A Quick Course on Rapid Learning: How to Learn Skills Faster with Less Stress

1. Introduction: hello and welcome to a quick course on rapid learning. In this course, you'll learn how to make the most of any time that you spend on trying to learn a new skill or subject. I made this course for people such as yourself. Anyone who's interested in learning creative time, sir, entrepreneurs, anyone who has a vested interest in being able to pick up new skills quickly. This is especially important nowadays, when there's so much good, useful information out there, it's hard to keep up. If you're anything like me, you've experienced foma or the fear of missing out as it pertains toe different things that you want to learn and just not having enough time to learn them. So in the interest of making the most of your time is a learner. I've put together this very short course to help you better manage all of those things that you want to learn. In this course, you'll learn how to structure your approach to learning so that you can make the most of the time that you invest. It's also going to help you sort through the materials that you might use in order to learn something so that you can focus your attention where it belongs instead of getting distracted on something else that might sound appealing happens to me all the time. So I'm really experienced with the idea of picking the right information to help you learn at the right time. And I have a system for doing that that I'm going to show you in this course. My hope is that by the end of this course, you're going to be ableto also sort through all the materials that you might use and find out how best to absorb that information without spending too much time spinning your wheels . What I want is for you to be able to apply what you learn quickly instead of spending a lot of time consuming information and not a lot of time using it. If that sounds interesting to you, I hope you'll stick around for the rest of the course. 2. The Importance of Rapid Learning and Overcoming FOMO: I want to start by talking a little bit about why rapid learning is so important and a little bit about our enemy in this process, which is foma, or the fear of missing out. The world is changing really quickly, and there's things happening both in our environment and in our technology and our processes that change so quickly that it's hard to keep up. If you're a naturally curious person, as I assume anyone who started a course like this is, you probably see any number of things that are interesting to you. I always think that there's some new skill that I wanna learn or some new hobby that I want to take up. The challenge with that is that if I'm already focusing on something that ends up being a distraction, that fear and that concern that I'm not gonna be able to do all the things that I want to do is going to be a challenge for me learning the things that I've actually committed to. If you've ever seen the movie Ground Hog Day, where Bill Murray is trapped in an infinite loop of the same day, over and over again, he feels like he's in hell. He feels like he's being punished because you can't escape the same day over and over again . Actually watched that movie and thought, I can't even imagine all the things I could learn if I repeated the same day over and over again. Although admittedly, I probably wouldn't feel that way if it actually happened. So if that resonates with you, you're probably experiencing some of the challenges that can come with trying to teach yourself anything, which is the distraction that comes from wanting to learn something else because there's so much incentive to learn new things. This is a real challenge, so the approach to solving that is an information diet. So if you think about how you might go on a diet for food, where you're trying to avoid all of the many options that are available to you, that won't help you accomplish your goals and stick to the things that will. You're trying to do the same thing with an information diet. Now we tend to be a little bit more aware of what we eat, because we have to make the conscious choice to consume it. But with information that isn't the case. It's out there and just being exposed to it. What's it into our minds? And we tend to consume thoughtlessly. We tend to learn new things and see learning itself as something beneficial, even when we haven't thought about why we're learning that thing now. I am all four learning for learning's sake. But the challenge becomes when you learn something that takes away your attention to the thing that you actually had chosen to learn. So our first step is really going to understand how we can be on a type of information diet that will restrict our tendency to get distracted by other things that interest us. And the way that you do that is by being intentional, so focusing on a goal and knowing exactly what you need to know in order to get that goal. So that's the structure that we're going to build that will help you maintain consistency around what you are exposing yourself to as far as information goes 3. Rapid Learning Rapid Learning Plan Learning Goals: along with the course materials have included this rampant learning plan as a PdF so that you can print it out and follow along with some of the lessons throughout the course. This way you have something tangible to guide both your learning and your practice in the skill of rapid learning. Now, most of what I talk about in the course is abstract and concepts and ideas about how you can apply your learning. So I wanted to produce this plan alongside that so you have something tangible to guide your action, so please do print it out and follow along as you go. Now I'll talk about each section after the relevant video where we go or the concepts. But for this 1st 1 I wanted to talk about the learning goals. I mentioned how important it is to have your explicit learning goals. So for this first part, I want you to fill out this section here under learning goals where you explain what it is that you're going to learn. Then what you explain how you'll know that you have successfully learned it. So what is a good measure of success for the skill you're trying to learn. Now you want to define it as something that you can measure and that you can say you actually did so It might be being able to play a specific song on an instrument or being able to complete a certain task as part of a design project. So be sure to add that into this section. Next is something that's very personal is I want you to explain why that matters to you. This is a way to sort of anchor your motivation behind learning the skill which will help you when it comes time to really reinforced the investment you're making in that learning. After that, I want you to do something unusual, which is to name three things that you are interested in learning but that you are consciously setting aside so that you can focus on this skill as we talked about in the previous videos. One of the biggest challenges toe learning and learning quickly is distraction and focusing on other things that are important to us. And we want to learn but detract from our ability to really double down on the things that are most important right now. So I want you to call out the three things that you really also want to learn. But you are consciously stepping aside from in the time that you will work on this skill that's really covered in this next section where I want you to put in a deadline for when you are done with this skill, or at least this phase of learning this skill. Obviously, it may be something that you continue to learn over a long time period, but I want you to sort of time box. You're learning because that also helps to motivate you. And after this time is over, you can go ahead and decide if you want to move to one of those other three skills and repeat this process differently. But this is a way for you to really laser focus your learning, which will help you achieve your learning goals. So that's it for this section. Go ahead and fill that out before you move onto the next video 4. Setting Up an Information Diet: Let's talk about how you can set up your information diet toe. Help you get access to the right information at the right time. In my experience, professionally developing training in corporate environments or for technology where we're trying to help people learn a new skill, one of the things we always talk about. It's just in time learning. You don't want to train someone on something before they have a chance to use it or before it's applicant pools of them, because then that information just disappears without being used. Instead, you want to get that to them right at the moment where they're going to need it. So part of being on an information diet is giving yourself that just in time information being exposed to information at the right time to be able to use it. So how do you know what the right time is? Well, the first thing you need to do is have a goal. What is it that you're trying to learn and what does that learning look like? If you don't have a goal, it's going to be very hard to know what information you need in support of that goal, so our first step is going to be identified. Your learning objective. What is the skill or the concept that you want to master? The next step is to create filters that support that goal, and what the filter is going to do for you is help you limit the information that's coming in that isn't immediately relevant to what you're trying to learn. So now that you've identified your goal and hopefully you have it spelled out in such a way that you know exactly what it looks like. And the best way to make that goal work is to make it specific and measurable. You might pick something like, I want to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to create a logo for my sister's business. That's a very specific goal. So now you can create a filter that supports that something that doesn't help you get to designing a logo for your sister's business is not going to be something that you need right now may be useful later, but we're focusing on right now, the just in time learning. So let's talk about the construction of the filter now. A lot of information is going to be useful. But what information is going to be immediately relevant to the next step in your learning journey, So you have to assess where you are in relation to your goal. If you want to design a logo, do you know how to use illustrator at all? If you don't, then that's your starting point. You may be familiar with using illustrator, but you might not be familiar with logo design concepts, in which case you've identified that the next step is to learn those logo design concepts. Finally, you may need to learn typography or marketing concepts to make sure that your logo is as good as possible. Our goal is to figure out where you are in that learning journey and then figure out which information is the next piece of information you need. Our goal is to set priority and be strategic, so the thing that you're finding really makes sense for what you're doing. So the way that you might do this is you start on designing a logo so you look up what the overall process is, So start with the big picture. What do I need to do in order to design a logo when you found that, ask yourself, What do I know from here and what is missing and try to follow the process. Your goal here isn't to be successful in designing the logo, but it's to try it enough to know where your gaps in knowledge are. The reason it's important to start trying to do the thing is because you'll see where's your first blocking point you may discover my first blocking point is, I don't know how to use the pen tool, an illustrator and I feel like that's going to be very useful. If that's the case, your next step is to figure out what information for learning the pen tool do you need to get in order to be successful so your filter is basically creating the ladder of information that you need in order to get to the next step towards your learning goal. Your filter is set up to be binary, so every time you see a piece of information, you ask yourself, Does this information help me get to the next step in my learning journey? If it does not, it's not something you need to consume right now. Set it aside and We'll get it later if it's something that's interesting. But that's your process of building a filter. Think of what's the next step? Does something meat. That next step doesn't empower you to accomplish that next step if it doesn't go to the next piece of information that does. 5. Rapid Learning Rapid Learning Plan Information Diet: Now that we've learned a little bit about an information diet, I want you to go into this section in your document, where have outlined two columns, one for passes and one for filters. And this is, Ah, I sort of thought experiment to think of how you will filter out certain things that you know to be a distraction and what things you want to entertain that will be a benefit to you learning that skill. So on the left hand side with your passes, I want you to list out the things that you will consume as part of your learning of the skill. What are the things that you've identified as being high value that you give yourself freedom to explore and as much details you want? This might be books or articles by specific authors, blog's or websites or YouTube channels or anything like that. It could be other courses that help you in that skill. So go ahead and list those out. The things that you think will be the most value to you now you're filters. On the other end are the things that can be distracting or might be problematic to you. Learning so this could be books or videos or things on other topics that you know will capture your attention but won't necessarily provide you any value towards the goals that you stated in the previous section. Another way to look at this is your filters might be the types of things that you know are most likely to distract you. So you may have YouTube channels that air helpful for your learning goal. But the additional videos that appear in the sidebar that are meant to capture your attention might be the opposite, so you may filter out YouTube altogether. But think about what is going to be a challenge to keeping your focus and add those to the things that you need to filter out as part of your information diet. 6. Getting the Most Out of Your Learning Time: now that you've created your information filter and you have a well defined goal for what you're learning, objective is your next step is trying to get the most out of the time that you invest. In other words, how are you going toe leverage the time that you're investing in learning to develop as many skills as you can as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is to overlap your learning. What I mean by that is when you're practicing one thing, try to make sure it gives you exposure to another element of that thing. So, for instance, if your goal is to develop a logo, you might go into the process of saying my next step in my learning journey is to really master using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. Okay, that's a skill that you have to learn. So you found the resource. Is that suggest this is how you develop competency with the pen? This is how you get good at using the pen. Then you can look for other things that might be related to that overall skill, so you might find that the next step is about proportions or ratios and how to structure your shapes to be appealing to the eye. So what you might do next is look at how you can take your exercises in mastering the pen tool and apply them to learning more about ratios and proportions. So if you can find an exercise that shows you about ratios and proportions that maybe shows you how to have the overlapping circles or different shapes or the proportions, and you can use your pen to trace over those, you could be practicing two things at once, very intentionally. You know that you're trying to learn how to master command of the pen tool, which is very mechanical thing, and you're also learning about proportions and ratios, which is a very artistic, interpretive conceptual thing. And those are the best places where you can get overlap, something that you have to master technically and something that you have to master conceptually, and they could be two different concepts. That's how you get double the reward for the ever that you spent learning. This is where guidebooks and frameworks that try to teach you through concepts that are woven together are helpful. So finding a good learning material that provides this something like on over viewer masterclass helps because you can see where those different concepts relate so that you can apply them together. The next step that's going to be very helpful in this process are templates or frameworks. So if you're trying to do something maybe more technical or complex, you can find yourself really down in the weeds and not able to focus on learning because you're trying to take care of something else. So as I've tried to teach myself how to code, I've run into issues where my development environment was incompatible with the code that I had gone. It's part of the tutorial, and you end up not being able to make very much progress because you're troubleshooting something that's unrelated to the school that you're learning. So one of the things that's very helpful is having a template or a framework toe work from so that whatever you are learning is immediately relevant to that thing and not something outside of it. So what help me in one of these learning courses was being given a complete development environment that mirrored exactly what the professor was using so that I had MAWR guidance on how to do things, and I didn't have to worry so much about fidgeting with my computer as I did with actually learning how to code. Your goal is to focus on the baseline, so try to remove anything that's extraneous to your goal by finding templates, frameworks or places where you can overlap your skills to make it easier. 7. Focus on What's Critical for Learning: your next step is really going to emphasize focusing on the critical and when I say the critical I mean, what are the core things that determine your success? So if you're building a logo, if your goal is to design a logo, you might want to go out and look at the most successful people in logo design. Or at least someone who's a very good teacher who can tell you the difference between a successful logo and an unsuccessful logo. When you start finding out what makes the distinction between the two, you can focus on what skills you need to learn and where you really need to practice something that doesn't support the difference between the baseline. The minimum basic skills that you need to have and true success may not be what you want. At this point, you might find that proportion or ratio is what's really important to make a very successful logo versus in okay logo. But you would find that out by looking at some of the courses by people who are very good and listening to what they emphasizes being the difference. Once you've identified that, you can start structuring your practice around accomplishing that goal. What are the things that I need to do at a very basic level to accomplish that? In other words, what mastery do I need tohave over a technical sub skill, something very specific to get there? Is it about gritting out my logo design? Is it about figuring out how to use efficient programming concepts? Is it about learning how to get the dexterity in my fingers? If I'm trying to learn how to play the guitar, figure out what that core skill is, what that thing that makes the difference between okay and very successful and figure out a way to focus on that because your next step is going to be deconstructing that skill into drills that you can practice. Practice is the thing that is going to make your learning stick. It is the most important element of this entire process. So how can we develop a practice routine that you can apply efficiently in terms of time but really gets you know where you need to go when you do that? By identifying the critical skills and applying the just in time learning we talked about, in addition to the filters By combining all those elements together, you can focus on the critical and get the type of learning you need in the type of practice that really improves mastery, and that's what you need in order to learn quickly. 8. Rapid Learning Rapid Learning Plan Define Sub Skills: Now we're going to get into the component where we really think about how to practice our skill effectively. The first step is to identify the three sub skills that will help you in structuring your practice. So we talked about building an overlap of practice. Think about what sub skills you want to capture. So again, if you're doing design, you might think of proportion or perspective. Ah, symbolism and color might be your three different tools. Or it might be talking about the pen tool versus using certain features and illustrator versus Freehand sketching. Whatever sub skills you've identified for the big skill that you're trying to learn, try to identify three specific ones you can focus on in this section Now. These may be the things that you've identified as being the most determinant of success. The things that successful people really focus on. Be sure Teoh really think through what's going to have the best effect 9. Practice Smart: we've talked about how you can focus on just in time learning. We've talked about developing a filter and understanding your goal. All these things they're gonna help you get the most out of your learning. So the next step is to really talk about where you're learning, becomes knowledge and experience, and that's through practice. If you spent any time studying how to study, practice has probably come up. It's the most important part of building a skill, and practicing well is extremely important, as it's been covered a lot in the popular culture of practice and skill development. What differentiates really accomplished people from amateurs who spend similar amounts of time on their craft is how well they practice. So your goal is to come up with a way of practicing that helps you internalize what you learn and the skills that you develop because you've got a goal already defined. Your process should be around practicing, doing something that accomplishes your goal. So, for example, if we talked about developing logo design skills, toe help, say your sister develop a logo for her business, which you want to practice is something that is as close to that as possible. In other words, you should be making logos. Now that sounds pretty obvious, but a lot of people miss this point by spending too much time consuming information. This goes back to the filters in the idea of just in time practice. You want to get information that helps you practice the skill that is going to make you better. So where you should be doing is practicing, creating logos. Now that's a little bit on the nose and probably overly simplistic. So let's break it down a little further. How do we make that practice matter? And the key is that you want to deconstruct your practice to something very specific, so maybe you want to practice your line work or your typography or your use of color. Maybe you want to practice your vision, visual language or the metaphors that you use in the logo you're going toe. Want to pick one element that can be focused on as part of your development? You see, if you simply develop a logo, there's a lot of different things that could be going on, and you may distract yourself by looking at the typography and miss the amount of effort, you might put into the overall line work or the color scheme. So the way that you avoid that is you focus on doing the thing, in other words, making logo. But you focus on doing one component of that in your practice so you might focus on your typography. So with the intention that comes out of knowing what are the sub skills, the specific things that go into doing that goal skill? Well, you can start to practice those sub skills mawr intentionally. Let's talk about intentional practice because this is what really matters. Intentional practices where you've made the decision to practice on one of those sub skills , and you are getting feedback from doing what you're doing to see where you need to make improvements. For example, if you were practicing a skill in a sport like, say, serving overhand in tennis, you get immediate feedback based on where that ball goes when you hit it with your overhand serve. Now that feedback helps you make adjustments. It works even better if you have a coach, because the coach can tell you why something worked or didn't work and allows you to focus on your mechanics. Now, if you're trying to develop a skill in something that's a little more abstract, like developing a logo, you'll want to focus on what you're doing and try to get feedback. So does this typography work? Does this color scheme work? And you want to A have a way of assessing what's working enough? So the important part of our practice section in this learning skills quickly is to develop a mechanism that helps you track what's working and what's not. So our goal, then, is threefold. One. Get to practice faster. Figure out what it is that you need to practice on a specific level and then practice it as quickly as possible and as frequently as possible to. You want to find a way to measure the feedback, to get input, to know what's working or not working, so that could include a mentor or coach or some standard you can use. Maybe it's something you can build into what you're doing. Say, if you're practicing at lifting weights or swimming, you can compare the amount of weight that you're lifting and how you feel afterwards, or the times on which you're completing your laps and swimming. Having something that gives you a measure of what's working and not gives you the feedback you need to make adjustments. Even if you were doing something like swimming, you might put AH camera to monitor how you're swimming in your strokes if you don't have a coach, because then you can see what's working or not. The final step is building feedback into your practice. If you're not making adjustments based off your practice on what's working and what's not, you're not going to see the type of improvement that you want. So you're taking in all this information. You need to use that information to help make adjustments to what you're doing and what you're not doing, so that things will work better. That's the goal of learning quickly, practicing better, practicing quickly, practicing often with input that makes you better at whatever you're trying to learn 10. Rapid Learning Rapid Learning Plan Practice Plan: now that you've identified those three sub skills, think about what you will do to practice each of them in the boxes below. So we have these three boxes that correspond with those three sub skills. Make a plan for how to practice them. So you may have looked up videos on how to use the pen tool. What kind of drills could you use to help you master users of the pencil? It might be tracing over pictures or something like that. Be sure to put that in the practice paint plan. What are you going to do to master that sub skill? Spell out what you are going to do in terms of drills or activities or research or reading , and then how you will practice, in other words, how much time you'll spend and when you're going to do it. It's really important to get down in this section of the practice plan what you were going to do to actually do that practice. It's called on intention statement and intention statements. Do a really good job of reinforcing your desire to do something when you don't have to really make that willpower decision later. So it's a lot more likely to happen after you've developed that component of your practice plan. The last part is to do the feedback, which is how are you going to build assessment into your practice so that you can improve what you're doing? So if you're doing something like drills with the pen tool where you're evaluating how well you've gotten control the pentacle, you might look at how closely you overlapped with whatever image you are tracing over with the pen tool. If you are playing a song on an instrument, how Maney notes do you catch? Maybe you can use an app that measures the notes that you're hitting to make sure that you're getting them accurately. If you're doing writing, if you're writing something or you are maybe sharing any other creative thing like art, is it something that you can present to people and get their feedback on? Whatever tool you're going to use, whether or not it be by coaches or by stimulus feedback, in other words, what you can sense or see your here figure out some way that you will measure each one of those elements of the practice plan so you find areas of improvement. And this is where a coach or feedback from other people whose opinion you trust is really helpful. Once you finish that section, you've basically filled out the rapid learning plan. This gives you something to go back and look at as a resource. In a reference to make sure you're continuing to practice Now, you can do one of these every time we're going to pick up a new skill because mere act of going through this worksheet is going to ensure that you think about all those elements and that they become more riel other than just some story you heard someone say online that you forgot about later. This really anchors your learning process, and it gives you something that you can evaluate and change later. This is not set in stone, but when you go back to change something, you really have to think about it, which is the most important element. So I hope you find this helpful, and please be sure to print this out and try to fill it out on your own as part of your learning journey. 11. Bringing it all Together: all right, This has been a quick course, and we've covered a lot of material. But the goal is for you to be intentional about what you want to learn. Be intentional about the information that you're taking in tow. Learn it and then structure your practice in a way that you can get the most return on your investment of time and effort. So how do you go about that? Let's pull everything together and give you the direction that you need in order to be successful at doing all of these things in whatever skill you're trying to learn. The first is to keep track of what you're doing. Start by identifying your goal. Remember, it should be something that's concrete. You say This is what I want to learn. This is how I'll know. I have learned it. Next developed a set of questions you need to answer in order to practice at doing that thing. So what information do you lack that you need in order to accomplish those goals? If we go back to the logo design example, what questions you have about logo design, where the tools included, or the sub skills that make up logo design that you need answered. In order to start practicing logo design, you probably need to figure out what the overview of all those skills are so that you can figure out what specific things might help you do those tasks. So is it about line work? Is it about typography or is it about color? Figure out what experts do, how they break down their craft so that you can adapt from there. The next step is to find the materials that are going to help you get there. So what is the overview? Material is going to help you see the big picture of the skill. And then what is the detailed material that's going to show you where you should really emphasize your practice and your learning? Then you need to start practicing. So for practice, you're going to figure out how you can overlap. These skills do multiple at once to get the most out of your time, and then how you're going to get feedback in order to improve. You should be writing all this stuff down in a journal or in a notebook so that you can see this is what I'm trying to do, and this is what I learned while doing it, because the practice of learning quickly comes from practicing. It's a little bit redundant, but you know what I mean? Finally, keep at it. Seek out the information that you need in order to keep moving forward. Try to figure out what makes someone different from another person and what skills they have that you want to learn. This is where you can start channeling that natural curiosity that can be on obstacle. The learning quickly, but can also be your best resource because you need to harness that curiosity to figure out what's going on when this person does what they do so well. If I wanna learn that, what am I missing and how do I find it? That's the basics. This was a crash course in learning skills quickly and being able to manage all the information that's available for you as learning resource is, I hope that this gives you a way to filter and work through the things that you are so curious and interested in, but that it gives you a way to be more successful 12. Conclusion and Thanks: All right, We've reached the end of the course. I told you it be quick. The goal here was to give you some framework that you can use to manage. All the resource is available to you. I hope that the result is that you will feel more comfortable learning and you won't have anxiety about all the things that you're not learning. I know that you're a curious person like I am, and you're excited about all the things that are out there, toe learn and how you can grow as a person or in your interests. So take these steps, and if you can take nothing else away from this, remember focus on doing something rather than just consuming knowledge. And when you can apply your knowledge to do something, you'll learn so much more. And it will give you a way to choose where your time is best spent so that you never have to feel anxious that you're missing out on something that you could have learned because you'll know that you learn what you wanted to and needed to learn. I hope you enjoyed this class. If you did feel free to check out some of my other courses on learning and problem solving and how to take all the knowledge that you have and use it more effectively. If you did enjoy the class, please feel free to leave a review. Follow me if you'd like to see some of my other courses and I hope to see you around. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. Bye bye.