Accelerated Learning Study Skills Fast Learning +4 How can you learn faster?

1. Ingest information in multiple ways – A study by Judy Willis in 2008 states that “The more regions of the brain that store data about a subject, the more interconnection there is. This redundancy means students will have more opportunities to pull up all of those related bits of data from their multiple storage areas in response to a single cue. This cross referencing of data means we have learned, rather than just memorized.” So as an example, let’s say your learning to speak Spanish. You could combine many different methods of learning to make it more effective including:
1. Flashcards
2. Writing exercises
3. Youtube videos
4. Audio exercises
5. Using an app like Duolingo or Busuu
6. Practicing with someone in person or over Skype
2. Stay fit – Almost every morning, around 6 or 7 AM, I’ll do either a cardio workout (Usually a 4 mile run to the Golden Gate Bridge and back) or a 50 minute circuit training session with P90X. When I do that, my mind feels incredibly clear and sharp. There’s a study published in PLoS One that backs this claim. (This was also covered in the New York Times) Basically this study involves 81 young women who were native German speakers who were randomly divided in to 3 groups. In each of the groups they wore headphones and listened for 30 minutes to a number of paired words.  One word as a Polish noun and the other was its German equivalent. Each person was asked to memorize the unfamiliar word. One group listened after sitting quietly for 30 minutes and the other group listened after riding stationary bikes at a light pace for 30 minutes. Guess what happened? The group that rode the bikes performed best.
3. Learn by experience – I was a terrible writer when I first. Like I said, one of my first posts only got 354 views. But I kept writing. Now I’ve written over 50 posts, started my own motivational blog and have over 2.4 million views. There are few things that beat learning by experience. When I held my first marketing event, it was hard to get even just 30 people in the room. I had no idea how to build a landing page and registration site, no experience in building an email invite and no idea on how to get the word out effectively. After years of hosting marketing events, now I can get 100 people in a room easily and can launch an event in less than a day. But…maybe my stories aren’t good enough for you. Let’s use a celebrity. Richard Branson is a great example of this. He wasn’t an expert on the airline industry when he first started. It didn’t matter, he dove in anyway. Here’s the quick story from Virgin.com: “Richard Branson was stuck in Puerto Rico while trying to get to the British Virgin Islands. ‘They didn’t have enough passengers to warrant the flight, so they cancelled the flight,’ he explains. ‘I had a beautiful lady waiting for me in the British Virgin Islands and I hired a plane and borrowed a blackboard and as a joke I wrote Virgin Airlines on the top of the blackboard, $39 one way to BVI. I went out (and got) all the passengers who had been bumped and I filled up my first plane.'” Now Virgin Airlines is one of the top airlines in the world.
4. Stay focused on one task at a time – Research at Stanford has shown that focusing one single task at a time is far more productive than multi-tasking. Travis Bradberry has written that “The frequent multi-taskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.” Stay laser focused.
5. Constantly test – When I would prepare for interviews, I would constantly practice role plays. This form of testing helped me to prepare for commonly asked questions and also taught me how to stay calm and collected when I get curve ball questions. Push yourself through tests. Whether it’s multiple choice, free form, role plays or flashcards, find ways to test whether or not you really understand the material you’re studying.
6. Express yourself – It turns out that writing about your fears and worries might actually help your scores. According to Scientific American, “Psy­chologists at the University of Chicago found that college students who first wrote about their thoughts and feel­ings about an upcoming math exam for 10 minutes solved more arithmetic problems than did students who sat quietly. And the writing task improved the scores of highly anxious ninth graders so much that they per­formed as well as students with low anxiety on a biology final exam. The authors say that the technique may be most useful for habitual worriers in high-pressure situations.”
7. Set up incentives – Studies have shown “findings (that) are consistent with the hypothesis that reward motivation promotes memory formation via dopamine release.” So for example, after completing a study session of reading a chapter, you could reward yourself with a short walk, a green smoothie or a funny Youtube video.
8. Space out your learning – Have you ever crammed for a college final before? I have. I passed the test. But I don’t remember 99% of what I learned in those cramming sessions. Let’s face it: cramming isn’t effective. A study done by Nicholas Cepeda (York University, UCSD) shows that periodically reviewing information is a better approach than cramming.
9. Stop wearing that 3 hour sleep badge with pride – We get it, you work hard. But don’t lose sleep over it. It’s simply not worth it. And there are a ton of studies that show getting enough sleep will help you learn faster and your memory will improve.
10. Don’t sprint non-stop – It’s hard to sustain that and studies have shown that having regular breaks will actually boost productivity and improve focus. For example, nowadays, I’ll spring really intensely for
    about 30 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. I’ll usually meditate during that time or drink a green smoothie to relax. When I’m done with that 5 minute break, I usually feel re-energized and ready to crush it again.

You will forget half of what you read after 2 weeks and 90% after 2 months.

Many answers here are saying that taking notes and reviewing them is boring or not necessary. This is simply not true. You will not retain what you learn from a book unless you get multiple repetitions of the information over time.

People tend to want the shiny new thing (“fresh” information) when really they would be better off reviewing what they have already read/forgotten. One you fully realize how much time you are wasting by not reviewing your notes (because you are forgetting so much of what you read) you will start to  enjoy it. Most of my best ideas come from going back and collecting and synthesizing disparate notes and quotes from the books I have read.

My General Process Looks Like This:

1. Consume your information

This means you underline your book, take notes from an audio or video course or collect the best posts from a forum into a word document or page in OneNote.

2. Boil it down

Transfer your highlights or underlines to a separate piece of paper so you have your own set of notes.

3. Boil it down again

Use a highlighter to go over your notes and find the most important pieces. You can circle chunks of text in your notes to start organizing them.

4. Create Your final product

These are only useful for certain types of information. Some books are more general facts/information and may not be worht the extra time investment if you only have a few pages of notes and not many actionable steps.

A. Mindmap

Use your chunked notes to create a mindmap. Stick to one page and fit in as much detail as you can.

B. Action List

Go through your notes and decide what you want to take action on. Prioritize the list and put it somewhere where you will look at it again, like the wall next to your computer.

C. Notecards

Cut up your information into two sided notecards. You can do this by hand or digitally.

Tip: You can leave notes at any stage in the process and come back later. You can also skip or combine these steps depending on how aggressively you want to learn.

 I read a lot, was a business performance coach and trained in many countries.

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3 ways to start learning like a boss

It’s not about memorizing information, it’s about processing it.

Just like in the world of computers, you should practice the habit of learning day-by-day so that you will become a better processor, not a bigger hard drive. Cool? Ok! Let’s start.

1. Learn with a higher purpose

I am talking here more than just learning to pass an exam or learning to acquire a certain certificate.

Create a mission around the art of learning.

Always have the end goal in mind that is bigger than the struggle or monotony that you will go through the daily practice.

Start with the end in mind.

For example, a big mistake I always did in the past was doing tutorials on coding. I always wanted to create stuff, but I lacked the knowledge and confidence to actually tackle a significant project. So the first step I would do is start doing tutorials. I finished so many tutorials I lost count. Understood everything in the process, and then… that would be it. I already lost interest, it got boring, it was easy, it was safe. I wasn’t tempted to go for bigger projects because inside my head the previous experience thought me that the process was already tedious and boring.

Then I got hired by a company to develop games. I didn’t know jack squat about how games were made. But that became my ultimate goal. Everything that I learned got me closer to creating that story, that product. Some days were tedious, boring and repetitive and others were extremely exciting. But I was engaged in the process of learning because my mission was bigger than learning how to calculate the collision force between two objects.

I started practicing this with writing. If my ul
timate goal was learning how to create the perfect structure and title I would have gotten bored a long time ago. But my ultimate goal is to deliver a great experience to my readers. That is what keeps me in the game, that is what makes each day a new possibility to improve myself and my learning.

Instead of saying you want to learn how to code Ruby on Rails set a goal to create an online e-commerce shop that can offer an innovative customer flow. Even if you don’t have a clue. This will ultimately measure your learning process and you will see how your brain will approach the act of learning from multiple angles instead of the linear one you get from tutorials.

“Learning is a process, it never stops. Attach it to something bigger than yourself and you will be in awe with what you can achieve.”

2. Leave gaps in between information

*Linear learning = How people think they should learn. **How you should actually learn

Some of the greatest achievements in this world were accomplished by rearranging or trying different approaches to old methods. We think that in order to learn we need to learn from one end to another. That might work if you just want to become really good at copying people or at best, be at the same level as they are. In his book, “Evolve your Brain”, Joe Dispenza talks about the pathways that are created in between your neurons from habit. The more you practice a habit the stronger that pathway becomes. It becomes like autopilot but eventually if you stop enforcing that pathway you forget it. That’s how we get over bad habits.

Remember how you rocked 11th-grade chemistry and now you don’t even know what Dihydrogen Monoxide is used for?

Just like how bodybuilders grow their muscles by leaving appropriate resting gaps between workouts you should leave gaps between the information you learn. Try skipping a chapter in a book or tutorial. When you might get blocked in your progress you will either find a new perspective from which you can solve the problem or understand better the missing concept and it’s purpose when you actually need it.

You have to find the sweet spot between knowing the basics in order to get started and what is the bigger task you want to tackle.

These habits will cement the pathway between your neurons much better than just repeating information in your head, because that pathway was created in a moment where you were stuck, in a moment when you were frustrated, in a moment when you tried to fill the gap from different angles.

In that moment you will own the information, not repeat it.

This way you have more anchors that hold on to that information. Some people call it experience.

If Repetition is the mother of Learning, then Experience is the grandmother.

3. Discipline yourself with time pressure

Do you remember that one time you studied for that exam the whole weekend? And by studying I mean: reading 2 hours, cleaning your room 1 hour, cooking food for 2 hours, surfing the web for “more information” for another 3–4 hours, watching those 3 cat videos, reading another chapter from your study and then putting a Facebook status of how much you spent studying today?

Or maybe you just went linearly through all your study without actually leaving any gaps to properly process the information.

I remember I used to do this a lot.

I would have this exam where my brain would go blank as if I didn’t even study. The funny part is that during the exam time I had that blocked gap combined with time pressure and I knew exactly what information I needed in order to complete my task. But it was lost in the back of my head somewhere. If one of my colleagues would whisper me a 5-word sentence, it would help me solve a third of the tasks in my paper. It was amazing how focused I could be in those 40 minutes of stress time. Sometimes I would pass, sometimes not. What would be even more interesting is that after the exam, in the next 10 minutes debating the tasks with my colleagues suddenly I realized I knew how to do everything perfectly.

Now I always study like I’m in an exam. I learned this from some of my friends who are designers or artists. They set a 1 one hour timer, where they sketch something and try to fit in as many details as possible until the timer is over. Then they would throw away the paper or delete the file. Tomorrow they would start all over again within the same 1-hour framework.

This made them really good.

They would not have time to research everything and they would also be under the clock to create an output. At the end, they would analyze their results, where they needed to work on more and tomorrow they would focus on covering that gap again.

Great business people like Elon Musk or Richard Branson focus on minutes instead of hours in order to fulfill all their daily tasks. It made them more efficient because 60 minutes creates a different urgency in your head than one hour. You have only 24 hours in a day, but you also have 96 quarters of an hour available. This method can help you be more mindful with how you organize yourself.

* Stop bookmarking yourself to failure

I’m giving this one away as a BONUS because it’s very important to grasp.

I used to bookmark everything. I would spend 3 hours a day researching stuff and then bookmarking it for future “in-depth” research. And that’s how in one year I ended up with 3400 bookmarks about topics that interested me. I would not be fully immersed in what I was saving because I was tricking my head into thinking I would come back to it later. I was using my Bookmarks folder as an external hard drive for my brain but I wasn’t really improving my cerebral processor because I wanted to find out the best practices first. My neurons would have a mental orgy from how much information I would find and save “for la
ter”. I felt like I knew so much.

I will tell you what is the best way to learn anything.

Get good at something and then expand around that.

Don’t trap yourself with “I’ll bookmark this for when I need it.”

DO IT NOW.

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