The ultimate guide to learning anything faster

“If only I learned about investing when I was still in my early twenties…”

If only.

For many of us, there are more things we want to learn than we have time.

As information becomes more readily accesible online, the number of things we want to learn is only continuing to increase. And the only variable we can control is the amount of time we spend learning them.

Shortening the learning curve is a topic that’s been studied for many years, and this guide will cover the fundamental core principles of learning faster. You’d be able to leverage these principles to push yourself to learn faster in any topics including languages, business, musical instruments, and more.

“One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to
have an extraordinary life, is the ability to learn rapidly” — Anthony Robbins

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Why reinvent a wheel that’s already been created?

The common tendency we all have when learning something new is trying to master it alone, underestimating the amount of time and effort that can be saved by getting help from someone who’s learnt it.

Think back to a time when you first learned how to speak a new language or a new skill.

You probably had a steep learning curve initially, but after a few years or even months of experimenting and making mistakes, you could design a shortcut to help a friend avoid those same mistakes you made early on.

In order to achieve mastery faster, our first step should be to consult the top players in the field, and model the path they have already carved out for us.

As Tony Robbins puts it:

Many great leaders have proven that the fastest way to master any skill, strategy or goal in life is to model those who have already forged the path ahead. If you can find someone who is already getting the results that you want and take the same actions they are taking, you can get the same results.

It doesn’t matter what your age, gender, or background is, modeling gives you the capacity to fast track your dreams and achieve more in a much shorter period of time.

In this day and age, it’s possible to retrieve almost any solution that’s out there in the form of books, blogs, training videos, consultants, someone in our network — the list goes on.

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso

Deconstruct the skill

The next step to hacking the learning curve is to deconstruct the skill into its basic, fundamental components. Break down the parts and find the most important things to practice first.

This is in reference to the popularized Pareto’s Principle, where the goal is to generate 80 percent of results putting in 20 percent of the effort.

It turns out that this concept can apply to almost 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 can be summed up from 20 percent of our highlight experiences)
• And so on…

Here’s the Pareto graph in a different visual format.

Embracing this way of thinking only goes to show that very few things actually make a difference in any aspect of our lives, including learning.

Our goal then, should be to separate the 20 percent of our learning materials that will give us 80 percent of the result.

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 believes that you don’t need 10,000 hours in order to master a skill. As Kaufman elaborates, 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.

The general pattern looks like this: when you start, you’re horrible, but you improve very quickly as you learn the most important parts of the skill. 

Related topic to learn: Parkinson’s Law

For example:

• If you’re trying to learn a musical instrument, you should know the few, most common chords that gives you access to 80 percent of songs.
• If you’re trying to learn a new language, you should focus on learning the most common 1,500–2,000 words that will give you 80 percent of text coverage.

Stop Multitasking

Multi-tasking 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 co-workers coming by our desk for a “five-minute break.”

However, multi-tasking can be one of the biggest hurdles preventing us from learning faster.

Think about your own computer.

When you have 20+ 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 done by the University of California, Irvine, found that a co-worker gets only 11 minutes work done before they’re distracted.

The same thing applies to our long-term focus. Many of us aren’t able to dedicate the 6-12+ 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 towards 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.

Reps, reps, reps

This is the part where most of us struggle, and what many of us don’t want to hear.

YES! The key to mastering anything faster requires practice.

It requires frequency and persistence of 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 learn 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, elaborates in his 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.”

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?

Non-stop hours of playing time, practice, and immediate feedback that forced them to get better.

That’s the key difference that rose The Beatles to the top, according to Macolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

The band brothers didn’t just practice in their garage for the sake of practicing; they strived to get in front of a live audience that will provide them immediate criticism and constructive feedback.

As the Beatles grew in skill, audiences demanded more performances — 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.

Go Long

Unfortunately, many of us give up before or during what Seth Godin calls “The Dip.”

Godin describes 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

1. You run out of time (and quit)
2. You run out of money (and quit)
3. You get scared (and quit)
4. You’re not serious about it (and quit)
5. You lose interest (and quit)

Psychologists have also studied what’s known as the transition cycle. 

It’s the cycle of progress we go through whenever we’re experiencing change or a novel event, such as a tragic event or even learning something new.

Read Next: Hitting a wall? Here’s how to get your creative juices flowing

Image credit: Unsplash