How to: Never Stop Learning (Kiss Learning Styles Goodbye)

My Learning Guide Mind Map

Let the hope of new discoveries, as well as the satisfaction and pleasure of known truths, animate your daily industry.

— Isaac Watts.¹

The most important motive for work… is the pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community… Such a psychological foundation alone leads to a joyous desire for the highest possessions of men, knowledge and artistic-like workmanship.

— Albert Einstein.²

Learning: To acquire knowledge and skills and have them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.

— Peter Brown.³

Quick Links:

How Information Changed: Then and Now

DiSSS (An Effective Technique By Tim Ferriss)

CaFE (Secondary Principles)

Other Techniques

Not all of these techniques will be relevant to your learning situation. Choose the ones that resonate most. Use them the next time you learn something new.

History of Learning and Information

Writing appeared some 5,000 years ago. However, the increase of information that came with writing (the first ‘Information Age’) was met with the a similar resistance to the one we now have. You know it well — the resistance to that huge influx of information we experience daily. The ideas were that it had gone too far, that we don’t know how be satisfied with the knowledge we have, and that with more information comes less accuracy.

King Thamus (of Plato’s era) claimed that the early dependence on writing would ‘weaken men’s characters and create forgetfulness in their souls’. There were warnings of ‘fake’ knowledge (similar to our modern day ‘fake news’).

The Greek poet Callimachus called books a ‘great evil’.

Seneca told his students that an abundance of books was a distraction. He told students to instead focus on a limited number of reliable books.

Descartes recommended relying on our own observations. His idea was that since knowledge on any one topic is dispersed unreliably among so many sources, it would take a shorter time to observe than to search among those sources for the answer.

Though there is some truth in the observation that too much information isn’t always effective or beneficial, it’s also important to remember that we have the ability to process and store more information accurately now than we did back in the early Information Age. It depends what we do with that information and whether we are able to use it effectively.

Sharing Information Began With Recording What We Learned On Walls and Papyrus

How Information Changed — Then and Now

Our lives operate very differently now in regards to information. Two significant instances of this are:

(1) how we retain and use information. People had to manually store their information using books (Da Vinci is said to have used upwards of 3,000 notebooks) and somehow remember where all of that information is stored. There’s a difference between externalising information, and externalising information effectively for future use.⁴

(2) how we operate our daily lives. Daniel Levitin calls our modern way of living ‘shadow work’. Unless we have the money to pay for technology and personal assistants, many of us organise our own finances, book our own tickets, make our own calls, cook (and sometimes grow) our own food, make various bookings, book holidays, use self-serve checkouts, do online shopping. Some of these instances have undoubtedly made our lives easier with the aid of technology, however it has also added to the time we use to organise our daily lives. Unless we learn how to organise effectively, it can impact how much important information we absorb for future use. There are so many advantages to new learning, but recent research also shows that embracing new ideas and new learning can help us live longer and stave off Alzheimer’s.⁵

There is a theory called richness. It refers to the idea that much of what you have experienced can still be accessed — it’s still in your mind somewhere. It explains why sometimes you experience a scent or sound that takes you back to something you experienced previously (associative access). There are learning techniques that help this process along — to help you take advantage of richness. As we will see below, we can take full advantage of ‘richness’ if we can connect whatever we learn in future to prior knowledge.

1. DiSSS (Technique by Tim Ferriss): Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing and Stakes.

The ‘D’ in Tim Ferriss’ ‘DiSSS’ Stands for Deconstruction — Pulling Apart ALL the Elements to Understand Each One

Deconstruction: What are the minimal learnable units you can start with and then build from? Deconstruction is used in many ways to rebuild something and understand it fully. Cooking is a good example of this — Ferran Adria made use of deconstruction in El Bulli, the best restaurant in the world before it closed. The creative process at ElBulli involved many ways of challenging a dish, an idea, a cuisine, a technique, until it could not be deconstructed any further. Learning something should be infinite. But it should have finite stages to help you maintain momentum.⁶

There are ways to deconstruct an area of learning. Sometimes it’s a straightforward technique like a recipe, and each step is broken down. It provides a way of deconstructing how a dish is made.

But there’s also reducing. Ask yourself how the area you’re learning about can be reduced into the simplest possible components. For example, if you were cooking you could remove elements of the recipe or start with the most basic recipe using one ingredient (eggs are perfect as you can reduce and build on them infinitely).⁷

Another tool of deconstruction is interviewing. Be creative with this step — you can’t always get access to the stars but you can research how they do things online or by reading books.⁸

The next tool in deconstruction is reversal. The top 1% succeed despite how they train, not because of it. Try seeing how a top performer in any one field trains, and do precisely the opposite. Try researching a ‘backward’ or ‘reverse’ way of performing the skill you’re learning. It might be a bit challenging but by doing this you’re expanding your creativity and problem solving skills.

Selection: Which 20% of those learning blocks should you focus on for the most effectiveness?⁹ When you’re overwhelmed with your learning, remove steps until you only have the necessary elements you need to learn the new skill or area. Just remember to focus on the minimum so you don’t overwhelm yourself, and build from there.

Sequencing: Choose the order of learning carefully. If your progression in the skill is well-designed, you’ll find that you are layering skill and your logical ordering will give you a highly efficient way of learning. Will you learn backwards? Will you choose one element, learn it thoroughly and then choose another in the sequence? Whatever you choose, ensure you have a careful plan that suits your available time and the skill. See the commonalities between best performers and ensure you have set yourself a deadline for each stage.

Stakes: Set up enough of a carrot and stick scenario so that there are real consequences when you follow the program. Ensure you’re accountable to someone or a group of people, and take advantage of loss aversion — we are more likely to work harder to avoid losing $100 than to gain $100.¹⁰

2. CaFE: Tim’s Secondary Principles — (Compression, Frequency and Encoding)

Compression: You should be able to encapsulate the most important 20% of what you’ve learned into a one-pager that is easy for you to understand. Try doing your own — the more effort you put into making it, the more likely you are to remember it. Use colour and bold fonts. When text on a page is slightly out of focus, or presented in a more difficult font to decipher, it can actually be easier to recall the content. When you’re absorbing material from a lecture or other source and the order is mixed, you are apt to recall it better because your brain is actively working to place the material in a sequence that you can make sense of.

Frequency: How frequently should you practice? As a general rule of thumb, you need a combination to learn effectively — spaced practice, cramming, interleaved practice and regular testing. So for cooking, my daily frequency is to try and cook simply on weeknights by learning techniques, ingredient uses and flavour pairings. I also challenge myself with short cooking marathons and an ambitious menu when we entertain (cramming). These short sprints provide a lot of learning in a short amount of time. It is also an effective avenue to receive immediate feedback from others. Cramming has its place if you’re prepared. There is also interleaved and spaced practice — for example, I’ll take a class on a specific technique and practice it myself back home a month or so later (and regularly thereafter) to ensure I don’t forget, incorporating it into a dish. Even if you’re learning a lifelong skill, it is incredibly helpful to set deadlines for stages of learning. Haphazard learning isn’t effective or economical. When you set your deadline, use deconstruction and other techniques outlined here to prepare materials, stages of learning and then your scheduled calendar. Set a milestone at the end of each stage of learning.

Encoding: One of the most significant elements of learning is to encode what you have learned into previous material. If it’s not relevant to what you have learned somehow, you’ll likely forget it (which explains why a lot of that material we learned in school has disappeared from our memories completely). There are many ways to encode, both technically (like acronyms) and on a higher level (using economics in your day to day life). It’s highly effective for remembering declarative knowledge. You can use encoding to practice other topics you are learning — for example, when Tim Ferriss wanted to learn Japanese, he also took Japanese calligraphy.

Learning Becomes Easier When You Can Fit It In With Something You Already Know (Prior Knowledge)

Other Techniques

You Can (and Should) Use Both Sides of Your Brain When Learning — It Should Not Be A Linear Process

There are some high level concepts to start with before we get into the technical learning techniques.

• I really like Grant Cardone’s 10X Rule. Take the topic you want to learn about, and brainstorm all the ways you can be 10X better than anything else you’ve seen. Set targets that are 10 times what you think you want and then do 10 times what you think it will take to accomplish those targets. An old friend once told me — shoot for the moon and even if you don’t get there, you’ll land among the stars. It keeps life truly exciting. You will never be bored. A great example of his rule is Da Vinci’s method of learning — he wasn’t just an artist. So many other areas we would naturally assume to be unrelated were areas Da Vinci studied deeply — anatomy, zoology, geology, botany, optics, aerodynamics, civil and mechanical engineering, geometry, embryology and architecture.
• Attention: For a new piece of information to form part of your memory, you need to have paid conscious attention to it. Think about your keys. If you are the type that always loses them, chances are you aren’t thinking about the keys when you’re putting them down — you’re thinking about the missed call, the angry email, the laundry piles. Honestly, I don’t really want to be thinking about keys at all. I have a dedicated key tray and keep them (safely) there. Because they’re anchored to one spot, I’ve never lost them and it’s one less thing for me to think about. There is other information I’d rather pay attention to. Choose what activities you don’t want to be mentally engaged in (like remembering where you put something and finding an efficient way to store it, or a routine you forget) and the activities you want to be immersed in (your work, a personal project or hobby).
• Use ‘satisficing’. Know your priorities — some areas deserve more attention than others, and rightly so. Satisficing allows you to balance effort with benefit. If the effort of doing something far outweighs the benefit, reconsider how you’re learning and whether it’s worth proceeding or whether you can reduce.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Inspiration for the Spiral Staircase (Source)

• Serendipity for creativity: Have an open mind towards new experiences (like that new hobby you have been meaning to try). Da Vinci found inspiration in his external environment, which in turn inspired him to design new objects. The twisting spiral suitcase many of us admire was originally inspired by Da Vinci’s sighting of the conch shells on Italy’s northwestern shore. He designed the spiral staircase at the French king’s château at Blois. A modern example is Dominique Crenn’s menu, which is inspired by her environment and translated into a poem. Have you ever seen a menu in poetic form? Your physical environment can be a truly inspiring source for creativity and learning. Take a walk with your favourite music and a pen at the very least to get yourself started.

A Limited Resource. Use Carefully!

• Willpower: Cut out decision making and the need for willpower when you’re learning. It is true that every social media encounter saps a little of that mental resource you could have used for a more important piece of learning. I truly believe that willpower is a limited resource that refreshes every day, so eliminate the need for willpower to make it easier to finish more difficult tasks. I deleted all social media off of my phone except for Instagram, which is still really helpful for me when buying gifts or doing research on interesting topics (particularly cooking). It also provides me with serendipitous inspiration when I need it. This has been one of the best moves I have ever made for my learning. If people want to contact me, they message or call.
• For something you find mentally taxing or difficult to understand, you can make an event of it. Go to a new space (Reid Hoffman’s favourite way to think) where you probably won’t know anyone, take just what you need and set the deadline or time limit. Make it easy for yourself and listen to ‘brain’ music to block out other sounds if needed. In fact, scientists have found that when we continually alter our routines for studying and we don’t have a dedicated space, our brains are kept active in learning.
• Make it measurable. Remember ‘Stakes’ from DiSSS? What gets measured gets managed (Peter Drucker). You can measure by setting the milestone and then documenting everything you do, or even by making it competitive with somebody else who is learning about the same skill.¹²
• Take advantage of your brain’s change detector. Your brain (generally) detects change remarkably well. New barista, road changing from smooth to bumpy suddenly, sudden changes in water temperature. You can use this to your advantage. Out of milk? Either write it on a list you always carry with you, add it to an app like Remember the Milk or Evernote, or simply take the empty milk carton and put it on your car seat. Something as odd as that will trigger your mind to remember to pass by the shops on the way home. Once you have externalised these small to-do’s, it will free your mind to focus on more important tasks at hand.
• Take advantage of your environment. The theory of Gibsonian affordances explains that an object’s design features tell you how to use it. When you take in your working environment (if it’s a permanent setting somewhere), consider whether your tools are the best suited to what you are doing, or whether you can change them to better suit your work. Don’t work in an environment if it is clearly difficult for you to focus your attention. Remember, without your full attention, new information cannot form part of your memory.
• The deeper the level of processing in your brain, the more effectively you will learn. So reading this article is passive learning, but taking a technique and practising it the next time you learn something is active learning, which requires more effort and will have a stronger chance of becoming encoded in your brain.
• The ‘deeper’ point above relates to the concept of flow. If you haven’t read Czikszentmihalyi’s Flow, I highly recommend it. You’ll find concentration immensely easier when you’ve invested a great deal of time into your chosen area. In early high school, I really hated algebra. One day I took the day off school and Mum just spent a few hours with me working solidly on algebra (she was really good at it). I was so engaged that day that the concepts stuck, and it became my favourite subject to study daily. This is a short form ‘sprint’, but you can engage deeply over a longer period of time also. The greatest life satisfaction comes from completing projects that required sustained focus and energy. — D. Levitin.
• Choose a hobby: Many of us have a profession that has a long event horizon — it can take a long time before we see the fruits of our labour. This is why a hobby with shorter timelines can satisfy the need to feel accomplished now — and it also helps draw parallels in creative trains of thought and keeps your mind stimulated.

Now onto the technical learning techniques.

• Mnemomic Triggers: Mnemonic cues will help you hold material in memory. Roman numerals are an example of mnemonic cues, as well as memory palaces, acronyms, acrostics and pictures. Mnemonic cues are excellent for declarative learning (facts, names, dates and other specific knowledge). They are not useful for understanding high level concepts. Use them as part of your learning kit, not to learn everything.
• Challenge yourself with materials: documentaries, film (if it’s relevant), texts, people, new media, and importantly, experimentation. Isaac Watts considers 5 combined ‘materials’ to assist with optimal learning — personal observation of the area you are learning about, reading about that area, attending lectures (think modern day audiobooks, podcasts, webinars), conversation, and meditation or study when you consider the material you absorbed using the other four techniques.¹¹
• Challenge yourself with recording new information. If you start writing on a piece of paper or typing up onto a Google Doc, think how else you can get the information down to help you remember it better. For example, linear note taking can’t always involve a great amount of colour, dimension, rhythm, images, mind mapping or conceptual or obstract thinking. So try and mind map or use other forms of note taking. Because your brain will be challenged and you will be more engaged, it’s likely you will remember the content better than if you just used the linear note taking that you are used to. Print key words (using CAPS), use images, symbols, use codes, colour coding and vivid ideas to make the topic on paper more memorable. Use the one-pager synthesis to practise this with.
• More on mind-maps: These help you view an entire sequence of ideas with just one look, particularly if you have invested a decent period of time into making the mind-map yourself. You won’t just see ideas, you’ll see how they relate to one another. Use colours, shapes, lines, images, text and your own codes. Shapes can help you distinguish between different ideas or techniques. You can also change the fonts — use bold and italics if this helps you retain significant high level concepts or declarative knowledge (like the year that someone was born). You can also mind-map a book to help you remember the most important and relevant parts.

Mind Maps Are Useful for Generation, Elaboration and Conception in Learning

• Use brain filters. If someone says the colour ‘blue’ to you, you’ll most likely think of water or the sky and other things that might be more personal for you — like a loved one’s eyes. You can use a word or colour or other trigger that ‘filters’ the information relevant to that idea.
• Use the ‘importance’ filter. I once heard Tim Ferriss say that when he’s absorbing a new piece of information (say reading, listening to a podcast or watching a documentary), he’ll only take the really mind-blowing pieces of information (say 3–5 pieces) and action them immediately. You can try that for this article. Don’t just highlight. If you think one technique is particularly useful, translate it to your calendar to try out tomorrow with a new skill you’re learning. The next time you’re reading an article, or even scanning social media or news, only focus on things that are ‘mind-blowingly’ important. This has redefined useful information for me. As Levitin says, ‘knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful’. And the same goes with information — knowing that you are absorbing only the most important information from what you are learning is equally powerful.
• Your best remembered experiences are one of two things — important (as we discussed in the previous bullet point) or unique. When you’re learning something new, you’ll remember it if it is important or unique, and if it isn’t already, you can be creative in making it one of those. For example, if you’re learning a mathematical concept or economics, make it personally relevant to your financial situation. You would be hard pressed to forget it.
• Bias awareness: It helps to be aware of your own biases. Did you know that we are easily swayed by first person stories or other vivid accounts of someone’s experience? It may seem obvious, but you’ll think about this the next time you read one negative review about a restaurant or theatre performance. Some views have valid points for you to consider, but having the thought in the back of your mind that there could be bias in a piece of information helps you take a step back and consider it more carefully. Your brain will remember a vivid story more than a statistic. An interesting place to learn more about the importance of story is the interview between Reid Hoffman and Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb.

Reid Hoffman and Brian Chesky (Source)

• Categorise: Humans love to categorise. We do it every day in every area of our lives — language, routine, learning, work tasks, life tasks, organising physical items — the list is infinite. This is incredibly helpful for organising information so embrace it, and also think creatively. So when you have an item in your hand, or a piece of information in your mind, don’t just take it for what it is. Ask yourself ‘what other uses can I find for this?’. Your brain will be rewarded with a shot of dopamine when you learn something new — and another shot when you can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.
• Don’t be afraid of resting your brain. Your mind wandering state is effective for connecting ideas you have been studying — you’re not wasting time or being lazy. This explains why some people get lightbulb moments in the shower, when driving, walking, during the night or while cleaning. Those light ‘brainless’ activities are fantastic for this (AquaNotes is my favourite tool for capturing those ideas in the shower, and I keep a notepad beside my bed for late night thoughts). This is also good motivation for starting tasks early, so you can leave a day or two between finishing and the deadline — so you have time to leave it, then come back to it with any new ideas and a fresh mind.
• Use brain extenders: Calendars, smartphones and productivity applications are useful if you can find the right solutions for your particular needs. They will keep the information you need so you can access it at the right time. There is always the low-tech solution (a simple notepad) if you need to start with the basics.
• Chunk your work. It will render your task or project more memorable since you have a well-defined beginning and end. Make your beginning point and end point as specific as possible.
• If your self-confidence and value of completing the task are both high, you’re less likely to procrastinate. This explains why sometimes you don’t want to study for an exam or do an assessment. You may not feel strong in this area or you feel you’re not getting great reward for the effort. Either boost your self-confidence by improving in that area, or increase the value of the task. To establish value, connect the material to your interests, design real world tasks for yourself that engage the topic, make it relevant to your life, reward yourself, and demonstrate enthusiasm for the topic — and stay around the people that do the same.
• Find a study buddy: It helps to have a conversation with people about difficult topics you are learning. Have a regular meeting time (say, weekly on Tuesdays at 10am), and have a goal (to discuss and compare the answers to problems x, y and z that you both studied in the previous week). This grows your self-confidence on the topic and helps you remember because you’re externalising what you have learned to another person, which strengthens that personal and relevant connection for you. Pair it with Tim Ferriss’ ‘stakes’ technique. Make it painful if you don’t finish or succeed in your learning goal. You’re more likely to finish if you’re accountable to someone and you have something to lose (we humans are loss averse).

Study Buddies — An Underutilised Resource

• If you are constantly learning, keep a research journal. Leonardo da Vinci always carried a notebook which is where drawings, letters, reflections, musings, prophecies, plans and ideas have all been recorded on various topics. This will help you develop your thoughts, build upon them and give you a place to store memories and externalise ideas. Reflecting in your journal is a technique that will help you connect what you learn with personal experiences. It can double as your work progress journal to track what you’ve learned so far. Seeing your progress on paper will help you defeat procrastination too.
• Keep an illustrated lexicon to help you remember new terms, only if new words are important to you. Da Vinci’s Codex Trivulzianus helped him build a literary resource that he could turn to at any time. You can build this over the years.

Da Vinci’s Codex Trivulzianus (Source)

• Spaced practice: Leave a bit of time between learning sessions. Retrieving information may feel harder, less productive and not as efficient, but that ‘effort’ theory applies here — the more effort you put into learning, the more likely you are to remember what you learned. Combine this with interleaved practice for maximum effect.
• Mixed and interleaved practice: Interleaving two or more subjects is more potent and effective. Benedict Carey learns Spanish guitar and takes classes in Spanish. You can learn literature while writing a story. This isn’t only a great brain stimulant but thoroughly more enjoyable than just learning in a single dimension about a topic. Also mix your practice — it will engage different parts of the brain and solidify your learning. So if you are learning a language, don’t just learn it by writing verbs or speaking. Watch movies in the language, listen to songs, practice singing in the language, have conversations in the language, try to do various activities connected with that language and culture. Mixing up problems is a reflection of the real world — you don’t get 70 algebraic problems at once. You get mixed problems at different times and your brain has to develop discrimination skills to understand when to use a solution for a particular problem. When I read three books at the same time (a chapter of each a day) on topics that were different but still touched on similar ideas, it gave me the idea to develop my own Masters. The books were Flow, Mastery and Start Up of You. You can read about the success of the mixed process concept in the famous bean bag throwing study.
• Develop discrimination skills: When you are interleaving and mixing your practice, you begin to develop the skill to understand differences between types of problems. For example, see ‘translating’ below — when you’re learning several new languages using the SAME passage, you begin to see the differences in how they use a verb. It may seem difficult but it is effective in understanding how the languages are different. Your brain is more active in understanding differences than just passively learning one language. Not that you will want to to try this at home, but Da Vinci decided the way he would produce the quality of drawings he envisioned would be to dissect the bodies of criminals, examining every part, and then doing the same with many animals to distinguish between their structures and human structures.

Da Vinci Didn’t Just Rely On His Artists Tools to Find Solutions to Problems.

• Generation: Solve questions and problems before you learn about the topic. Before you go to class, listen to a lecture, find out the answer to a problem or learn a new skill, try to brainstorm what you may already know about the topic. Just spend 5 minutes brainstorming on a piece of paper. Even if errors are made, you will boost your self-confidence in the area and you will strengthen your problem solving skills. You will be rewarded with a hit of dopamine when you hear something or read something that you already wrote on your little brainstorm, and you will be reinforcing information and building on what you already know.
• Elaboration: Then after you learn, practice elaboration. This involves giving the material meaning by expressing it in your own words. You connect it with what you already know and relate it to prior knowledge. The deeper you engage in this process, the stronger your understanding will be and the easier it will be to remember later. Combine this with retrieval practice to get the most out of what you are learning (below).
• Retrieval practice: This technique involves recalling facts, concepts or events from memory rather than simply rereading. Remember those flashcards you may have used as a kid? Try them again. The Leitner box is a flashcard system designed just for this type of learning. Retrieving facts interrupts the forgetting process. Another way to practice retrieval is quizzing yourself after you’ve learned something. Don’t just ‘review’ notes. Quizzing will help you obtain a more accurate understanding of what you really know and what you think you know about a topic. Do not fall under the illusion that you don’t need to quiz yourself because you already know. Alternatively, you can do a ‘concept map’ — construct a mind map representing everything you know about a topic. Then determine what gaps you need to fill.

The Leitner Flashcard System (Source)

• You’ve probably seen this one, but it’s very beneficial to teach what you are learning. If you have no audience, pretend you are giving a lecture, even if it’s an empty room. Hearing your own voice will physically make you stop when you’re explaining a concept you don’t yet understand.
• Say goodbye to ‘personal learning styles’. From everything I took in and practiced, this stood out the most for me. You’re not an auditory learner, a kinaesthetic learner, a visual learner or a ‘communicator’. It is most important to ensure that the mode of instruction matches the nature of the subject. By restricting yourself to one kind of learning, you are not only limiting your abilities and mindset — you are not taking full advantage of the incredible resources you can access. Consider the topic and then consider what methods work best. If you’re an auditory learner but want to learn cooking, I can assure you that listening to a podcast once a day won’t get the job done.
• Learn underlying principles: When you learn something new, practice extracting underlying principles. Elon Musk has touched on this. When you understand principles, you will start to differentiate different types of problems. When you come across new concepts, you can pick the right solutions even if it is a more unfamiliar situation. You can use this even when learning languages.
• Translating is specific to learning a language. Learn how to say the same passage (of your choice) in several languages. The passage should include various forms of verb structures and possessives, direct and indirect objects and noun cases. You’re learning fundamental principles and comparing them to other languages. You’ll be surprised how very quickly you can effectively communicate in the language you’re learning. You’re learning the underlying principles and applying them across different languages, extracting the differences and understanding when to use which verb or possessive in which language.
• Contextualise: If you can put your new knowledge into a larger context, it helps your learning. (See encoding above). This will depend on how much you care about the topic, how much you will use it later and whether it is personally important to you. Salt is considered by many chefs to be the cornerstone of cooking. The more unfolding you do, the easier it can be to learn about it. History, culture and geography are an excellent way to learn context of a topic. I’m reading about the history of salt,¹³ I’m reading and watching how chefs use it, practising the use of different types of salt depending on what I am cooking, tasting, and understanding how can be applied using different techniques (traditionally used to preserve human bodies in the Pharaonic era, and also used for smoking food, preserving it, seasoning, used as a bed for beets, to draw out moisture and so many more uses). Understanding it in as many dimensions as possible helps me see how I can apply it to different situations and to get creative with problem solving in the kitchen. It’s a way of using ‘mental models’ and it helps the encoding process.

Understand the Context to Grasp the Material as Best You Can

• Mental models: These are built when you learn a set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills (as simple as cooking an egg). The great idea with mental models is that they can be as simple or as complex as you choose. They are skills or knowledge structures that can be applied in various circumstances (remember the ‘pick up a hobby’ point above?). Brian Chesky of Airbnb mentions that it helped him to understand how an orthogonal industry works (cinema). It is cooking for me, writing for others, race-car driving for some — there’s a plethora of options out there. You probably are already thinking of the one most relevant to you.
• Finish before you have completed the task: It’s not as crazy as you think. Choose an end point and stop there when you are learning something, just before you get the hang of it. Give yourself a time limit and you know that you’ll still be thinking about that ‘unlearned’ bit. When you come back to it, it will have been at the back of your mind and it’s effectively distributing your learning between sleep (which helps memory consolidation). Your brain will have time to process what you have learned and you’ll be excited to come back and finish — your brain attempting to solve the problem before you even come back to it. This applies to assignments, new skills, and longer term projects. This is known as the Zeigarnik effect — when we become absorbed in a project, we have an urge to finish. But interrupting ourselves when we are absorbed actually extends the life of what we are learning and pushes it to the top of our to do list. Our mind will continue to mull over the topic.
• For a longer term view, know your personal resources: Each one of us has aptitudes, prior knowledge, physical materials interests and skills. Your competitive advantage is formed by your soft and hard assets, aspirations and values, and the market realities. Know what they are.¹⁴
• Take advantage of travel and life ‘chapters’: Even on daily travel you can learn. Cultivating the habit of reflecting on your own experiences (even if not written — some other way) makes life into a story and strengthens memory or learning.
• Have no fear of failure: Sick fact, WD-40 stands for ‘Water Displacement-40th Attempt’. In 2017, the company’s revenue was $380 million after 39 failed attempts. When was the last time you failed 39 times trying to learn something? Chances are you gave up long before then. When you’re learning, be patient with yourself and use the mistakes to build a bridge to the next stage of learning. Walt Disney and James Dyson are other incredible examples.

It Took 40 Attempts To Successfully Produce WD-40 (Source)

Remember, there is no limit to what you can learn, if you can relate it to what you already know.

Key Takeaways

Lexicon:

• Declarative knowledge — facts, figures, where your car is parked.
• Procedural knowledge — learning how to cook, riding a bike, driving, calligraphy.
• Associative access — your thoughts and experiences can still be accessed through semantic or perceptual associations.
• Richness — much of what you have experienced is stored somewhere in your mind. You can still access it.

Action Points:

• Ensure the material you use to learn is truly excellent. One well written, well researched book on a subject is better than 20 mediocre books.
• Ask yourself — if the method you’re using effective for what you’re learning?
• Ask yourself — is the method sustainable? If it’s too difficult to learn, you’ll probably put it off. If it’s too easy, it won’t excite you enough to maintain consistent learning. It needs to engage your thoughts enough for you to be in a state of flow when you’re learning.
• Use various techniques, and choose the ones that best suit what you are learning. Don’t restrict yourself to one type of learning style.

Footnotes

1. Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts
2. Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
3. Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel
4. How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael J Gelb
5. The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin; Stave Off Alzheimers
6. A Day at elBulli by Ferran Adria; Ferran Adria — Notes on Creativity by Richard Hamilton; Ferran Adria and elBulli: The Art, The Philosophy and The Gastronomy by Jean Paul Jouary
7. Eggs by Michael Roux
8. Daily Rituals by Mason Curry and Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. Research and list the people to interview in your area of interest. It’s usually more helpful to you if they’re geographically close. There are lots of templates online on how you can contact your interviewee, and Tim Ferriss provides some good tips in The 4 Hour Chef.
9. The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch
10. Try StickK.
11. Watts goes into detail about each of these techniques in Improvement of the Mind.
12. Documenting everything you do is already out there in blogs, personal journals, vlogs and used by media moguls like Gary Vaynerchuk.
13. Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
14. The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman

You can see the full list of sources I consulted on my Trello Master’s Board.

EndNotes: The idea for this Masters came from our slow-moving and irrelevant tertiary education. I deferred a Masters of Law (Corporate and Commercial Specialty) to focus on areas that are more relevant to the conceptual age. I’ll still be learning about the law, but in a way that’s more relevant and connected to the outside world. You can follow along with my progress on Medium.

Dedication: It’s a long dedication, but I have a big family:

To Dad, thanks for teaching us the power of persistence and Dettol. To Mum, I really loved my quattro-flavoured sandwiches. I never exchanged any of my quarters with anyone. To Jeremy, thanks for being prepared with the promise of a power wedgie if anyone tried to harrass me (they never did). To Jewelz, thanks for introducing me to Mr Bingley’s confession: ‘I have been the most unmitigated and comprehensive ass.’ I hope to return the same value to your life some day. To Mat, thanks for sharing my love of bacon. Keep cooking until crispy. Maybe one day we won’t have to hit the fire detector with pillows. To Dora, there’s a lot more to you than soap bombs. If you’re not careful we might start randomly posting your art around Sydney. To Tim, your flatulence may be powerful, but your inheritance of Dad’s persistence is even more powerful. May the force be with you. To Luke, your passion for fact books and finger pointing will take you far. Never give up your sense of curiosity.