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If you want to learn new skills quickly, the process can be easy and fun.
But let’s call a spade a spade:
What might challenge you are the steps involved.
This point is important for one simple reason I’ve observed many times over my years as a professor and author who helps people with skills development:
Far too many people miss out on learning the most effective process for rapidly acquiring a new skill. Often, they chase after efficiency first.
In fact, learning how to learn effectively is where everyone should start when it comes to just about every skill you can learn.
There’s another problem we’re going to eliminate today:
We live in a world where all kinds of gurus keep telling you what to do and how to do it based on their journeys.
Sure, sometimes you can follow their tips.
But let’s get one huge problem out of the way from the get go:
You should not try to reproduce anyone else’s journey.
Why should you take me seriously – apart from the fact that I just gave you the most powerful advice for learning any new skill upfront?
Well, for one thing, I have rapidly learned skills that helped me become a person of accomplishment. I’m not asking you to follow my journey, but you should know that I’ve been in the trenches of developing multiple skills. I have:
- Written and marketed multiple bestselling books
- Accomplished goals in multiple languages
- Delivered a TEDx Talk with over 2 million views
- Built the world’s leading memory improvement website
- Completed a PhD, two MAs and multiple certificates
- Toured as a musician in multiple bands
- Studied multiple languages
- … and much, much more on my polymathic journey
Despite all those experiences, I’ll be the first to tell you that I still have a lot to learn. And that’s the next best tip I can give you upfront:
Keep humble. It helps you learn faster no matter how good you get.
So are you ready for the best nitty-gritty learning tactics I know?
Let’s get started.
How to Learn and Master New Skills Quickly
The first thing I would point out is that technically there’s no such thing as a “new skill.”
Now, this might be getting a bit philosophical, but I think the point is important.
Just because it’s “new to you,” doesn’t make it new. In fact, it wouldn’t even be called a “skill” if someone else hadn’t learned it first.
That’s why this first tip is so important. As Michael Hyatt once put it, “you always have all the resources you need.”
When it comes to learning skills, this statement has never been more true. Most of us can access blogs, videos and social media to learn more than ever before.
One: Get Clarity Using “Dual-Coding”
Often, the people who have mastered skills completely define them very differently than those who want to learn it.
For example, if you read certain books by Bruce Lee, you’re not going to get a lot of technical verbiage about the physics of movement. You will get a combination of photographs with something more akin to philosophy, which is more important to skills development than you might think.
Combining reading with looking at illustrations is called “dual-coding.” It’s been scientifically tested and in this study, researchers found that it helps learners enjoy both concrete and abstract thinking at the same time.
But when you’re looking for books and courses, you have to watch out for sandtraps.
Many publishing companies hire people to write books and create courses teaching skills the instructors don’t actually possess, after all. It’s a tragedy, but you can learn to avoid it by doing your research.
It’s not that such learning programs are always bad.
You just want to make sure that you’re getting a variety of learning inputs, with ample materials coming directly from the source.
I use the Bruce Lee example because he shares more than just the technical processes and photographs. In books like Striking Thoughts, Lee gives you critical thinking strategies as well so you get the benefits of dual-coding.
Access to multiple channels of information is so important because combining theory and practice will help you learn skills faster in almost every case.
Two: Seek Experiences Wherever Possible
As part of going to the source and beefing up on theory, try to find ways to learn the skills through lived experience.
This doesn’t mean not reading books or taking video courses. You definitely want to do that, and make sure you read in a way that makes the information memorable.
I’m talking about supplementing the skill you want to learn with:
- Workshops
- Seminars
- Apprenticeships
- Field trips
- Long term coaching
- Working with a mentor
Even skills that are solitary, like reading and writing, benefit from working in groups. You can take breaks and talk with others, rapidly accelerating how you learn.
Three: Remove Limiting Beliefs
A lot of people think they have a particular learning style.
Whereas you might respond better to different kinds of visualization related to reading, there’s no reason to believe that anything holds you back.
As Tesia Marshik has shown in her research, learning outcomes don’t budge at all when educational material is presented in ways that cater to different learning styles. Check out her TEDx Talk for a quick overview of her work in this area.
Four: Make Your Own Metaphor
One of the reasons people blame “learning styles” for their failure to master skills is having a low-self image.
Fortunately, it’s fun and easy to use positive visualization to correct this issue.
You can also craft a personal metaphor. As Nir Eyal has shown in his research, many addicts have recovered thoroughly and completely after adopting a new persona.
The science behind this strategy is solid, but it’s also not new. Many philosophers, ranging from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond have suggested this strategy.
In my own case, I have often adopted personal metaphors like:
- My memory flourishes like a garden
- I am a Discipline Engine
- My life is floating along with calm and enjoyable cruising altitude
Practice creating and using your own metaphors and I’m confident you’ll find yourself learning new skills much faster.
Five: Embrace Mistakes
Fear of failure spreads like a disease.
It’s a particularly savage blight on the learning community because few things can be learned without making mistakes.
Many times when I want to learn a new skill, I know in advance that I’ll be making tons of mistakes.
When you accept and embrace this fact, you’ll enjoy more fulfilling success.
The trick is to employ the next step.
Six: Journal and Analyze
I always counsel my students in the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass to use a Memory Journal.
It’s an essential tool because it helps you keep track of your progress.
And when failure happens – as it inevitably will – keeping a journal helps you reflect on the exact nature of what went wrong. As this study found, students learning pharmacology not only learned faster. They also managed to reduce their stress and enjoy better mental health overall.
This works because of the reflective thinking journaling promotes. Without using journaling to analyze your progress, it’s difficult to make corrections and avoid repeating mistakes.
It also makes deliberate practice nearly impossible if you starve yourself of the metacognition journaling provides.
Seven: Break Things Down As Your Practice
Too many people approach a new skill as one giant object. It’s important to eat the elephant one bite at a time.
I’m not necessarily talking about chunking things down, but rather seeing the component parts of the skill you’re trying to learn. Then examine how those parts can be divided into even smaller components.
For example, when I learned the very difficult skill of writing books, I didn’t just dive into 100,000 word tomes.
I started with small articles.
Even to this day, I write books one chapter at a time. And these are written one page at a time. My general practice is to focus on just 2000 words a day, but always with an eye to appreciating each word as part of the whole.
Likewise, when learning to market my books, I didn’t try to advertise on dozens of platforms all at once. I picked just one, learned its ropes and grew from there.
Let me give you another example from when I learned this complex riff on guitar:
I didn’t try to learn the whole passage in one go. That’s a mistake a lot of people new to the skill or learning music make.
Instead, I broke the passage down into individual sections. Then I focused on practicing just those sections before weaving them together. Using mnemonics for music helps with naturally breaking things down, but you can also do this when learning music without any memory techniques.
Here’s the point:
Break things down to the smallest possible component. Then practice that isolated aspect of the skill.
If you struggle with breaking things down, this is where adopting a personal metaphor can help. You can say, for example, “I am a master at breaking skills down.”
Eight: Balance the Challenge-Frustration Curve
Largely due to fear of failure, many people avoid challenges.
The problem is, if you don’t take on challenges, you cannot grow.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, many people rush into things so quickly that they wind up frustrated. That leads them to give up prematurely.
With this in mind, the best thing to do is balance what I think of as the Challenge-Frustration Curve.
There’s no chart or diagram that will show you how to do this. You simply have to maintain an awareness that you cannot grow without taking on challenges. And if things get too tough, you need to explore ways to reduce the frustration that will inevitably occur when you’re not skilled enough to continue – yet.
Nine: Avoid Unanswerable Questions When Setting Your Goals & Milestones
How long does it take to learn a new skill?
Well, let me ask you this:
If you really want the skill, does it really matter how long it takes?
Personally, I focus on acquiring new skills that I want to enjoy maintaining for life. I don’t want my mind cluttered with worrying about when I’ll finally master a skill.
Instead, I want to enjoy each and every step of the way.
In other words, mastery is ongoing practice. And the best way to pick up new skills is to act as if you will be learning them forever. This is another kind of mental metaphor that helps keep your focus where it belongs.
That said, if you really need to know how long something takes, do some research.
Find three people who have mastered the skill and found out how long each of them took.
Make an average of the times they took. Probably that number will resemble how long you’ll need to master the skill.
Ten: Space Your Learning Out & Enjoy Breaks Strategically
Did you know that there’s a highly scientific way to take breaks while learning? A tactic for getting rest that will help you learn new skills faster?
It’s called interleaving. You literally focus on learning one skill for 15-20 minutes, then switch to something else.
The best part about it is that you can pick up multiple skills at the same time while accelerating your progress.
My fellow memory expert Dave Farrow has talked about how it helped him learn robotics quickly.
I find interleaving especially useful when reading, especially dense and technical books about philosophy.
I also use it a lot when learning music.
For example, I tend to spend a maximum of ten minutes on a challenging piece of music. Then I switch to playing something easier before coming back to the harder piece of music.
My fitness trainer led me through a similar process for learning the Turkish getup with kettlebells. I was especially difficult for me at the time because I was not strong at the time, nor flexible.
We broke it down and after working on just part, we switched to something else before coming back to working further on the Turkish getup.
Rotating through different parts of different skills isn’t new. If you think about it, schools have operated this way for a long time, interleaving topics like math, science, social studies and language arts throughout the weeks of each semester.
As adults, we don’t have schools to design rotational learning like this for us. But now that you’re aware of the principle, you can do so for yourself.
Eleven: Be a Completionist
In the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass, I pass on a few notes my best students have urged me to show new students.
To take one example, from Adolfo Artigas you get the stern warning not to skip around the program or “cherrypick.”
I find this important in every course I take myself.
And the only reason I can see why more and more people are missing out on crucial details is that digital amnesia is ruining their ability to focus for more than a few moments at a time.
The reason completing books and programs from beginning to end is so important has to do with your brain chemistry is that thorough learning requires tonic dopamine. In other words, you need a stable level of the brain chemical across time.
But when you flip between screens and tabs on your computer, you’re blasting yourself with phasic dopamine. It ruins your attention span.
Now, there are ways to skim and scan through books that let you study faster with wrecking your focus, but they’re not a replacement for being a completionist most of the time. That’s why it’s important to study in ways that actually ensure you will remember what you study.
Another part of proper completionism involves learning from experts efficiently.
As this scientific research paper outlines, part of the puzzle here is learning how to distinguish real experts from novices who are pretending to know more than they actually do.
One tip that comes out of the research is that real experts tend to much better organized and live well-integrated lives. So when you’re deciding who to learn from, perform due diligence. Match what they say with what they actually do and have their claims independently verified.
Twelve: Get Help If You Need It
Many people are too proud to get a coach or mentor.
That’s a shame because often times, personal guidance is the only thing that will help them move forward.
I’ve had many coaches and mentors and the only downside is that you sometimes have to experiment with a couple of them until you find a fit.
But that’s the same thing with trying on shoes, so it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.
If you’re journaling as I suggested above, you should be able to find the right fit for you a lot sooner.
And when you’re practicing the mental metaphor technique I shared with you today, you’ll soon be able to add your mentor’s style to your mind.
You can literally save yourself a coaching hour by asking yourself, “What would my coach tell me to do about learning this skill?”
Learning New Skills Could Not Be Easier
Now that you’re equipped with some of my best tips, I hope you agree that learning any new skill is a lot easier than it seems.
The trick is to adopt a personal policy of complete and “radical” honesty.
Don’t let yourself or anyone else pull the wool over your eyes. There’s nothing to be gained from self-deception.
And one of the best skills of all to learn involves amping up your memory. That way, you won’t forget the tips you learned today.
If you’re interested, grab my FREE Memory Improvement Kit:
In it, you’ll learn to use a Memory Palace. This is a skill that gives you a mental toolbox for storing lessons like the ones you learned today.
And if you have any questions, just pop them in the comments.
So what do you say?
Are you ready to get out there and learn something new?
