Become a Learning Ninja

Learning How to Learn

Thinking focused and diffuse.

Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.

The ability to take responsibility for your growth — self-directed learning is a superpower in the age of knowledge abundance.

Ordinary folks want to be entertained. Extraordinary people want education and knowledge. The world’s most successful people are known to read at least one book per week. They are always learning.

Understanding how our brains work can help you learn more efficiently and significantly reduce frustration. Neurological research indicates that we have two distinct fundamental modes of thinking and can only operate in one at a time. Both are needed to help us learn and assimilate information differently.

First, the ‘focused mode’ is used when intently and directly concentrating on something you’re attempting to learn or understand. The ‘diffuse mode’ allows for more creative thinking and broad-range perspectives. This more free-flowing and creative mode is related to the brain’s neural resting states.

The diffuse mode of thinking is best applied when the problem you’re working on requires new ideas or approaches or concepts you haven’t even thought of before.

The diffuse mode is related to creativity and originality. Here is a quote from Monty Python member John Cleese that describes the diffuse mode approach:

“This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If you just keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later, you will get a reward from your unconscious.”

In the absence of actually having thought a particular thought before, you can’t know how the neural pattern associated with the target thought ‘feels’, or which neural connections give rise to it (and indeed where these connections need to occur in the brain). So, the interesting philosophical question is — how can we develop a novel thought in the first place?

To sharpen our understanding of these two fundamental modes, we’re going to draw a pictorial analogy between the neural framework of the brain and a pinball machine. Incidentally, both metaphor and analogy are powerful learning tools.

Jose Ortega y Gasset said:

The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of humanity. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation, which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

The focused mode of thinking can be visualized as a densely packed array of pinball machine bumpers, making it difficult for a specific thought (the pinball in this analogy) to travel around and explore different regions. Similarly, the diffuse mode has far more expansive spaces between bumpers, facilitating new neural connections and thought patterns.

The more relaxed diffuse mode offers a valuable big picture perspective. Indeed, you can’t focus as intensely to finalize problem-solving or understand the finer aspects of a concept — yet the diffuse mode enables you to get to the initial place you need to be to go about finding a solution.

When learning something new, especially something difficult, your mind needs to smoothly transition back and forth between the two fundamental learning modes to assimilate the desired material best. So, let’s drop in one more analogy to conclude this section. The most effective way to build neural structures, and thus knowledge, is to do a little work each day over an extended period instead of resorting to frenzied last-minute cramming.

In the same way, muscles can only be developed little by little through sustained commitment over a prolonged period. Neural structures also must be built up steadily over time to ensure robust and reliable foundations of knowledge.

The care and feeding of our brain is critical to acquiring and retaining knowledge.

The path to success is the continuous pursuit of knowledge.

Success is the product of accumulative advantage. When it comes to personal development “sudden” is the result of a lot of “gradual.”

Staying on the path and making incremental progress requires combating procrastination.

The best thing a person can do is help another person learn more.

The brain is an energy hog. Our brains consume around ten times more energy by weight than the rest of the body.

Computers can outperform us in analytical areas such as chess or mathematics. However, many bodily processes, like our senses, are incredibly complex and still beyond the capability of the world’s most powerful computers.

Despite the power and capabilities of the human brain, we do not understand how it works very well.

Neuroscientists use brain imaging techniques to study the brain and its activity. Neuroscience is also of great importance to psychology, given the influence of the unconscious mind on our motivations, thought processes, memory, and emotions. For example, such imaging has ascertained that correlated brain regions are most active when the subject is resting. Conversely, others regions ‘switch off’ in the resting state are most active when the subject is interacting with the world.

A synapse is a single connection between neurons and can be imaged. Indeed, memories are stored in the mass, on the order of 10¹⁴, of synapses in the brain. Brain research has established that the brain is plastic and can change. Brain connectivity is dynamic and continues to be so even after it matures. There is a continual turnover of synapses forming and disappearing in an ever-changing neural environment. It begs the question, which we will discuss later, how do memories remain stable over the years?

Here’s an interesting thought: you’re technically not the same person you were after a night’s sleep or even a nap due to this upgrading process of the brain through the formation of new synapses. Later, we will discuss how to take advantage of sleep and your unconscious mind, priming yourself to assimilate information and solve problems more efficiently.

The path to success is the continuous pursuit of knowledge.

Success is the product of accumulative advantage.

The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain Is Different and How to Understand Yours

How Your Brain Fills in the Blanks with Experience

Our neurocircuitry is shaped by a lifetime of learning.

Our brains are molded by our experiences so that we can fit into different situations—even the decidedly suboptimal ones.

This flexibility is one of the most human things about our brains. In fact, according to some contemporary views of human evolution, our ancestors underwent a “cognitive revolution” precisely because they were forced to adapt. For example, based on evidence suggesting that the size of our ancestors’ brains increased following periods of extreme weather instability, one popular explanation for our remarkable flexibility is that the hominids who could not adapt to environmental changes didn’t survive. In other words, the brains of modern humans were selected for their ability to learn and adapt to changing environments.

But one of the major costs of this remarkable flexibility is that humans are born without any significant preconceived notions about how things work. How people remember a story reflects differences in how they experienced the actual event. The scientific explanation for this boils down to differences in perspective.

One of the fundamental ways your experiences shape your brain is through a process called Hebbian learning. In essence, Hebbian learning is the biological mechanism that allows your brain to keep a running set of statistics about how frequently things occur in your environment. Your brain has a way of “counting” the frequency of occurrences of different types of events and using this system to figure out what’s most likely to be happening, given the incomplete information it receives.

The work happens in the connections between neurons. Timing is essential for organizing such communication. As it turns out, it’s also vital for learning. When two neurons in close proximity become excited at approximately the same time, the connections between them will strengthen, increasing the likelihood that the message of one will be picked up by the other. Though the actual principles of Hebbian learning are a bit more nuanced than this, I always remembered the catchy slogan I first learned as an undergrad: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” And the more often this happens, the stronger the connection between the two neurons will grow. This process is your brain’s way of connecting the dots. It assumes that if events A and B virtually always coincide, they are part of the same “neural event.” Once this happens, even if your brain only gets evidence that A is going on in the outside world, it is likely to assume that B occurred as well and will create that experience for you.

I want to be specific about what “counts” as an experience when it comes to developing your perspective. Put simply, you learn from all your neural experiences. From your brain’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether the signals passing through it originate from something you’ve seen in the outer world, a daydream fantasy, or a deliberate attempt to imagine your potential future. Instead, each corresponding electrical storm shapes the landscape of your brain’s database.

One experience that almost all human beings share, which is known to have a pervasive influence on your mind and brain, is the language or languages we speak. This is because language is so central to the way we think, feel, and behave that we spend most of our waking hours using it.

If you do not know more than one language, or if your second language knowledge is limited or acquired later in life, your brain is more narrowly tuned to your first language than if you have more diverse language experiences. One benefit of this is that your brain is likely better prepared to use that single language than the brain of someone who learned more than one language would be. Roughly speaking, the reason for this is that people who speak multiple languages have more options to consider when using their statistics to comprehend or produce one language. They need to resolve competition between them before using any specific language. This means that it takes them a fraction of a second longer to access any piece of linguistic information they need to use, even in their most proficient language.

But there are also benefits to being broadly exposed to different types of statistics. For example, not only do people with exposure to multiple languages have a richer set of behaviors to choose from, they are also likely to consider more information when deciding how to behave. But the cost of considering diverse ways of responding “in the wild” can certainly add up. In short, having a brain that is more widely exposed may slow down processing in any particular environment or context. Still, it also allows a person to be prepared for a larger number of situations.

Most of us understand that it’s much easier to learn languages when we are children than to pick one up as an adult. This raises the question: How much learning happens in the earlier years of life, and how much can we adapt to later? The short answer is that there are different windows of adaptation in different parts of the brain. To simplify, we can sort brain regions into three types based on how much, and for how long, they are open to experience. The first type, made up almost entirely of the parts of the brain that regulate the functions that keep you alive, are experience-independent. These parts of the brain regulate your critical functions like breathing, heart rate, and body temperature, which do not vary much across different environments.

Next, we have the experience-expectant regions. These are the parts of the brain that learn to interpret specific types of information about the world “out there,” because they are hard-wired to receive information from our senses. The fact that we have to learn to recognize the things we see, hear, and smell allows human babies to develop expertise in the environments they were born into.

However, many experience-expectant regions also have “critical periods” for receiving input. At the beginning of life, they are waiting for data and are incredibly malleable. But as you age and these areas amass information about the world around them, they become more and more entrenched in processing the kind of things you expect to see and are less influenced by new experiences in the outside world.

Fortunately, some parts of our brain remain malleable over much of our life span. These are the experience-dependent parts of the brain. Among them are most of our cortical “association” areas, including those that allow us to acquire new vocabulary words throughout our life. One of the most critical experience-dependent regions is the frontal lobe, which supports much of the flexible behavior that characterizes human adaptability. The basal ganglia nuclei are also experience-dependent. They are arguably among the most adaptable brain regions because they are rich in dopamine communication signals that increase neural plasticity. This is critical for shaping your brain’s decision-making processes.

Unfortunately, these experience-dependent regions can also lead us down some blind alleys: For example, they shape our implicit biases around race, age, gender, and sexual orientation—to name a few. Even though these biases involve how we learn to associate higher-level concepts that coincide, or in the same context, with one another, they can still influence our early perceptual understanding of the world in disturbing ways.

To correct the shortcuts in our brains, we can expose ourselves to diverse, real-world experiences and allow narratives told from different points of view to shape us. Moreover, if we can become more intentional about what kinds of experiences we feed our brains, we can help shape how our future selves adapt to the world.

"Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."

Mark Twain

Twain is hilarious, and I think that quote perfectly captures the essence of procrastination. When you think about doing something you'd rather not, the areas of your brain associated with pain are activated. Your brain naturally tries to shut off this negative stimulation by redirecting your attention towards other, more pleasant things. This pain response is the insidious driving force behind procrastination:

• You feel unease after observing or thinking about something you don't want to do.

• You try to counteract the negative sensation by shifting your attention.

• You feel happier because of this.

However, procrastination-based happiness is temporary. Research tells us that the 'neuro-discomfort' associated with something you'd rather not do starts to fade away not long after you start working on what you initially were averse to doing.

A popular productivity tool used to help counter procrastination is the Pomodoro Technique, developed in the late 1980s. The method involves using a timer to set an interval over which you concentrate on what you're working on without interruption, usually lasting 25 minutes. This time is a comfortable duration over which anyone can maintain focus.

Importantly, once the timer ends on a particular cycle, you give yourself a small reward in the form of a few minutes break to, for example: browse the web, take a walk, grab a coffee or snack, do some stretching. This technique effectively amounts to an intense, undistracted 25-minute mental workout, followed by a brief, five-minute respite period of mental relaxation.

You can then repeat this process as much as desired. It sounds like such a simple system because it is, and you'll be surprised by how powerful it can be in keeping you focused on what's most important. Next time you're struggling to force yourself to stay on task, try to complete a 25-minute Pomodoro instead. Hopefully, by then, you'll have gained some momentum and will impress yourself with how much you go on to achieve in that sitting.

The technique's name comes from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer the method's creator Francesco Cirillo uses. Any timer will do. Just make sure you commit to a strictly distraction-free burst of concentration.

Practice Makes Permanent

Practice is vital in learning.

We generally regard mathematics and the sciences as more conceptually challenging than other fields. This perceived complexity is related to the abstract nature of the ideas they encompass. For example, mathematical ideas tend to come without an analogous 'thing' or object based on reality. This abstract nature makes it difficult to anchor the concept to understand it better. For example, you might say that words such as 'love' and 'hope' are abstract, but at least linguistic concepts like this can be directly related to emotions we can feel.

These examples highlight the importance of practicing with the ideas and concepts you're learning, particularly more abstract areas, to enhance and strengthen the neural connections you're making throughout the learning process. However, even if the ideas are abstract, the neural thought patterns you're constructing are real and concrete.

Here is author Toni Morrison on how to get better at writing—or anything:

"I thought of myself as like the jazz musician: someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful. I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures."

Consider a thought pattern as a series of neurons, which have become linked together, and 'fire' together through repeated use. Equipped with this picture, we can visualize three separate stages of understanding:

1. When you're first beginning to understand something, the neural pattern is present but is weak.

2. You deepen the same neural pattern when you cover the material again or start a related problem.

3. Once you fully understand the problem or concept, the neural pattern becomes ingrained in your neural structure. In other words, practice makes permanent.

Here is Seth Godin on Creativity and practice, "Creativity is a choice, it's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else. There's a practice available to each of us—the practice of embracing the process of creation in service of better. The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output, because the practice is all we can control. The practice demands that we approach our process with commitment. It acknowledges that Creativity is not an event, it's simply what we do, whether or not we're in the mood."

Sculptor Elizabeth King said beautifully, "Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions." Learn to juggle. Draw an owl. Make things better without considering whether it will work this time. The practice will take you where you seek to go better than any other path you can follow. And while you're engaging in the practice, you'll honor your potential and the support and kindness of everyone who came before you."

Start by studying something with focus (the focused mode) when learning. Then take a break, allowing your brain's diffuse mode to operate in the background and assist in your conceptual understanding. In this way, the neural pathway has a chance to solidify, and you can avoid the chaotic knowledge base and poor foundations that are the result of cramming.

Because your results are all the result of your moment-to-moment decisions, you have tremendous potential to change your life by changing those choices. Your decisions will mold your actions step-by-step, day-by-day until they become habits, where practice will make them permanent.

Understanding Memory: Remembrance of Things Past

One way to model and understand memory is to split it into two major memory systems: long-term and working memory (also known as short-term memory). These two systems are related, as you'll often bring something from your long-term memory into your working memory to actively think about it, especially in tandem with other, perhaps newer, ideas.

Your long-term memory is akin to a vast storage warehouse distributed across the brain, with different long-term memories stored in various regions. As a result, long-term memory can store billions of items. Research shows that you need to revisit it at least a few times to increase the chance of storing and securing an item of information in your long-term memory. Practicing and reviewing information is critical because too many things can be stored here and start to bury or obscure one another.

On the other hand, your working memory is akin to a blackboard, necessitating repetition of what you're trying to work with so that it stays in place on the blackboard. You'll perhaps recognize this feeling from the times you've repeated a phone number to yourself until you get to write it down. We repeat information to help counteract dissipative processes that cause memories to fade or disappear. The locus of working memory is in the prefrontal cortex located at the very front of the brain, immediately behind the forehead. In addition, it has connections to other brain regions to access long-term memories.

We use the working memory system to hold a few distinct ideas in mind to understand a concept or solve a problem. It's the system involved in what you are immediately and consciously processing in your mind. However, the latest research suggests that our working memory can only hold about four information items or 'chunks.' Our tendency to group ideas and memories into so-called chunks makes our working memory feel more expansive than it actually is.

Long-term memory stores fundamental concepts and techniques involved in whatever you are learning about, whereas working memory is deployed when dealing with something new. Transitioning new information from your working memory to your long-term memory takes time and repeated practice. One way to assist this process is through a technique called spaced repetition.

Spaced repetition relies upon repeating something you want to retain in your long-term memory over several days. We now know that repeating something multiple times in one evening is significantly less effective than repeating that same something over several days. This phenomenon is another reason pulling all-nighters of cramming is ineffective. The spaced repetition technique allows the requisite neural and synaptic connections to form and strengthen, facilitating a solid knowledge structure. Practice makes permanent.

Neuroscience has demonstrated that the brain evolves as a result of experience.

Taxi drivers who have been transporting customers around London for many years possess larger hippocampi, a brain area critical for spatial awareness and memory, than newer cab drivers.

Similarly, accomplished musicians have larger grey matter volume in motor, auditory, and visual-spatial regions, implying that their brains have altered due to daily practice.

When the brain is damaged, such as during a stroke, therapy can help to restore lost capacity. This capacity arises due to other brain areas taking over for those harmed.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's ability to adapt to new experiences. Exercise has a similar effect on the brain as it does on the body. This process can occur quickly: learning to juggle or play the piano changes brain density in a few days.

This plasticity is empowering news because it suggests that we aren't stuck with our old brains and old habits. Instead, we can forge new paths, creating the flexibility to mold the future based on what we do now to train the mind.

How to remember everything you learn

(backed by science):

Sleep is Nature's Balm

Being awake builds up metabolic toxins in your brain that are flushed out when you sleep. When you're asleep, your brain cells shrink slightly, creating additional space between them, allowing fluid to flow through and wash out toxins. So sleep is your brain's way of keeping itself clean and healthy.

O sleep! O gentle sleep! Nature's soft nurse

Shakespeare

This toxic buildup is why you may struggle to think clearly after insufficient sleep. You're working with a brain with metabolic toxins impeding its optimal functioning. Besides the short-term effects of sleep deprivation, such as doing worse on tests, having too little sleep over too long is linked to headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes, and a shorter lifespan.

Sleep, the main course in life's feast, and the most nourishing.

Shakespeare

Sleep is a crucial part of the memory and learning process. During your slumber, your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you were thinking about and learning, erases the less important parts of memories, and consolidates areas that you need or want to remember. In addition, your brain uses this downtime to repeatedly go over certain neural patterns to strengthen them, rehearsing some of the trickier parts of what you're trying to understand and learn.

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care

Shakespeare

Sleep significantly enhances your ability to understand and solve complex problems. The deactivation of the conscious 'you' in the prefrontal cortex helps other areas of your brain to start communicating with each other more easily. This state is a prime example of your diffuse mode in action forming the neural pathways to your learning tasks while you're resting. Even dreaming about what you're learning or studying can majorly enhance your ability to understand it by condensing your memories into more accessible to grasp 'chunks.'

Plant the seeds for your diffuse mode by first doing focused mode work when awake. Then, you can increase the chance of dreaming about a particular topic you covered by going over it shortly before sleeping or napping. You can also improve this chance by suggesting your mind dream about something.

Here are thoughts from Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, a top learning expert. He is a pioneer in computational neuroscience, and one of a handful of scientists elected to all three US national academies: engineering, science, and medicine. Here is a list of significant takeaways and tips about learning:

• There is a general principle that you can learn more through active engagement, independently solving problems, practical experimentation, or participation in a discussion than passive listening. This concept is the notion of learning by doing and can sometimes be more effective than simply reading many books.

• Learning by osmosis from more knowledgeable people is another good way to assimilate information. Also, being in a creative environment around other creative people is a potential way to enhance your creativity and productivity. You can improve the quality and clarity of your ideas if you have other people to bounce them off or try explaining them to (The Feynman Technique).

• Passion and persistence can beat pure intelligence in the pursuit of success.

• Exercise such as running can effectively disengage the mind from regular trains of thought and help develop new ideas through the diffuse mode. In essence, it can allow your subconscious thoughts to bubble to the surface.

• It is of great difficulty, if not impossible, to consciously do or focus on two or more things at once, as they’re likely to become mixed up. Multitasking is more a case of ‘context switching’ between topics.

• Try not to get hung up on a question you can’t answer in a test environment. Instead, move on to the next question. Often, the answer to the problem holding you back can mysteriously pop into your brain later in the test, courtesy of the diffuse mode. Our brains can operate with disparate things working on parallel tracks.

• Neurological discoveries have revealed that the hippocampus (a seahorse-shaped part of the brain that is paramount in learning and memory, located in the middle) continually generates new neurons, even well into adulthood. Studies of rats tell us that having an ‘enriched environment’ such as the freedom to move around and interact with things and people, encourages the formation of much stronger neural connections. You ideally want to be surrounded by other people who are stimulating you and have access to events in which you can actively participate.

• However, independent of such an enriched environment, exercise can also boost the number of new neurons that are born and survive in your hippocampus, aiding you in remembering things.

Learning Styles and Dual Encoding

Do you favor a particular learning style? Do you think you can learn better when you stick to your learning style, such as auditory, visual, or kinesthetic?

Learning style theory is one of the most prevalent but makes a wrong assumption about learning.

While you might have a preferred learning mode, evidence is unambiguous that sticking to your learning style doesn't lead to better outcomes.

In a meta-analysis, Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, psychologists from the University of California explain:

"Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education."

What's a better, evidence-based approach to learning?

Dual encoding. Your memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Dual encoding is a very effective way to make the most of the first memory process - how you encode new information in your brain.

In essence, you combine verbal with visual materials. As a result, you encode new information in two ways (verbal and visual), increasing brain activity.

So, attach an image to visualize the information whenever you learn something new. For example, picture your house if you read a foreign vocabulary for 'house.'

The best image for any word is the one you associate with the strongest memory. So, for example, "dog at the beach" for you would look completely different from me (because your picture would be your dog, and the beach would be the most vivid beach you can bring to your mind).

Another example is for reading: get the Kindle version of the book and the audiobook. Listen to the audio book on 1.5 or 2 times speed and follow along reading.

How to Master a New Skill

We all want to be better at something. After all, self-improvement is necessary to get ahead at work. But how do you start once you know what you want to be better at — be it public speaking, using social media, or analyzing data? Of course, learning techniques will vary depending on the skill and the person, but there are some general rules you can follow.

Mastering new skills is not optional in today's business environment. In a fast-moving, competitive world, learning new skills is one of the keys to success. It's not enough to be smart — you must always get more competent. We must constantly look for opportunities to stretch ourselves in ways that may not always feel comfortable. Continual improvement is necessary to get ahead. Here are some principles to follow in your quest for self-improvement:

Check your readiness

When working on a new skill or competency, you must ask yourself two things. First, is your goal attainable? There are certain limits to what you can learn. For example, you may want to be a brain surgeon but not have the eye-hand coordination required. Second, how much time and energy can you give to the project? It's not like going to the pharmacy and getting a prescription filled. Self-improvement is hard work. Many people implicitly believe that if you have to work hard at something, it means you lack ability. This misconception is rubbish. Instead, recognize that learning a new skill takes extreme commitment. Unless your goal is attainable and you're prepared to work hard, you won't get very far.

Make sure it's needed.

Ensure the skill is relevant to your career, organization, or both. Unless you need the skill for your job or a future position, you'll unlikely get money for training or support from your manager. Gaining a new skill is an investment, and you need to know the return up front.

Know how you learn best

Some learn best by looking at graphics or reading. Others would rather watch demonstrations or listen to explanations. Still, others need a "hands-on" experience. You can figure out your ideal learning style by looking back. Reflect on your past learning experiences, and list good and bad ones. What did the excellent, compelling experiences have in common? How about the bad ones? Identifying common strands can help you determine the learning environment that works best for you.

Get the right help

Eliciting support from others can significantly increase learning. Find someone you trust who has mastered the skill you're trying to attain. And look beyond your immediate manager who evaluates you. Ask yourself: Who in my organization, other than my boss, would notice my changes and give me honest feedback? Then approach that person and say something like, "You are so comfortable with [the skill], something I'm not particularly good at. I'm trying to work on that and would love to spend some time with you, learn from you, and get your feedback." If you can't find a mentor inside your company, look for people in your industry or from your network. Ultimately, you want to go with the best teacher. Suppose someone in your organization is able and willing to provide quality mentoring, then excellent. If not, seek outside help.

Start small

Self-improvement can feel overwhelming. You can't take on everything. If you do, you'll never do it. So instead, choose one or two skills to focus on at a time and break that skill down into manageable goals. For example, if you're trying to become more assertive, you might focus on speaking up more often in meetings by pushing yourself to talk within the first five minutes.

Reflect along the way

To move from experimentation to mastery, you need to reflect on what you are learning. Otherwise, the new skill won't stick. Always share your goals with those individuals who can provide informational or emotional support along the way. Even if that person doesn't have the answer, he can help you and keep you honest about how much you're improving. Talking about your progress helps you get valuable feedback, holds you accountable and cements the change.

Challenge yourself to teach it to others

One of the quickest ways to learn and practice something new is to teach others how to do it. So share what you know with your team, manager, or co-workers. You can force yourself to do it by putting a "teaching" date on your calendar or agreeing to lead a formal training session a few months later. Your learning will be much more focused and practical with objectives like those.

Be patient

Too often, we approach a new skill with the attitude that we should nail it right out of the gate. The reality is that it takes much longer. It's not going to happen overnight. It usually takes six months or more to develop a new skill. And it may take longer for others to see and appreciate it. People around you will only notice 10% of every 100% change you make.

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Select a skill that is valued by your organization and manager

• Divide the skill up into smaller, manageable tasks

• Reflect on what you've learned and what you still want to accomplish

Don't:

• Try to learn in a vacuum — ask others for guidance and feedback

• Rely solely on your boss for advice — you may want to involve someone who isn't responsible for evaluating you

• Assume it's going to happen overnight — it usually takes at least six months to develop a new skill

Case study #1: Learn by trial and error

Jim Petkan was a basic Excel user when he started his first job out of college. As a recruiter for JP Morgan, data analysis wasn't one of the required skills. However, a few months in, he was asked to build an Excel model to track and report campus recruiting efforts' success rates. "I was out of my element," he admits. "Excel is not a core part of a recruiter's job. I focused on hiring people, and I was being measured on that." But he was interested in analysis (that's why he chose to do recruiting at an investment bank) and wanted to prove himself as a newcomer.

He started by learning as much as possible on his own. He found tutorials on Google and watched instructional videos on YouTube. But he still struggled. "When I got stuck, I would ask bankers. They build models every day, so I was able to leverage my connections and find people who had the right skills," he says. Over two weeks, Jim developed the model. "I didn't get it perfect the first time. There were mistakes in the formulas, and people found errors," he says. But he continued to refine it, and others asked him to take on similar projects because of his success. "Once people knew that I could pull data together quickly — and make sense of it — I started to get a lot of requests."

He admits there were more effective ways to learn Excel than this trial-and-error approach, but given the immediacy of the need, it was necessary. By the time he left the job almost three years later, Excel and data analytics were strengths that helped him land his next position.

Case study #2: Experiment with different approaches

Susan Sammons, a regional finance controller at a global outsourcing company, noticed that colleagues resisted any time she suggested an improvement to a financial or IT system. Her ideas went through numerous rounds of review and were always questioned. Finally, she decided that her communication style was hindering her and needed to be changed. "I got feedback a few times that I was too opinionated," she says.

Susan started by reading books about persuading people effectively and joined Toastmasters, a non-profit educational organization. Through that program, she learned how to connect with stakeholders and present ideas more appealingly. Also, coincidentally during the same time, the president of Susan's company started interviewing key employees to understand better what they did or did not like about their jobs. This chance provided Susan with a perfect opportunity. She explained her desire to see her ideas have more impact, and the boss advised her to focus less on why something needed to be changed and more on how it could happen, including what she could do to ensure it did.

Susan realized she had assumed that her colleagues understood the problems and how to fix them. She had highlighted what needed to be done and left it at that. With her new understanding, she tried a different approach: she mapped out a process and pointed to the root causes. This step helped her audience understand where they could make changes and how exactly she could help.

Susan has noticed a big difference in how colleagues respond to her suggestions: they are now more open to hearing them and willing to work with her to implement them.

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst:

Imagine a day where you quickly fly through tasks, accomplishing more in less time.

BUT.

Most days feel like a chaotic scramble, leaving you drained and unproductive.

Sound familiar?

Here are 12 ways to own your time:

Pomodoro Technique:

➥ Break tasks into intervals.

3-3-3 Method:

➥ Prioritize tasks into quick wins and must-dos.

Eisenhower Matrix:

➥ Sort tasks by urgency and importance.

2 Minute Rule:

➥ Tackle tasks that take two minutes or less.

80/20 Method:

➥ Focus on the 20% of tasks that yield 80% of results.

Eat the Frog:

➥ Start the day with the most challenging task.

ABCDE Method:

➥ Rank tasks from most to least important.

Kanban Board:

➥ Visualize workflow and manage tasks efficiently.

Getting Things Done:

➥ Organize tasks into actionable lists.

Time Blocking:

➥ Schedule specific blocks of time for different tasks.

MSCW Method:

➥ Define tasks by must, should, could, and won't have.

Warren Buffet 5/25 Rule:

➥ Focus on your top 5 goals and eliminate the rest.

Seven tips to 10x your productivity.

Stress less by doing more.

Being productive is about something other than working hard.

It's about finding the techniques that maximize your time.

Here are seven tools and methods to boost your productivity today:

1. Eat the Frog

↳ Start your day by completing the most challenging task on your list.

↳ The rest of your day will become a whole lot easier.

2. The 2-minute rule

↳ If you can get a task done in 2 minutes.

↳ Get it done immediately.

3. The Eisenhower Matrix

↳ Prioritise the urgent and important ahead of unimportant and non-urgent.

↳ Learn to delegate or say 'no' to unimportant tasks.

4. Seinfeld Strategy

↳ Achieve your goals by turning them into daily measurable habits.

↳ Keep up the daily streak for as long as you can.

5. Time Blocking

↳ Schedule and group tasks into specific time blocks across the day.

↳ Leave breaks between blocks, but always stick to the schedule.

6. Oliver Burkeman's 3/3/3 Method

↳ Complete 3 hours of deep work on the most important tasks.

↳ Do 3 hours of shorter urgent tasks or meetings.

↳ Finish with 3 admin/maintenance tasks.

7. Pomodoro Technique

↳ Create a list of outstanding tasks that can be completed across 2 hours.

↳ Work in blocks of 25 minutes with a 5-minute break in between.

↳ Repeat this four times, and then take a longer break.

Use these techniques to take control of your task list

Before it takes control of you.

1. Choose the models that work best for you.

2. Implement them into your daily life.

3. Take back control of your time.

Research by the consulting firm McKinsey reveals a promising fact: Implementing specific productivity frameworks can lead to a significant 20-25% increase in productivity, potentially transforming one's work life.

Being more productive has nothing to do with working your fingers to the bone.

It's about doing more with less.

The consultant will tell you it's about working smarter.

Whatever you call it, it's about getting more done.

The six productivity frameworks we explore are:

1/ The Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)

2/ The 2-Minute Rule

3/ Getting Things Done (GTD) Workflow

4/ OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

5/ Kanban Method

6/ The Seinfeld Strategy – (Yes, the comedian)

Emotional Intelligence:

How We Perceive, Evaluate, Express, and Control Emotions

Emotional intelligence is the skill of recognizing, understanding, expressing, managing, assessing, and utilizing emotions to interact with and relate to others in a positive and effective manner.

Emotionally intelligent individuals have a unique advantage. They can motivate themselves, interpret social cues, and foster strong, meaningful relationships.

The 4 pillars of Emotional Intelligence (and books to master them):

1. Self - Awareness

2. Self - Regulation

3. Social Skills

4. Relationship Management

Here are nine mindsets of the most successful people:

Develop them through daily habits:

1. Embrace curiosity.

↳ Ask questions. Invite new perspectives.

↳ Learning isn't a phase. It's a lifelong pursuit.

2. Focus on solutions.

↳ When problems arise, take a breath.

↳ Then, ask: What can I do to fix this?

3. Reframe failure.

↳ Setbacks happen. Success is how you respond.

↳ Persistence beats talent every time.

4. Prioritize ruthlessly.

↳ Set clear goals. Say no to distractions.

↳ Consistency compounds. Small steps = big results.

5. Be resilient.

↳ Challenges will come. Prepare yourself mentally.

↳ When they hit, dig deep. Stay strong.

6. Seek wisdom.

↳ Surround yourself with people who inspire you.

↳ Listen to their stories. Learn from their mistakes.

7. Invest in yourself.

↳ Your health is your greatest asset.

↳ Prioritize sleep, nutrition, and exercise.

8. Keep your commitments.

↳ Long-term success is built on integrity.

↳ Do what you say. Show up on time.

9. Take responsibility. Give gratitude.

↳ Own your life. Your wins. Your losses.

↳ And be thankful for all of it.

Incredible numbers cited by the Harvard Business Review!

According to HBR, 70% to 90% of innovations fail!

Business Executives often name innovation as their highest priority.

Yet, it's important to acknowledge that they also often find it to be one of their most significant challenges, a struggle shared by many.

Despite large investments in research and development, big data curation, and even AI, there's little evidence that these numbers are improving.

In this Cheat Sheet, we examine six models that can help organizations and leaders innovate faster and more effectively.

The six models we explore are:

1/ Gap Analysis

2/ The Value-Complexity Matrix

3/ Design Sprint by Google

4/ Lean UX Cycle

5/ The 6 Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono

6/ The Kano Model

Are you overly focused on solving problems?

You may need to change your thinking and spend more time on problem-framing first.

"All good innovation starts with FINDING and FRAMING problems...and it's only after we have unpacked problems to really understand them and define them that good responses (and therefore innovation) can actually happen." - This comes from the excellent Problem Framing Canvas by the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation.

What's the problem with skipping over the "framing" stage?:

? You can end up "solving" the wrong things

? You can get stuck re-using "solutions" that just aren't effective

? You can feed a bias for action (over empathy & reflection)

? It can lead to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Innovation starts with finding problems – Things we can't stop thinking about, that annoy us or our colleagues or customers intensely, and that we can't let go of. The noticing, finding, exploring, discovering, understanding, and ultimately framing of problems that matter.

Here are five steps to ensure that you don't jump to solutions:

1️⃣ Expand (e.g., how might we?)

2️⃣ Examine (e.g., what are the deep causes?)

3️⃣ Empathize (e.g., what are the pain points?)

4️⃣ Elevate (e.g., what are the interconnections?)

5️⃣ Envision (e.g., what's our ambition and what steps are involved?)

Does this resonate with you? Is it something you do well? I must admit that I love jumping in and trying to "fix" things... even when I know that's not sensible.

9 Visuals That Will Change How You Think

Shape your future by shifting your perspective.

Shout out to Liz Fosslien for this fantastic collection.

1) Be careful not to judge; we don't all start in the same place.

2) Remember, what feels hard today will feel easy in a few years.

3) Explain the "why," not just the "how" to skyrocket someone's learning.

4) Failure and success aren't opposites; failure is a part of success.

5) We must combine intention with action to achieve our goals.

6) When you feel overwhelmed, narrow your focus to the very next step.

7) You can still succeed, even if you think the odds are against you.

8) If you step "outside of the box," you can "become a star".

9) Don't let a bad day ruin all the progress you've made to date.

Change your mindset to change your life with these nine powerful lessons.

Ten visuals that will transform the way you think.

Change your mindset, change your outputs.

Fantastic illustrations from Pejman Milani

1. Thinking vs Writing

↳ Writing your thoughts down inspires clarity and relief.

↳ Clear minds are sharper, more productive, and more powerful.

2. Control Your Ego

↳ Ego is effective when controlled in small doses.

↳ Overinflate it, and you risk it coming back to bite you.

3. Pleasure vs Purpose

↳ Relying on pleasure for happiness is unsustainable.

↳ Become fuelled by purpose and prioritize delayed gratification.

4. True Leadership

↳ The best leaders don't take all the credit.

↳ They share it with the team that helped them achieve it.

5. The Impact of Gratitude

↳ Practice gratitude to accept your blessings.

↳ Don't waste your blessings through entitlement.

6. Money Isn't Wealth

↳ Money might make you rich, but it doesn't make you wealthy.

↳ True wealth comes from the memories we make and the relationships we form.

7. Power of Reciprocation

↳ Help to lift others up whenever you can.

↳ Your kindness will be repaid to you without hesitation.

8. Productivity Hack

↳ Being productive isn't about being the busiest.

↳ It's about learning to prioritize and understanding when to say 'no.'

9. Habits Win Out

↳ You can't rely on motivation and inspiration.

↳ Daily repeated habits are the only things that are guaranteed.

10. Aim High

↳ If you're struggling to hit your goals, aim higher.

↳ Don't underestimate yourself. Aim high and see how far you go.

10 insightful lessons to change your life.

Now, it's time to put them into action.

TLDR:

1. Write don't think.

2. Learn to control your ego.

3. Chase purpose, not pleasure.

4. Share your victories with your team.

5. Don't be entitled; always show gratitude.

6. Avoid sacrificing life in the pursuit of money.

7. Treat others how you would want to be treated.

8. Learn how to prioritize to increase your productivity.

9. Create daily habits that turn up when motivation doesn't.

10. Never underestimate yourself; aim higher if you can't do it.

I love visuals like this, where powerful ideas are conveyed in the simplest way possible.

Jack Butcher is one of my all-time favorite visual creators, so I want to feature his work today.

Let me know which ones resonate with you.

Accelerated Learning

Anyone can learn almost anything in life faster.

The majority of people learn passively. They sit back and wait for insights to come to them.

However, you can expedite the process by actively seeking out useful ideas.

One method is to inquire about what high performers do. Then, make their best practices your baseline.

Learn to Be a Learning Ninja

The path to success is the continuous pursuit of knowledge.

Success is the product of accumulative advantage. When it comes to personal development, "sudden" results from a lot of "gradual."

The following are techniques for becoming a learning ninja and ensuring success in life.

Folks with a growth mindset realize they can improve their abilities through dedication and hard work. Dreams and potential are the starting point. In addition, a growth mindset perspective creates a love of learning and resilience essential for great accomplishment.

Here are some proven techniques to become a learning ninja and guarantee success in your life.

Make Learning Obvious

Learning becomes more accessible and manageable when integrating learning into your environment and making the cues visible.

Create a plan and stack it with existing behaviors.

Be intentional about your learning.

You are more likely to continue if you have a specific plan for when and where to practice learning new skills.

Most of us fail to develop the skills we want due to a lack of clarity. Once you set an implementation intention, you don't have to wait for inspiration to strike.

Use this simple sentence to apply this strategy:

I will [PRACTICE] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

You can even go a step further with the Habit Stacking technique. Habit Stacking is attaching your desired learning time after something you already do each day.

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

Creating specific intentions and habit stacking are two of the most practical methods for developing cues for your habits and creating a clear plan for when and where to take action.

Redesign your environment to make it conducive to learning.

Cues initiate our habits. You subconsciously register the signal and are immediately triggered to perform the behavior.

The same principle can be applied when building and sustaining learning habits.

If you want to make learning a more significant part of your life, make it a part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues.

• If you want to finish a book, put it on your desk or nightstand for easy reminder and access.

• If you reach for social media apps as soon as you pick up your phone, move the apps to the second page or third screen and bring the apps that help you become a better version of yourself to the front.

• Please don't keep your phone on your desk or shut it off while studying.

• If you have your social media sites at the top of your Bookmarks, move them to the back of the list.

• Add dedicated learning time to your calendar every day, perhaps 10–15 minutes first thing in the morning or during lunch.

Make Learning Attractive

When we like doing something, we are likely to keep doing it.

Combine your learning time with something you already do and enjoy.

Bundle or link an action you want to do with an activity you need to do.

With the [HABIT I WANT], I will [HABIT I NEED].

Start to see learning time as an opportunity instead of a burden.

Most people see learning as a burden that they have to do. However, learning is a gift that keeps on compounding.

The path to success is the continuous pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge accumulates. Success is the product of accumulative advantage.

Knowledge isn't just power but value. Ben Franklin said knowledge is the one investment that keeps paying dividends.

Consider modifying one word: You don't "have" to. You "get" to.

• You get to learn something new, polish your existing skills, and unlock more opportunities.

• You get to read one book a week/month and have more ideas to talk about

• You get to listen to one video segment daily and utilize that time to expand your knowledge and skills.

By changing that one word, you shift the way you view learning.

Learn at the right time.

Learn when you are high in energy and have the least distractions. For most people, it's either early morning before work or just before sleeping. However, as the day progress, we are burdened with unexpected meetings and deadlines. As a result, the entire day goes by, spending more time responding to everyone else's schedule and less time working on what matters most to us.

Don't let urgent tasks overwhelm the important ones.

Urgent refers to a task that requires immediate attention. These are the tasks that scream, "Do it now!" Urgent activities force us to be reactive, marked by a defensive, negative, hurried, and narrowly-focused mindset. On the other hand, important tasks contribute to our long-term mission, values, and goals.

Make Learning Easy

One way to make learning easy is to reduce the amount of friction associated with it.

Prioritize good over best.

"The best is the enemy of the good." — Voltaire.

When practicing during our learning journey, we often get stuck at the planning stage. Planning is undoubtedly critical but doesn't have tangible outcomes without concrete actions. Action makes us feel we are making progress without the risk of failure.

When you want to learn something or develop a skill, you should quickly find ways to apply it and create something, even if it's not good in your eyes. Then learn some more, practice, and improve with feedback.

Get into the habit of implementing what you learn here, and you will get far in your journey.

Remove frictions from the path of your learning.

We, modern humans, prefer easy things that require the least effort. We live in an age of abundance and comfort. Technology has made it easy to book a ride, order food, get entertained, and so on with the click of a button.

The same principle applies when we want to learn something.

So to ensure that you continue with your learning journey, remove frictions from your environment. Instead, make it part of your environment or bring your learning to devices you already use, such as your phone, tablet, and laptop.

Learning online is a great way to keep it simple and available.

Follow the 2-minute rule.

We often make big plans to change something about ourselves but soon quit them altogether or make little progress. We find the best courses to learn something but fail to follow through to completion.

I have been a victim of that. I often try to learn multiple skills simultaneously or change more than one habit. I often fail. To counteract this tendency, I recommend the Two-Minute Rule, which states:

It should take less than two minutes to do when you start a new habit.

We can break down most habits into their two-minute versions:

• "Meditate for 15 minutes" becomes "Meditate for one minute."

• "Complete the MBA ASAP course" becomes "Watch one lesson."

Make Learning Satisfying

Satisfaction usually means achieving a personal goal or completing a task at work. However, if the outcome is delayed, we often lose motivation. Therefore, one of the critical components in habit formation is enjoying an immediate reward. The more instantaneous the reward, the more likely you will learn that a behavior is worth repeating in the future.

Play the long game but keep your eyes on providing the immediate reward

We repeat a behavior when we are rewarded for it. We prioritize immediate rewards over long-term rewards.

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. — James Clear

The earlier suggestions increase the odds of performing a behavior this time. Immediate reward increases the odds that we will repeat the action next time.

To build and stick with learning habits in the long-term, find a visual, immediate reward, even if it's small. The most effective habits are the ones that make you feel good at the moment and lead to the results you want in the long run. It's not just about the results. The feeling is essential. Without it, you have no immediate reason to repeat the behavior in the future.

• Create a weekly or monthly learning tracker and check-off days to get a sense of achievement and feel satisfied immediately.

• Apply the learning and create something, even if it means a best practice or a tip on Twitter, a post on Facebook/LinkedIn, or an answer on Quora.

• Create a short-term plan for applying what you learn in your work or personal life and keep it where you can often look at it.

Conclusion

There's a difference between our intentions and ultimate actions, and that difference can be summarized in a sentence: 'You'll do what you want to do, not what you want to want to do'.

So build in rewards to keep consistent. Long-term consistency trumps short-term intensity.

No matter how consistent you are with your learning habits, you won't feel like learning on some days, which is OK. However, make a rule that you won't miss following your learning plan twice in a row.

Keep learning, keep sharing, and keep growing.

Metaphors are powerful tools for understanding

Metaphors are powerful language tools for helping us communicate and understand the world around us.

Metaphors are potent ways to grasp complicated concepts.

But their use comes at a price. Metaphorical thinking creates a barrier, a separation between direct experience and us.

Everything becomes “like” something else instead of directly identifying with the thing we should be experiencing. As a result, we end up watching our life instead of living it.

Metaphors and comparisons act as separators and create an existential gap between the world and us.

Through our addiction to TV, we have become habituated and accustomed to watching, and we end up taking that stance of watching as our own life and experiences unfold before us.

Magical realism in literature, and art in general, is a way of bridging this gap and identifying with experience directly. It is a workaround antidote to too much reliance on Metaphor.

The Red Pill

I have been thinking about and trying to be aware of this. The reliance on Metaphor is like a technology run amok. It is so powerful an interpretive tool that we don’t take time to see how its ubiquitous use separates us from everything else. And then we deeply worry about our existence because we don’t feel connected to anything.

You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland.

Take the red pill. Experience and respect everything as alive.

Cultivate Identity

Instead of saying this thing is “like” this other thing, say this thing “is” the other thing. The trees are alive in the wind. Your loved ones are visiting you in memories.

Richard Feynman was a famous genius physicist and polyglot from the twentieth century. He wrote a great book called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" However, he also had a simple technique for learning and understanding subjects that I would like to share with you.

How to Use the Feynman Technique

Step 1: On a sheet of paper, write the concept's name at the top.

Step 2: Explain the concept in your own words as if you were teaching it to someone else.

Step 3: Review your explanation and identify the areas where you didn't know something or where you feel your explanation is shaky.

Give it a try! Try explaining one of the concepts in this course to a friend or family member after you have written it down.

The 50/50 rule is a strategy for overcoming the forgetting curve: Spend half of your time learning something new and the other half teaching or explaining what you have learned to others.

The Feynman Technique is no joke!

The Feynman Technique Will Help You Remember What You Read

Books give you access to the most brilliant people who have existed. Your fast track to health, prosperity, and wisdom is to learn from the best thinkers and doers. But, reading per se doesn't elevate your life. You can read fifty books a year and not change.

Dale Carnegie said knowledge isn't power until it's applied. To apply what you read, you must remember what you learned.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was an expert at remembering what he learned. His pedagogy inspired Bill Gates so much that he called Feynman "the greatest teacher I never had."

Most People Forget What They Read

Many people confuse consumption with learning. They think reading, watching, or hearing will make the knowledge stick.

Unless you've got a photographic memory, nothing is further from the truth.

Most of what we absorb is filtered by our brains and forgotten to protect ourselves from overstimulation. If we remembered everything, we wouldn't be capable of functioning in the world.

But most people act like their brains retain everything. They focus on quantity, like reading a specific number of books a year. By focusing on quantity, they forget almost everything they read. For them, reading is mere entertainment.

Schopenhauer said in the 1850s, "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process." So, to learn, we need to think for ourselves.

A person who reads and doesn't pause to think and reflect won't remember or be able to apply anything they read.

You can spot these people quickly. For instance, they claim to have read a book but are at a loss for words to convey what they learned from it. They haven't learned anything from their reading. I bust myself regularly for being guilty of this.

Mortimer Adler said, "The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks."

Luckily, we can learn from what we read.

How to Remember What You Read

The best method to retain knowledge is to teach it to others. Additionally, it's a simple approach to see if you can recall what you read. Before you teach, you must take several steps: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate it using your own vocabulary.

Feynman mastered this process like no other. His colleagues and students knew him for being able to explain the most complex processes in the most straightforward language. That is how Feynman got the nickname "The Great Explainer."

If you want to supercharge your learning and become more competent, The Feynman Technique will help you learn anything. Think of it as a learning algorithm.

The Feynman Technique is a method to help us remember what we read by using elaboration and association concepts. It's a tool for remembering by explaining what we learned in plain, simple language.

The Feynman Technique is not only a fantastic learning method but also offers a look into an alternative style of thinking that enables you to dissect concepts and rebuild them from scratch. This analytic technique is called thinking from first principles and is a favorite of Elon Musk.

This approach intuitively believes that intelligence is a growth process, which dovetails with the work of Carol Dweck, who excellently describes the difference between a fixed and growth mindset. Here's how it works.

The 4 Steps of the Feynman Technique

The Feynman technique consists of sequential steps:

· identify the subject,

· explain the content,

· identify your knowledge gaps,

· simplify your explanation.

Here's how to apply it to any book you read:

#1 Take a blank sheet of paper after finishing a book that will stick in your memory and write the title.

Then, mentally recall all the principles and main points you want to remember. Here, many people make the mistake of simply copying the table of contents or their highlights. By not recalling the information, they skip engaging with the material.

You want to retrieve the concepts and ideas from your memory. This effort requires brainpower. You can make learning successful by giving the ideas some thought.

While writing your key points, try using the most straightforward language possible. We tend to use complicated jargon to mask our unknowingness. Big "expert words" keep us from getting to the point.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

— Albert Einstein

#2 Simplify like you are explaining the content to a 12-year-old

This step sounds simpler than it is. But plainly explaining a concept requires deep understanding.

When you explain an idea to a 12-year-old, you force yourself to simplify relationships and connections between concepts.

Make it real. Find an interested friend or write your explanation as a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or Quora. Writing your description will expose gaps in your understanding that you can then address.

#3 Notice your comprehension gaps.

When you break down a book's main ideas, you can discover what you didn't comprehend. There will be portions you understand entirely and others that need to be reviewed. These are valuable hints to dig deeper.

You can start learning when you find knowledge gaps — where you leave out a crucial detail, struggle to find the right words, or have trouble connecting ideas.

Go back to your book and reread the paragraph once you've identified where you're confused until you can clearly explain it.

Filling your knowledge gaps is the crucial step required to remember what you read. Skipping over it leads to an illusion of knowledge.

#4 Simplify Your Explanation

Depending on how complex the book is, you might be able to explain and recall the ideas after the previous step. You can, however, include one more layer of simplification.

Read your notes aloud and arrange them into the most straightforward story possible. When the explanation is clear, you have completed the necessary preparation.

You'll know you fully comprehended the material when you can express what you read in simple terms.

The Takeaway

We are all aware from our experiences that knowledge is useless if you can't apply it. And if we forget what we read, we can't use it.

Montaigne pointed to this fact in one of his Essays, where he wrote:

"We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor's house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?"

The Feynman Technique is an excellent way to internalize knowledge from books. It's a way to parse ideas and rebuild them from the ground up.

Here are the steps:

1. choose a book, get a blank page and title it

2. teach it to a 12-year-old in plain, simple language

3. identify knowledge gaps and reread what you forgot

4. review and simplify your explanation

Write a book.

The act of writing a book creates clarity for yourself.

Writing ideas down (a lost practice in today’s world) isn’t just about creating something, it’s about thinking things through at a deeper level than casual random thinking can provide. Write a book so you can think better.

Being a comedian is challenging. How do you consistently come up with new material and keep your act fresh? Here is comedian Jerry Seinfeld discussing the secret to his productivity:

"For each day I do my writing task, I put a big red X over that day."

"After a few days, you'll have a chain. Just keep at it, and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is not to break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

Get a large wall calendar that displays the entire year on a single page and put it on a visible wall.

Get a red magic marker.

Learning a new language or musical instrument and building a career or business is a lot about the slow and steady accumulation of little bits of effort over time.

Writing a page each day doesn't seem like much but do it for 365 days, and you have a novel.

Chunk everything down into manageable bits.

A calendar helps you:

• Plan work

• It gives you concrete goals

• It keeps you on track

• It provides a sense of accomplishment

Boeing creates day-by-day plans for five-year projects.

Use this technique in many different areas:

• exercise,

• learn to program,

• Writing: blogs, books

• Social Media posting

• to build successful websites

• build successful businesses

It works because short pushes don't get us where we want to go. Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity every time. Pulling all-nighters before a test or term paper is due is an ineffective strategy for learning and retention of knowledge.

Consistent daily action builds extraordinary outcomes. Inch by inch, anything's a cinch. Inch by inch works if you move an inch every day.

Inch by inch, anything's a Cinch!

Have you ever struggled to acquire knowledge about a new subject?

You may watch a video on chemistry and quickly zoom out. But, unfortunately, there's too much you don't know to make sense of it.

Research in cognitive psychology on the architecture of the human brain and how it incorporates new knowledge suggests that instruction needs to align with current learning levels to lead to improved learning outcomes. For example, if the video chemistry video meets my current learning level, I can improve my subject knowledge.

Why can you only understand things close to your current learning level?

Cognitive science gives two reasons: First, human learning is cumulative. Second, learning involves focusing working memory on new knowledge.

Learning is cumulative because of how our working and long-term memory interact. Your working memory has a limited capacity for actively processing new knowledge (only a couple of items at a time). Yet, this capacity expands if you can build on knowledge that has previously been incorporated into long-term memory.

The next time you try to understand something but can't, look for instruction that meets your learning level. Find material that builds on your foundation of prior knowledge to make your practice more effective.

YouTube is free education.

It's a virtual campus.

Here are the top channels to accelerate your learning:

Making Time for Learning

It can seem like an absolute luxury to schedule time for studying. It frequently appears as though there isn't enough energy left over after a long day to do anything but watch tv and go to sleep. Who has the time to study coding, German, or ancient Greek philosophy?

However, when we broaden our thinking, we have our best experiences. Life is empty without learning.

Anyone can increase their success rate and rate of learning in all aspects of life, but especially in the workplace, where many individuals are unhappy or unfulfilled because they aren't expanding or learning enough.

We are designed to pursue continuous improvement and endless refinement. Constant learning is how we improve. It's a system; employing it is how we achieve our goals.

The techniques detailed below can help you maximize the limited time you have to learn new topics. In addition, making them automatic will significantly improve the quantity of novel and intriguing things you can accomplish—without requiring heroic efforts.

Always have several books with you.

A significant barrier to reading more books is not having exciting reading material readily available. You can go months without reading a single page if you don't have any books you're excited to finish.

A simple strategy here is to always have a good book with you. Carry different formats: ebooks on your phone, tablet, or Kindle; audiobooks and earbuds, and physical books.

Audiobooks are handy whether exercising, driving, or standing in line. You can always have something to read by downloading digital books on your phone. Hardcover or paperback books give you the joy of paper at your fingertips when you get a more prolonged moment to sit down.

Keep the books enjoyable above all else. You're reading the wrong books if the notion of spending more than fifteen minutes reading makes you cranky. Instead, establish the habit of reading first by choosing books you will enjoy.

Keep a tab in your browser open with an online course ready.

You can always find something to watch when bored at your computer by keeping a course open in your browser or having a prominent bookmark.

Find courses on YouTube, Coursera, or Udemy that interest you in addition to books, and during computer breaks, watch them.

As with book suggestions, I advise starting with lighter fare and moving on to heavier material once you've established a habit.

Also, have the course available on your phone to watch when you have some downtime.

Prepare your projects so they can proceed.

There are other ways to learn than books and courses. Skills and hobbies demand practical experience. However, finding time for tinkering in a hectic life might be challenging.

Make sure your projects are prepared to continue as one way to make the most of your time here. Create a dedicated workplace if you can so that all you have to do is sit down and start working. If you cannot reserve a physical space, arrange your supplies to reduce the time needed for setup and cleanup.

Project readiness includes more than simply physical setup. The other is getting a project through the challenging "blank slate" stage. Once the framework is established, a computer program, painting, or woodworking item is simpler to continue working on. The key is getting projects to a point where you can efficiently work on them for days, little by little. A little progress each day adds up quickly. 

Stretch Outside Your Comfort Zone at Work

Extend your existing level of job tasks.

It's challenging to find entirely unscheduled spare time. You may only have short chunks of time throughout the day if you have children or other obligations in addition to a demanding work schedule.

We need to strive for learning, but work can be a powerful source. Clients and employers generally want consistency over innovation. They encourage you to focus on activities you already know how to do. While many claim to be committed to constant improvement, bottom-line factors favor stability over growth, leading to stagnation.

Regularly pursuing at least one work or endeavor that is speculative is a way to add extra learning to your life. This stretch should be outside your present competence in a subject that interests you. For example, it can involve learning a new technical skill, taking on a management role, or researching a different market or business.

Opportunities for this aspect of the job come to those who look for them and vary greatly. But, you'll find it if you search for it.

Here are some more techniques that can help you maximize the limited time you have to learn new topics. In addition, making them automatic will significantly improve the quantity of novel and intriguing things you can accomplish—without requiring heroic efforts.

Make friends who share your interests.

Scholarly discussion groups have long supported progress in science and society. With his junto's help, Benjamin Franklin could organize for his community and discuss intelligent subjects. The Scientific Revolution was sparked by the loose confederation of thinkers known as the Invisible College.

There are various possibilities for discussion groups. Like Ben, you can gather a group of friends who are interested in the same thing. As an alternative, you can join existing groups on websites to talk about something you're interested in. For example, you can join the MBA ASAP group by going to the website.

In many cases, the reason we have trouble finding the time to study isn't a lack of time but rather a lack of a meaningful setting to apply what we've learned. We are social creatures. When we engage in activities that make us feel alone or useless, we rapidly give up on them in favor of those more likely to make us friends or help us with real-world issues. If you value education, include it in your social interactions.

We can use flashcards to fill in time gaps.

Many abilities are seen to be intimidating. Though we find the thought of conversing in a foreign tongue to be romantic, we find the actual act of doing so to be unsettling. Sitting down and writing code is a complete grind, yet we want to learn a new programming language.

The difficulty of these activities can be broken down using a technique called pretraining. In this approach, you first master the fundamentals to make using the new talent easier.

Using flashcards is one method of pretraining. It takes more than just memorizing words to learn how to speak another language. However, it can help you get started; it is much simpler to pick up on (and enjoy) conversations. Similar to learning programming grammar and commands, doing so will make your next project much easier to complete. However, it won't make you an expert programmer.

Flashcards have the distinct advantage of being portable, allowing you to practice them during brief periods of downtime. You can create them for your phone for easy access anywhere. Of course, it's difficult to learn anything complicated in such a short time, but it's ideal for bite-sized practice.

Keep a "stretch" book by your bed.

Another great way to increase your learning time is reading before bed. It's also an excellent time to try reading more challenging books. Because these are usually works that require some mental effort, they will also put you to sleep more quickly.

Choose a book you've always wanted to read but have been put off, and keep it by your bedside. For example, you could read a classic work of fiction like The Brothers Karamozov, a demanding nonfiction book, or a book of particular personal importance.

The end of the day is also ideal for developing a consistent reading ritual. The consistency facilitates habit formation over the more chaotic background that emerges throughout the day. Furthermore, reading a book at the end of the day can be a meditative activity to help you relax before sleep.

Five Hacks to Stay Laser-Focused for Learning

The Pomodoro technique

This focusing technique is named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that the creator Francesco Cirillo used to implement the system (Pomodoro means tomato in Italian).

It aims to reduce burnout and mental overload by splitting tasks into 25-minute segments called Pomodoros. While working on a Pomodoro, you should be hyper-focused (which means no procrastination or distractions).

Pomodoro works in cycles of four. After your first three Pomodoros, you should take a quick 5-minute break after each one to recover and relax. After your fourth Pomodoro, you take a more extended 30-minute break for further mental recovery and then repeat the cycle.

It's a well-defined methodology, and it's rocket fuel for focus.

The Wim Hof method

Wim Hof, also known as The Iceman, is a Dutch motivational speaker and extreme athlete noted for his ability to withstand very low temperatures.

Best known for attempting to scale Mount Everest in a pair of shorts and hiking boots, he has broken more world records than even he can count. His feats include a near-fatal 57-meter swim under the ice during which he went temporarily blind and a barefoot half-marathon in the Arctic.

You'll find no shortage of people who believe in the benefits that the Wim Hof method can provide. Proponents say that over time you'll be able to increase focus, reduce stress, gain extra energy, and improve the quality of your sleep by encouraging the release of the hormone epinephrine.

Routine is critical to the Wim Hof Method. It's one of the three pillars (alongside cold therapy and deep breathing) that form its core.

Every morning (without fail), wake up and take between 30 and 40 deep breaths in reasonably quick succession. Then, when you feel light-headed, exhale as much as possible and hold it for as long as possible. Repeat this several times, and you should feel a "buzz" that signals rejuvenation on the cellular level.

Some people stick with the breathing exercises, but you can also undertake a second part of the Wim Hof Method. Hold your breath and do as many push-ups as possible before you can't resist the urge to breathe. Once you've done this, stretch out a little with a few yoga poses to recover before going on to the most "fun" final part of the method—an ice-cold shower.

Force your focus

These days we have more potential avenues for procrastination than ever before. We're bombarded with distractions from social media and news articles constantly. For better or worse, these things are a part of our lives, but they are focus-killers.

If you know that you're the kind of person who can easily get lost in a YouTube rabbit hole or keeps checking Facebook every 10 minutes, there is help available.

One can use several apps to monitor and limit your time on these procrastination stations. They all work similarly. You tell the software the websites you use for procrastination, and you allow yourself a certain amount of time to visit them daily.

You can browse them as usual until this time limit expires and block them until the day's end.

Nootropics

One of the more outlandish ways to enhance focus and boost productivity is using Nootropics. They claim to be supplements designed to increase cognitive function, similar to how a bodybuilder takes supplements to grow their muscles.

They are made from natural compounds that are non-addictive (as opposed to pharmaceutical stimulants like Ritalin). They usually include a few obvious ingredients like caffeine, but they also have a variety of unusual herbal ingredients (each with a claim to be more wonderful than the last). Nootropics can be consumed in various ways, from standard supplement capsules to Nootropic coffees and teas.

The jury is most certainly still out on the world of Nootropics. However, fans of these "smart drugs" swear by their effectiveness, and many famous successful entrepreneurs (like Tim Ferriss) attribute their success to them.

However, clinical studies and impartial research are lacking in the field, mainly due to how quickly they have exploded in popularity. Nevertheless, the results of preliminary trials do suggest that there may be some scientifically verifiable benefits.

Put pen to paper

There's a certain disconnect when you're typing something instead of writing it out on paper. However, studies have shown that picking up a pen and writing down ideas, notes, and thoughts in a notepad (instead of pounding away at a keyboard) can provide real-world benefits.

Students who took notes by hand performed better in exams and demonstrated much greater memory recall capabilities compared to their keyboard warrior counterparts. Scientists are still not entirely sure why this is the case, but entrepreneurs have jumped on the bandwagon and are taking notes by hand to increase their focus and recall capabilities.

Try picking up a notepad and a nice pen at a stationary store and see if you notice the difference too.

Conclusion

So there you have five hacks that highly successful entrepreneurs use to stay laser-focused on their projects. Of course, I'm not suggesting you start using all the techniques mentioned here today, but why not consider adopting one or two of them into your daily routine?

If you do, I'm reasonably confident you'll notice increased focus and improved productivity levels quickly.

How To Learn a New Skill Quickly and Effectively

7 Proven Tips for Mastering a New Ability

One of the most rewarding aspects of life is developing new skills or abilities.

Whether you want to pursue a fun hobby, upgrade your work skills, or change careers, learning something new can be challenging and fulfilling.

Of course, success is never guaranteed. Many eventually give up on their goals due to unforeseen challenges, obstacles, or setbacks. And to make matters worse, the negative experience can cause them to avoid future opportunities for growth.

Fortunately, learning is a skill like any other. By adopting best practices and avoiding common mistakes, we can improve our ability to acquire new skills. We will explore seven proven tips for learning a new skill quickly and effectively.

#1: Narrow the Scope to Accelerate Progress

The priority is getting clear about precisely what you plan to learn.

For example, if you've decided to learn a new language, it's essential to be specific about why that skill is important and how you intend to use it. Ask yourself, can you get away with simply speaking the language? Is it necessary to learn how to read and write, or can that come later?

A common mistake is taking on too much at once in the name of "efficiency."

In the case of learning a language, it's considerably more challenging to pursue reading, writing, and speaking at the same time. It might seem like a minor increase in the effort to combine them into one step, but the added complexity is far more likely to kill your momentum and cause you to quit.

So, regardless of your goal, finding ways to narrow the scope is critical.

It's easier to create progress, build momentum, and ultimately achieve success when you keep things simple. Then, later, after you have completed your initial goal, you always have the option to layer on related skills and abilities. For example, once you can speak a language, that knowledge is beneficial for developing the ability to read and write.

#2: Prioritize Direct Experience Early and Often

A critical aspect of skill development is gaining experience in the situation or context that you plan to apply the skill.

If you want to learn to code, find a way to start working directly on simple apps as early as possible. If you're going to learn a sport, aim to join a pickup game sooner rather than later. If you want to speak a new language, look for opportunities to engage in basic conversations with a native speaker.

This direct approach is in stark contrast to how many things are taught today.

Much of what people learn in classrooms or online courses are abstracted from real-world situations. Students study facts, concepts, and other information without having a practical way to use what they've learned. Likewise, new skills are often taught in simplified, isolated environments.

As Ultralearning author, Scott Young explains,

"…directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing."

Unfortunately, this approach fails to address one of the most significant challenges in personal development, which is the problem of "transfer." Transfer happens when you learn something in one context, such as shooting a basketball in a driveway and then use it in another, such as playing a real game.

The problem is that experience in one context often fails to translate well into another. For example, it's one thing for a basketball player to make shot after shot in a controlled, familiar environment. It's another to take a similar shot, in the face of a strong defender, after receiving an awkward pass while tired from running up and down the court.

A great way to avoid the transfer problem is to participate in the goal activity as early and as often as possible. Rather than focusing exclusively on isolated skill-building, look for opportunities to "get in the game" regularly. This direct experience makes it easier to identify skills worth practicing while also providing an environment to apply those skills as they are developed.

Note: This may not be an option for every pursuit. Some activities may be too complex, difficult, or dangerous to dive right into. However, the ultimate goal should be to close this gap as quickly as possible. That way, you can apply what you are learning and avoid falling into the trap of focusing exclusively on solo practice.

#3: Address Weaknesses Through Focused Practice

As you gain direct experience, you will inevitably encounter challenges or setbacks you cannot address with your current abilities.

For example, when learning a language, you might start by using flashcards to memorize basic conversational phrases. Then, when conversing with a native speaker to gain practical experience, you may discover that some words are not commonly used. Furthermore, you may encounter a few new phrases. While this can be frustrating, such experiences provide a clear direction for further improvement.

Your next practice session might involve removing uncommon words from your flashcards and adding new phrases in anticipation of the next conversation with a native speaker.

Scott Young calls this the "direct-then-drill" approach. Direct experience provides the foundation for further study. But, once a weakness has been identified, it's time to "drill" the relevant skills or knowledge in focused practice sessions.

At every step, it's essential to return to the goal activity. Apply what has been learned and get a refined sense of what to work on next. This process may seem obvious to some, but it's easy to fall into the trap of focusing entirely on isolated practice, mistakenly assuming it's the fastest way to improve.

However, isolated practice needs to be balanced out with integrated learning.

The "direct-then-drill" approach can be applied to almost any pursuit, such as starting a business, writing a book, or learning an instrument. In each case, the foundation is the same. Everything begins by finding the most direct opportunity to engage in the goal activity. Then, as setbacks or challenges arise, it's time to engage in purposeful practice to develop or improve skills that seem helpful along the way.

#4: Seek Out Qualified, Actionable Feedback

Regardless of what you seek to learn, feedback plays a critical role. It can make all the difference in catching mistakes early, adopting best practices, and avoiding stalled progress. Therefore, you must create situations where a qualified teacher, mentor, or coach can routinely observe your progress.

Now, it's worth noting that not all feedback is helpful or productive. Blind praise or sharp criticism, such as "you're smart" or "you're lazy," is often harmful. That's because it's directed at you as a person rather than your performance.

The best feedback is that which addresses current mistakes and guides future action. This kind of feedback should detail what you are doing wrong and how to fix it. Often, this requires a qualified coach or teacher with deep subject matter expertise and a history of successfully guiding others through the same process.

Of course, direct experience provides some level of feedback as well. However, external input from a coach will allow for much more rapid advancement. Therefore, if you are serious about making progress, it's best to put yourself in situations where you can receive such feedback regularly.

Beyond simple corrective feedback, another powerful resource is what Scott Young defines as "meta feedback." As he explains,

"This kind of feedback isn't about your performance but evaluating the overall success of the strategy you're using to learn."

In other words, rather than identifying specific mistakes, you may be making, this feedback addresses the overarching approach you're using to learn. For example, learning a new language using a mobile app may be inferior to using flashcards.

Naturally, there will be situations where it's impossible to find subject matter experts. For example, emerging hobbies or interests may be so new as not yet to have qualified teachers or coaches. In such situations, it can be beneficial to gather feedback from non-experts.

As a rule, it's easier for an outside observer to assess mistakes or areas for improvement accurately. But, with that said, you should always take their suggestions for correcting the errors with a grain of salt because it's easier for non-experts to identify problems than to come up with correct solutions.

#5: Build on The Experience of Top Experts

Some pursuits can and should be more structured than others.

For example, when learning to play piano at an expert level, there is a clear sense of the order in which you should introduce techniques and concepts. The same is true of many other well-understood pursuits, such as playing professional sports, mastering games like chess, or preparing for Olympic-level competitions.

In such cases, time has allowed for learning methods to be refined over multiple generations. Experienced coaches can then help students build on what worked in the past, avoid common mistakes, and push things to the next level. This is one reason experts in many domains continually outperform the previous generation. The training methods are constantly being improved, which allows students to perform better.

With that said, many pursuits lack history or structure. In such cases, it's best to study the top experts or best performers and determine what they have done to become effective. Please dig deep and seek to learn as much as possible about their life experience, related hobbies, or other factors that may have played a role in their success. Then use what you have learned to develop training methods for reproducing their results.

#6: Understand the Fundamentals Deeply

Another key to effective learning is understanding the basics on a deep level.

This practice often involves digging beneath best practices and surface knowledge to understand better how and why things work the way they do. In other words, instead of just memorizing rules-based processes for getting things done, seek to understand how the procedures work and why they were established in the first place.

When we understand something deeply, we can apply the knowledge to various situations, recall details with greater accuracy, and learn related concepts faster.

Consider the difference between memorizing complex directions to several restaurants in a new city versus truly understanding the lay of the land. When someone has deep knowledge about a city, they don't have to memorize turn-by-turn directions for every new destination they want to visit. Instead, they can link new destinations with existing knowledge, recall relevant landmarks, and add them to their mental map.

In my experience, many so-called "professionals" rely heavily on predefined processes or formulas to get things done. As a result, even minor changes in their workflow can cause panic because they lack the deep knowledge required to adapt on the fly. Also, much of their experience isn't transferable to a new job due to being built on processes and protocols that are highly situational.

Adopting and following best practices is crucial, especially when first exploring a new area of interest. However, as your knowledge deepens, you should avoid relying on processes or formulas as a crutch. Instead, seek to understand how things work and why one adopted best practice in the first place.

This approach can help you identify when a process is flawed or outdated and help you understand when it makes sense to break away from the rules and improvise to create superior results.

When in doubt, ask yourself questions like:

• Why are things done that way?

• Is that still the best approach today?

• What else might work better?

Tip #7: Rely on Habits Instead of Willpower

In my experience, well-designed habits provide the single most significant point of leverage for effective learning and positive change.

No amount of willpower or motivation can compete with the progress that results from consistent action over an extended period. As author James Clear explains, "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." Thus, we must carve out time to focus on the things that matter most.

My favorite strategy for building new habits is to anchor them to existing routines. As social scientist BJ Fogg explains, "You already have a lot of reliable routines, and each of them can serve as an Action Prompt for a new habit." He explains, "to create a new habit, you need to find what behavior it should come after."

For example, you might choose to build a habit that occurs either after your morning shower, when you return home from work, or after cleaning up the dishes in the evening. The right choice will depend on various factors, but one crucial thing to consider is the frequency of the existing routine. If you want to develop a habit of writing for 30 minutes each day, for example, you'll want to attach that habit to another practice that already takes place daily.

Another thing to consider is that certain parts of the day may be more predictable than others. I find adding new habits to my morning routine more manageable, even if that means waking up a little earlier. On the other hand, my evening schedule is more prone to last-minute changes or unscheduled disruptions. So, consider the aspects of your routine that are more predictable daily. Then, look for ways to incorporate new habits within those windows of time.

The zettelkasten or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing.

In short, a Zettelkasten is simply a framework to help organize your ideas, thoughts, and information. By relating pieces of knowledge and connecting information to each other (by way of hyperlinking), you are replicating a train of thought.

Building a Second Brain

Important concepts to help you take better notes

Optimizing a system outside of yourself is the goal of developing a second brain. You have more time to spend doing the things that make you feel alive and less time worrying about remembering the facts.

We are living in an age of abundance. We have more of everything which is certainly valid for information. We consume more than ever. But have we got any results from so much consumption of information? Do we even remember any of it? Our brains are not optimized for remembering information, and the information we consume rarely helps us move forward in our careers and life.

This remembering and recall is what your second brain is for. To better use the information we collect, we need to package it up and save it externally. Personal knowledge management helps to harness the potential of what we know.

Uses of a second brain system

• Find anything you've learned in the past

• Organize your knowledge and use it to move forward in your life

• Connect ideas

• A reliable system to share your work and work confidently

• Spend less time looking for things and more time doing the best, creative work you are capable of.

What is a second brain?

Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. — David Allen

Your professional and personal success depends on your ability to manage and use information effectively. Information is the foundational block of everything you do.

Information overload can make us exhausted and constantly forget what we know. Using our brains to store everything we know is not a good strategy anymore. Instead, we can outsource that to technology.

The time you spend recalling and remembering information is the time that could be used to do something, invent new things, create stories, collaborate with others, and many more works.

We must form a new relationship with technology, information, and ourselves.

Your second brain is a mirror, teaching yourself and reflecting on ideas worth keeping and acting on.

Rethinking Note-taking

The main aim of a knowledge worker is not to hoard information, but to produce something out of that information, to use it. Information is a building block and can be used to create something much more significant.

Technology not just makes note-taking efficient. It transforms the very nature of notes. Just like others, you are on your phone most of the time. But instead of killing time, you are creating value.

So many of us share the feeling we are surrounded by knowledge yet starving for wisdom.

Choosing a Note-taking app

Many software tools can act as your second brain, from simple word processors to more advanced tools like Roam and Obsidian. Whatever you choose, your notes app is designed to facilitate personal knowledge management.

Don't look for a perfect app before you start taking notes. Rather than having a single app that can do everything, it's about creating a note-taking system with different apps and services.

The CODE Method

• Capture: Keep what resonates

• Organize: Save for accountability

• Distill: Find the Essence

• Express: Show your work

Capture — Keep What Resonates

Information is the food for your brain. You are what you consume. A garden is only as good as its seeds, and information is the seed for your brain. So you should fill your garden with the seeds of the most interesting, insightful, valuable ideas.

Knowledge is not something you go and find; it's everywhere. External knowledge fills your inner thoughts. External knowledge could include highlights, quotes, meeting notes, highlights, passages from books, stories, insights, reflections, and many more.

How to avoid keeping too much (or too little)

Don't save the whole article. Don't just save the link for reading later as well. Understand that in a piece of content, certain parts are more interesting, helpful, or valuable to you.

You must be a curator. Take charge of your information instead of just letting it wash over you.

Criteria for finding valuable information:

• Does it inspire you?

• See your feelings. See what sparks your imagination.

• Is it helpful?

• Is it personal?

• Is it surprising?

Keep what resonates:

Don't make it hard to decide whether to keep something or not. It will just add more resistance to the note-taking process. After all, the secret to building any habit is to make it effortless and enjoyable.

How to capture information to save any content you want:

• Passages from book ideas

• Using Readwise and highlighting feature

• Ideas from online articles or web pages

• Using eloquent chrome extension

• Ideas from podcasts

• Bookmark the clips or segments as you are listening to them. Some apps even allow you to export the annotation

• Ideas and thoughts in your brain

• Using your phone to record

• Just a voice recorder or other dedicated app such as Otter, which transcribes your notes

• Ideas from youtube videos

• Copy and paste the excerpts from the transcript part

Externalizing information can help in:

• Remembering

• Creating new connections between different ideas

• Rehearsing ideas

• Writing and thinking and interconnected. One sharpens the other

• Free up your mental space

Try to make note-taking effortless. Conserve time and energy for later steps.

Organize- Save for accountability

Your second brain is not just a tool; it's an environment for thinking. You can't keep it messy. Organizing helps to shape your thinking. Most people save notes under a tag that becomes too broad to be useful. Hoarding the information under one particular tag doesn't make it much useful.

Organizing for action

When you know that you can use any idea you encounter, you start paying attention to what you consume. The action-based approach for organizing your second brain is called PARA. Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives.

How PARA works

• Projects: What are you working on Right Now? Projects have a beginning and end. They are discrete chunks of work. Examples: Complete web design, Finish a particular course. Publish a blog post, write a book, etc.

• Areas: What are you committed to over time? Areas have no definite end date. They can be lifelong projects. Examples: Friends, Finances, Health, Personal development, Cooking, Marketing, Sales, etc.

• Resources: Things that you want to reference in the future. Information that doesn't belong to any project or area. Examples: Topics you are interested in, subjects you are researching, hobbies and passions, etc.

• Archives: Things you've completed or put on hold. Items from the three categories above are no longer active. Examples: Completed or canceled projects, areas that you are no longer committed to, resources that are no longer relevant.

How to decide where to put your notes

Don't try to decide where a particular note belongs when you first capture it. Instead, separate your capturing and organizing steps into two distinctive parts.

Ask yourself the question: In which project will this be most useful? If none, choose the area. If no area is suitable, select a resource and finally move it to the archive.

You put the note in a place where it will be helpful the soonest.

PARA is not a filing or storing system, it's a production system. It's dynamic. We are not fixed or static to a particular organizing system. Instead, PARA is a way of identifying what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go.

Distill- Find the essence

Reading and research gather building blocks from our, which makes the final product more impactful. In addition, we can use our notes to drill the essence and make up our source material.

Notes are things to use, not just to collect. Note-taking is like time travel, sending knowledge through time to your future self.

Progressive Summarization

Your notes are only as useful as their discoverability.

The progressive summarization technique helps in increasing the usefulness of notes. It is a technique to highlight the main points of a note, highlight the main points of those highlights, and add multiple layers of notes. This process distills the essence of a note.

Progressive summarization helps you navigate faster between your notes because you don't have to spend 10 minutes reading the article to get the gist.

You can get the gist in a few seconds. If you need to know more, you can always go back to the other layers of progressive summarization and the source.

Progressive summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible but for forgetting as much as possible.

It is meant for one purpose: To make it easy to find and work with your notes in the future.

Mistakes Novice Notetakers Make

• Over-highlighting: Less is more. If you're capturing everything, you might as well capture nothing. As a rule of thumb, each layer should contain only 10–20% of the previous layer

• Highlighting without a purpose in mind: Distillation requires time and effort. It would be best if you only did it with a purpose in mind. Maybe when you're getting ready to create something.

• Making highlighting difficult: Don't worry too much bout analyzing, interpreting, or categorizing whether to highlight something or not. Rely on your intuition. Please don't make it taxing that it breaks your flow of concentration.

Express- Show your work.

Expressing is about sharing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks.

We all stand on the shoulder of giants. So it's smart to build on thinking others have already done rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead of starting from scratch, you can start from the abundance of notes you have.

Everything is a remix.

Nothing gets created out of thin air. We all stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us. Borrow parts of others' work instead of taking their whole work.

You only know what you make.

To know something means to put it into action. An idea sticks when you engage with it. Your life will change when you begin to express your thoughts and turn your knowledge into action.

One simple idea can change people's lives when you share it.

Three stags to bring creative work together

• The archipelago of ideas: They are your stepping stones. You gather a group of ideas that forms the backbone of your work. And then, you switch to convergence mode to link the ideas together to make sense.

• Creating a digital outline: A rough outline of the final product can offer far more advantages. This structure helps you to have something to start with instead of facing the blank screen when starting with.

• The Hemingway bridge: Hemingway would always end his writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. He built a bridge for the next day. He used today's momentum to fuel tomorrow's work. Whenever you are working, don't work till the last drop of your energy. Reserve the last few minutes and set intentions for what you would like to do in the next session or what will be your next steps.

• Dial down the scope: Waiting until everything is ready is like sitting in a car in a driveway and waiting for all the traffic lights in the town to go green simultaneously. You should drop, reduce and postpone the least important parts and move forward. Then, build it in a smaller version which would deliver much of the value in a fraction of the time.

Inner Discipline and Outer Discipline

It's important to have inner discipline, but it's not enough. We need an external system that can add structure to our life.

• Project checklist

• Weekly and monthly reviews

• Noticing habits

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10 free websites so valuable they should come pre-bookmarked on every browser.

Learn to play an instrument to supercharge your brain

The mental benefits of playing music

Did you know that fireworks go off all over musicians' brains when they pick up their instruments? They may appear calm and focused from the outside, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required. But there's a serious party going on inside their heads.

How do we know this? These days, neuroscientists can hook people's brains to machines and figure out which parts of the brain light up when doing different activities. Many activities exercise our brains considerably. However, nothing beats the way playing an instrument stimulates our brains.

Neuroscientists have made tremendous advances in understanding how our brains work in recent decades by monitoring them in real time with instruments such as fMRI and PET scanners. When people are analyzed in these machines, tasks, such as reading or doing math problems, each have corresponding brain areas where activity is observed. However, when researchers made the participants listen to music, they witnessed fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains lit up at the same time as they processed the sound, dismantled it to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then reassembled it into a unified musical experience. And our brains do all of this work in the split second between hearing the music for the first time and tapping our foot.

When scientists switched from studying music listeners' brains to musicians' brains, the modest fireworks became explosive. Listening to music engages the brain in integrated ways, but playing music is the brain's equivalent of a strenuous workout. As a result, multiple areas of the brain lit up, processing different information in interconnected and astonishingly fast sequences, according to neuroscientists.

The brains of musicians were far more structurally and functionally connected than those of non-musicians, particularly in areas of the brain responsible for speech and sound. The musical group also demonstrated stronger connections between the auditory cortices and other brain areas such as the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortex, which are known to control higher cognitive functions like memory, working memory, and executive functions.

Playing a musical instrument engages many areas of the brain, particularly the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. Disciplined, structured practice in playing music, like any other workout, strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that power to other activities.

The most noticeable distinction between listening to music and playing it is that the latter requires fine motor skills that are controlled by both brain hemispheres. Playing music combines the linguistic and mathematical precision of the left hemisphere with the novel and creative content of the right hemisphere. For these reasons, playing a musical instrument increases the volume and activity in the corpus callosum, the bridge between the brain's two hemispheres, allowing messages to travel faster and via more diverse routes. This bridge enables musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively.

Making music involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message. Musicians have higher levels of executive function, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail. This ability also influences how our memory systems function. Indeed, musicians have improved memory functions, creating, storing, and retrieving memories faster and more efficiently. According to studies, musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to assign multiple tags to each memory, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag, like a good search engine.

How do we know that music has these advantages over sports or painting, for example? Could it be that people who pursue careers in music are already more intelligent? Neuroscientists have investigated these issues and have discovered that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument differ from any other activity studied. And in several randomized studies of participants with similar cognitive function and neural processing levels at the start, those who were exposed to a period of music learning outperformed the others in multiple brain areas.

Recent research on the mental benefits of music has advanced our understanding of cognitive function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that comprise our brain's incredible ensemble.

Plato said that “music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything”.

If you are interested, check out my “Music Basics and How to Play the Guitar easier than you think!” course here on Udemy.

The Benefits of Video for Learning

Sal Khan is an educator and entrepreneur who founded Khan Academy in 2006. The first steps of such a big project were made in 2004 when Sal tutored his cousins. He put his first YouTube videos up as a supplemental refresher for his cousins so they could pause and repeat them anytime. To Mr. Khan’s great surprise, his cousins preferred the automated version. Moreover, these videos became very popular on the internet among learners.

Students get a lot of benefits from video lessons, especially in situations when they do not understand the topic, get confused, lag, or have to review something. So it is more than just a nice-to-have, but it can also be “of a social value” because students who had had a terrible time with subjects can get it thanks to videos. Videos are an interesting live book that puts no pressure on the learning process, and I believe it is an effective tool for students to improve their knowledge.

Videos remove the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and let students have a self-paced course at home. Students watching self-paced videos increase their motivation and desire to study– and this is a crucial issue today in education.

Today it is essential to get an education to find a good job, feed families, and survive. Videos create significant opportunities for people to enter the world of knowledge, no matter where they are.

How to learn

I got this idea about how to learn while reading the following book.

How to Read a Book: A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler

It’s one thing to know how to learn new things, but it’s another thing entirely to be good at it. Learning how to learn will help you pick up new skills more quickly and effectively.

There are plenty of articles and books on the subject, so spend an hour or two getting up to speed. Then, put what you’ve learned into practice by dedicating 20 minutes each day to learning something new.

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever to be able to learn new things quickly and efficiently.

Whether you’re trying to pick up a new language or learn a new trade, being able to learn quickly can give you a significant advantage.

While some people seem to have a natural knack for learning, there are strategies that anyone can use to learn more effectively.

Learning is a lifelong process; there are many different ways to learn, and everyone has their unique way of absorbing information.

Whether you’re trying to learn a new language or expand your knowledge of the history of mathematics, some techniques can help you learn more effectively.

Some people prefer to learn through visual aids such as pictures or diagrams, while others prefer to listen to audio recordings.

Experiment with different methods and find the ones that work best for you.