How To learn anything quickly

 USING THIS ANALYSIS TO DRAW YOUR MAP

Once you’ve finished your brainstorm, underline the concepts, facts, and

procedures that are going to be most challenging. This will give you a

good idea what the major learning bottlenecks are going to be and can

start you searching for methods and resources to overcome those

difficulties. You might recognize that learning medicine requires a lot of

memorization, so you may invest in a system such as spaced-repetition

software. If you’re learning mathematics, you might recognize that deep

understanding of certain concepts is going to be the tricky spot and

consider spending time explaining those concepts to other people so you

really understand them yourself. Knowing what the bottlenecks will be

can help you start to think of ways of making your study time more

efficient and effective, as well as avoid tools that probably won’t be too

helpful to your goal.

Often this coarse-grained analysis is enough to move on to the next

phase of research. However, with more experience, you can dig deeper.

You might look at some of the particular features of the concepts, facts,

and procedures you’re trying to learn to find methods to master them

more effectively. When I started my portrait-drawing challenge, for

instance, I knew that success would depend highly on how accurately I

could size and place facial features. Most people can’t draw realistic

faces because if those attributes are off even slightly (such as making a

face too wide or the eyes too high), they will instantly look wrong to our

sophisticated ability to recognize faces. Therefore, I got the idea of doing

lots and lots of sketches and comparing them by overlaying the reference

photos. That way I could quickly diagnose what kinds of errors I was

making without having to guess. If you can’t make these kinds of

predictions and come up with these kinds of strategies just yet, don’t

worry. This is the kind of long-term benefit of metalearning that comes

from having done more projects.