The Best Way To Remember Almost Everything You Learn
We wish we could learn things faster and more effective.
We learn how to cook. We learn an effective way to deal with people in the workplace. We learn a good way to maintain a good relationship with our family. There are so many things to learn, yet we have limited time.
In fact, the best way of learning is not just spending more time.
In this article, I will show you the most effective way to remember almost everything we learn.
Learning Pyramid: The Key Connection Between our Brain and Learning
In 1960s, NTL Institute published a research on how humans learn things.
As the research shows, the development of human learning turns out how humans remember things. According to the research,
- We learn 5% of things from lectures, i.e. college, university, or professional lectures
- We learn about 10 % of things from reading articles or books
- We learn about 20% of things from visual content, such as audios and videos.
- We learn about 30% of things based on demonstrations
- We learn about 50% of things from the group discussions
- We learn about 75% of things when we practice what we learn
- We learn about 90% of things when we teach others.
(Based on this research, it explains why we cannot learn things from the lectures in the university only.. oops..)
We cannot learn most of the things from the traditional passive methods, such as books, lectures, or videos. We can only learn less than 50% of things by using these methods.
Instead of forcing ourselves to remember more information with the traditional passive methods, we should focus on the active ways to learn things.
Apparently, we all have learn things from the active methods. We don’t pay attention at all. Look at these examples:
- If a 2 years old boy wants to learn how to walk, he needs to practice how to walk instead of watching how others walk.
- If we want to learn a new foreign language, we should focus on speaking with other native speakers.
- If we want to get fit, we have to work with other people or a personal trainer instead of watching videos
Sounds familiar, right?
“I don’t have time…”
One of the most common excuses for ourselves to say, “I don’t have time…”
Unfortunately, I always make this excuse, too. I feel guilty.
There are 24 hours in a day (or 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds). We all have the same amount of time in each day. Ev Williams, Larry Kim, Arianna Huffington, and other millionaires have the same amount of time as we all do. Yet, they have built the most successful businesses in the world.
All successful millionaires started from nothing. They learned how to maximize time for effectiveness.
If I watch a 5-minutes YouTube tutorial of “how to calm an aggressive cat” instead of a 15-minutes video tutorial with the similar content, doing simple math, I have more time to learn more different thing and retain the same amount of information.
We have to make the most out of the limited time by focusing on the solutions. We need to learn to reject everything else that can distract us from our goal.
If we want to remember more new information everything, we need to spend less time on re-learning what we have learned already, and focus on the new ones.
About the author
Tony Yeung fails to get his Twitter account verified, but he never gives up to write articles on Medium.com
