Figuring out how to learn easily is one of the biggest favors you can do for yourself. That’s because learning can be hard. So hard that many people basically give up on it some time in adulthood. It’s hard because it takes energy. Your brain is the biggest calorie hog in your body, and when it is engaged in learning it is expending calories at a daunting rate (when I was in college, I learned that a nice stack of peanut M&Ms could help alleviate the calorie burn).
Your body is naturally calibrated to minimize energy use where possible, so if it doesn’t seem like learning something is going to be rewarding then your body will steer you away from it with whiny commentary like “That’s haaaaard” when you are trying to understand some science-y thing you’re not familiar with – like how hormones work.
But learning is rewarding. We know it’s rewarding because people everywhere play games. And games require learning. Lots of learning (ask any athlete who studies game day films). But getting better at something, winning, achieving milestones, all these things are rewarding to human brains.
So learning is hard and we love to do it. The question is – how can we do it usefully and well? How can learn important things in our own lives and from our own lives. Without going back to school!
Here are some tips, tricks and observations on making use of your natural learning ability in your life.
#1: LEARN HOW TO LEARN FROM OTHERS.
Humans are animals blessed with social learning capabilities. We see other people do things and we imitate them. We see other people fuck up and we rigorously avoid whatever embarrassing things those other people did. We learn from what other people tell us. We learn from our interactions with other people. We learn from history. Some authors even think that our capacity for social learning is one of the things that makes us superior to artificial intelligence (so far).
Successful people in every field often spend a lot of time studying other successful people in that field. Movie directors absorb what other movie directors have done. Fine artists study what other artists have done. And so on. In fact, trying to copy what other people have done is often a key part of a literary author’s education.
Other people can help you learn almost anything you need to know in life (which is one of the things that makes YouTube such a wonderful thing.
To make good use of this technique, all you have to do is apply it consciously (you probably already apply it unconsciously to some extent). Let’s say for example, you want to write a book. Read a similar book and analyze it. Take it apart. Reconstruct it. Rate it. Explain to yourself what works and what doesn’t. Figure out what you like and don’t like about it. Learn as much as you can from what the author did – and then start applying it to your own endeavors.
This business of consciously noticing what you learn from observing others can be applied to almost every aspect of your life – parenting, finances, choosing TV shows that you like, etc. You just have to use this technique on purpose to start reaping more consistent results.
#2 – PAY ATTENTION TO YOURSELF
This is a weird one and a bit harder than the first one, as I can attest.
If you’re like most people, you make certain mistakes over and over again. You go to bed too late to wake up refreshed the next morning. You leave too late to make it to work on time (yup, I did this thousands of times). You regain the weight you thought you lost forever. Or maybe you end up binge-watching something you’re not that interested in rather than going to the gym. Over and over again, you do things that give you results that are different from what you predicted.
You fucked up. You made an error. You screwed it up again. And you will keep doing this until you pay attention.
It’s not because you’re stupid that you’re not paying attention to whether you are getting things right or getting them wrong. You’re not paying attention because you’re busy and you have other things on your mind. But to learn from yourself, you have to pay attention to what actually works for you and what doesn’t.
Rehearse success for better learning:
When you give a presentation at work and it goes well – rehearse it! Replay over and over again in your mind what you did to prepare, how you executed it, and what went well. Learn from your own successes!
You’d be amazed at how many people don’t do this. They stop getting better at the things they’re halfway decent at because they discount their successes and dismiss them. They don’t get better at new things they show some promise in because they discount their successes and dismiss them. If you wrote a computer program that worked well – rehearse how you did it!
Rehearse your successes! Learn from them.
Analyze your mistakes to learn from them:
The next time you start a diet, analyze what you actually did the last time you started a diet. Not just how enthusiastic you were at the start. But how it truly went. What you liked and disliked. Where you failed and succeeded. The mistakes you made over and over again. What you don’t want to repeat. What you do want to repeat.
It is very easy to not do this. Doing this is hard. It is much easier to listen to someone who tells you that this new diet will work when all the other ones didn’t. Learning is hard. But it works. If you learn that you can easily tolerate being hungry in the morning, but inevitably give in to temptation around midnight – take that information into account when you start any kind of weight loss program.
It doesn’t matter how many people say you need to eat breakfast and avoid late night eating if you’re not actually going to do it. Learn from your own experience. Pay more attention to yourself and your own life than to what other people say your life should be.
This is kind of a conundrum because, as noted above, we naturally want to learn from other people. And we should. But our learnings from other people have to be tested against our own experiences.
#3: IF IT’S IMPORTANT TO YOU – LET THE LEARNING BE DIFFICULT
There’s some evidence that your learning will be better if it’s difficult. But that’s not exactly why you want the learning to be difficult. It’s because the learning will be more valuable to you – and you’ll treat it that way.
It’s called the Ikea effect in some circles. You went to all the trouble to assemble the furniture, so now it’s more valuable to you than the sheer price point would indicate.
Think of an entrepreneur. The learning curve for an entrepreneur can be quite painful. As in you lost a lot of money and time doing things in a way that wasn’t very successful. But boy does an entrepreneur learn a lot from those costly mistakes. Those costly mistakes are not going to be repeated.
If you travel around the Australian outback, get lost and bitten by a snake, and then spend a certain amount of agonizing time wondering if you’ll make it through your adventure – you’ll learn a lot. About snakes. About navigation. About yourself. Perhaps you also learn a valuable lesson about not panicking.
But you’ll only learn these things if wandering around wilderness areas is important you. If it’s not, the only thing you’ll learn is “NEVER EVER EVER GO BACK TO AUSTRALIA”. But if wilderness travel is important to you, the fact that your trip was difficult is not only not an impediment to more travel – but one of the most valuable experiences you’ll ever have.
If something is important to you, let it be difficult. You want to write that book? Go ahead, struggle with it. Struggle with it a lot. Struggle with it for a long time. Keep struggling until you get that exquisitely rewarding sensation of mastery – when your sentence does what you want it to. When your paragraphs flow. When your cliffhanger has even you on the edge of your seat. And so on. The fact that learning something is hard doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn it.
#4: DON’T RE-READ THE MATERIAL.
You can learn a lot from reading but you can’t read your way to deep learning about your life. You have to experience things. Even students in school, who are solely learning to get a good grade on a test, don’t get much out of re-reading material.
If you really want to learn something, you have to do something with what you’re learning. You can read a self-help book for example. But if you want to learn how to stop being so anxious all the time, you’ve got to actually try to experience not being anxious.
Right now, I’m trying to teach an injured shoulder how to move again. I cannot read my way into better shoulder health. I’ve read a lot on shoulder injuries and how to heal them. But I can’t read endless articles on shoulder injuries and expect to get better. I’ve got to have my shoulder actually experience being able to move. That means moving it. Moving my shoulder is hard (see #3 above). But if I move my shoulder, and try to adjust the movement a little bit each time, my brain learns that my shoulder can and does move. Not the way it used to yet, but my range of motion is increasing and my brain is learning.
#5: HOW TO USE VISUALS TO IMPROVE LEARNING
Somehow it’s often easier to remember something if you have a visual image associated with it. The visual image doesn’t have to contain the information you’re trying to remember, it just needs to be associated with it. For example, here’s a picture:
If you have a visual like this in your mind associated with taking a walk each evening – remembering to take a walk each evening will often be easier. You’ve associated an image of relaxing family time with your evening walk. When you scroll through your mental to-do list or expectations for the day, a picture of you and your family peacefully enjoying a walk will pop up.
You can use other sensory cues too – taste, smell, hearing, touch, etc. Having any kind of sensory memory cue can be a powerful inducement to doing something again. You’re essentially encoding your learning (walking good!) in a compact and easily retrievable little package.
Use this when you want to learn to repeat a good behavior. Use it when you want to remember the name of someone in your field you only see at conferences – create a visual memory of shaking their hand and saying their name. This is so much easier on your brain than trying to remember a list of names without any sensory cues.
Athletes use visualizations to get better at sports. You can use it if you’re trying to learn how to swim as an adult, for example. Picture yourself using perfect form. Rehearse the picture in your mind (see #2 above) until you begin to associate that mental picture with actually swimming. It helps!
Do the same thing if you’re trying to master new cooking techniques. And so on. Sensory memories are an easy and underutilized tool for learning.
#6: PLAN TO LEARN
Learning is like candy for your brain. The effort of learning produces a reward in your brain, a signal that something that was difficult is now easy. That progression is like a little dose of sweetness for your brain.
Since learning is rewarding – plan to incorporate it into your life. Learning things that aren’t useful can be fun – how to use a yo-yo, that your cat enjoys having you chase him around the house, how to win at solitaire.
But learning things that are useful, that you actually want to know, is fun too. Learning how to make your own bread can be lots of fun. Learning how to answer your boss’s truly bizarre questions in staff meetings can be fun too. Once you figure out how to answer those questions, you can sit back and laugh as everyone else in your department struggles. Yay you!
Maybe it would be useful to you to learn how to communicate with your teenager in a way that got through to them and eased your worries about them. That’s a project.
But you can do it! You’re not doing it already because it hasn’t occurred to you that your teenager’s alarming study habits are something you can actually learn about and ameliorate.
There may be lots of minor (and some major) problems in your life that could be solved or at least improved if you make a commitment to learn a new way to deal with them.
Looking at learning as a way to make your life measurably better and more comfortable, rather than as a virtue or an effort, can make all the difference in what and how easily you learn.
#7: DON’T WEAR YOURSELF OUT.
Take breaks.
A burned-out brain doesn’t want to learn anything. In my previous life, I had to learn about new technologies every 6 months or so. Before that, I had learn the names of 100 new people every 6 months or so. For most of my life, I’ve had to learn stuff on a regular basis as part of my professional life. So I got very used to learning.
And one of the things I learned about learning is that it works better in short bursts. I’m not talking about the Pomodoro method, although I naturally gravitate toward things like that.
What I mean is that the brain has to rest. Learning takes place during rest, not during study. Study is important, but it’s not where learning occurs. Learning occurs when your brain does something with the information you just got, and it does that while it is not exhausting itself.
Rest. Rest your mind. Take a walk. Play solitaire. Watch a National Geographic special. Putter around. Pet the dog. The breaks are really important.
They’re important if you’re building muscle, and they’re important if you’re building neurons.
If you want to learn how to get along with your mother-in-law (good skill), go ahead and obsess over it. But then give yourself a break!
Your goal is not to solve the problem of your mother-in-law not liking you by brooding. Your goal is to learn how to get along with your mother-in-law. Different thing. Learning how to get along with your mother-in-law is less stressful and more rewarding. You’d be surprised how many problems are less stressful when you take a ‘learning’ attitude rather than a ‘solving’ attitude.
BONUS TECHNIQUES
And 2 more techniques that’ll help you learn almost anything.
Sleep! Sleep Like a Teenager.
Sleep is the key to learning. Sleep is when your brain consolidates all your memories and the new information from the day and turns it into stuff you can retrieve and use again later. No sleep, no retrieval later. You have to sleep on it.
Let’s say you’re trying to learn all the jargon and acronyms associated with your new job at a new company. Plus who everyone you met is and what they do. Hit the hay early each night after your intensive orientation to the new company and its code of conduct. Your brain will thank you. It’ll have extra time to try to figure out how to organize all those bits of information you got.
Same goes for anything else you have to learn – whether it’s bowling or differential equations or how to take better pictures with your smartphone. If you can take a quick nap after a learning session, even better!
Extra sleep is not always practical or possible, but when you can squeeze some in, take advantage of it! Sleep is the under-rated rock star of memory and learning.
And don’t skimp on your regular nightly snooze time either. Give yourself permission to sleep like a teenager. Deeply, all-out. For longer into the morning (or early afternoon!) than anyone really approves of. You will be more productive and learn more (and more quickly) if you actually prioritize sleep over productivity. A rested brain is a tiger! An exhausted brain is a senile housecat. Give yourself a chance to be a tiger!
Explain it to Someone Else Like They’re a Second-Grader
This can be a time-consuming hack but it really works. You don’t want to explain it to someone like they’re 5 years old – that’s a bit too simplistic. But you do want to explain it to someone like they’re that intelligent second-grader who asks probing questions.
When you have to boil something down to its explainable essence, you really really learn it. Your brain actively organizes and stores the information. If you have a family member, friend, or co-worker (or that second-grader!) who you can get to listen to your explanation of how to play the guitar, great. Your brain will work really hard to make sure you don’t sound like a fool in front of your colleague.
But you may not be able to find someone to listen to your explanation of chord progressions. That’s okay. After your guitar practice session, or right before you go to sleep at night, or in the shower or whenever you can – explain what you learned to yourself. It may sound crazy to think that talking to yourself about how to play the guitar will help you – but it will!
I once tried to learn how to play boogie-woogie on the piano. It’s both surprisingly simple and surprisingly difficult. But explaining to myself what I was supposed to do and why really helped sort everything in my brain before the next session.
Sorting and organizing things this way makes learning the next step easier on your brain and therefore your brain operates more efficiently. Your brain really appreciates this!
Granted, you may have rehearse difficult concepts quite a number of times before you really master them. If you’re trying to learn (and then explain) certain characteristics of quantum physics, it may take more than a single explanation session to become really comfortable with the ideas. But each time you explain what you learned, the concepts make a little more sense to your brain and become a little more integrated with the rest of what you know and a little easier to retrieve.
All right now you are ready to go forth and learn!
Discover more from Get Pretty Fed Up
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.