Most people don't know how to learn because they fry their brain with podcasts and YouTube videos and books and textbooks and social media and 6 months later after learning so much they have nothing to show for it. Why are you even learning in the first place if not to do something with it? Learning for most people has become a form of mental masturbation; it's the same cheap dopamine you get from scrolling on your phone but even worse because it makes you feel as if you're learning something, but the reality is you'll forget about it by tomorrow. Most of the people forget 95% of the things that they learn in just one month. I mean imagine going to class making notes spending hours and hours practicing or solving assignments and then in a month you don't even remember what you have even learned.
Now here's the harsh truth: you're learning slow, and if you can learn 10 times faster, you can achieve success faster. You can complete the portfolio project, you can start the business, you can articulate your thoughts in your writing or whatever it is that you're learning. Even further, it's my belief that most people are just wasting time. You can probably learn what you need to learn within 2 weeks when most people take 6 months to learn that one thing. On the other side, there are people who can learn things much faster than you. Something that takes you 10 hours just takes them 3 hours. And once they learn something, they don't seem to forget anything. For example, Scott Young, the author of the book Ultralearning, he finished his four-year computer science degree at MIT in just one year. He was also able to learn multiple languages in just a couple of months.
So to do that, you need to learn how to learn, and that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to cover these topics: the Protégé effect and Feynman technique, how to optimize for pattern recognition, which is very important, how to use AI to speed up the process, and Project-based learning so you actually do something and you solidify the knowledge. This is going to be a very practical guide, just straight here's how you learn.
The Meta Skill: Learning How to Learn
The mark of a free person is that they learn how to learn. That is the meta skill, that is the skill of all skills. If you're in order to pick up a skill that changes your life, you need to know how to learn that skill effectively so that you can use it. Because if you don't choose what to learn, you will be told what to learn. And if your mind is the operating system for reality, the options available for your future will be drastically limited and you won't even realize it. More importantly, the most important thing you can do when the world is rapidly changing like it is with technology and AI is learn. Learning is the single most important skill because it allows you to learn the skills that can't be taught in schools 'cause the schools are they're just this big system, this big maybe outdated system that take a long time to catch up with the times. Changing a curriculum is a lot slower than someone who learns the topic fast makes a YouTube video on it for you to learn even faster. And if you can keep up with that, if you can keep up and adapt with the latest skills that are coming in, adding them to your tool belt, you can do some incredible things.
Meta Learning: The Skill of Learning How to Learn
Remember your brain is like a muscle: the more you practice, the stronger the connections between neurons become. And this is where meta learning comes in – the skill of learning how to learn. And if you can master this, you'll be able to save a lot of time whenever you're learning something new. Basically, there are three rules of meta learning. Rule number one is to understand the reason why you're learning something. Because the way that you'll study would be entirely different if you're preparing for an exam when compared to just learning for fun. And having this clarity makes a lot of difference because it defines what you'll be focusing on the most.
So the rule number two is to figure out what are those minimum number of things that you should master in order to get the job done. For example, the classic case of most of the exams where you can just look at the previous year questions and understand that there's a pattern so that you can smartly skip a few chapters here and there. And now the rule number three is to figure out how you'll be learning the things that you have shortlisted. A lot of students just read something and expect themselves to learn. Some of them just watch a lecture and be like, yeah, now I know everything. The point is learning is not a passive process; it's an active process. And unless and until you read it, listen to it, consume it, and use some techniques to finally test yourself, you're not going to learn anything new.
Step 1: Create an Aim - Why Are You Learning?
The first step to learning how to learn is to create a map of your ideal life. It seems like the missing piece in many learning tutorials is that they just don't go over why you're learning in the first place. People choose something to learn, but it doesn't connect to any of their current skills and doesn't connect to the life they want to live. This is dangerous. You won't want to learn if there is no deeper meaning or clarity behind it. You will need more discipline, and you'll probably continue to hate learning like you did in school, or you'll feel like your learning is for the sole purpose of getting a job or career that you didn't care about in the first place. So that's step one: to create an aim for your learning. That way you can feel the progress you are making toward your self-generated goals, not the goals Society assigned to you. That is a major Key of Life enjoyment. If you don't enjoy what you're learning and you just feel like you're learning to do something that was expected of you since you were a kid, that your parents wanted for you, or that Society wanted for you, you're not going to enjoy it. And that alone is going to hurt how much you learn. People who enjoy learning something can be so much better at people who are just innately smart.
You need to gain clarity because a hierarchy of goals frames your mind for what you are going to learn. If you don't have these things written down, when you go to learn something, you aren't going to know how to apply it to your goals because you don't have goals. You just have the goal of going to school, getting a job. So the only thing your mind is trying to pick up as information fuels that goal. Generate your own goals here, what skills and knowledge you need to acquire in order to achieve them, which will also help shape your learning and what you decide to learn, and then are there distractions standing in the way?
Step 2: Outline a Project First
Listen to this carefully: the best way to learn is to build a real-world project and only search for information when you need it. How much you learn is directly correlated with how much progress you make on the project. When you watch endless tutorials, you fill your mind with noise and chaos. Most of that information goes to waste. It leads to overwhelm, anxiety, and slows down how fast you learn. When it comes time to build the project – the only reason you're learning in the first place – you feel as if you learned nothing and have to search for the information anyway. So if you want to learn faster, skip the tutorial phase, outline the project first. Now, you don't necessarily need to skip the tutorial phase, you just need to start the project and hit that struggling point. And then when you go into the tutorial phase, you actually pick up the information.
When I say outline a project or create a project, this tends to confuse some people. A project can be anything. Your health can be a project, your body can be a project, your relationship can be a project, your business can be a project, an image in Photoshop can be a project, a website for your portfolio can be a project. A project is simply a structured way of achieving a goal or making progress toward a goal. It's a way to further narrow your frame of reference so your mind biases the right information as you learn. And again, this continues to optimize pattern recognition as you read books, study tutorials, or have conversations. Good dopamine will spurt into your brain to signal that information is important for the completion of the project. Your subconscious will munch on problems and send relevant ideas to your conscious mind. This is what creatives call shower thoughts.
How to Start a Project
Choose something to build that moves the needle toward what you want in life from earlier. Create a note or document and brain dump everything that comes to mind. Save three to five sources of inspiration that you want to emulate. This part is so important, even when you're creating Photoshop or art or something like that as a beginner, or tweets or writing, anything – a book, a course, whatever it may be. You start by pulling certain parts of those things into your own project. So you're not necessarily starting from scratch, you're just not starting with a tutorial. You're trying to imitate – intelligent imitation. You're trying to pull from multiple sources to create your own thing. And then as you go and hit sticking points, that's when you learn best. Now with this, you want to study those sources and break down their structure or characteristics. Then outline the project into sections, milestones, images, inspiration, and what you need to know in order to complete it. And then, of course, have a place to capture ideas that come to mind, preferably somewhere you don't lose the ideas or forget about them.
Step 3: Start Building (Even if You Know Nothing)
Learning comes from struggle, not memorization. If you know nothing, at least try to take the first step. Download the software and start playing around. Try to create something, anything. Just get your mind in a state where it's hungry to learn. Otherwise, you probably won't digest the information you search for. Then follow this process: you start, then you don't know what to do, you try and fail, you search for the answer or ask AI, you try to implement the answer, you repeat until the project is complete. And if you can't find the answer, you ask an expert.
A few years ago, Google searching was considered a skill – being able to type the right things into Google to get the answer that you need, or being able to search Reddit or Stack Overflow if you're a programmer or things like that. Now that AI has all of that information, prompt engineering is becoming the new Google search in a sense. As an example, if I'm building a project or just an image in Photoshop and I get stuck, right? I start, I don't know what to do, I'm kind of just like trying out different tools, and then I can't create it. And let's say I want to remove a background from an image. I know nothing about Photoshop, right? Then I can just type into AI and say, "How do I remove the background of an image in Photoshop?" And it will give me a few different options that I can try. Then I succeed, and because I'm struggling and my brain wanted to learn that thing, it kind of locks it in into place a lot better. And then you continue on with the project and you keep going.
Overcoming the Urge Not to Start: The Ziegarnik Effect
How do you start when you don't feel like starting? Because that's a big problem for a lot of people, is they just don't want to start, so they never do. The Ziegarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon where people remember unfinished tasks more than completed tasks. Meaning if we don't complete tasks for our projects, it's much easier to find the motivation to get started. But how did you get started from scratch? So there's a trick here called the Ziegarnik squared effect. In other words, you want to kind of invoke the Ziegarnik effect by starting easy tasks before getting started on your project. Because if you start those tasks, then they'll be unfinished and you'll want to continue working on them, and they lead naturally into the task that you need to work on. This could be something like setting up your desk, like literally coming and cleaning your desk, or making coffee in the morning and coming to sit down, or some kind of ritual or routine that allows you to just get into the thing. You don't necessarily have to start doing what you were doing before, you just have to kind of go into it, start playing around a bit, and then once you start doing something or mess with something, you want to continue doing it.
Active Learning Techniques
Most people think that learning equals consuming information – that if you read more, watch more lectures, take more notes, you'll learn everything. But that's not how it works. Learning actually happens in two phases. Phase one is where you consume information through reading, watching, or listening. But phase two is where you give yourself some time to process it, apply it, and retrieve it later. But most of the people don't even care about phase two, and that's why they struggle to learn anything new.
Learn in Three Phases
Always learn in three phases. Imagine I'm learning how to build an app, website, or just preparing for an exam. My first phase would be to just watch a couple of videos on it. The second phase would be practicing it, because this is the phase where most of the learning usually happens. You'll also get a lot of doubts, but don't be scared to ask those doubts, doesn't matter how stupid they are. Don't hold back because your friends might be judging you; that is killing your growth. Now the third phase is the retrieval phase, basically a phase where you test yourself after four to five days of learning something new, either by solving some questions or asking yourself more questions. All these three phases are equally important. So whenever you're making a study schedule next time, make sure that you block time for all these three phases.
Use Technology to Learn and Revise
AI tools have become so good right now, and some of them are literally free to use. There are tools like Google's NotebookLM which can summarize your notes, explain concepts, and even turn your study materials into a podcast where you can ask questions. Another is Google's AI Studio, where you can actually do a Google Meet with it, share your screen, ask your doubts, and it will answer all the questions in real-time, like you're on a meet with an expert. There are also apps like Anki, a flashcard app which asks you questions in regular intervals about new information so you don't forget it. Utilizing AI like ChatGPT or specialized tools like Cortex AI's 'Kai' can significantly enhance the process by allowing you to ask specific questions, get summaries, or even act as a study partner or strategic advisor for your learning goals.
Keep Your Brain Active: Pomodoro, Sprints, and Interleaving
Studies show that on average, if you're studying for 4 hours straight, then the effective study time is less than 25%, which means your brain spent less than 1 hour actively learning. The best way to counter this is to use techniques like Pomodoro and Ultradian Sprints. With these techniques, you'd actively spend some time learning something and then would actively take a break. So now you're getting into a phase of learning, taking a break, learning, taking a break. Now your brain actively knows what you have to do at what point of time, which means you'll not end up daydreaming while you're learning something new. There's also one more technique called the interleaving effect, which basically says that instead of studying the same subject for 4 hours straight, you should actually switch to a new subject after 1 to 2 hours of time. This will make your brain actively focus on the reading material and this also works much better because now your brain will start seeing a pattern between different subjects, which makes the entire learning process much more effective. The funda is simple: you need to keep your brain as active as possible while you're learning a new piece of information.
The Feynman Technique & Protégé Effect: Teach to Learn
The Feynman technique is a learning method popularized by physicist Richard Feynman. In short, it's about deeply understanding a concept by explaining it in simple terms, as if you were teaching it to someone with no prior knowledge. Whenever you read something new or learn something new, you should essentially close that book, take a new piece of paper, and try to explain whatever you have learned in the simplest manner. While explaining that concept to yourself, if you get stuck, that is the exact concept that you need revision with. In other words, if you can't explain it in the simplest manner, then even you don't understand it well enough.
This overlaps with what's called the Protégé effect, which in short is: the teacher learns more than the student. Teaching what you know or what you learn encourages you to make sense of it in your own way, to finally string it together in your own mind so that you can articulate it. That's learning. And by doing this, it exposes even more gaps in your knowledge. What this does is it increases the effect of pattern recognition. Life becomes more enjoyable and serendipitous because you notice more things in life that can help you achieve the projects or goals that you set your mind to. You learn more just from living.
Structure Your Learning Time
The best way, in my opinion, to structure your learning is in three different focused blocks. The first is 30 to 90 minutes of building: you build your project and search for information when you need it. The second is 30 to 60 minutes of learning: you follow your study regimen (perhaps generated by AI or based on your meta-learning plan) and take notes on what you learn. The last block is 30 minutes of walking: this way you can listen to YouTube videos, audiobooks, or lectures. Go on a walk and jot down ideas on your phone as they come to mind. Those are your Keystone habits. That's when all of the learning happens. Nobody is going to give you the time to learn and build what you want to learn and build. You have to take the time, put them on your calendar, wake up an hour earlier or stay up an hour later. Turn it into a ritual.
The Missing Piece: Write to Reflect and Connect
So you know what you want for your future, you have a project, and you are learning and building daily. But there's one missing piece, and it turns out it's also a way to further enhance how much you learn. The missing piece is people who care about what you're building. To make people care, you need to show what you're doing in public, and in most cases, the best way to do that is writing – teaching what you know and what you're learning as you build. Writing is how you systematically reflect on what you learn. When you teach what you learn, you expose more knowledge gaps, you struggle more to understand, you have more specific knowledge to research. This directly employs the Feynman technique and Protégé effect.
Writing is the foundation of media, it's accessible, and it holds much more power than just building an audience. Treat social media as your public journal rather than a place to just distract yourself. In that way, you at least have a chance at attracting potential supporters, customers, employers, investors, team members, and anything else you would need to reach the life you want. This is why it's so powerful: learning, building, writing to systematically reflect on what you learn in public so people value what you're learning and building. It just doubles down on the effect of learning. It's less about building a following and more about putting your work in front of other people. Your chances of success are zero if you haven't given people a chance to know or care about you.
Here’s what’s recommended: write a newsletter once a week to summarize what you've learned, and remember, teach it. Write posts on X, Threads, or LinkedIn. Talk about your opinions, beliefs, personal experiences, and what you are learning and building. Add one more 30 to 60-minute time block for writing. Remember, the person who puts the most number of efforts while learning something new – be it in the form of making notes after the class, revising, practicing, or anything else – he will end up learning the most. It's all the game of keeping your brain as active as possible while you're learning something new.
