The science of rapid skill acquisition

Chapter 1. Learn with Rapid Skill Acquisition

What is learning? Beyond the pain and discomfort and annoyance, learning represents the ability to change your life and circumstances. The problem is, we were never taught how to learn because most of our schooling tended to be passive. Unfortunately, the skill of regurgitating information and filling in the blanks does not serve us well in the real world. What serves us is knowing the most effective methods for learning a skill.
An important step in learning is to figure out what you want to learn. We have many desires but should only devote our precious time to things that matter. What matters? Things that can increase our happiness and bankability, capitalize on a strength, enhance a life purpose, make the most of an opportunity, or cope with a life circumstance. Not every skill, hobby, or piece of information is created equally, especially in terms of what will create a shift in your life.
There are four important stages of learning to familiarize yourself with. When you know where you are, you can plan much better the next steps you need to take. The four stages are unconscious incompetence (you don’t know what you don’t know), conscious incompetence (you know what you’re doing wrong), conscious competence (you know how to succeed, but it takes effort and focus), and unconscious competence (you can succeed without thinking about it).

Chapter 2. Strategic Planning

For optimal learning, plan to deconstruct your skill into smaller subskills. This helps you psychologically as it is easier to face a series of small tasks versus one large task. It also helps you use your time wisely because when you deconstruct, you can figure out which subskills or areas of inquiry have the biggest impact. This is exemplified by the 80/20 Rule—just like in learning languages, where the majority of daily conversations only use a few hundred vocabulary words.
Be willing to learn and mix styles and mediums of learning. Though the jury is certainly out on the scientific efficacy of stylistic differences, the reality is that learning can only occur when you can pay sufficient attention and maintain adequate focus. That’s just harder in some mediums and styles for some people over others. There’s no downside to having different types of ammunition for learning. There are two models we talk about: the learning pyramid (reading, listening, doing, teaching, etc.), and the Solomon-Felder index of learning styles (active, passive, global, sequential, etc.).
The final (or for some, primary) aspect to creating a plan for learning is to understand how to effectively gather information and filter resources. After all, not all sources are created equal. This consists of a few steps involving looking for dissenting information, looking at overall trends and patterns, and constructing a nuanced overview. During this phase, many people get stuck on the information-gathering phase, and it inhibits them from action. Know that you will never know everything, and you must consciously choose to stop learning at some point.

Chapter 3. It’s Just Practice

Now that you understand the foundations of what makes up rapid skill acquisition, the time has come for you to do something about it: practice. But not just normal practice, which is typically a mixture of passive review and regurgitation. True practice is difficult, tedious, and painful. The more you struggle, the more you learn. Keep that in mind.
There are a few different ways to plan your practice. The first is to use deliberate practice, which involves breaking skills down, isolating trouble areas, then drilling them mercilessly in an attempt to improve overall performance. Take it slow, be patient, and build the right habits and muscle memory from the ground up. Breaking bad habits or incorrect knowledge is far more effort.
Interleaved practice is a proven idea that seems counterintuitive. Using large blocks of time for learning one topic is less effective than splitting the same block of time into multiple topics—AAA becomes ABC. This helps you connect unrelated topics to each other and keeps you further engaged by not letting you become complacent in your practice. Here, frequency is the important factor.
Spaced repetition is another kind of practice to use. It is again the notion that what the brain prefers is frequency rather than overall duration. Arrange your study and rehearsal sessions accordingly. Instead of practicing for five hours on Monday, spread it out over the next five days, and you will spend far less time than five hours overall, yet you will retain more. Imagine that a path must be worn in the brain, which can only occur through a sufficient amount of repetitions.
Problem-based learning is where you deliberately choose a problem to solve, or a goal to achieve, which will necessitate the learning of a skill. In essence, instead of setting out to learn X, the idea is to set a goal of solving problem Y, and in the process, learn X. This will keep you engaged and motivated, and also drive deeper learning because you will take ownership of something and put all the pieces together yourself. For instance, you will need to know what you know, what you don’t know, identify solutions, and take action.
All the practice in the world won’t do you any good if you aren’t doing it correctly This is where self-assessment, gaining self-awareness, and learning from your mistakes comes in. It requires brutal honesty, trying to view your blind spots, and going through an assessment of questions that force you to answer, in detail, what you did wrong, and what must be changed going forward. This step cannot be ignored.
An underrated aspect of practice is making time for it. To do so, you simply have to get into the habit of scheduling your practice, rather than practicing when the mood happens to strike you. Schedule your entire day, as consistency is important, especially in earlier stages of learning.

Chapter 4. Deep Comprehension

Boy, learning isn’t a picnic, is it? Practice is tough and taxing, and so is deep understanding and comprehension—the type that truly gives you mastery over a subject or skill. There are a few specific methods to achieve this type of mastery.
First is known as elaborative interrogation, and you can think of it as a form of self-interrogation, self-summarizing, or self-questioning. You look internally and create an inquiry about a topic or skill. Focus on “why” and “how” questions. Go beneath the surface. Discover where your knowledge ends and begins and discover your blind spots.
A form of elaborative interrogation is known as the Feynman Technique, which is named for the famous physicist, Richard Feynman. There are four steps to this: choose a topic or skill, summarize or demonstrate it as succinctly as possible, seek out your blind spots through how easy or difficult the previous step was, and then use an analogy. The analogy is considered a high watermark in comprehension because it requires enough knowledge and understanding to be able to manipulate and translate relationships into different contexts.
Bloom’s taxonomy is a method of understanding your level of comprehension. Once you discover your level, there are concrete guidelines about what you need to move to the next level. It consists of the following levels: memorization, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating.
Deep comprehension, despite our best efforts, is often avoided because of the sheer amount of work and tedium involved. Who has the willpower to continually question their thoughts and examine their understanding? It’s difficult to say the least. Recapturing your dormant sense of curiosity can be your greatest weapon in learning. It can keep you motivated and in motion when your self-discipline runs out.

Chapter 5. Stack Your Skills

A skill stack is something you likely already possess. It’s the concept that you can’t rely on one skill or proficiency to stand out in whatever you are trying to accomplish. Only 1% of us can be in the top 1% of a skill, and that likely won’t be you. Thus, we should create a skill stack that is composed of three or four interrelated skills that you are in the top 10–15% of. It’s realistic and will set you apart from your competition.
A major key is to have the skills be related. This means you shouldn’t just focus on your strengths, which oddly enough can hold you back. Take a look at the top performers in your field to see what various skill stacks they possess. When you know what you want to increase your proficiency in, it’s as easy as reading a couple of books or a few articles, attending a few lectures, and gaining some basic exposure. This alone will make you better informed and prepared than 90% of the general population—this positions you as an expert!

Chapter 6. Social and Physical Surroundings

We like to think of ourselves as being solely responsible for our accomplishments, but it’s not true whatsoever. Our social and physical environments have enormous impacts on our thoughts and behaviors every day.
Your social circle can make or break you. They can be your supporters or they can be negative naysayers. The most dangerous ones, however, are the people who appear to have your best interests in mind but really are projecting their own fears and insecurities onto you. It may not always be possible to break from these people, but at least recognize the source of their criticisms and take them with grains of salt.
Hopefully you have people around you who you can model—those who function as role models. You may not be privy to their thoughts, so take special interest in their actions and behaviors, because those are the most indicative of their thoughts and intentions. Observe, observe, observe.
The next step would be finding a mentor—official or unofficial. This is someone who you can bounce ideas off, solicit feedback from, and overall nudge you in the right direction. Ideally, your mentor is someone who has learned from scratch themselves, because they are best positioned to dissect your actions and provide you with useful feedback based on their own experiences and struggles.
If possible, find yourself a community to immerse yourself in, with the best examples being Brazilian soccer players and Florentine art guilds of the Italian Renaissance. It’s difficult, but the idea is to surround yourself with such a high level of skill that it becomes your new normal and average.
Don’t depend on your willpower when you can design your environment to completely bypass having to consciously make a decision. This is where you, generally speaking, keep things around to help you learn and practice, and remove things that prevent you from doing so. It is simple in principle, and leads to the optimal activation energy for learning.

Chapter 7. Manage Your Expectations

Setting expectations on how you are able to learn a new skill is important to staying on track and not giving up completely. Too high and you may feel discouraged; too low and you may feel bored and unengaged. Habits have been shown to take over two months to form, and new skills have been shown to take at least 25 hours to become any good at. So don’t despair when you aren’t naturally skilled and proficient. It’s all part of the discomfort of the learning curve.
Expect that there is a long road ahead of you. Don’t rely on or expect shortcuts. To want anything more than a steady, linear progression in learning a new skill is a pipedream. Stay realistic—you know yourself, and don’t compare yourself to the standards of anyone else.
Everything in this world you want represents a sacrifice, though some are not as apparent as others. Learning a new skill certainly will involve numerous sacrifices, be they big or small. This is where the wheat separates itself from the chaff because most people are either unaware or unwilling to make those sacrifices on a daily basis. Nothing is free!
The last mindset to keep in mind is that wherever you are and whatever your level, you know nothing. Truly. When you can believe that, you approach the entire process of learning differently. Something familiar can still be rediscovered, and something new demands even greater attention and analysis.