3 Steps to Learn Anything Fast — The Art of Ultralearning
Unlocking the secrets to mastering new skills quickly isn’t just about hard work — it’s about using the right strategies.
Here’s how you can supercharge your learning process with three powerful steps.
Step 1: Get in the Right Mindset
Before you even start to learn anything, you have to get into a mindset of growth. As with almost all achievements in life, motivation is the key to unlocking potential. Having the desire, or even better, the need to grow is a strong intrinsic motivation and will keep you committed for the long run. Of course, there are other motivational factors, like wanting to land that next great job or get a promotion to increase your salary, but those extrinsic motives are often short-lived.
Another strong motivation for me personally was scarcity. I was working as a manager for a company that went through extreme cost cuttings, and we wanted to conduct an employee survey. As I didn’t like the idea of going through hundreds of handwritten pages, I decided to learn programming. Over the course of 12 weeks, I learned to develop a full-stack web application that allowed me to conduct the survey digitally and automatically get the results in a neat dashboard.
(This was before MS Forms, so I actually had to deal with how to store the data in SQL 😃)
Step 2: Plan Your Studies
If you want to learn something by yourself, you cannot rely on the curriculum of a university. You have to plan your own curriculum, which means you need to learn how to actually learn. This has a huge advantage because you can focus on exactly the topics you are most interested in and can leave out things you already know.
When I learned Full-Stack Web Development, I started by looking at what universities were doing (the study programs are mostly public information) and how other people who learned it went about it. I wrote everything down in a checklist and used the following headings:
Information (Things I need to memorize)
Ideas (Things I need to understand)
Processes (Things I need to practice)
Then the research started, and I filled out my checklist with everything I could find. After that, I searched for the best resources to learn from for each of those things. In my case, it was a website called codecademy.com, an online learning platform called pluralsight.com, and the CS50 course by Harvard University (FREE).
Step 3: Learn Through Practice
Science suggests that actually practicing is the fastest way to learn any topic. So, start by setting yourself up with a project — something that brings value to you and is complex enough that you learn everything you planned in step 2.
Define a goal to stop you from procrastinating. For my example, it was telling my boss that I would have something ready in 12 weeks, and I delivered. Of course, I could have backed out because this wasn’t my job, and nobody expected me to do it. But sometimes, even setting such an imaginative deadline puts just the right amount of pressure on you to not give up learning the skill.
Bonus: Remember
Chances are high that you master your project and afterward forget everything you learned just as fast as you incorporated it into your memory. This is where spaced repetition comes in handy. I use an app called Anki for that, where you can put questions and answers on cards, and an algorithm will determine when a card is shown to you based on the last time you got it right. This is a proven technique to remember what you learned.
Last Words and Further Reading
I really hope that this article gave you some inspiration to learn about a new topic, not only on a surface level but to dive in deep to master a new skill. Most of what I explained here I got from a book called “Ultralearning” by Scott Young.