Becoming Better at Learning
After leaving my job one year ago to take a mid-career break, I’m starting to actively explore my next professional endeavor. I don’t know what I want to do next, but I do know that regardless of what field I enter, I will have to learn. I’ll likely need to learn new technical skills, management styles, product details — who knows exactly what, but with certainty, learning will be involved.
The first ten years of my career were dedicated to sports marketing, most recently working on Olympic partnerships at Visa. It was the most exciting, rewarding and challenging job I’d ever had. And a boss pointed out that while everyone has different motivations at work, I was motivated by learning.
Of course! I actively sought out reasons to learn new things both inside and outside of my job. Finding a reason to learn was crucial — I needed context, an area to apply new knowledge. Moving to San Francisco was a great excuse to learn how to sail, because where else in the world can you sail in such a beautiful bay year round? Wedding planning led me to hone two skills: calligraphy and coding. I wanted to address our invitations and build our wedding website from scratch, and outsource the rest. And working on sponsorships of the FIFA World Cup and Olympics, both taking place in Brazil, was a fantastic reason to learn Portuguese.
Until I took the course Learning How to Learn, I thought I was just a total natural at learning languages. But what I discovered through the course was that the structure I had set up was the important part, and one that could apply to learning all sorts of new skills. With Portuguese, I studied for 1.5 hours, twice a week, for seven years. Apply that same methodology to any other topic and of course my confidence and skill level would be high after years of practice.
Languages are a relatively easy application of learning techniques because the outcome (or product) isn’t as defined as a technical skill. Vocabulary retention, verb conjugation — all the variables that go into learning a language — are much more fluid and can reasonably vary from person to person without taking away too much from overall conversational abilities. With the lack of pressure on rigid memorization, I instead focused on the process of learning, merely spending time each week practicing and improving.
And therein lies one of the valuable insights I learned from the course: it’s much more important to focus on the learning process (such as spending 1.5 hours twice a week studying) than the end product (reaching Portuguese fluency).
If you can find nine hours in your schedule next month, I highly recommend taking the course. But if not, here are the most important takeaways I learned — the best tips on how to learn better accompanied with rationale on why those methods work. All of these concepts come directly from the Coursera course, Learning How to Learn, with credit directly to the instructors, Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.
1. Deliberately introduce states of relaxation prior to states of focus.
Our brain has two modes of learning: the focused mode and the diffuse mode. The focused mode involves conscious learning, such as deliberately sitting down to study and practice a topic. This mode is centered within our prefrontal cortex, the same area of the brain responsible for decision making and controlling our attention.
Conversely, the diffuse mode involves unconscious learning. Multiple areas of the brain work together in this mode, which does not involve deliberate practice, but can be thought of like a program running in the background. Thinking in the diffuse mode can take place as you think about a new physics equation while running, or by playing random chords if you’re learning to play the piano.
It’s important to switch between diffuse and focused mode when learning. Both Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison would let their mind wander until the point of falling asleep, at which point they would drop either the keys or ball bearings held in their hands. That jolted awakening would help them shift from diffuse to focused mode, and channel their creativity or technical thinking, based on where their mind wandered as they fell asleep.
2. Take care of your body: sleep and exercise are two important instruments to retain new information.
Sleep — whether a full night’s sleep or a nap — physically upgrades your brain, growing new synapses on your neurons. We can see neural growth after learning new topics, showing how learning changes the structure of the brain when coupled with sleep. During sleep, your body tidies up concepts you’re learning by strengthening areas you want to remember. It also rehearses the tougher parts of what you’re trying to learn, going over neural pathways you’re trying to enhance, steepening those pathways.
Sleep is also your brain’s way of keeping your cells clean and healthy by removing toxins. When you sleep, your brain cells shrink, creating more space in between them. But, if you take a test with little sleep it means you’re operating while your brain has tiny metabolic toxins floating around, little poisons that prevent you from thinking clearly.
Exercise is another great way to help your mind enter into a diffused mode. Researchers have found that intense exercise four hours after learning significantly boosts memory. And at a biological level, studies have proven that regular aerobic exercise increases the size of your hippocampus, which guides verbal memory and learning.
3. Overcome procrastination by setting a timer, focusing for just 25 minutes and giving yourself a reward at the end.
Learning how to conquer procrastination habits is critical to becoming a better and more productive learner. Procrastination can lead to cramming, which doesn’t help with long term learning. Commonly, people will start a task that is unpleasant, seek happier brain pathways by switching to a more pleasant task, and then feel temporarily happier.
When you look at something you’d really rather not do, you actually access the same neural pathways in your brain as pain. Except that pain is just temporary: not long after starting a dreaded task, that discomfort disappears.
One of the best ways to beat procrastination is through the Pomodoro Method (which means tomato in Italian): Set a timer for 25 minutes, eliminate distractions and focus. Then give yourself a reward when you’re done. The idea is similar to the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, which means “good change” in Japanese and is a management philosophy about short, continuous improvement. One application of Kaizen is just like the Pomodoro Method: do something for one minute at the same time every day in order to build new habits and skills.
Giving yourself a reward at the end, like going for a walk or checking your phone, can also function as a taking a break following an intense study session. As you relax, your brain will switch to the diffuse mode, helping build stronger neural structures and reinforcing what you were just studying. You can also think about breaks as context switching: instead of multitasking and trying to do two things at once, switch between different tasks to maximize your brain’s processing abilities.
Dreaming about what you’re studying is another way that your brain enhances its ability to understand a new topic after intensely studying. When learning a new language, students who dream in the foreign language make faster progress than other students.
4. Space out a series of study sessions over a period of days to maximize memory retention.
Time and practice are the two critical ingredients involved in transferring new information into long term memory. Specifically, spaced repetition helps cement items from your temporary, working memory into your warehouse of long term memories. Therefore its best to repeat what you’re trying to retain, while extending your practice over several days, instead of cramming new material into an entire day.
Neurons become linked together through repeated use, creating permanence of an idea in your brain. Especially with scientific and technical topics, practice is key in order to strengthen the connection of those neural pathways. Because many technical topics aren’t familiar at first, they initially seem much more abstract, so it’s crucial to build familiarity through repeated practice.
5. Join a community of people that support learning and creativity.
Having an enriched environment with stimulating people and events is crucial to learning. Just as having youth around is a great way to keep yourself youthful, surrounding yourself with creative people can help you build your own creative skills.
When things get stressful, it’s easy to fall back into old, bad habits. You have to remind yourself how and why this new habit is important, and building a community with supportive people working towards the same goals is one way to combat that slide backwards into poor habits.
If you don’t have an existing community, you can find one online or create one for yourself. For example, if you want to learn a new language, find people at work who want to do the same. In my last job, I organized Portuguese lessons for our entire team and it was a great way to bond outside of our regular projects. And last year, I joined South Park Commons, a community of people exploring how to have the most impact in their next professional endeavor.
6. Link together new pieces of information through chunking.
Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite pieces of mental information through meaning and context. Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through use and meaning. One great example is thinking about individual letters (p-o-p) versus a whole word (pop).
Your brain chunks together information by linking together networks of neurons that are used to fire together simultaneously, helping your brain run more efficiently. Habits emerge from chunking, because your brain uses this method as an energy saving technique that gets your neural pathways into an automatic mode. Focus, practice and repetition help create chunks, paving the path to building an expertise in a new area.
Learning happens in two ways: through bottom-up chunking via repetition, and top-down chunking after seeing the big picture. Context lies at the intersection of top-down and bottom-up chunking.
To apply chunking to your own learning, follow these steps:
1 // Focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk (and remove distractions!). The Pomodoro Method can be a great tool here.
2 // Understand the concept by taking action to expose yourself to the new idea. For example, if you want to play a song on the guitar, listen first to get an initial sense of the pattern you want to master, then play a few chords at a time, gradually joining them together.
3 // Practice, and practice again. Repetitive action helps you gain context to understand not just how but when to use this new chunk of information.
7. Look away from the material you just reviewed and see what you can recall.
The retrieval process helps you preserve information, and is more efficient and effective than just passive reading. Purely spending a lot of time with information or rereading text doesn’t actually help you retain that information. You have to actively test yourself on what you’re learning by practicing recall to see whether you’ve actually grasped an idea.
Write notes in the margin of a book to summarize an idea instead of just highlighting, which can actually hurt memory retention because it leads to a false sense of confidence about material retention. Or immediately after every lecture, meeting, or any significant experience, take 30 seconds — no more, no less — to write down the most important points.
8. Use mistakes to help you identify what to practice.
Mistakes are a good thing when learning because they allow you to catch illusions of competence. Maximize your study time by repeatedly practicing problems related to the answers you got wrong or don’t understand.
9. Mix up your learning through interleaving: jump back and forth between different problems that require different strategies.
Reviewing for a test by skipping around through problems in the different chapters and materials can sometimes seem to make your learning more difficult. But in reality, it helps you learn more deeply, because it trains your mind to learn when to apply different techniques, not just how to apply them. Practice yourself by using different approaches or procedures to solve problems. I’ve used this technique in language learning by first doing a more intense task like listening to a native Portuguese speaker, and then switching to a milder mode of using the Duolingo app to practice vocabulary.
10. Focus on process rather than product.
Reframe your views on procrastination by focusing on process (the time spent working) rather than product (the accomplishment). For example, saying “I’m going to spend 20 minutes working” helps you identify the process, instead of saying “I’m going to do my homework assignment”, which focuses on the product. Process help build habits by concentrating on the amount of time needed over days or weeks to complete a task, instead of fixating on the task itself.
11. Have a consistent quitting time.
Planning your quitting time is as important as planning your learning or working time. Have a 5pm quit time and stick to it. Parkinson’s law is real: you will expand work to fill the time available for its completion.
12. Use visual learning cues to retain information.
Our visual memory system was strengthened by our ancestors, who needed visual cues to recall how to navigate the wilderness. When you think about it, it makes sense that our visual memory would be stronger than our memory of written words: as a species, we’ve spent thousands of years using visual cues in the outdoors, and only hundreds of years reading and writing.
When you realize this, you can appreciate all sorts of applications that use this fact as an advantage. Chip Kelly is considered brilliant for introducing visual play calling boards in college football while coaching at the University of Oregon.
In your own studies, you can use this method in two ways.
When reading a textbook, do a picture walk through the chapter before reading it: review the diagrams and photos before reading in depth. You can also apply this idea through the memory palace technique, a great way to remember a long list of unrelated items. Think of a familiar place such as your home or office, and mentally place individual items you need to memorize in physical spaces throughout that location. As you mentally “walk” through your location, your mind will recall the item located in each space. Studies show that people can remember 95% of a 40–50 item list after just one or two walks through a space.
13. Distinguish between helpful and harmful overlearning.
Overlearning can be valuable in areas where you get nervous, such as interview prep or public speaking. TED Talk speakers, for example, practice for over 70 hours for one 20 minute talk.
But for the most part, overlearning isn’t helpful, because repeating something you already know doesn’t help improve your abilities. Instead, focus your studies on the material you find the most difficult, and deliberately practice to improve those specific skills.
Scott Young is notorious for being an efficient learner, finishing MIT’s Computer Science degree in just one year, and picking up four new languages another year through a series of intense immersions. To improve his language skills now that he’s back home in Canada, he’s found that five hours of studying Korean a week helps maximize his language development — any more time spent than that reduces his memory retention.
14. Keep a beginner’s mindset.
Not having existing knowledge of a topic can actually work to your advantage as you begin exploring a new field. The Germans even have a word for this advantage: einstellung, which translates directly to “mindset”, means that an existing idea may prevent another or better idea from consideration. In other words, you have to unlearn your previous notion before learning a new one. Thomas Kuhn famously confirmed this by identifying that most scientific breakthroughs come from relative novices, either young people or those originally trained in another field.
15. Remove distractions.
Because procrastination is a habit, it’s automatic, meaning you often lack awareness when doing it. And habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings, making your brain expect that associated reward. That’s why removing distractions is critical to learning. Without distractions, you can focus and get into a flow state.
Think about what typically distracts you most and set up an environment that removes those distractions. Noise cancelling headphones or shutting off your phone are two ways to help focus.
16. Start.
My mother-in-law retired a few years ago and decided she wanted to spend more time running. She’s now run at least a 5k for over 800 consecutive days. How did she do it? She started, with her first consecutive 5k run in 2015. She talks about how the toughest runs in the years since that first run weren’t the marathons (she’s run three), or the days after the marathons, but the first few runs. Getting momentum going was the hardest part, but once it was established, she had built a habit that made it easier to continue.
The Coursera course repeatedly cites the idea of the Law of Serendipity, that Lady Luck favors the one who tries. You can’t learn, or retain new knowledge, unless you begin. Good luck!
