How to Learn New Subjects & Skills Blindingly Fast
You’ll be shocked at how fast it really is to master skills if only you stack all the work upfront
Tools, Concepts & Frameworks
These are what Tim Ferriss calls meta-skills.
These are conceptual and cognitive frameworks which improve the rate & quality of your skill acquisition, and the quality of your information processing.
Pareto Principle or 80/20 Rule
The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”).[1] Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.
Mindmapping
A mind map is a tool for the brain that captures the thinking that goes on inside your head. Mind mapping helps you think, collect knowledge, remember and create ideas. It will make you a better thinker.
It’s a diagram for representing tasks, words, concepts, or items linked to and arranged around a central concept or subject using a non-linear graphical layout that allows the user to build an intuitive framework around a central concept.
Heuristics
A heuristic, or a heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving that uses a practical method or various shortcuts in order to produce solutions that may not be optimal but are sufficient given a limited timeframe or deadline. Heuristics methods are intended to be flexible and are used for quick decisions, especially when finding an optimal solution is either impossible or impractical and when working with complex data.
Heuristics are also known as rules-of-thumb.
Mental “Chunking”
Chunking refers to an approach for making more efficient use of short-term memory by grouping information. Chunking breaks up long strings of information into units or chunks. The resulting chunks are easier to commit to memory than a longer uninterrupted string of information.
The most common example of chunking is in phone numbers.
Eg. a phone number sequence of 01165085832 would be chunked into 011-6508-5832.
Iterating
Practice makes perfect. In education, iterative is defined as the process of learning and development that involves cyclical inquiry, enabling multiple opportunities for people to revisit ideas and critically reflect on their implication.
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law is the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted. Put simply, the amount of work required adjusts (usually increasing) to the time available for its completion. The term was first coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a humorous essay he wrote for the Economist in 1955.
Systems thinking
One of the major tools of systems analysis is systems thinking. Basically, systems thinking is a way of helping a person to view systems from a broad perspective that includes seeing overall structures, patterns and cycles in systems, rather than seeing only specific events in the system.
Elements of systems
- Interconnectedness
- Synthesis
- Emergence
- Feedback Loops
- Causality
The Five Stages of Learning
STAGE 1: CONFUSION
- Google once, get a lay of the land
- Its not just that you don’t know much about the topic, but it’s the fact that you don’t know exactly what & how much you don’t know. These knowledge gaps are what leads to learning projects taking much longer than you expect
- Use Parkinsons law, learn just enough & set limits to prevent falling down the information rabbit hole
STAGE 2: FIRST INSIGHTS & CONNECTIONS NOTICED
- You know a little about the topic, but you don’t know what is important & what isn’t
- Figure out the high-level subjects that this falls under, and any crosslinks with other subjects on the same level of hierarchy
Eg. Econometrics, which Wikipedia told me is a sub-branch of Economics
- Make connections, draw diagrams, create mindmaps
- Start with a One pager. Break down the subject enough that you could explain it to a 5 year old.
- Expand on that. Expand the topic further if necessary, so the subordinate topics are connected to the main ones
- Use 80/20 analysis to focus on the most important core topics
STAGE 3: BOREDOM/BURNOUT
- You’re starting to get overwhelmed by the amount of information on the subject. It hits a point where you can’t think about it anymore & need a break. Your head feels “full”.
- Take a break. Do something else, let the information stew in the back of your mind while you do other things.
STAGE 4: INSIGHTS CEMENTED / CONSOLIDATION
- Insights about the subject start bubbling up on their own, provided you aren’t keeping yourself too distracted to notice.
- Make notes on the insights
- Take stock, review, consolidate, cull extra connections. While you were engaging in divergent thinking when learning the subject, this is when you engage in a period of convergent thinking, and tie back all your insights & learning into a concise info package.
- This is when you realise you actually know quite a lot about the subject, but at this stage you don’t know what you don’t know.
- You think you’re sophisticated on the subject matter (which you are), but you don’t know the extent of the rabbit-hole. There is always deeper understanding to be had, more insights to uncover, more sophistication to develop.
STAGE 5: ITERATE
- Repeat Stages 1–4
- Figure out the number of iterations by using the heuristic of the 80/20 principle
- This cannot be planned or thought about (though you could use statistical analysis of the popularity of the subject, recurring topics, keywords etc)
- The 80/20 heuristic is applied in real time, as you run the iterations. With each succeeding iteration, you’ll get fewer & fewer insights, & this ROI generally falls exponentially with the number of iterations you’ve run (law of diminishing returns).
- Decide how much subject matter knowledge you need & is enough for this moment.
- Use Parkinsons law to set limits to the number of iterations
Final Thoughts
Using this framework for organising all your most important learning projects will allow you to rapidly gain insights into the subject or skill you’ve chosen to acquire.
Best part is, the process is iterative in nature, and when you do multiple runs across the subject landscape, you harvest further insights with each “pass”, until you reach a level of (self-defined) proficiency in that subject-matter or skill.
What Comes After?
Meta-learning
Now you’ve learnt a set of cognitive skills & tools, and will start to apply them in your own life, and possibly surprise yourself with the results.
When you take these tools & use them to iteratively improve your skill of learning & progressively apply these frameworks to themselves, you start to get into a region of accelerated learning & development of insights & connections that comes close to superhuman.
Tim Ferriss is one of those rare people. Ramit Sethi is another. As is Cal Newport. Some master artisans, craftsmen & teachers also fall in this category.
Your ultimate goal with your journey of truly accelerated learning should be to get into this zone of meta-learning.
Hi there,
I’m Yash Chheda
I’m a UX Designer based out of Bengaluru, India who can help you improve user experiences by making your products accessible and intuitive.
If you are an Enterprise or SaaS organization dealing with challenging & complex problems at the intersection of users, business & tech, please connect with me to see how I might be able to help.
When not dissecting users, I enjoy hiking, reading, meditating & travelling.
