How To Supercharge Your Learning
Five years ago, I was unemployed and trying to get this website off the ground. Many details were figured out, but one that was missing was a design. I needed to style the site so it would look good when I launched.
Out of work, I didn’t feel comfortable spending money for a designer, so I decided to do it myself. The only problem? I had no idea what I was doing! I needed to learn.
I bought a WordPress theme that would allow me to skip learning HTML, but I still needed to pick up CSS if the site was going to have any unique style to it.
At first, I tried learning the way I’d always been taught to take on something new:
- Research it.
- Read / watch some training materials.
- Look for an expert to help when I didn’t understand something.
- Start experimenting.
I read books and blog posts and training lessons on CSS and felt overwhelmed—like there was too much to remember. And what I did remember wasn’t enough to put to use in a real world scenario. I was piecing together bits of knowledge here and there, but I couldn’t do anything with it.
After three months of frustration and a terrible looking website, I discovered this little tool built into most web browsers that lets you inspect any website. I could go to all my favorite sites and not just see how they were built but play with and change the code to see what would happen when I made little tweaks.
I’d take elements I liked from one site and plug them into my own. I didn’t know what would happen, but each experiment taught me something new. Sometimes the results were good. Other times they were bad. None of that really mattered, though. What was happening was real learning. Each time I tried something—even if I didn’t know what I was doing—I’d get instant feedback. Later, I’d go back to the manuals to read about what I’d just tried. Suddenly, it all made sense.
Two weeks later, I had a web design I was proud of.
Since then, I’ve been fascinated with finding the best ways to learn skills quickly. Turns out, there’s a lot of research to suggest the way most of us try to learn something new is slow, frustrating, and just not very successful.
As an adult with a busy life, when you need to learn something, you need it yesterday. If you can’t pick up new skills and knowledge quickly, you probably won’t even bother. Maybe that’s held you back from making a career switch or learning a hobby or something else important to you.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Breanne Dyck and a hundred of you from our community for a webinar dedicated to the concepts of fast-paced learning.
We identified a few myths that hold you back from learning new skills as quickly as you could and, more importantly, one truth that could help you pick something new up incredibly fast if you use it the next time you need to learn something unfamiliar.
Here’s the entire webinar replay for you… completely free.
Supercharge Your Learning: 3 Lies & 1 Truth About How We Learn
Below is an hour of the most important things you need to know to learn a new skill quickly and efficiently. I know very well that an hour is hard to come by, so I’d like you to think of this as an investment in your education today and in the future.
Think about how much time you might be wasting right now trying to learn a new skill. Probably more than an hour, right? If you want to learn something that takes more than a day and will be useful for more than a week, watching this video could save you hundreds of hours or more.
If you care about your own personal development and you want to learn faster and become smarter, carve some time out of your busy schedule for this. You won’t regret it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQAgUJ4RIx0