Road map To Learn Any Skills Efficiently and Win The World
Before Starting with the principles and Techniques with you. I want to say Learning is a journey and here I am providing you some of the most important principles and Techniques to learn any skills effectively.
I have learnt all these concepts from the course “Learning to Learn [Efficient Learning]: Zero To Mastery”
Learning vs Winning The System:
There are lot of factors which decides how successful you will be in the future but there is one factor which is common in every high achievers personality and that is “Learning Attitude”. When you are learning any skills you have two options open for you. One is to complete the course as soon as you can, grab the certificate and rush to your Interview. The other path is to take time and understand Why are you Learning this skill? What problem does it solves? How can i apply it in the real world? You become curious and start exploring it with Fun. And this attitude will help you to reach wherever you want in the Long Term.
Key Point:
Your certificate will may help you to get in the interview room of your choice but how well you will perform over there will solely depend on what you have learned and how well you have understood the concepts.
Compound Learning:
Tell me something with honesty. Have you ever fully completed your new year resolutions? I can bet you haven’t and it is so because their is a flaw in your goal. you maybe saying Wait! what flaw? So when you are having your dinner/lunch how do you actually eat it. I mean you won’t take the entire plate and start pouring in your mouth right? Obviously you will be
eating bite by bite.
Same thing should be done with your task/goals. First you divide your task into smaller chunk and give a time frame to solve those individual chunk. In this way you will have your entire goal complete.
Key point:
You want to learn Spanish and you cannot learn a language with in a day, so you divide your Goal.
1st day: you try to learn the most common 25 words used in Spanish.
2nd day: learn the next most common 25 words.
3rd day: learn the most common 50 verbs.
4th day: learn 20 most common sentences
5th day: start watching Spanish movies with subtitles.
Now within a week you will gain enough confidence with the basics of Spanish.
Pareto principle:
It is also known as 80/20 rule. The idea is 20% of work activities produce 80% results. It tells us to select the critical and most necessary things that gives immediate results while learning a skill and rest of the information are just noise.
Example:
If you want to become a programmer then instead of learning 100’s of language and technology the smart decision would be to research and talk with experts and know what are the Top 20% of the skills required to get a job as a programmer and learn them.
Key Point:
We have lot of information to learn but not all of them are equally important. In the sea of information only some minimum information are worth giving our time which actually has potential to take us somewhere.
Active vs Passive Learning:
Active Learning:
It is done by taking ACTIONS like writing notes, working on projects, trying to solve problem by yourself. In order to learn better, strong neural connections needs to be build by brain and that powerful neural connections can only be created by doing Active Learning.
Passive Learning:
It is like watching youtube tutorials, listening to podcast etc which gives you the feel of learning but actually you aren’t.
Key point:
If you want to learn coding then you can watch hours of tutorials on youtube, udemy, udacity etc. Sure you will get the idea what programming is but the people who surpasses other and be great are the ones who actually opens the laptop, start writing code and run into the errors and try to solve it.
Focus vs Diffuse mode of thinking:
There are two states of brain:
a) Focus Mode:
when you are doing one single task and you give your 100% of attention then you are in focus mode. It is like a laser beam pointing to a point.
b) Diffuse Mode:
It means focusing on different task simultaneously. It is like flash light instead of a laser. It activates all parts of brain.
Stop reading and tell me Which is the best way to learn?
Actually going back and forth between Focus and Diffuse mode helps you to learn efficiently. The idea is to spent dedicated time on learning and then after bit of time when you are tired or can’t focus, you go to diffuse mode. You can go for walk, let your mind wonder.
Deliberate Practice:
According to Research all the high performing experts of different fields can literally visualize things. They can create experiences in their mind and predict with high accuracy rate. All this is achieved by deliberate practice.
you might have felt when you start learning something you see some progress but soon after a point, you feel like you are stuck there, you don’t see any improvement. This is the time to do deliberate practice.
Steps to get to the state of deliberate practice:
a) Specific Goals
b) Intense Focus
c) Feed back
d) Frequent discomfort by being at the edge of our ability.
Key point:
If you are willing to master any skill and you feel like you aren’t improving anymore then you need to start doing things that are beyond your current skills level. You should push to the edge of your ability and this is how you will master.
Spaced Repetition:
Revising is the worst way to study. If you want to learn something then stop revising. I know i am making a bold statement. Instead of revising you need to do recall and spaced repetition. When you study something and comeback for revisiting just don’t open your book and start revising instead try to recall the concept. Ask yourself questions like what is the concept? What did you understood about it? Explain the concept like a story to yourself and then open your book and see what are the things you got right and what went wrong. This is called recalling.
Spaced Repetition is about revisiting the concept you have learned frequently after few days because in order to understand the concept well and store in your long term memory you need to strengthen the neural connections in
your brain. And this can be done by frequently revisiting the concept and recalling it after few days.
Be Adventurous:
Our brain loves excitement, it loves to experience new things and that’s why when you go to a trip, you never forget those amazing moments. When you gain new experiences, your neural pathway gets stronger in your brain.
We remember things when we are in adventurous state, when our emotions are high or experiencing something new. It actually helps our brain to grow. If you want to be a efficient learner then don’t hesitate to try something new. Always choose your own path and remember THE WORLD IS A PLAYGROUND. so have FUN.
