Lazy man’s guide to learning.

Steps to learn effectively.

Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

“Life is growth. You grow or you die.”
― Phil Knight

Isn’t it funny that we spend the better part of the first half of our lives in schools, learning about all sorts of topics regardless of their applicability and usefulness in the future, and yet, the one thing they don’t teach is the skill of learning? This is one of the fundamental flaws in our education system. We learn about topics that we will never once use in our lives, but something as fundamental as the skill of how to learn is usually never taught at any school. Throughout your life, your ability to succeed comes down to one thing and one thing only, Your ability to learn something new as quickly as possible. Being able to learn something fast makes you adaptable to changes.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

— Charles Darwin

Before we start to learn a new topic, we must first learn how to learn. Usually, this is left to the students. If you’re lucky you would have stumbled upon a method that works for you. The best research-backed, optimal techniques to learn should be highest on the priority of the list of things that the school should teach.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

— Charlie Munger

Once you know how to learn, you can apply the skills to learn any topic of your interest. Learning is a meta-skill, like reading. It’s the basic block of figuring out anything in life.

If you keep learning all the time, you have a wonderful advantage.

— Charlie Munger

If there was an exam on how to learn instead of what you learned, most would fail. Without knowing the right way to learn, we end up trying to force feed information. We try to memorize ineffectively and cram for the sake of exams and we tend to forget whatever subject we learned almost immediately after the exam. Most kids who score well in tests are not good at the subject, instead, they are good at taking tests. Most training schools teach kids not how to learn a subject, but rather how to get good at taking tests on that subject. Hacking the system instead of thinking of long-term learning. Tips and tricks to get better grades and SAT scores. So much so that test prep itself is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Can we get smarter?

The Mindset: Entity theories vs Incremental theory.

Before we look at how to learn, we must first get into the mindset of learning. Each of us has a set of tasks that we think we are good at and others that we avoid because we think that we are weak at it. Just think of the subjects you studied in school. Were there any subjects that you were strong at? Like Math or Physics..” I know some of you’re saying “Math..yea right”. Well, it could be anything. Maybe it was Biology or languages. Can you think of why you thought you were good some subjects vs others? Can you remember when and how you came about to decide which subjects you thought you were good at and which you weren’t?

According to researchers, there are two main theories on intelligence:

Entity theory and Incremental theory.

Entity Theory states that some people believe they are strong at certain topics while weak at others and that the reason is innate. They were gifted with intelligence in some areas like math and science while they are innately weak at others and there is nothing they can do about it. Such individuals tend to focus on the tasks they think they are good at and gain mastery in only those subjects that they believe to be strong at. People in this category are said to have a fixed mindset.

Incremental theory, on the other hand, says that intelligence and mastery have more to do with effort than with innate abilities and with enough practice, anyone can master a task regardless of whether they think they are good at it or not. Anyone can become a world-class performer if they dedicate enough time and effort to gain mastery regardless of if they had an innate gift towards it. People who believe in the incremental theory are said to have a growth mindset.

It was found that students who had a fixed mindset and believed that they were naturally weak at some subjects found it much harder to learn it later on. The cause for the child’s conclusion could be environmental, such as parents and teachers rewarding the children for getting good grades rather than appreciating the amount of effort that they put in. The child naturally starts believing that since they got good grades they should be good at that subject and weak at the ones they didn’t score well on. To avoid falling into this paradigm, parents and teachers are advised by children’s psychologists that they should encourage children based on the effort put into learning a subject and not based on the results of the test. This teaches children that their ability to learn and get good grades depends on their efforts and not some innate talent and proclivity for certain subjects. This makes children have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. Growing up, they know that if they want to learn and tackle a new topic, all they need to do is put in the effort.

Effort = Learning.

Learning = Growth

Anyone can learn anything. It’s just a matter of effort.

Josh Waitzkin has one of the best books on the topic of learning out called “The Art of learning”. Josh was a chess prodigy. He became an International chess master at the age of 16. He was the basis for the movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher”. Waitzkin, in his book “The Art of learning” lays out his process on how he perfected the art of learning to become a grand master. But here’s the most interesting thing, if talent was innate then Waitzkin was surely a born chess genius., but after retiring early, Waitzkin used the same learning techniques that had helped him become a grandmaster in chess to enter the world of martial arts. He began training Aikido and then went on to competitive Taiji Push Hands and became the world champion. You would think one would stop there, but not Josh, he then went on to get a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu from the world-renowned Marcelo Garcia.

“The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.”

― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

What Josh proves is that mastering a task is not something you’re born with. If that was the case, he would have been a chess champion and nothing more. Clearly, there’s more to it. Learning is an art and Josh lays out his principles on how to master any activity in his book. Not only does Josh master a purely mental game like chess, but he then uses the same techniques of learning to master physically challenging sports like Jiu-Jitsu and Taiji push hands.

Here are the basic steps that can help anyone learn and master a new topic.

How to learn:

1. Build the basic blocks: Take your time to understand the basics. Anything you learn without first understanding the basics will be built on a shaky foundation. Have you ever gotten stuck at a certain point and mugged your way through to move forward? Subsequently, you have to keep mugging anything that needs to be built on that original piece of information that you didn’t understand. Take adequate time to learn the fundamentals.’
2. Quality over quantity: Focus on how well and not on how much you learn. Taking adequate time to thoroughly learn the simple stuff can help in the long run. Focus on quality of the matter and not the quantity.
3. Chunking: Chunking is the process of storing large sets of information for future reference. If you have a large subject or a difficult task to learn, take a small part of it and learn it thoroughly before moving on to the next bit. Once you internalize this small chunk, you will be able to access this large set of information and process it easily. Think of the first time you parallel parked or reversed out of your driveway. The first time, it might have taken you infinite amounts of focus and concentration to get through the task. But over time, you will find it easier and easier to complete the task without much effort. This is because all the necessary steps needed to execute is chunked in your memory and your brain is able to access it easily and succinctly. New motor pathways and synapses are formed in your brain ensuring that the new action you’re trying to perform is stored for future reference. Over time all you have to do is sit in the car and you almost automatically reverse out your driveway without too much of effort because your brain just accesses that part of the chunked memory and you go into an overdrive mode( No pun intended). This happens to almost anything that you learn.
4. Practice till you internalize: Repetition is your best friend. If you repeat something long enough, regardless of how complicated the task, you will slowly start to internalize it. Once internalized, it becomes second nature. This is a vital part of chunking information in your brain. Do not memorize, but instead, practice basic moves till you internalize them before move on to the next step and repeat the process.
   In his book, Josh talks about practicing finishing moves with just 3 pieces on the board, while his competitors spent countless hours on memorizing opening moves. Josh would practice movements with just 3 pieces like 2 rookies and a king. Going over these movements, again and again, made the movements of these 3 pieces into chunks in his memory which he could access in the middle of the game when he came across a similar arrangement on the board.
5. Review constantly: Once you have read and understood a topic, before moving on to the next step, sit and review what you read. Go through in detail and try to recall what you have read. Many students read something once and think they have it memorized but fail to recall it later in the exam. Reviewing what you learned is a valuable way to ensure you have stored it in your memory
6. Get physical: Improving your body’s capacity to recover from physical exhaustion can have cognitive benefits. Josh talks about getting into the habit of running to overcome mental exhaustion. In the middle of a heated chess match, he would get up and go for a quick run. The increase in heart rate and the consequent recovery acts as a signal for his brain to relax completely as he went back and resumed playing the match feeling as if he had just taken a nap. Practice improving your recovery time by subjecting yourself to quick bursts of physical exertion followed by rest. High-intensity interval training once or twice a week can be beneficial. Your mind starts to match your body and as the heart rate speeds up and slows down, your mind learns to calm down and relax just like your body.
7. Focus above everything else: Above everything else, focus is the key to learning. Immerse yourself in the subject without distractions. Dedicate a set time and space to learn the new topic. Short bursts of intense focus followed by a period of relaxation. Intense focus for 30 mins followed by rest to allow your brain to recover and then repeat. In order to learn something effectively, we need both focus and rest. Stress caused by the focus time followed by relaxation helps the mind muscle grow just as the muscles in your body grows when subjected to stress in the gym followed by recovery. Its when your mind is relaxed that new neurons form and solidify what you have learned.
8. Relaxation as work: Take relaxation time as seriously as learning time. Josh talks about how taking relaxation and recovery seriously helped him improve his game both in chess and martial arts. Some of the best ideas and breakthrough to problems that you have been thinking off comes when your mind is in a relaxed diffused state like in a shower or when sleeping or walking about in nature. This is because even though you’re relaxing, your mind subconsciously works on the problem. This phenomenon was well known to Einstein and Edison. Edison would think deeply about a problem and then lie on his armchair while holding a pair of ball bearing in his hands and when he would almost fall asleep, the sound of the balls falling on the ground would wake him up and in this relaxed semi-conscious state he found solutions to a lot of problems and came up with new creative ideas that he would use to work on in the focused state.
9. Repetition over length: Instead of spending a lot of time going over the topic once, spend some time to get back and repeat what you have learned. Spaced Repetition is the best way to internalize and transfer the newly learned topic from working memory to long-term memory.
10. Simplify: The Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman had a technique for learning something new which came to be known as the Feynman technique of learning. Read, try and simplify what you read such that you can teach a child. If you can not then go back and revisit the material and source and try again till you simplify it enough to be able to teach it to a child.
11. Sleep: Well yes lazy people, you were kind of right. All that sleeping you have been doing is good for you. It’s good for learning as well. Have you had the experience of studying all night only to blank out in the exam? Pulling an all-nighter and taking the exam sleep deprived is the same as going to the exam drunk. Sleep is vital and essential for learning and memory. What you have read needs processing and this happens when you sleep. Make sure you get at least 7–8 hours of sleep when you are trying to learn something new. It helps you chunk and memorize the material.

“In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

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Struggling to be productive and want to stop wasting your time? Read Lazy Man’s Guide to Productivity. Tips and trick to become productive and beat procrastination. Read on kindle.