How to Learn Quickly: 10 Proven Ways to Master Any Skill

Ten practical ways to master any skill can help you learn quickly, improve personal growth, and stand out without spending all your time burying your books.

Core points

• Energy management is better than time management:Prefer priority to managing energy and optimize learning efficiency. Avoid staying up late and lose energy and focus on energetic learning periods.
• Sleep helps learning: Effectively use sleep to consolidate memory and improve creativity, and avoid learning arrangements that affect sleep quality.
• Concentration skills: Use the tomato working method to create a focused, non-interference learning range to improve memory and productivity.
• Active memory: Actively recall during the learning process, enhance long-term memory and understanding, and surpass passive notes.
• Interval repetition: Use the interval repetition method to fight the forgetting curve to enhance long-term memory of the learning content.
• Fehmann Learning Method: Decompose complex information into simple explanations, like teaching children, deepening understanding and memory.

Key skills for quick learning

What would you think if I said there was a skill that could benefit anyone, anywhere, and at any time? No matter what career path you choose, can you accelerate your progress without being affected by technological changes?

Does it sound too good to be true? Well, that's the point: In a world where changes are faster than ever, you need to adapt quickly and continuously. This requires the willingness to change and the ability to learn. Learning quickly – and becoming a lifelong learner – should be your new superpower. You can’t stop the world from changing, but with this adaptability, you’ll be the first to embrace change and use it for your own benefit—and you’ll also surprise potential employers.

The meaning of rapid learning

When we think of fast learners, we may think of the few who seemed to complete the course easily in school and college days. Or we'll think of those memory champions who have some unique ability to remember the first six digits of Pi (3.14159 by the way) and even remember 65,536 digits. Sixty-five,536 people! What an impressive feat. These people must be very special. Or they have to practice every day.

However, this is the thing: you can learn this skill, too. This is not a superpower, nor is it reserved for a few talented people, nor is it something that can only be achieved through drugs and supplements. Good news, right?

Being a fast learner simply depends on understanding how your brain (and body!) works and how to adjust your learning activities accordingly. Everyone can do it. This is a skill. The method is as follows.

Manage energy, not time

Don't bother managing time. Manage your energy. First of all: It doesn’t matter how much time you spend studying.

I said it. Staying up late before the exam, taking a 12-hour YouTube study live broadcast, or staring at a book for a long time after midnight is not only unnecessary, but it will also actively disrupt your progress.

Of course, you need to invest your time in learning a new skill. But more importantly, you need to put your energy into it.

View energy as the most important resource in the learning process. Your brain’s ability to master new concepts or come up with new ideas depends not so much on the time you spend taking notes, but on the mental state and the energy you are using when you do so.

And energy is a limited resource. Imagine your energy level is similar to your bank account. You have a certain amount there (hopefully) and maybe some withdrawal amounts that are beyond that amount. But there is always some time when you have to charge it or you will be exhausted.

Let's take a closer look.

1. Stop destroying your own success

If you belong to 20% of American students who often stay up late during the semester, you should know that science does not highly evaluate this strategy for increasing output. On the contrary, lack of sleep is associated with poor overall performance and may hinder your long-term memory formation.

So while staying up late can be a great story, they don't help you much when it comes to learning effectively (and sustainably).

More importantly, because we are used to measuring our learning efforts with time, we start to use these crazy long learning times as the benchmark we have to reach again, and whenever we don't meet these benchmarks, we Will feel disappointed and frustrated.

Rather than measuring the amount of study time, we should prioritize quality. Put in a few hours of high energy work every day and you will be far more than your previous night shift zombie self.

2. How to truly learn in sleep

I have some bad news to tell you: If you want to passively learn something in your sleep by playing lectures in the background, that won't work. This method of improving learning efficiency has failed scientific testing.

However, the good news is that you can really learn in your sleep. It's just that the way it works is slightly different. The so-called slow-wave sleep or non-rapid eye movement sleep cycle helps your brain convert short-term input into long-term memory. More importantly, this process helps your brain find patterns and connect with existing ideas, thereby improving your creative problem-solving abilities. But this is not over. Sleep can also help you reset your brain's ability to absorb new information. So next time you feel like your brain is stuffed and you can no longer practice, consider taking a break, taking a nap or having a good night’s sleep.

So while you can't use your sleep time to enter more information into your brain, a good night's sleep is crucial to sort out what you've learned during the day and to make sure you keep it for a long time.

If you have trouble with this, here are some ideas for getting more sleep:

• Do not consume caffeine after 2 pm. While the effects of caffeine appear almost immediately after drinking, it will stay in your body for hours. After six hours of intake, half of the caffeine will still remain and affect your sleep.
• Develop routines for night and morning. The night routine signals your body that it's time to shut down. And the proper morning routine prepares you for success and ensures that you don't indulge in meaningless browsing for the first hour after waking up (no, checking your social media in a specific order doesn't count as Morning routine).
• Avoid highly stimulating activities before bedtime. Help your body (and brain) enter night mode and don't increase energy levels before bedtime. Things to avoid include intense exercise, energetic music, greasy food, exciting reading or overly stressful TV shows.
• Improve your sleeping environment. While many factors can affect a good night's sleep and not everyone can splurge on buying the latest mattress, there are many measures you can easily implement to get a good sleep. Most importantly, there is a dark room with no or only minimal light sources. If necessary, invest in some blackout curtains (there are many very affordable options). Ideally, keep your phone outside the bedroom.

Improve your concentration

Once your energy level improves and stabilizes, and you have a good sleep, it's time to turn your attention to…your attention.

In this case, "focus" refers to your ability to actually sit down and learn a topic. This is the skill that stops you from cleaning your room for the third time this week instead of dealing with new chapters in the book.

No matter how much energy you have, it won't be of use if you can't use it for your study project.

3. You need a Pomodoro

A Pomodoro will actually help you learn skills. The so-called tomato work method (pomodoro means "tomato" in Italian) is named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer used by its inventor.

Using timers also happens to be a very effective way to improve learning efficiency.

It works as follows:

• Set the timer to 25 minutes. (It doesn't have to be tomato-shaped, but this will be cool.)
• Study. Don't interrupt your study time because of anything. Only 25 minutes. Almost anything can be done until you finish it.
• Stop immediately after the timer rings. This trains your brain to have a clear boundary between the expected learning time and rest time and makes it more likely to really focus within 25 minutes.
• Five minutes of quick rest. Avoid overstimulating activities (so ideally, don't start browsing social media). Instead, stretch your body and watch your breathing, or clean up the sixteen coffee cups that somehow piled up on your table.
• Repeat two to three times before taking longer breaks.

Why does it work?

Multitasking is a myth. Your brain is not designed to do two things at the same time. Instead, it switches quickly between tasks. Each switch consumes brain power bandwidth. The loss caused by context switching is much greater than we thought. It doesn’t take just two minutes to reply to text messages quickly during study. Research shows that it can take up to 25 minutes to return to concentration.

However, when we decide to learn the next two hours, it is difficult to constantly resist distractions. Instead, it's easy to pick up your phone to "Quickly View My Message" or reply to that semi-emergency email you know exists in your inbox.

So instead of hoping you can manage to stay focused for two hours under countless possible disturbances, create smaller, more intense study time and learn to clearly distinguish between study time and rest time.

4. Use the five-minute rule to overcome procrastination

There are many potential causes of procrastination. A task may be considered too difficult or too loose. Or it might just bore you. But whatever the reason, our inner resistance is usually the strongest before we start a task.

This is where the five-minute rule comes in. It's a simple trick to make you believe in yourself and it will work even if you know you're about to cheat on yourself.

The next time you feel procrastination comes, make an agreement with yourself and work on the task for only five minutes. After these five minutes, you can stop and do other things. However, it’s very likely that you will continue with the task at hand because you’ve overcome the first hurdle and gain some motivation.

It also works perfectly with the tomato working method. The Pomodoro Work Method is designed to reduce disturbances during work, while the five-minute rule is the starter for each individual working time.

5. Pay attention to your environment

Anyone who has read James Clear's Atomic Habits will realize how much your environment affects your subconscious behavior. This is also applicable to your learning process and habit formation. You should design your environment to support your learning efforts, not to confront it. Here are some guiding ideas:

• Put your phone in a different room and make it difficult to access YouTube or social media. Recent research has shown that perceived efforts of a task may be related to estimated opportunity costs. Unfortunately, social media, video games, or just YouTube videos are all designed for our brains and are very, very attractive – so the opportunity cost is high. Help your brain to eliminate these alternatives to reduce the effort of another study time.
• Set up a simple routine at the beginning of each study time. It can be as simple as pouring a cup of tea and playing some learning music. More importantly, you send a signal to your brain: Now is the time to learn. You can even plan your entire week of study time.
• The same advice is to separate your study space from your leisure space. A dedicated room is the best, but if this luxury is not an option, then just reserve a place for learning. If everything in your room has to serve multiple purposes, it is a good habit to remove all study materials after you finish your day's work and put them back only when the next Pomodoro work time expires.
• Finally, organizing your room and cleaning your desk is a great way to reduce overload of information related to disordered spaces. The same goes for your digital space. No, dumping all files on your desktop and relying on Apple's Finder to find documents is not a good way to personal knowledge management.

Learn how your brain works

With our newly acquired laser-like concentration and still high enough energy levels, let's take a closer look at what science says about acquiring new skills.

6. What mistakes do most people make in their studies

When we are in school, we adopt a simple learning method. We listen to the teacher’s lectures, take notes, maybe read books... and then take more notes. When the exam time comes, we start to reread the notes until we feel confident enough about the subject.

This approach is seriously flawed and does not really adjust to the way our brain processes information and learns new skills.

First of all, we did not practice the new skills we actually wanted to master. You will most likely not be tested to "take notes and reread them later". You have to pass multiple choice exams or write a paper at school. After that, you might want to create a website, learn a foreign language or master new songs on your guitar. In each case, the most effective way to learn something is to practice the actual new skills you want to master.

This so-called active practice is important because it is difficult for our brain to transfer knowledge and skills from one area to another. So if you want to make your brain a little easier, do the real thing and design your exercises based on the results you want – not the default path you learned in school.

Second, perhaps more importantly, rereading notes is a bad idea, and there is another reason. When we try to put an idea into our minds, our brains don’t actually gain knowledge. We learn by trying to get something from there.

Research shows that rereading notes is a very low-value learning activity. In this study, students were divided into four groups and treated the exact same content according to the following rules:

• The first group is allowed to read the material once
• The second group was allowed to read the material four times
• The third group was asked to create a mind map after reading the material once
• The fourth group tried to recall the content of the material after reading it once

The fourth group scored far more than all other groups. Trying to remember what you read is more effective than rereading it three times.

Therefore, the key to learning faster and improving long-term memory is to constantly test your mastery of new knowledge. Rereading is far less helpful for your brain cells than actively trying to answer questions about the topic. This self-testing strategy is called active memory (or active practice), and when it comes to learning, it will become your new best friend.

7. Repeating intervals will make you a memory master

If you have ever tried to recall some of the more advanced courses in a school or college career that you haven't reviewed in a long time, you may have experienced the Ebbinghaus Forgotten Curve.

In short, you inevitably forget things over time. On the plus side, you can greatly improve your long-term memory with some strategic repetitions.

The key is to spread the learning time, rather than putting all the practice time together. Study three times a week, one hour each time, for four consecutive weeks, is more effective than studying the same number of hours a day. This is called distributed exercises, also known as interval repetition.

If you want to implement interval repetitions during your study time, you can choose a variety of options based on the level of complexity and customizability you want:

• Anki is the most popular open source tool for creating flashcards with built-in interval repeatability. This is a great tool for beginners.
• RemNote is a more advanced mix between the Notes and Space Repeat Tools. It has a higher learning curve, but has great potential.
• Notion is an all-in-one office space application that provides maximum flexibility, although building a system with this tool from scratch can be daunting. Using prebuilt templates can be a good choice.

8. What knowledge can Lego teach you about learning?

When buying Lego, you can get a building block set with specific instructions and large special parts, or you can simply get a large bucket of small colored building blocks. The latter option means you will spend more time building things out of this even pile of blocks.

Your brain works similarly. It's not too good at handling multiple things at the same time. If I let you remember the letter A A B D G N P S U until the end of this article, it may be difficult for you to focus on the text. This is just some letters, but it is about to cause information overload in your brain.

If I told you to remember the acronyms NBA, USA and GDP (which happens to have exactly the same letters), the situation would be very different.

This is because your brain can use a method called "blocking" to combine unorganized fragments into larger units, which helps you remember information more easily. That's why you have a hard time learning basic math operations in the first grade of elementary school, but these operations are more or less automatically as you continue to learn more complex topics. Your brain has created blocks of knowledge around these operations and has more resources available to solve advanced problems.

Use this to use your own strengths and find ways to put together new pieces of information. This is especially important when you are facing a new concept, as you are unlikely to have an existing knowledge structure.

So, next time you learn key points in a new field, or just start learning some new material, don't just create arbitrary lists. Instead, the goal is to organize information based on meaning, connection, and any informal standards.

Use the correct learning skills

Finally, let's take a closer look at two very useful and effective learning strategies.

9. Explain from the perspective of a five-year-old child: Feynman's learning method

Nothing can improve your learning efficiency better than developing the habit of explaining your newly acquired knowledge to others.

Feiman's learning method is named after the famous physicist Richard Feynman, and it is all about breaking down an idea or concept into its components and explaining it as simply as possible in your own words it.

To get into the right mindset, imagine you are explaining this new concept to a child.

First, take a blank piece of paper and write down everything you know about this concept. List the key points in a way that makes sense to you. Do not use any primary sources to do this. Rely on your current level of understanding.

Only when you are stuck somewhere, go back to the original source to fill the gap. This way, you can make sure you really know what you don't know - this step is usually harder than finding the right answer.

When finished, browse and explain again and check the friction point. Is there a coherent structure? Where do you rely on assumptions that you don't fully understand? Where are you hiding behind the complexity without really grasping the key points?

Finally, simplify your explanation as much as possible. Where did you use technical terms that would prevent outsiders (or children) from understanding? Is there a metaphor or example that you can introduce to simplify things?

As you can see, this is not a strategy for any type of new information. This is a long process that should be retained at the key points of the new theme. But apply it to complex problems and see how new concepts can quickly become more intuitive.

10. How to learn complex topics faster through practice

There are many specific skills required to create a great website. You need to understand the layout and design; understand the user needs and how they browse your website; of course, you may also need to know how to write some code. You need to be able to combine many different skills to get the desired results.

The problem with such complex topics is the lack of clear feedback when performing tasks.

Feedback is crucial for any learning effort. It's very simple in theory: you compare your actual results with your ideal results. But good feedback is difficult to obtain. Usually, your final result will be rated or evaluated. How is the website actually performing? Has it achieved the customer's goals?

But this means you always judge the sum of various factors and cannot easily pinpoint where your greatest weakness lies—and therefore where your greatest growth potential lies. Higher-level feedback will inevitably ignore some details. It's noisy because it mixes several skill subsets.

This problem can be solved through practice.

Exercises are breaking down a large task into smaller, more independent components and practicing them individually. Create many different website designs and judge them only based on their aesthetics. Focus on user journeys and ignore all other factors. Try writing as concise and elegant as possible for a given random design.

This not only improves the relevance of feedback, but it also helps you improve your skills without investing in the amount of time it takes to complete the task. You will also improve your skills faster because you can identify your greatest weaknesses, thereby improving the marginal utility of your study time.

How to Become a Quick Learner (in short)

Finally, let's review the lessons we've shared in this article:

1. Manage your energy. Implement a healthy lifestyle (exercise regularly and pay attention to nutrition). Never sacrifice good sleep just to squeeze more time.
2. Concentrate, focus, focus. Use the Pomodoro work method to reduce distractions and overcome procrastination using the five-minute rule. You can also prepare for your success by designing your environment to help you rather than hindering you.
3. Your brain knows how to learn. Don't fight it. Make active and direct practice the backbone of your study time. Use spatial repetition and blocking to achieve long-term memory easily, just like playing with Lego blocks.
4. Use research-based learning skills. From the teacher's perspective, become a better student. And eliminate your weaknesses by delving deep into the exercises.

If you are interested in learning more, please check out this collection of articles on effective learning. If you are ready to start your own learning journey and become a developer, don't miss our hyper-learning system designed specifically based on these principles.

Frequently Asked Questions about Quick Learning (FAQ)

What are the effective quick learning strategies?

There are several strategies to help you learn quickly. First, breaking complex information into smaller, more manageable blocks can be easier to understand and remember. Second, using memory tips or memory aids can also be beneficial. For example, you can remember information using acronyms, visual images, or rhymes. Third, active learning, including actively participating in materials, such as taking notes or teaching others, can also enhance learning results. Finally, regular reviews and practices can help consolidate your learning and improve your long-term memory.

How to improve memory to learn better?

Improving memory can significantly enhance your learning ability. Some effective strategies include regular physical exercise, which has been shown to enhance memory and cognitive function; obtain adequate sleep, as sleep is essential for memory consolidation; and consume a healthy diet rich in fruits, vegetables and omega-3 fatty acids. , These are good for brain health; and control stress, because chronic stress can damage memory. In addition, brain training exercises, such as puzzle games and memory games, can also help improve your memory.

How to stay motivated during the learning process?

Staying motivated during the learning process can be challenging, especially when the materials are difficult or progress is slow. But setting clear, achievable goals; focusing on the progress you have made, not how far you have to go; rewarding your efforts; and maintaining a positive mindset can all help you get motivated. Additionally, finding ways to make learning fun, such as turning it into a game or engaging it into a hobby can also help you stay motivated.

How to overcome learning disabilities?

Overcoming learning disabilities often requires a combination of persistence, flexibility and creativity. If you are struggling to learn a specific concept or skill, don't be afraid to seek help, whether it's from a teacher, a tutor, or online resources. Try different learning strategies and see what works best for you. Remember, it’s OK to make mistakes – they are an important part of the learning process.

How to apply the knowledge I have learned to real life?

Applying what you have learned into real life can help consolidate your learning and make it more meaningful. Find opportunities to use your new knowledge or skills in your daily life. For example, if you learn a foreign language, try to talk to a native speaker. If you learn a new programming skill, try to build a small project with it. The more you use what you learn, the more you will understand it and the more likely you will remember it.

How to learn more effectively in a group environment?

Learning in a group environment can be very effective because it allows for collaboration, discussion and peer feedback. To make the most of your group learning, actively participate in discussions, listen to other people’s opinions, ask questions, and share your own thoughts. In addition, participating in group projects can provide valuable experience in teamwork and problem solving.

How to effectively manage learning time?

Effective time management is essential for learning. Some strategies include setting specific learning times, breaking your learning time into easy-to-manage chunks, taking regular breaks to avoid burnout, prioritizing your tasks, and eliminating distractions. Additionally, using tools like planners, calendars, and to-do lists can help you stay organized and go according to plan.

How to stay focused during the learning process?

Staying focused during the learning process can be challenging, especially in the presence of many potential distractions. But creating a quiet, comfortable learning environment; turning off unnecessary electronics; taking regular breaks; and practicing mindfulness or meditation can all help you improve your concentration. In addition, staying hydrated and eating healthy snacks can also help you keep your focus.

How to develop learning into a habit?

To develop learning habits can greatly improve your learning efficiency. First, set aside certain time every day for study and stick to it. Make learning a priority and incorporate it into your daily life. Additionally, setting clear, achievable goals and tracking your progress can help you stay motivated and learn to develop habits.

How to measure my learning progress?

Measuring your learning progress can help you stay motivated and identify areas that need improvement. Some ways to measure progress include taking regular quizzes or exams, tracking your grades or scores, reflecting on what you learned and how you improved, and seeking feedback from teachers or peers. Remember that progress can sometimes be slow, but every step forward is a step towards your learning goals.

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