5 Techniques to Learn Anything, With or Without Anyone’s Help

Successful people have mastered the art of watching. Here’s how you can, too

Asking questions is the simplest way to get answers. But sometimes, geography, culture, or language stand in the way. Perhaps the timing isn’t right, or the source just is unwilling to share. In other cases, the source is just gone. In cases like this, some people take the setback and move on.

But other people stick around, they open their minds, and they watch.

For example, a person could reverse engineer an end product, similar to how an enthusiast recently open-sourced Diablo II. Or, they might study a subject and glean insights from it, similar to how these designers recently studied Duolingo.

Poker champion and author Annie Duke writes in Thinking in Bets, “In poker, the bulk of what goes on is watching. An experienced player will choose to play only about 20% of the hands they are dealt, forfeiting the other 80% of the hands before even getting past the first round of betting. That means about 80% of the time is spent just watching other people play.”

But the thing is, especially when we don’t know what to look for, some things get lost in translation between what we’re watching and what actually happened…