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Everyone loves to learn something new.
But not everyone agrees on what.
Some people find math and programming boring, while others don't.
But learning to play an instrument, sing, draw, a new language, or how to train your dog is also studying.
And I want to convince you that ANYONE can do this.
In this article, you will get ready to learn ANY topic.
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You're Not Dumb: Everyone Can Learn Any Topic
I often hear from people that they can't learn something because they are not intelligent enough.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Anyone has the same capacity to learn something new. Because we humans evolved to master learning.
Of course, some people have more facilities to learn something.
For example, access to tons of books, money to pay for courses, motivation, better logical reasoning because of life experience, etc.
So a student could be more "intelligent" in math just because he or she likes it.
Or because he or she knows how to learn.
Learning How To Learn: 7 Tips
There's a lot of science behind how to learn effectively.
To learn how to learn, these are some principles you should follow:
- Remember: basic concepts.
- Understand: explain concepts. If you can explain it, you understand it.
- Apply: use the information in new contexts.
- Analyze: connect with other concepts or ideas.
- Test: evaluate your knowledge.
- Feedback: receive positive and negative feedback to improve yourself.
- Create: work on new projects applying what you learned.
If you're interested in the science of learning, I recommend this book by the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene:
How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now (affiliative link)
I did a review here:
Break Down What You Want To Learn In Small Blocks
We always see the big picture.
For example, we often say "Oh no, this will take me years to finish reading".
If a book has 600 pages and we start studying it with this mindset we will get stressed or frustrated.
We will feel that it's like a never-ending story.
But you should change this mindset.
Instead, think:
"Okay, this book has 600 pages. It has 10 chapters, so I will try to study half a chapter per day. Thus, I will finish studying this in 20 days".
See the difference?
This mental model tackles the problem by reducing the topic in small blocks.
Now you can study for 30 minutes per day, and finish a book in 20 days that would take you a full semester!
This is what I mean when I say study smarter, not harder.
Learning Upgrade: Ultra-learning
And you can take this new approach to learning to another level: ultra-learning.
This means to learn something effectively and intensively.
It was popularized by Scott Young in his blogs and then book "Ultralearning" (affiliative link), where he shows how he finished a computer science degree at MIT in just a year using its free resources.
The idea is to create a roadmap to learn your target, make study habits to focus on, effectively use retrieval, feedback, and retention techniques, and then create original projects.
- The most important part is to find the right resources to learn.
- Read about how others learned the topic. Use their advices.
If you want a detailed explanation, I wrote a series of articles summarizing each Ultra-learning principle:
- Principle N1: Meta-Learning
- Principle N2: Focus
- Principle N3: Directness
- Principle N4: Drill
- Principle N5: Retrieval
- Principle N6: Feedback
- Principle N7: Retention
- Principle N8: Intuition
- Principle N9: Experimentation
2 Ultralearning Examples: Learning Neuroscience From a 1800 Pages Book And Learning German (B1) In 2 Months
In my first year studying Psychology I decided that I wanted to be a neuroscientist.
To do this, I knew I would have to learn a lot about how the brain works, since I only had one lecture on the topic.
So I found the Principles of Neural Science (affiliative link) by Kandel et al. and decided to create a roadmap to finish it ASAP while also being realistic.
I reduced my study sessions to tiny blocks, so I could finish this 1800-page book in a year and a half.
It may sound like a lot of time, but most PhD students don't even finish half of this book in 4 years!
My second example is learning German (or any language).
Here I found an amazing resource that had detailed coursework from A1 to B1 spread across 18 chapters with 4 sessions per chapter.
So I decided to study a whole chapter per day.
And in just 54 days, I went from 0 to B1.
Learning is a superpower.
I hope I inspired and convinced you how ANYONE can learn any topic.
If you learn how to learn, then nothing will stop you from mastering that topic you always wanted to learn.
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Thanks for reading!
I added affiliative links in my book recommendations based on my experience, so I may earn a small commission if you click on them :)
See you,
Axel