PPI #89: How to Learn Faster

Your approach to learning does not work. You're taking way too long to learn all of the valuable skills that you need. Today I'm going to teach you 10 tips to learn all those valuable skills that you need a lot faster. 

The first is to respect one of my favorite rules, the 80/20 principle. It simply states that 20% of causes create 80% of the effects.

Get into the habit of quizzing yourself. It's much more powerful than simply taking notes. So what that means is you get to the end of a chapter and before you immediately move on to the next chapter, just pause, pause for a moment and ask yourself, "What did I just learn? What were some of the core concepts, the core principles?"

The number three way that you can learn things much faster is to get into the habit of teaching or sharing what you learn. When we teach or share what we've learned with someone else we more deeply embed that learning within us.

Number four. Quit bad material, or quit things that aren't helping your learning. And I'll go back to the example of a book again. You don't simply need to complete the book because you started it. 

Number five is a concept called space repetition. Space repetition is presenting what you've learned back to yourself in space intervals, with each interval increasing over time, because as you're learning the information, you don't need to refer back to it as much. 

Number six, to learn faster you need to actually schedule learning into your day and week.

Number seven is taking advantage of the micro moments throughout your day. There's times where we're commuting or moving from one activity to the next or exercising, and those are all learning opportunities.

Number eight is to put some pressure on yourself, and you can do that in the form of looking for a certification or an official course that's tied once again to whatever it is that you're trying to learn. That kind of healthy pressure will force you to learn faster.

Number nine, try learning in a group, with a group of other people, a group of friends, or a group of peers. Try not to learn on your own, but try to learn in a social setting.

And the 10th way in which you can be learning faster is simply choose things that you would enjoy to learn. You're not going to learn anything quickly if you hate whatever it is, or if you don't truly want to learn it.