Have you wondered why some people can learn something fast while others fail? My brother is like that. It seems to be his super power, he doesn’t study, he doesn’t rack his brain, the level of retention when he attends class is magnificent. You might not be blessed with such a ability, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make yourself learn faster. Consider doing this.
1. Teach Knowledge to Your Self
Often when I’m reading I feel smart. I feel like I know what I’m doing but the reality is I don’t get the knowledge from a book until I convert that into practical use. So if you’re reading books for knowledge or watching videos on YouTube you’re going to have the feeling that you’re learning and the feeling that you’re becoming smarter and more sophisticated in your studies but the reality is that’s not entirely the case.
Yes, you might pick up on some good concepts get some practice reading through some examples but until you take the knowledge and the examples from those books flash them into something that makes sense for you, the ability to grasp this concepts would be limited. In fact, you will forget 99% of everything you’ve learnt within a week.
So how exactly do we benefit from reading and watching videos on a particular topic? Well what I do is take all the information from those things and convert them to a series of blog posts or a master document. This is the best way to make yourself learn faster. 
For example here is a JavaScript document I’ve been working on. For me learning JavaScript has literally just been going through JavaScript concept by concept and writing a blog explaining that to a beginner so you could do that with a blog.
Trust me once you start taking these and converting them into an active document you’re creating, you are solidifying the knowledge in your brain.
2. Teach It To Someone Else
When it comes to learning, I’m always considering how can I teach this to someone else which is why I created those documents and why I create YouTube videos too.
If all you ever do is learn from people when you’re getting taught you’re not going to actually learn until you take that information and teach it to other people.
This is basically the Feynman technique. It is when you take complex concepts you break them down and pretend you’re teaching them to someone who has no idea what they’re doing.
When you’re reading a book you’ll think you understand the concepts but once you try and explain those concepts to someone who really has no idea of what you’re talking about, maybe your parents then more than likely you’ll realize where you’re lacking. I don’t believe I actually know something until I can prove myself by teaching that in a blog or in a video.
3. Categorize information
I believe our brain kind of works in buckets. Things make sense when you can take something you’ve learned and put it in a bucket.
For example if you’re trying to learn all these programming languages, rather than just trying to memorize each language separately. Try breaking them up into buckets. The way to break things up in bucket things that’s totally up to you but anytime there is categories I can promise you that your brain is going to be more effective and be prepared to make yourself learn faster.
The reason this works is because when there’s categories, there’s less things your brain has to memorize as their own entity. I can just think hey there’s two types of programming languages then when I say that one category can be memorized as its own entity and the other category can be memorized as its own entity.
And then I don’t have to try to memorize all the differences between all the different languages and if that makes no sense you just got to try.
4. Get Examples
Try to solidify concepts with examples. When you’re going through all these books and these learning, they’re going to give you a lot of concepts and these concepts really don’t make sense because they’re new to you at the beginning. They take more root when you convert these concepts into practical knowledge using examples.
So keep going through examples over and over again until you no longer have to think about the concept you just understand. The whole concept of vocabulary works this way. If I was explaining, what a car is and you’ve never heard of a car or never seen one in your life. Every time I say ‘car’ you’re going to be like wait what was that again? Or like can you explain that?
But if I go to a car store and show you all the different types of cars you know we have Honda, we have Toyota, well after enough examples you no longer have to think about what a car is, you just know what a car is. The same thing applies when you get into more complex concepts.
5. Practice Regularly
I am guilty in that I will study something for like an entire day and then go numerous days without studying. I would advise against this and I’m actually trying to get into a more consistent pattern where I’m studying for a few hours a day or just developing every single day.
This is working for a lot of people there’s a lot of initiatives for coding for example on the internet a hundred days of code, 301 days of code basically the concept is rather than just studying every single day and trying to learn these concepts actually apply these in developing on a daily regular basis so the stuff is always fresh in your brain.
Now You Know
Bat Man doesn’t have superpowers yet he is the protector of Gotham. You don’t need a cape before you know how to make yourself learn faster.
Shisdulo 😊
