The Simplest And Cheapest Habit You Can Do Right Now to Speed Up Your Learning
I've been dipping my foot into web development for the past 3 weeks.
It’s been a while since I felt like a complete idiot.
If you ever tried to learn a new programming language, you know you can’t expect to watch 7 hours straight of YouTube videos and code the next Instagram from memory.
Still… I didn’t think it was going to be this hard.
I was obsessed with trying to learn this as fast as possible. I ended up forgetting the golden rule of learning… That you have to take breaks!
Stop learning to learn faster
It’s easy to get knee-deep into coding. Especially when things don’t want to work.
You get frustrated. You want to to fix it. And you don’t want to wait until tomorrow.
But looking back at these 3 weeks, I admit most of my progress didn’t come from practicing. It came from taking breaks. It was during these breaks that concepts finally “clicked” in my head.
It was only then I was able to move on to the next topic.
Whenever you take a break from what you're trying to learn, you're giving your brain a chance to process information. The act of processing information moves stuff from short-term memory into long-term memory. This means the concepts you’re learning get internalized. You don’t need to memorize something.
Now you understand it.
But this only happens when you're not in deep focus. It happens when you’re walking to work. Doing groceries. Washing the dishes.
And when you move information into long-term memory, it gives your brain space to learn even more.
It’s probably why I don't remember 90% of what I learned in college. I tried to jam too much information into my brain in a short period just to pass a test. I didn't give my brain a chance to process and learn. I guess I wasn’t interested in that.
You can’t learn fast if you don’t take breaks.
Breaks are not the only thing you can do to speed up your learning
Taking breaks from learning something is just the first step to accumulating knowledge.
But it’s not enough. The amount of information we need to deal nowadays asks for more than just remembering things.
That’s why to take your learning to the next level, you need to build your current knowledge on top of old knowledge.
For example, you might know that eating cake makes you happy because it releases a lot of dopamine. But if you don’t know what dopamine is, you’ll never understand why too much of it is bad for you.
This is why it’s important to not just stick new information into long-term memory. You also have to connect it to what you already know. This helps you expand your mental models even further.
If you want to speed up your learning even more, connect what you just learned with a block of knowledge you already have.
Combine this with permanent notes, and you’ll learn (really) fast.
If you want to combine both above, start writing permanent notes
It’s easy to think you’re learning when it’s all in your head.
It happens to me all the time. I think I have this amazing understanding of something.
Then I go try to do something about it, I realize it’s full of gaps.
This is why I love permanent notes.
Permanent notes are notes you write with your thoughts. The only thing that goes in there is your thinking. And the best thing is that they each build on top of each other.
So if you don’t take permanent notes, I suggest you start now.
It’s really simple.
You take a piece of knowledge that you can’t get out of your head.
You write it down in your own words.
You write the next permanent note that links to that first note
Repeat until you have a web of notes.
Each note will act as a building block for the next one. And from what I wrote above, this is a great way to learn a lot faster than just trying to understand isolated pieces of information.
Summary
You don’t need to be the smartest person in your Country to learn faster.
You just need to become smarter about it.
To learn faster:
Take breaks
Link new knowledge with older knowledge
What’s your hack for learning quicker?