keep going.
However, as the name suggests, the Just like the initial learning frustration,
"honeymoon phase" doesn’t last forever. knowing that the "dip” is a thing that
Once our progress slows, we then exists, it can be easier to persevere and
experience what Godin calls "the dip." fight through it until you reach the next
level of mastery.
01 WILLPOWER
There’s research that shows we get a small, finite amount of willpower each day.
For a lot of us, we tend to waste our allotment of daily willpower on trivial choices so
we won't have it when we really need it.
For instance, if we wake up and debate about hitting the snooze alarm, we’re depleting
our store of willpower and we’ll have a more difficult time choosing healthy food
options over high caloric ones or opting to study over just relaxing on the couch.
In other words, once we run out of willpower, we tend to fall back on our default
habits.
02 HABITS
To achieve something new, we need to create a new habit. We're creatures of habit,
we think, we feel, we do the same things every day - day after day.
Charles Duhigg's book "The Power of Habit" notes: "A Duke University researcher in
2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day
weren’t actual decisions, but habits."
23 Your Essential Guide to Learning. Faster. Overcoming Barriers
SHOW UP EVERYDAY
With the power of habit in mind, If your goal is to be a writer, this means
Kaufman recommends committing to having a set time every day where you
20 hours of practice before beginning. write 500 words. Whether you feel creative
that day. Or whether the writing feels
So, if you schedule your 45 minutes of subpar. 500 words. Every day. If your goal
practice every day into your calendar, is to get in better shape, this means
you’re less likely to miss a day. That showing up everyday and exercising,
shifts it from relying on willpower to a whether you feel sore or less energetic. If
recurring habit, which is also a good you want to learn a new language, this
antidote to the eventual ”dip.” means speaking the language everyday,
regardless of your proficiency or how
uncomfortable you might feel.
This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe
writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work,
power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our
dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight.
When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized
rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete. ―
Steven Pressfield, "The War of Art: Break Through the
Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles"
CREATE DEADLINES
CREATE STAKES
In addition to deadlines, giving yourself painful stakes and ramifications can also
be extremely motivating. In Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Slow", he
shows how loss aversion is more powerful than benefit seeking. In other words,
sticks work better than carrots. And potentially losing a carrot you already have is
also more motivating than gaining a new carrot.
Tim Ferris writes in the "4-Hour Chef" book, "No matter how good a plan is, how
thorough a book is, or how sincere our intentions, humans are horrible at self-
discipline." There are sites like stikk.com and dietbiet.com where you pre-pay a
certain amount of money and if you don't reach your goal someone else will get
that money or it will go towards an anti-charity of your choosing.
Sticks and loss aversion work well, but don't completely forget about the carrots.
Be sure to think about how you'll reward yourself for completing your goals.
Think beyond the ho-hum and make it something you're really excited about!
28 Your Essential Guide to Learning. Faster. Overcoming Barriers
DEATH TO MULTITASKING
To maximize your results and achieve more in less time, it’s best to focus your attention
on just one activity at a time.
That means putting away your phone while you’re learning and practicing. If that sounds
cruel and too harsh/unrealistic, there’s a scientific reason you feel that way.
Cognitive researchers have shown that digital notifications can supply us with a habit-
forming hit of dopamine every time we receive a smiley emoji or positive recognition
from our peers.
If you think you can handle your multitasking just fine thank you, you could be right…
2% of the population is able to effectively multi-task. However, for the other 98% of us,
multitasking causes us to be 40% less productive and 50% more likely to make mistakes
compared to non-multitaskers.
Some studies also show it can take an average of 25 minutes to effectively return to the
task at hand.
So, multitasking can be an invisible barrier to learning and acquiring new skills. To help
you stay focused, two good first steps would be to put away your phone and remove
notifications on your computer.
Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique consists of working in short 25-minute spurts. In essence, you
set a timer for 25 minutes and then focus intently on only one project without switching
tasks. Once the timer goes off, you’re free to get up or check on any messages you
might have missed. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato, so it makes sense that you can
access a free timer at https://tomato-timer.com/.
29 Your Essential Guide to Learning. Faster. Overcoming Barriers
DISTRIBUTED
ADD VARIETY PRACTICE
Research shows that you can learn
Setting a time routine for when you by practicing less.
practice is extremely helpful (see
habits on page 25), however, Less as in less time per day, but not
practicing the same way every time less time overall. That’s why 45
might not be the best use of that time. minutes is a good goal.