"If only I could have learned Spanish three years ago…"
"If only I learned about investing when I was still in my early twenties…"
If only.
For a considerable lot of us, there are a bigger number of things we need to learn than we have time for. What's more, as data turns out to be all the more promptly open on the web, the quantity of things we need to learn has just expanded. That implies that the main variable we can really control is the time we spend learning them.
Shortening the expectation to learn and adapt is a subject that has been concentrated on for a long time, and this aide will cover the key center standards of adapting speedier. Were these standards superbly set up, you could influence them to drive yourself to learn speedier and ace any classification of learning, including dialects, business abilities, musical instruments and that's only the tip of the iceberg. To cite Tony Robbins: "One expertise you need to ace in this day and age we live in, on the off chance that you need to have an unprecedented life, is the capacity to learn quickly."
In this way, here are those standards:
1. Don't reinvent the wheel.
Why reexamine a wheel that is now been made? The basic propensity we all have when gaining some new useful knowledge is attempting to ace only it and thinking little of the measure of time and exertion that can be spared by getting help from somebody who's as of now learned it.
Recollect a period when you initially figured out how to talk another dialect or acquire another aptitude. You presumably had a lofty expectation to absorb information at first, however following a couple of years or even months of testing and committing errors, you could plan an easy route to offer a companion some assistance with avoiding those same mix-ups you made right off the bat.
With a specific end goal to accomplish dominance speedier, our initial step ought to be to counsel the top players in the field, and model the way they have effectively cut out for us. As Robbins puts it: "Numerous awesome pioneers have demonstrated that the speediest approach to ace any expertise, technique or objective in life is to display the individuals who have officially fashioned the way forward. In the event that you can discover somebody who is as of now getting the outcomes that you need and take the same moves they are making, you can get the same results
"It doesn't make a difference what your age, sex or foundation is," Robbins proceeds. "Demonstrating gives you the ability to quick track your fantasies and accomplish more in a much shorter timeframe. In this day and age, it's conceivable to recover any arrangement that is out there as books, online journals, preparing recordings, advisors, somebody in our system - the rundown goes on."
To cite yet another shrewd individual, this time Pablo Picasso: "Great craftsmen duplicate. Awesome specialists take."
2. Deconstruct the skill.
The following stride to hacking the expectation to learn and adapt is to deconstruct the aptitude you see into its essential, crucial parts. Separate the parts and locate the most vital things to practice first. (See Pareto's Principle, which portrays an objective of putting so as to produce 80 percent of results in 20 percent of the exertion.)
Things being what they are this idea can apply to just about anything in life, including:
Business (80 percent of sales comes from 20 percent of customers)
Employee efficiency (80 percent of results comes from 20 percent of employees)
Happiness (80 percent of happiness comes from 20 percent of relationships)
Travel experiences (80 percent of our travels may be summed up from 20 percent of our highlight experiences)
Grasping along these lines of intuition just demonstrates that not very many things really have any kind of effect in any part of our lives, including learning. Our objective then, ought to be to particular the 20 percent of our learning materials that will give us 80 percent of the outcome.
As it turns out, fast-learning experts have already embraced this ideology, and have provided some concrete examples on how to do this effectively. In his TED talk, Josh Kaufman said he believed that you don’t need 10,000 hours in order to master a skill. Instead, the key is to embrace the first 20 hours, and learn the most important subset skills within that time frame to get the maximum amount of impact. Numerous studies in the fields of motor and cognitive skill acquisition have established that the first few hours of practicing a new skill always generate the most dramatic improvements in performance. (See Parkinson’s Law.)
3. Stop multitasking.
Multitasking is a guilty pleasure we’ve all developed in the age of constant notifications and mobile applications. From checking our emails every ten minutes, to scrolling through our Instagram feed, to welcoming co-workers coming by our desk for a “five-minute break”: Multitasking can be one of the biggest hurdles preventing us from learning faster.
Think about your own computer. When you have 20-plus different tabs open on your browser, your computer begins to slow down and it takes longer to process every action afterwards. Studies have shown that when an individual gets distracted, it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the task at hand. What’s more important to note is that a study by the University of California Irvine found that a worker applies himself or herself only 11 minutes before becoming distracted.
The same thing applies to our long-term focus. Many of us aren’t able to dedicate the six-to-12-plus months it takes to learn a skill because of the countless new projects, ideas, or hobbies that come our way. And when we decide to shift our focus to a new distraction, it’s much more difficult to find the same passion and drive to focus on the previous skill.
Once you have deconstructed the subset skills that will give you the maximum amount of results, focus solely on improving those skills and avoid learning anything else until you’ve mastered them.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
This is the part where most of us struggle, and what many of us don’t want to hear is the rule that mastering anything faster requires practice. Learning requires frequency of and persistence in performing the same skill over and over again, until you can do it subconsciously, without having to think about it.
The best performers in the world understand this “secret” to learning faster and become the best, yet rarely talk about its importance because of how unsexy it sounds.
Expert-level performance is primarily the result of expert-level practice, not due to innate talent. As K. Anders. Ericsson, a scientific researcher from Florida State University, elaborated in a paper: “People believe that because expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance, the expert performer must be endowed with characteristics qualitatively different from those of normal adults. This view has discouraged scientists from systematically examining expert performers and accounting for their performance in terms of the laws and principles of general psychology.”
5. Seek immediate feedback.
In 1960, while they were still an unknown high school rock band, the Beatles went to Hamburg, Germany, to play in the local clubs. The group was underpaid. The acoustics were terrible. The audiences were unappreciative. So what did the Beatles get out of the Hamburg experience? Nonstop hours of playing time, practice and immediate feedback that forced them to get better. That’s the key difference that elevated the Beatles to the top, according to Macolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. The band didn’t just practice in a garage for the sake of practicing; they strived to get in front of a live audience that would provide them immediate criticism and constructive feedback.
As the Beatles grew in skill, audiences demanded more performances -- giving them more playing time. By 1962 they were playing eight hours per night, seven nights per week. By 1964, the year they burst on the international scene, the Beatles had played over 1,200 concerts together. By way of comparison, most bands today don’t play 1,200 times in their entire career. This is why at Rype, we’re solely focused on connecting you with native speaking tutors, who can give you immediate feedback during your lessons.
6. Go Long.
Unfortunately, many of us give up before or during what Seth Godin calls “The Dip.”
Godin says that although it’s important to know when to quit, many potential winners don’t reach success because they quit before the dip. According to Godin, five reasons you might fail to become the best in the world include:
You run out of time (and quit)
You run out of money (and quit)
You get scared (and quit)
You're not serious about it (and quit)
You lose interest (and quit)
Psychologists have also studied what’s known as the transition cycle. This is the cycle of progress we go through whenever we’re experiencing change or a novel event, such as a tragedy or the opportunity to learn something new. There’s a sense of euphoria we all experience when we begin something new. That's why we’re so addicted to seeing notifications on social media, because dopamine gets released each time.
Once the honeymoom phase fades away, we experience the “dip” and our progress begins to plateau or diminish. This is when most of us quit. The reason why this is important is that if you can predict that a dip is coming, when you’re learning anything new, it’s easier to fight through it. More importantly, the dip is there because those persistent enough to stick it out can ride the upward wave that is at the end of the tunnel.
So, to restate these points on how to hack the learning curve:
Model an expert who’s been there, and don’t reinvent the wheel.
Deconstruct the skills that will deliver 80 percent of results.
Stop multitasking
Practice those reps, reps, reps! Then seek immediate feedback.
Go long and don’t quit before or during the dip.
Do you have any tips or strategies? Please leave them in the comments section below.
