Learning is one of the very best ways to use your time and many of us state that the reason we want more time is so that we can learn a particular topic or a language.

But a lot of us just don’t know how to go about learning things efficiently and thus this ends up taking more time than we think it will too.

In short: you probably already have the time you need to learn German or electronic engineering – you’re just putting it off.

Here’s how to get started…

Start

The first and most important tip is simply to start right away. That initial point where you actually get started will often seem like a big deal until you bite the bullet and it becomes apparent that you were dreading nothing. And once you’ve actually started, you’ll find it’s much easier to carry on and that you actually want to devote a little more of your time to learning these new skills and abilities.

DiSSS

Tim Ferriss is a name we haven’t come across yet in this book but we owe him much. He is the author of The 4 Hour Workweek which was one of the first best-selling books to deal with the topic of lifestyle design. More recently, Tim wrote another book called The 4 Hour Chef which deals with learning a new topic quickly (he uses cooking as an example). He outlines four steps you need to take to learn any new topic efficiently and uses the acronym ‘DiSSS’ to describe them. They are:

Deconstruct

This is where you break down what it is you want to learn into essential and reproducible parts. So for example, if you were learning something like wakeboarding you might identify that you need to learn the posture and the terminology while developing grip strength. Likewise, you also try to identify the most crucial skills to master and you can do this by asking experts what they would tell a beginner to learn first for maximum results.

Selection

Next, you are going to take a look at all those parts and decide which ones you are going to learn. It might be that there are certain things you can learn that will allow you to save time or by-pass other tasks entirely. For example, Tim recommends that when learning a new language, you start out by first learning the 200-or-so most commonly used words. Because these common words make up such a large part of our language, this means that you can actually get by in a lot of conversations using them. Even if your grammar isn’t ideal, you’ll at least be able to identify what people are talking about and this is better than nothing!

 

Sequencing

Deciding the order to learn things in is also a very good idea. Tim points out that sometimes the best sequence isn’t necessarily the most obvious one or the one that is usually taught. For instance, he believes that you can learn chess faster if you start with the finishing moves and work backwards. This way you better understand the end point so you can fill in some of the blanks to learn how to get there.

Likewise, he says that dancers should learn how to dance as though they were the opposite sex. This teaches them what effect they’re trying to create for the other party!

Stakes

Finally, Tim recommends setting stakes in order to force yourself to learn the subject. For instance, you can give money to a friend and tell them to donate that money to a charity you don’t support if you fail to complete your objective. This incentive might just be enough to speed you up!

Have a Goal

Finally, this tip is not related to DiSSS but comes from my own personal experience: always have a goal to work towards. In other words, don’t just try and ‘learn a subject’ but instead learn that thing in the context of trying to achieve something else. This will give you more of a structure to your learning and will help you to better understand what everything you learn is for and how it fits in in a practical sense.

Don’t learn programming – set out to make a simple app and learn as you go. Don’t learn German – learn enough German to be able to order your meals and shop on a holiday you’ll go on at the end of the year. This also makes the project more meaningful and rewarding and that in turn helps to motivate you!

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