How I accelerate the learning process for any skill
Learning fast is a superpower
“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” –Eric Ries
I really don’t like secrets. Unfortunately for me, the world keeps many of them, hidden in the bowels of skills and arts and accessible only to those with that ever-elusive experience. But I’m a curious fella with a compulsive urge to dig into everything and lay their secrets bare. With so many fascinating fields to be explored (and a healthy dose of impatience), I’ve become interested in metalearning — learning how how to learn. Accelerated learning, the practice of learning anything relatively quickly, is a fundamental component of metalearning. Being able, willing, and excited to learn opens countless opportunities to engage with experts, and having a broad knowledge base facilitates knowledge transfer between fields, making it ever easier to learn additional topics.
Growing up in an Asian family, my early education came from long hours spent “studying” — memorizing rules and specific scenarios. More time meant more examples, increasing the chances that I would have practiced something that would show up on the test. This didn’t scale. By the time I got to college, the rate at which I could cram facts couldn’t keep up with my self-inflicted courseload, and I was not a happy camper. After somehow passing all my classes and graduating, I found the breathing room to learn what — and more importantly, how — I wanted. Along came the opportunity to explore the learning process itself, and a quest to find frameworks for learning quickly and effectively. The best ones I’ve found for accelerated learning are below.
These days, I’m applying these frameworks (to varying levels based on personal interest) to learning a variety of topics, including programming in Clojure, product development, biochemistry and nutrition, cooking, Muay Thai, building company culture, and French (the bane of my high school life; I refuse to surrender to verb conjugations and silent letters).
I’m learning both physical skills as well as the sort of concepts that form the core of knowledge work. As part of the metalearning process, it’s worth paying attention to differences in the way you learn between the two types and adjust how you apply frameworks accordingly.
Sidebar: The word “framework” sounds sophisticated, and people like to throw it around. But what exactly is a mental framework? To me, it’s a set of questions that guide exploration and constrain the search space when you’re faced with more potential information than you can absorb in one sitting. In some cases, the order in which you ask the questions matter; questions build off answers to previous questions. In other cases, the questions may be multiple ways of dancing around a core idea, and their order isn’t particularly important. Frameworks are useful when you need to do something multiple times, where the high-level structure or process is similar but the details and results are different with each iteration.
Knowledge Tree
If you were given a whiteboard and asked to explain a complex idea, you might start drawing some kind of tree — one or more basic ideas, with lines pointing to sub-ideas, each layer getting more detailed. Learning new concepts is fundamentally the process of filling in that tree.

Each node represents a piece of information about the new topic. More broadly, they can also highlight terms or specifics that haven’t yet been explained. In the diagram above, I write questions that come up along the way in orange. Edges link nodes to each other or to a more central topic. As you learn more about a topic, you start making connections from the new information to your trunk — all the stuff you already know. Once those connections are made, you’ve learned everything that new topic.
Often, when you’re first introduced to a new field, you start from a piece of information far away from your existing tree. Without a clear path to the trunk, there’s nothing holding that piece of new information in place, and it’s quickly forgotten. For example, if you’re a native English speaker and I mentioned in passing that the French word for egg is œuf, it’s difficult to remember because there’s no connection to information you already know. On the other hand, the word information is the same in English and French (if it helps, imagine pronouncing the word with a French accent). In fact, many words ending in -tion are the same between English and French.
When an idea “clicks” and effortlessly makes sense, you’ve made the connection to your trunk. It might take some time and experimentation to find a path that works for you. A few techniques that I find useful:
- Find a different explanation that better connects to the knowledge you already have. How else could this be explained? Could it be made more clear with different wording or a different metaphor? Is there another author on the subject who can explain it differently? In the French example above, I only mentioned œuf in passing but said three things about information. Each of those has the potential to form an edge, and approaching it from different perspectives increases the chance of that happening.
- Dig into what is unclear: Which specific terms and concepts are unclear? Focus on them specifically and repeat, peeling back layer by layer, until you find that you understand everything at a particular layer. Then use that understanding to help you understand the previous layer.
- Attempt to explain what you’re trying to learn: How would I describe this topic if I had to explain it to someone who didn’t know anything about it? This works best with an expert, who can correct any gaps between what you think you know and what is correct. However, this can also be done solo if you pay attention to the aspects that you struggle with and dig into them.
The tree also works in reverse. Genuine understanding of a topic establishes a path from what you already know to that topic. You can retrace that path to rediscover or rederive information or specific facts — an ability that is much more powerful and efficient than memorizing all the facts.
DSSS
DSSS is a framework from Tim Ferriss, covered in detail in The 4-Hour Chef (ostensibly a cookbook, it’s actually a colorful, delightful exploration into accelerated learning). The four steps in DSSS are:
- Deconstruction: What are the minimal facts or motions that this topic can be broken down into?
- Selection: Which 20% of the blocks will get you 80% of what you want to learn?
- Sequencing: In what order should you learn those 20% blocks?
- Stakes: How do you setup stakes (incentives) to ensure you follow through?
This framework is designed to be generalizable to learning anything. That also means it might require more discipline to determine the specifics for applying it to different cases.
Deconstruction is closely related to creating the knowledge tree — each deconstructed block is analogous to a node on the tree. If you’re learning from existing material, such as books or videos, the contents are the nodes. Your job is to assemble them into a tree that makes sense for you.
That’s where selection can help. The 80–20 rule is true of many things in life — to a first approximation, 20% of something will drive 80% of the result. Specifically, what are the 20% of nodes that will help you see the outline of the tree and build edges to your trunk? Focus on those first. Good materials and instructors will help break down the blocks, in the form of an overview, introduction, table of contents, etc. However, pay attention here — this is where sequencing applies. You may need to adjust the outline or create an entirely new one to work with your particular knowledge tree. Occasionally, you’ll also find content arranged to be easier for the authors rather than the reader. For example, history textbooks may present events chronologically, while you might find that a focus in distinct cultures to make more sense.
Sidebar: How do you determine which 20% are the most important? I haven’t yet found a generalizable answer, but I’ve found some heuristics helpful:
• If a term or concept appears often, it’s likely to be part of the 20%.
• For every new concept, keep reading/listening/absorbing until it gets too dense. Often, the easy parts are the 20% (or make up a good chunk of it).
• If you’re far from the original topic (in terms of relevance or details), you’re probably in the 80%.
Stakes are a personal consideration and may be optional. If you’re learning something because you’re naturally curious about it, you might not need stakes. On the other hand, if you’re cramming for an exam, a metaphorical cattle prod (or friendly competition) might be what you need to stay on track. Know thyself.
DOES and observing
DOES is my personal learning framework:
- Deconstruct: What are the minimal facts or motions that this topic can be broken down into? Sometimes, this question is difficult to answer without existing experience. Observing an expert at work can help.
- Observe: Who is an expert that I can observe doing this? I’ve found watching someone who knows what they’re doing to be much more useful than reading about it. Usually, there are nuances that would require too many words to describe, but are intuitive in action (this applies to both knowledge skills and physical abilities). For me, an expert is an engaged instructor, coach, or mentor — hands-on guidance and availability is more important than a ranking of expertise. In other words, it’s better to have someone you can ask for help rather than merely reading about what the best in the world did.
- Execute: the best way to determine if really know something is simply to try to do it. Can I write a program to print the output I want? Can I actually translate a sentence into French? Hence, I find it incredibly helpful to observe someone do what I want to learn, then practice executing that same block, ideally with expert supervision and guidance. Full-immersion learning (bootcamps for coding, living in a new country for foreign languages) is an intense version of this step.
- Stakes: How do you setup stakes (incentives) to ensure you follow through?
This approach works well if you’re attentive and observant. Over time, you can develop an intuition for how much detail you can absorb with each observation. This benchmark will guide you — keep watching, paying attention to different aspects each time, until you understand the different pieces and how they fit together. This is true of learning individual blocks as well as the skill as a whole. Note that in many cases, this approach also requires you to be comfortable with failure and calm under pressure, especially if you’re practicing under expert supervision.
Cultivate mental discipline
Regardless of how you learn, developing a few mental characteristics will help tremendously. Think of it like strength training — developing and maintaining an elevated baseline leads to a positive impact on everything else in life. Similarly, developing and maintaining an elevated mental baseline puts you well on the way to feeling limitless. Four characteristcs I’ve found helpful:
- Presence: Being able to gather your focus and direct it towards what you’re reading, observing, or doing. This idea is fully explored in Cal Newport’s Deep Work and can be practiced with mindfulness meditation.
- Meta-awareness: Being aware of what you know and don’t, and being honest with yourself. Over time, you’ll be able to take a step back from what you’re doing, detaching from heads-down work, and observe yourself and your thinking process. This is almost the opposite of presence, but done in an intentional, purposeful way. Mindfulness meditation and journaling can help develop this characteristic.
- Avoid decision fatigue: Eliminate decisions that aren’t important by aggressively prioritizing ahead of time, and automate as much of the rest as you can through routines and delegation. This minimizes decision fatigue and helps you gather and place your focus on what you’ve decided is important. This topic is covered in-depth in The 4-Hour Workweek (and find some additional tactical ideas here).
- Grit: Being able to commit to something and follow through. I often struggle to gather my thoughts and actually start work. Scheduling work time ahead of time helps me avoid making the decision to start during what would otherwise be prime work time. Meta-awareness will help you realize how long it takes for your mind to stop thrashing and fully focus on the task at hand — for me, it takes about fifteen minutes. Grit is being able to power through this period until you can settle into a state of flow. Setting up stakes can help with follow-through.
One final tactical detail: Get to know your ideal work schedule. For example, I find that I work best in 2–3 hour blocks. Many days, I’ll only have one good block. Some days I’ll have two; once in a blue moon I can pull off three. I do my best work in the morning (due in no small part to decision fatigue wearing me down during the day), usually starting around 9 and lasting untill 11 or noon. I might get another block during the afternoon, and almost never after dinner. It’s crucial to realize that that’s ok. Three great hours of focused productivity in a day is leagues more than most people sitting for 8+ hours in an open office get, and over time, consistency (finding one solid block a day) is much more important than trying to squeeze out as many hours as possible each day.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in a decade” — Bill Gates

