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