By Daniel Robledo | Last Updated July 05, 2020

Have you ever been watching someone drawing, playing an instrument, skating, etc, and thought: “That looks fun, I want to do it”

If you are anything like me, you sure have.

But suddenly you remember all of the times you have started playing the guitar or taking Japanese classes and how you felt like you were learning nothing and stopped doing it at all.

It will be great if there was a strategy to learn new skills not only faster but also in a more fun way, you’ll be able to do pretty much anything you want.

Well, that strategy exits and it is exactly what we are going to see today, we’re going to learn how to learn.

If you apply this strategy to your learning process, you’ll be learning 10x faster in no time.

The “I Don’t Know What To Learn” Problem

Alright, before you start learning efficiently a new skill, you need to know what to learn in the first place.

This may come harder than you expected either because you don’t know what your main interest is or because you have so many interests that you can not decide on which to focus on.

What If I Don’t Know What My Passion Is

First of all, you should know that the term “passion” could not be more wrong because it assumes that everyone is born with some pre-existing big interest when in reality we humans are constantly looking for new ways to grow.

What you should be doing is looking for working on building skills and gaining experience instead of looking for a supreme-passion.

As Cal Newport states in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You:

“Pick something you have an interest in and simply work as hard as you can to get good at it.”

The key here is that you need to understand that you are not born with some specific interset but with personality traits that make you more likely to like learning one thing or another.

The very best strategy, in this case, would be to find a thing that interests you and that can expand a little bit your Adjacent Bubble, commonly known as “Comfort Zone”.

Adding new skills to your set is not only good for your personal and professional growth but it is also one of the funniest things you can do in life.

If you want some suggestions, these are some examples of fun skills you can learn:

• Coding
• Public Speaking
• Drawing
• Animation
• Video Editing
• Photo Editing
• Pixel Art
• Writing
• A Language

What If I Have Too Many Interests

Another common problem you may come across is having so much interests that you enter into a psychological phenomenon called “The Paradox Choice”.

“There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us.”

I have come with this struggle more than once in my life and let me tell you that the solution is not obvious but is so simple that you’ll be on the correct path in no time.

This idea comes from a post on James Clear’s Blog and it consists of four steps:

1. First, make a list of your main goals. (At least 25).
2. Second, highlight your top five goals of that list.
3. Third, focus only on those five goals until you accomplish them.
4. Finally, treat the remaining 20 goals as Avoid-at-All-Costs goals.

This process may seem weird at first because you may be thinking that the remaining 20 goals are also goals that need to be accomplished and that you should be working on them from time to time.

Although the reality is that you need to narrow your focus as much as possible to accomplish more, if you try to work on 25 different things you’ll both spread too thin that you’ll accomplish nothing and you’ll eventually burn out.

Now that you have your 5 priorities, write them down somewhere you can see them every day to remind you what your current focuses are.

How To Learn Any Skill 10x Faster

Well, now you have your priorities written down and before you jump into the learning process, let’s learn how learning occurs.

The 3 Cognitive Stages Of Learning

Learning is a psychological process that goes through 3 stages: The Cognitive, Associative, and Autonomous Stages.

The Cognitive Stage

The first stage on the learning model is the cognitive stage, this is the stage in which you start learning about the new contents, identifying sub-knowledge.

This is both the stage in which mistakes are most common and less important, don’t worry too much about making them and focus on learning from them.

The Associative Stage

Following with, the associative stage is that in which you already have general knowledge and you are starting to practice more the skill, making neuron-connexions in your brain.

Your focus on this stage should be to vary the stakes and challenge yourself, if you don’t want to get stuck you need to expand your comfort zone.

Keep in mind that researches have shown that the learning process is not linear, it is logarithm, i.e the more time passes, the lower the learning pace.

The Autonomous Stage

Finally, once you know the skill enough that you can do it almost automatically, you’ve reached the autonomous stage.

Now that you are here, you have two options:

• You can move to another skill because you’re already more than capable of doing it at an above-average level.
• You can try to master it, notice that being autonomous and being a master in a skill is not the same. Mastering a skill takes so much more time.

The 4-Step Learning Process

Alright, now you know how learning occurs in your brain and you are ready to get into the learning process.

I’m going to show you the 4-Step Learning Process that the author Josh Kaufram outlines in his book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast.

For the shake of understanding, I’m going to give you a personal example to follow along with the process.

The example I’m going to show you is what I’ve done when I learned Pixel Art.

Step 1: Prepare Yourself & Your Environment

The very first thing you should do is make it easier to learn the new skill than not to learn it.

This means, setting up a good environment, increasing your motivation as much as possible, and making your resistance almost non-existing.

Let’s start with the motivation, we’ve already talked about How To Increase Your Resistance To Procrastinate but let’s do a little review on the Motivation Equation:

In this particular case, there are some specific great ways to adjust the four terms of the motivation equation to make learning easier for you:

• Expectancy: Set little goals for your new skill to enter on a “Success Spiral”.
• Value: Think about some practical use you’ll get from the new skill, if it is art-related, commit to making a little piece as soon as possible.
• Impulsiveness: Apply the “20-Seconds Rule”, make the act of starting practicing take less than 20 seconds.
• Delay: Set yourself both time constraints and deadlines.

Ok, now you need to take care of your environment, if you’ve already applied “The 20-Seconds Rule”, you are already good to go.

What you really should do is find either a good teacher or a good course to learn from, self-learning is fine also but having a great learning source will speed up a lot the process.

Talking about my example:

• I increased my Expectancy and Value by committing to create one Pixel Art piece every week and by reminding myself that I was learning this skill to apply to my Game Development Career.
• I lowered my Impulsiveness and Delay by setting the software I use on my Desktop and by setting myself a one-month deadline to learn the skill.
• The resources I used were courses both on Skillshare and Youtube.

Step 2: Deconstruct the Skill

The next thing you should do when trying to learn a new skill is to deconstruct it into sub-skills that are easier to learn.

These sub-skills should be small enough that they don’t overwhelm you but bigger enough that you can spend at least one or two days on each of them.

Continuing with my Pixel Art example, I deconstructed the skill in:

• The Fundamentals
  • Drawing
  • Anti-Aliasing
  • Dithering
  • Shading
  • Color
• Character Creation
  • Top-Down
  • Lateral
  • Animation
• Environment
  • Natural
  • Artificial
• Level Creation
  • Tilesets

Step 3: Learn About Each Sub-Skill

Now that you have your sub-skills, all you need to do is to learn about all of them.

You should learn about each one until you are comfortable with it, you don’t need to be a master or learn everything related to them.

What I did here is to create a Pixel Art piece representing the learning I have acquired on that specific skill.

Step 4: Apply The 3 Principles Of Practice

The final step is to practice the skill until you have either an above-average level or until you’ve mastered it.

The key here is to be smart when it comes to practice, as the authors PC, HLR & MAM state in their book Make It Stick, the practice should be spaced, interleaved, and varied.

Spacing your practice means setting up intervals between practice sessions in which you can either learn anything else or get into the theory of your new skill.

These intervals should be big enough so that practice doesn’t become a mindless repetition, including a little of forgetting into the learning process will boost the knowledge’s strength.

Setting up an interleaved practice is to simply apply the principle that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice.

Learning more than one thing is a great way of interleaving your practice, you learn one day about one subject and the next one about another one.

Varying the practice underlies below the same idea, varying your learning makes you reach beyond memorization to conceptual understanding and application, building more round, deep, and durable learning.

How I scheduled my Pixel Art practice was:

• Spacing it to one day of practice and one day of theory.
• I interleaved it by not learning on weekends.
• I varied it by learning Video Editing at the same time.

 

Leveling Up Your Learning

Alright, now you know the basics of how to make your learning process as effective as possible but, there certain little things you should know if you want to start learning at a non-human pace.

Common Mistakes To Avoid

ReReading

We all have been there, you sit in front of your textbook and you think that if you read it 5 more times, then you’ll magically understand, retrieve and master the information.

Well, I have bad news, rereading is just a waste of time.

You can make multiple readings you should — but you need to have a goal for all of them, don’t try to read multiple times to understand something.

Not Testing Yourself

Testing is one of the most powerful ways of checking whether or not you are understanding the new knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t approve tests as a source of determining what you know and what you don’t. You should regularly test yourself to see which concepts need reviews later on but don’t stop if you don’t get a perfect score.

Not Preparing For The Dip

Keeping in mind that the learning process is not linear but logarithmic, you also need to be prepared for “The Dip”, a concept introduced by the author Seth Godin on his book The Dip.

The Dip is the time on any learning process in which your pace starts to lower and you need to put so much more effort to continue with than you had to at the start.

The key here is that once you’ve overcome The Dip, you have so much knowledge that you are ready to perform at an above-average level.

Crucial Tips

Imitate Masters

Let’s be honest, you don’t need to be 100% original to learn a skill, certain people have already put the tremendous effort to master a skill and it is totally fine to learn from them and even imitate what they do until you’re ready to develop your process.

Record Yourself

Keeping track of your learning process is a great way of both increasing your motivation and looking for mistakes.

You can compare the very first thing you did with the last one, I promise you that the progress you’ll see will make your motivation skyrocket.

Great Learning Resources

As I’ve said before, having some kind of teacher or course to follow along with your learning process is one of the most powerful ways of boosting your learning.

Here you have both Apps and Courses’ Resources that you may find useful:

• Skillshare: Great courses about video and photo editing, programming, art, psychology…
• Treehouse: The best platform for learning how to code.
• Codecademy: Another code platform with some great free courses.
• Brilliant: Problem Solving, Computer Science, and Math learning platform.
• Wolfram Alpha: A must App if you are learning some math-related skills.
• Anki: The best flash-cards App I’ve ever used.
• iTalki: Great App for language learning.

Let’s Start Learning

Hopefully, you now have all of the tools you need to develop new skills faster and more efficiently.

My challenge for you this week is to apply this strategy to a new skill you want to learn for a month:

1. Make your top-five most important goals.
2. Find a skill that is either related to one of those goals or that it excites you.
3. Find a good resource to learn from.
4. Go through the 4-Step Learning Process.
5. Practice for one month and check out the results.

I hope you found this post interesting and useful and I will be so happy if you can share with your friends and let me know what you think in the comments and on Twitter.

Thank you so much and see you soon!

Books Credits:

BROWN, PETER C. MAKE IT STICK: the Science of Successful Learning. BELKNAP HARVARD, 2018.

Clear, James. “James Clear – Focus: The Ultimate Guide on How to Improve Focus and Concentration.” James Clear, 29 Feb. 2020, jamesclear.com/.

Godin, Seth. The Dip When to Quit (and When to Stick). Findaway World, 2007.

Kaufman, Josh. The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything …Fast. Portfolio/Penguin, 2014.

NEWPORT, CAL. SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU. PIATKUS Books, 2018.