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These skills will change your perspective on learning

I still remember when I was a kid and had trouble learning. I wasn’t a bad student, but I wasn’t stellar either. None of my old teachers would tell you that one day I’d be teaching about learning, that’s for sure!

Like most kids, I didn’t think about much about my education. I just went with the flow and accepted that learning meant taking tests and getting graded. On tests, I usually scored high enough; slightly above average.

But here’s the thing: I had no clue what I was doing.

I was just a pretty decent test-taker.

I’d ingest most of the material a day or two before and cram all the information I could so it would be fresh in my mind for the test. A week later, I’d forget everything.

It’s smart in the short-term, but in the long-term, it made subsequent learning harder and harder.

It’s not until is turned 30 that I realized that my life could drastically improve by increasing my knowledge and building a larger and better repertoire of skills.

And I was so right.

I took learning into my own hands three years ago and my life couldn’t be more different than it was back then. I work on things I care about, I make friends more easily, I’m not afraid of failing anymore, etc.

To say that it was life-changing is an understatement.

Anyway, in this article, I want to show you five skills I’ve become very good at that helped me become the learner I am today. When you learn them, they allow you to learn better going forward.

Are you ready?

Progress Logging

Before you even start learning a new skill, think about what you want to be able to accomplish at the end of your practice. Always give yourself a deadline or objective. Mine’s simple: I practice skills in chunks of 15 hours, broken down into daily 30-minute practice. I start on the first day of the month and end on the last day of the month. That’s always my deadline.

If you have less time to practice or you’re not sure you’re going to stay motivated for that long, simply set yourself a more reasonable deadline for you.

Set deadlines that will motivate you to take action on your learning and not discourage you. An approach I like to use is the SMART goals-setting approach — that is, make your goal:

Once you have your overall result clear in your mind, start breaking into down into weeks of practice. What results do you want out of each week to reach your ultimate goal? If your practice is longer than two weeks, you’ll likely be wrong in your planning, but that’s fine. I adjust my plan on a daily basis to make up for that.

Focusing

As a polymath, I like to do many things well. As a result, I start a lot of projects and try to bring them to a level I’m proud of. That’s a goal I rarely reach. To be really good at something, there’s nothing like giving it a lot of attention. If you do too many things, you spread yourself too thin.

I need to be reminded constantly that I’m doing too many things and I hate it. I often find myself working on twelve different projects at the same time (that’s no exaggeration). Most of the time, it’s not simple involvement either. Like, I’m the lead person on half of these projects, most of which are not short-term projects, like building a video game, writing a book, and growing a self-help business.

The only way I found to help me focus better is to raise my self-awareness. I won’t go into all the details here, but if you want to know everything there is to know about self-awareness, I wrote this comprehensive guide: How to Be Self-Aware — The Complete Guide

If you were to stop reading now and answer “why do I do what I do?” right this moment, could you answer with a single sentence? Most people can’t.

Before you can find out your why, you need to be aware of multiple aspects of your self. I like to make my brainstorming sessions easy, using simple lists. Here are some ideas to get you started.

On a single page, list your:

Skills — things you do well;
Hobbies — things that occupy your time;
Passions — things you do for fun without external incentives;
Talents — things you learn fast;
Loved ones — people you care about;
Moments of happiness — key moments of your life or recurring events;
Moments of sadness — key moments of your life or recurring events;
Personality traits — things that define you as a person; and
Values — things you strongly believe in.

Here’s a template you can use:

Once you have all the answers from your brainstorm, spend time figuring out how this all fits together. Move things in these categories (the four “what”s):

With the brainstorm from above and the answer to these questions, you might find something that comes at the intersection of your four “what”s. The answer might not come right away, but the more you do the exercise, the more obvious it will become. That’s how you know what’s worth focusing on.

Spaced Repetition

Take a moment to analyze the following graph:

If you do not recall what you have learned, you basically follow the forgetting curve. If you retain 70 percent of what you learned right after you learn it, within 24 hours you’re already at about 20 percent, and within a week, you’re at less than 10 percent.

This is cause for alarm, no?

Part of the reason you have homework in school is to partially help with that, putting you in the “Review 2” curve, increasing your retention by at least six times!

Isn’t it amazing?

So, when you practice something you’ve learned after 24 hours, then after one week, and then after one month, you’ll basically retain your learning for years to come. It takes such a minimal amount of time for you, yet the results are phenomenal.

So, the next time you schedule a learning session, think about spaced repetition and place “recalling sessions” in your calendar as well. That’s how, after not doing any video editing in a while, I’m able to just get back into it and remember how it’s done.

To help you facilitate the process, you can use apps like Anki.

Interleaving

Interleaving is a process where learners mix multiple topics during a learning session.

Let’s say you block thirty minutes of your time for learning. To interleave, you’d break into that between different but related topics. For example, if you want to learn the Spanish language, you could break down your learning session the following way:

According to the University of Arizona, interleaving has been shown to:

be effective for developing the skills of categorization and problem solving;
lead to better long-term retention;
improve your ability to transfer learned knowledge; and
force your brain to continually retrieve.

Because each practice attempt is different from the last, rote responses pulled from short-term memory won’t work.

To get better at it, choose a few topics, and disperse them throughout your learning sessions. The most efficient strategy is to use subjects that are related in some ways, like my example above.

If you’re interested in science, you could interleave by spending time in math, chemistry, biology, and physics, for example. For one learning session, you could practice in that order, but for another, you could reshuffle the order.

Doing that helps your brain not make the assumption that the material will always come in that order. The things you’ll learn on one topic may also be strengthened by another connected topic.

Essentially, changing things up forces you to retrieve information and make new connections between the topics.

Making Skill Trees

A skill tree is a visual representation of sub-skills required to learn a larger skill. It’s an ongoing document where you record your progress and learning material.

Skill trees help address learning pain points in three different ways, they: (1) raise your self-awareness, (2) channel your focus, and (3) guide your learning.

Skill trees raise your self-awareness because they force you to go deep into the sub-skills you’ve previously acquired and those you need to learn. When you build your skill tree, you map out all the sub-skills required, as well as your current proficiency level in each of them.

Once you’ve mapped everything out and you know how good you are at the different sub-skills, you can start to understand where your time should be focused.

And once you know where to channel your focus, you can start planning and executing.

The tool I’m currently using is MindMeister.com. You can also try the beta version of Ember.ly.

Skill Trees differ from regular mind maps because it’s not meant to be studied. It tells you what you need to get better at, but not exactly how. It’s a document you keep updating as your proficiency increases. You can even collaborate with others, but at its core, it’s all about YOU.

Here’s an example of the creation of a skill tree in three steps:

Step 1. Define concepts, facts, and procedures

Step 2. Break things down into cohesive categories

Step 3. Self-assess your proficiency from 0–4

Everything you need to know

Progress logging — Define SMART goals and quantify or qualify your daily practice.

Focusing — Know why you do what you do so you can know for sure that what you’re doing aligns with who you stand for.

Spaced repetition — Recall your learning material after study, 24 hours after, 7 days after, and a month later.

Interleaving — Identify connected skills and practice them in a shuffled order.

Making Skill Trees — Break skills down into smaller components and raise your proficiency awareness.