Learning a skill faster is a skill that everyone would be willing to have. Especially in this currently changing world it is very important to be dedicated to learning new things quickly.
If you are good at learning new skills , you are more likely to succeed. Now let’s look at some techniques to get you ahead.
1) Sharpen the axe
There’s a famous saying of Abraham Lincoln where he says if he is given 6 hours to cut a tree, he would spend four hours sharpening the axe. This stresses the power of preparation.
It’s very important to learn “how to learn faster”. For example if you want to learn how to play football, you should spend some time understanding the rules behind it.
2) Use crutches to optimize your focus
When you’re fully focused on learning, it makes your brain learn things faster.
There’s a famous technique called the 5 Minute rule. Here you force yourself to learn just for five minutes and once you do that you are more likely to spend maybe an hour or maybe even more than that.
So if you are willing to learn how to code, you must switch off your phone and keep it in another room and move away from all distractions.
3) Find opportunities for immersion
We learn best when we are in the environment where we are actually implementing what we are learning.
For example, if you are learning French, it is important for you to speak to other people in French. This will help you learn much quicker.
4) Figure out what your weak links are
Ask yourself “If the exam were tomorrow what topic would I be least happy or annoyed about” and then start preparing for it.
You need to understand what your weakness is and stress more on that.
5) Learn faster by testing yourself
The more active recall you have the faster you learn. The best way to do this is by testing yourself.
Testing is a strategy to learn faster. But the difficulty of testing must be desirable.
If you were to learn bowling by bowling to Virat Kohli, he would smash all your balls to boundaries and you would never learn. The best way is to bowl somebody who is slightly better than you.
Testing is like beating a red hot iron to get it into desired shape.
Not only will you gain confidence in how much you do know, you’ll more quickly learn the things you don’t know.
6) Get intense feedback often
Try to get feedback often and as quickly as possible.
You would never know how awful your writing is or singing is without somebody else reading or listening to it. l
7) Overlearning
One great technique of learning something faster is to learn something more than the depth that you actually necessarily need to.
Keep asking “why” and try to research as much as you can.
8) Spacing
Whatever we learn today we tend to forget part of it tomorrow and this is an exponential curve.
In order to remember what we learn, we need to practice regularly.
If you were to learn how to code, you need to solve problems everyday.
9) Teach what you’re trying to learn
The part of this credit goes to Richard Feynman who is considered to be one of the greatest teachers of the 20th century. According to this technique once you learn something
- Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.
- Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.
If you are interested to learn on this topic deeper, then check this.
Hope you found this helpful. Help us know in the comments below, the problems that you face while learning and we will find a method to help you out.Simple Pythagoras theorem to find sides of a triangle