How to Learn Faster with this one little Secret

We read books, watch videos, and take courses to fill our heads with content and information. Maybe we remember a few good ideas from the content we consume. But soon after time passes and we forget most of this information. It’s frustrating to spend all that time trying to learn something just to forget it. I want to share one simple idea in this post that is going to change the way your learn something. When you use this idea on something you want to learn, you will not only learn it faster, you will remember what you have learned. Stay with me here, this one idea is going to help you learn things faster.

I want you to think about about what happens after you read something or watch a video. Your mind sees or hears that information. The information is sitting in your head. But that is the problem, it is just sitting in your head doing nothing. The ideas will just float away and be forgotten unless… Unless you anchor these ideas to something, you will lose them. If you can write down one single idea from this post, it is this one idea: Make Knowledge Actionable. That is the secret to learning faster and remembering what you have learned. Let me explain what I mean by “Make Knowledge Actionable”.

We need a purpose, a project to anchor the ideas and information to our mind. A project gives us something real that we can tie the learning back to. A project reinforces what we learned, it gives us practice. A project does not let the ideas float away in the wind. We take that knowledge and we create something with it.

How do you make knowledge actionable?

Before we can make knowledge actionable, we have to figure out what we want. Maybe you have already thought about this, or maybe you have not really given it much thought. Take a few moments to just go over in your mind the reasons why you want to learn something. What is it that you want? Write this down on a blank sheet of paper. Now write down a list of things you believe you need to learn in order to get the thing that you want. The items you have written down to learn need projects. Choose a small project for each of the items. If your not sure what to choose for some of the items, keep reading and I will show you one way to find project ideas.

How do you find ideas for your project?

We can fall into this trap when we can’t come up with an idea or if we have too many choices to choose from we can’t make a choice. Here are a few ideas on how to quickly find project ideas.

Using Amazon to find project ideas

Go to Amazon and search for books on the topic you want to learn. Click on the first book at the top of the search results. If the book icon has a Look Inside words on top of it, click on the book icon to see inside. Look for the table of contents or scroll down to see if the table of contents shows up in the preview. The table of contents gives you a nice top level outline of what the author thinks about the topic that you want to learn about. In some books, a project idea is mentioned in the table of contents. Do this Look Inside for the top 5 books in the search results. Make sure not to click on any books results that are promoted as ads. If you find some project ideas, write them down next to items you want to learn on your piece of paper. If you do not see anything in the top 5 books, it is time to switch to the next source for project ideas.

Using YouTube to find project ideas

Go to youtube and search for “How to learn X” or “Projects for learning X” replacing X with your topic. Watch the top 5 videos. If any of the videos are too long, click the video controls and choose a faster playback speed. I find 1.25 to 1.5 to be fast enough. As you are watching the top videos, look for project ideas mention about the topic you want to learn and write down any you find on the paper.

Using Google to find project idea

If at this point you have not found any project ideas on Amazon or YouTube, go to Google and search for “Projects for learning X” or “How to learn X”. Look at the top 5 results and scan the posts quickly to see if any projects are mentioned. Write them down if you see any projects.

You have a project, now what?

At this point you should have at least one project for something you want to learn. If you have multiple projects, for a single thing you want to learn, choose the project that seems easier to you. If there is a tie, choose the project that is more appealing to you.

Making Knowledge Actionable

Now I am going to show you how to make knowledge actionable. Take your project and break it down into smaller tasks. If you are not sure how to do this, use Amazon, YouTube, or Google to search for “How to make X” replacing X with your project. Apply the same method of looking at the top 5 results. Look for an outline or results that mention the steps needed to make a project about X. Write these steps or parts down on your paper. These steps are your tasks to learn.

Now you are ready to make knowledge actionable. You have the steps needed to make your project that will help you learn something you want to learn. You can search for how to do each step, but try to limit how much information and content you are consuming to 30 minutes at most for each step. You want to avoid being a passive consumer of content. If you keep watching and reading instead of doing, the ideas will just float away. Bruce Lee said “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done”.

You want the information you watch and consume to be actionable, to bring you one step closer to learning that thing you want to learn. You want the information to be used to do something, to create something. You now have a purpose for the information you are consuming. Your steps to make the project are what will anchor the information in your mind. This is how you learn faster by making knowledge actionable.