How to easily learn anything you want?

Life is all about learning. We are always learning something, starting as a child to the day of our death. If you stop learning, you are already dead.

Learning is a meta skill. If you understand how to learn anything and retain that information, you have a super power.

We learn from ourselves and everything around us.

It starts as baby, when we copy other people’s face expressions. Have you ever noticed a baby doing that? If you look a baby and you smile, the baby will start smiling.

Then we go to school, we learn a lot of new topics from history, to science to maths to art.

But has anyone ever taught you how to actually learn?

The school system is the game of memorization. Our teachers don’t teach us how to learn but how to remember for exams.

When you use this technique in real life, it is a recipe for disaster.

Life is not a memorization game. Life is about learning skills and things that you are curious about.

The goal is to be a lifelong learner and you cannot do this by memorization.

So how do we learn?

There are many ways but I am going to focus only on one technique in this post.

For that I want to introduce you to The Learning Pyramid.

This pyramid was first introduced by education specialist Edgar Dale in the 1940s. It was later further developed and re-named “The Learning Pyramid” by National Training Laboratories Institute.

When you listen to a class or a video, you only retain 5% of the things talked about in the class or video.

When you read a book, you only remember 10%, that is why you keep forgetting what you read.

But when we listen and read the same thing, you retain 20% of the information. So watching a video with subtitles might help you in retaining more information.

Things start to take a shift when we start to demonstrate and discuss what we learnt.

If you read a book called Atomic Habits and you get excited about building habits. You share the information you learnt with your friend, spouse or parents. Now you retain 30% of the information.

If you know someone who also read the same book, if you discuss what you gathered or what impressed you the most. Now you can retain up to 50% of the information.

But things start to take a parabolic turn when you start applying these skills into your own life. You learn about building habits, you apply this into your life right away. Now you can retain 75% of the information and also now you can build great habits. It’s a double win.

You unlock the greatest lever when you start teaching the information you just learnt. Now you are living what you just learnt. This helps you retain 90% of the information.

This is one of the reason why habit building and setting systems has been such an easy task for me. I am at point where I can add and remove any habit from my life with ease. I started teaching about habits and systems not because I like to teach but I wanted to share this information with everyone in the world. This is the easiest way to make the world a better place.

I know not everyone wants to teach. But even if you just apply what you listened or read. The difference in the retaining information will be 7.5 times from reading and 15 times from listening.

Over time, think about compound interest of retaining the information you intake.

Action Item:

What is the easiest action item you can take from this? I feel without action everything we consume is useless.

If you are reading a book or listening to something useful, ask yourself how can you apply this in your life today? Take that action and see your life changing.

Learning is a skill and mastering this will make you achieve whatever goals and dreams you have.