How to become a badass learner
Learning: the first pillar of success and to fundamentally accomplish anything in life.
Ever since childhood, if you hadn’t learned how to walk or how to stay away from dangers, you wouldn’t even have made it to this day. It’s a fundamental survival thing.
As a species, we owe most of our development to the sheer ability to learn, accelerated by the technology of language which enables fast communication and construction of mental models.
Most of my career, I’ve spent in the field of training and people development. The hours I got to spend delivering training or sitting in a classroom, being coached and trained, are in the thousands, in various settings. It goes without saying, it’s my favorite topic.
So, I’ve collected my personal observations throughout the years, from participants’ feedbacks and my own self experimentation, and asked myself: what separates those who get results from learning, from those who don’t? How can you make learning work for you?
So here we go.
#1 DON’T TAKE NOTES
Nothing wrong with notes per se and everybody has his favorite learning method. But from what I’ve observed, especially at live seminars, people who take a bunch of notes are the ones that usually get least results.
They often adopt a ‘consumeristic’ approach to learning. Something like: “I’ve paid, so let me take as many notes as I can, so I bring a lot of stuff home”.
But that’s not how learning works. Learning is not an accumulation of knowledge.
Learning is behavioral change. And intellectual knowledge alone won’t cut it.
Instead of taking notes, try to focus completely on the speaker until you hear that one or two golden nuggets that strongly resonate with you and trigger a desire for behavioral change. Then implement them relentlessly into your life until they get you results.
The game is not about knowing it all, but implementing the important things consistently until they become second nature. Which leads us to…
#2 APPLY THE 20–80 RULE
Think of learning as a 20% — 80 % type of process:
20% is amount the theory and information you get from a source, whether it’s a book, a program, a live seminar etc.
80% is the amount of action you take to implement that knowledge into your life or doing exercises that are aligned with that.
This should also dictate the pace of your learning in general. Let’s say that you want to acquire a new skill or grow yourself in some area. You decide to take a course, or seminar or read for some time, maybe a month, then you go out there and apply that knowledge consistently for four or five months and finally go back to study some more and fine-tune. Rinse and repeat.
Best training programs are those that give you a little theory and a lot of exercise before you move on to the next module.
#3 SEEK PEAK EXPERIENCES
Another massive accelerator for personal growth in particular — and learning in general — is having peak experiences.
This is a generally new field of learning, but it’s picking up so much momentum and we won’t go too much into detail here, although you can find plenty of information online by searching for keywords such as flow states, peak experiences or states of consciousness.
Whether you climb Mount Everest, or participate in some sort of group ritual, go on the trip of a lifetime, do ice cold baths, extreme sports, prolonged meditation, chanting and so on, the key idea is similar.
You aim to get your mind into a peak state. These altered states of consciousness, even when experienced in glimpses, have the power to permanently alter your life and your personality structure.
The actual learning usually happens later, in what we may call the ‘integration’ part. When the experience is very intense it creates a shift, which naturally motivates you to make the necessary behavioral changes and life choices in the upcoming weeks or months.
Hence, seeking peak experiences in a safe setting and allowing plenty of time for integration is one of the greatest tools for attaining massive personal growth and accelerate your learning. There are specific trainings that aim at generating peak states.
#4 BUILD STUFF
Somehow related to the 20–80 rule: possibly the greatest way to learn about something, is building stuff.
You’re not going to become an expert at launching start-ups by reading all publications about start-ups or interviewing entrepreneurs. That may certainly help, but the biggest learning you get is by actually trying and building your start-up.
This may sound obvious but it applies to most things. Let’s imagine you want to learn online skills, such as SEO, Facebook Ads, building websites etc.
The best way to learn is to actually run campaigns, build a website, handle the day to day tasks, the stuff breaking, the automations etc.
With any skill, there’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes that never goes according to books or tutorials, which you need to figure out as you go.
So, you’re never ready enough and never will. Instead of waiting to accrue enough knowledge, start building something, get it off the ground, even if it doesn’t look perfect, tweak and learn as you go. That kind of learning cannot be replaced by any book or expert’s seminar in this world.
Also you’ll be able to extract a lot more value from experts once you have built something by yourself, as your questions and requests for help will be a lot more focused.
#5 GET OBSESSED
This definitely works for me and maybe not for everyone, but I think it has its merits and rationale.
When I pick a new topic, I tend to get obsessed about it and try to learn until I get the full picture and have it somehow generally handled.
Sometimes this makes me an annoying company for people around me. When I get into something new, I live and breathe that topic, so it may very well be the only thing I talk about even at the dinner table for a month (I’m not exactly fun to be around during that time).
However, this approach also brings incredible benefits, because when you get obsessed with one thing, you get tremendous momentum with it and it shortens the learning period.
In any new skill, you want to get over the beginning of the curve as quickly as you can, because that’s the stage where the field still seems too broad, very confusing and you don’t know where to find the right information or guidance.
But once the fog dissipates, you advance much faster.
Let’s say that you want to learn about gardening: there’s a benefit in committing 100% to this endeavor, without letting other notions come in during that time, or allowing your brain to stray with other hobbies, distractions, different commitments etc.
I’m not encouraging you to neglect your life and kids here, but just know that getting obsessed over a topic — for a given period of time — can make you learn very fast what other people struggle to grasp in months and years.
There was a time when I was bed ridden after a surgery and I created an automated online business from scratch, having zero notions of online marketing, in only two weeks.
Although the business didn’t turn particularly profitable, in only two weeks I had gone through the entire process of building everything by myself, from landing pages, email sequences, backhand integrations, webinars, payment integrations, digital products and even writing strings of code, all by watching free tutorials and reading blogs.
However, I got obsessed day and night for two weeks, working nonstop, fixing endless problems until the whole thing was up and running. Even though I eventually shut it down, I got an incredible end-to-end experience and full picture understanding about putting together the pieces of an online business, that I retain to this day.
Friends who had marketing roles in big companies were impressed at what I’d done and I also realized that many… didn’t know better!
So I learned that, if you obsess over something, you can indeed learn in weeks what average people around you take years to learn.
#6 GET A BUNCH OF BOOKS AND SKIM THROUGH
Another thing I’ve done since my teenage years when I got obsessed with something, was to order something like 10 books from Amazon all at once.
Everyone around me thought I was a little crazy or exaggerating. But the truth is, you don’t need to read them all.
At the beginning, what you fundamentally need, is to build a big picture understanding so that you can navigate the whole field: later you will dive deeper into niches and hidden corners.
Out of 10 books you buy and rapidly skim, you’ll soon realize that probably 3 are pure garbage or contain no more than two useful insights. Perhaps 2 are outstanding and worth reading every word (and re-reading) and the other 5 probably somewhat average and will tend to repeat the same notions, with a little tweak here and there.
You can skim through most of them and see where the similarities are, until you’re clear about what the cornerstones and the foundational ideas in the field are. Also, you’ll quickly notice that there are few different schools of thought and approaches, and choose the ones you resonate with the most. By doing this, you’re building a big picture understanding which is the foundation for everything you’ll do after.
#7 HAVE A CLEAR VISION FOR YOUR SKILL
The only way you can stay motivated for a long time through all the inevitable frustrations and setbacks is to have a clear and compelling vision for your future.
So, when you’re trying to learn a new skill or ability, you need to be very clear about how that is going to play into your future vision and why it’s essential to it.
For example, are you learning Chinese just as a hobby or are you learning Chinese because that’s necessary for you to take up a job opportunity which will allow you to move to China?
You see, that’s a completely different ballgame and the levels of frustration and failures you can withstand when you’re pulled by an exciting vision are much, much greater.
A year ago I started playing tennis, so I hired a coach. My primary motivation was to have fun occasionally with friends on weekends when I didn’t travel, so I wanted to learn the basic skills which would allow me to enjoy a game here and there.
Unfortunately, as I started practicing, I had the rude awakening that building the skills necessary to even enjoy a friendly game can take very long. And it requires training different aspects of your game independently: getting consistent on your forehand, on the backhand, getting the serve in etc.
It became obvious that it would take a disproportionate amount of my time to just get acceptably good at it, before I could reap any rewards. And the rewards in my case were just a few friendly games here and there. Not surprisingly, I gave up after experiencing a lot of frustration and almost no fun.
Then during my trip back to Italy, I met my cousin who’d also picked up the hobby, but much more successfully. He was able to bust through the frustration and enjoyed the game a lot. He had also signed up for a tournament at the local tennis club, for which he had been practicing a lot.
He even ended up winning that tournament and he’s super passionate about his hobby now. He also admitted experiencing frustration during the process, but the key difference is how much more invested he was in the final outcome.
The moment he chose to play a tournament he set a completely different vision for himself, compared to my desire to play with a neighbor on alternate Sundays. And that vision greatly contributed to pulling him through the grind of learning.
#8 RE-DO THE PROGRAM
Very few people do this and I’m no exception. When you take a course or a program that you value a lot and find great, give it a second go.
Even when you follow it to a tee the first time, there might be subtleties you’ve overlooked or things that over time don’t stick with you.
By doing the program a second time not only you solidify the learning, but you may be able to appreciate nuances and details you hadn’t caught at first. As small as these are, they can make a huge difference especially when you get to higher levels of expertise, where the difference is often made by small margins.
#9 IT’S MOSTLY ABOUT EMOTIONAL LABOR
Since we have established that learning equals behavioral change, this change rarely comes without a dose of emotional labor.
A good training program or new endeavor has to make you uncomfortable to an extent. You can’t expect to just put in the hours and check the boxes without experiencing any level of emotional discomfort.
A substantial change in any of your skills and capabilities, also comes with a change in confidence and ultimately identity. Your psyche is a strongly interconnected and complex mechanism, so you can’t expect to change one thing without affecting the whole eco-system.
If you’re serious about learning something — although it may seem like just a change in skills at first — it always ends up constituting a much deeper change in your being. And that’s usually threatening for the ego.
So again, if you’re really serious about learning and making that change in yourself, welcome that little (or big) discomfort and be aware that a good chunk of the labor is really the emotional one.
Follow Riccardo Caselli at Zen At Wall Street.
