How To Learn Any Subject Or Skill (Mastery In 5 Steps)

learn 10x faster than everyone else and achieve mastery

Learn Anything So Fast It Feels Like Cheating

Learning is hard.

And it frustrates me for all the wrong reasons.

Information overwhelm is oppressive and a modern luxury.

"How much of a book should I be taking in? Maybe I'll buy this course or watch this YouTube video; but wait, there's another one here that's just as good!"

Don't even get me started on the memorization trap, which I spoke of in last week’s newsletter.

Too much is the same as not enough.

Miyamoto Musashi

In a world with free information online, you can learn the equivalent of a college degree if you know how and where to look.

Education is (mostly) free, but the confusion in knowing how to traverse amongst it all?

I always think back to when I used to pick up my guitar.

I remember watching an incredibly exciting video of B.B. King discussing how he phrases his blues solos back when I was 18.

It was a 4 minute video on YouTube (seriously, you need to check this out).

I was sitting at my desk, the same desk that I'm writing this newsletter at right now, with my white Fender Stratocaster in hand, along with my Boss Katana amp sitting beside me.

The vibes were immaculate and I was ready to learn some guitar!

But then the overwhelm and confusion kicked in, very quickly, and here's why:

I had no idea what I was trying to learn.

I knew I wanted to learn something, be it, a very vague, general goal such as "blues guitar."

But I had such little clarity, even with a 4 minute YouTube video; it absolutely ruined my mood and made me feel resentful for a week (I’m not kidding; I’ve barely touched the guitar since).

I was lost in a desert, knowing where I wanted to go, but simultaneously, also not knowing at the same time.

I had no clear direction.

"Practice makes perfect" means well, but not if you're consistently practicing the wrong things in the wrong way with the wrong ends in mind.

You know how it works. You come upon something new or fresh that you've never seen before, maybe a book.

Perhaps you've just started a project, like building your own business from scratch, and you don't know where to start.

Maybe it's the start of your college semester and the next twelve weeks ahead are going to be your best by far! (I said this at the beginning of every one).

Then, once the excitement fades and the lack of clarity wipes you off your feet, the next phase of the cycle begins: confusion.

Where do I start?

How do I do this?

Am I even learning this the right way?

What is the goal here?

Confusion inevitably leads to frustration. Failing to know how to learn, and the secret to learning anything as we shall soon reveal, will lead you towards abandoning your hopes, your dreams, and your to-do list for the week.

If I was to sit here and tell you how often I've repeated this cycle you'd stop reading this right now and you’d lose all trust in me.

Then again, that's why I’m writing this.

The fastest way to learn is to slow down and think.

Let’s learn the foundational meta-skill of learning how to learn.

A 2 Part System To Learn Anything

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.

Aristotle

What happens to people who don't know how to learn anything properly?

On average, adults forget 70% of the information they've learned in any learning endeavor within 24 hours.

So, the forgetting curve seems to be everyone's enemy.

Right?

In fact, the complete opposite is true. It's actually the answer to this problem.

Think of the forgetting curve as a filter; the mind filters out and keeps what it deems precious to your survival.

You need to repeatedly use information, that you've previously acquired, across time in order to retain it; this is what encodes information into our brains as knowledge.

How do you do this?

Here are the two things you must do in order to learn anything:

• Active recall through creating your own understanding of the thing you’re learning

• Spaced repetition: testing yourself with questions, problems, and creating solutions repeatedly across time

That’s it.

Active recall improves retention by 50-70% compared to passive re-reading.

So how can we put this into a framework for you to use to learn anything?

In this newsletter, I will layout my system for gaining mastery of any subject or skill.

Having clarity when it comes to what you need to learn is important.

Clear goals, clear path; all you need then is to just do the work.

Once you've finished reading this newsletter, you'll learn how to build your own bridge to mastery for anything you want to learn.

The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.

B.B. King

Learning is the most important skill you need in your life.

Here's how to do it.

Learning Is Just Thinking (But Done Correctly)

Most people confuse passive consumption with learning.

No human action is truly passive; you need to be awake with your eyes open in order to read a book.

As Adler says in his book How To Read A Book, there are activities that are either more active or less active.

What we want is the most active and efficient form of learning.

Simply reading, rereading, highlighting, or taking notes is too passive; it won’t cut it.

These methods are pseudo-work, or something that feels like productive work but actually isn't.

But what happens is that most people skip the real work; deep thinking, understanding, and the synthesis of ideas by connecting new knowledge to previous knowledge, for merely believing that highlighting or writing notes means that they've learnt it.

Then, shockingly, people get frustrated when they've forgotten everything they’ve “learnt” within an hour, or they can't seem to "memorize" anything in the first place.

Relearning the same concepts in the attempt to purely memorize them, without ever applying them to a problem, or creating something new with them; failing to understand will destroy your soul with learning amnesia.

This is the wrong way to think about learning.

The doer alone learneth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No one else can do the learning for you; it's all to do with how you think, and do so deeply.

But how do human beings think?

Thinking, in terms of learning, can be broken into two levels:

• Lower Order Thinking

• Higher Order Thinking

Lower order thinking involves being able to remember, understand, and apply basic facts and concepts in their own right.

In order to retain anything, you must be able to recall it. This is the lowest form of thinking (although most people focus on memorization as “learning”)

Higher order thinking differs in many ways. It actually includes the levels of lower order thinking, as each level is not distinct from one another like stages would be, each building upon one another.

Higher order thinking involves analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to create new knowledge and your own understanding of information.

This is how to learn anything you want.

I love Bloom's Taxonomy and how it differentiates lower order thinking (recall, understanding, applying) from higher order thinking (analyzing, evaluating, creating).

If you don't know about Bloom's Taxonomy, read last week’s newsletter here.

The most important thing is to create your own understanding of a subject that can be applied to solve any problem - this is true mastery.

Understanding a topic is something, but creating your own understanding of a topic, using the highest level of thinking there is, with all other thinking levels encased within it; this is how you become a master at anything.

I know from reading How To Read A Book that there are four levels of reading that all happen simultaneously while an expert reader reads. I know them each by name:

• Elementary

• Inspectional

• Analytical

• Syntopical

The most important level of reading is level 3 - analytical reading. In other words, it's reading for understanding. It's all about understanding in your own words exactly what the author understands on the thing he or she is writing about.

I could continue rambling, but this is a concrete example of how to create your own understanding of a topic (like How To Read A Book).

You must practice recall through summarizing the topic in your own words.

The Theory-Practice Gap

The Theory-Practice Gap: The gap between theoretical knowledge and practical, real-world applications.

It's a term often used in nursing to showcase the impracticality of knowing information passively versus actually practicing within the real problem-solving environment.

This is Aristotle's point exactly; merely knowing something isn't inherently valuable.

Learning is thinking, and thinking is manifested with action.

Simply knowing facts means nothing if you cannot use them actionably to change the world by influence outcomes towards the better, overall good.

Most learners build half a bridge from ignorance towards mastery.

They start with no real blueprints in the first place, which is the first major problem.

No clear goals, and hence, they memorize as much as they can thinking they're making progress.

They get along pretty far, building something that looks like a bridge, only to get stuck halfway through and get lost in how to reach the ideal destination.

Most learners acquire knowledge but never apply knowledge through creating their own understandings.

Hence, they struggle to learn things effectively and retain information.

But this is why my learning framework works.

This framework teaches you how to strategically constrain yourself to deadly specific learning objectives. You'll become focused when learning something if you know exactly what you have to learn, and why. The end goal will be clearly defined for you. Reaching it will just take some work, with nothing being wasted.

Proper goal-setting will turn you into a learning machine, especially if you adopt the principles from my previous newsletters.

Do this, and you'll become intellectually invincible as a student of learning, about all things concerning the eternal human experience.

When I Realized Knowledge Without Action Is Pointless

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is my sh*t.

When people ask me what the best thing I got from my Multimedia bachelor's degree is, I always tell them this:

"My blue belt."

It's not just a physical skill; it's mental.

In order to know how to throw or trip your opponent down to the ground, break a limb, or tear someone's ACL (attempt to, that is!), you need guiding principles.

This is how I truly learned what Aristotle meant when he said the purpose of knowledge is action.

I was watching Justin Flores, JFLO for short, on YouTube looking at one of his foot-sweep seminars.

Full to the brim with information by one of the most skilled fighting teachers on the planet.

In relation to this, I honed in my focus and watched every little detail. I paid careful attention to every word he said.

But when I went to train, I got frustrated. Absolutely nothing worked.

Why?

It's because I never applied the concepts to my own situation. I was too busy trying to do the exact things Mr. Flores said, instead of taking the information, making it my own, and applying it to problems based on my own unique context and circumstances in the gym.

I'm smaller than Mr. Flores.

I'm a hell of a lot weaker too.

My limbs are longer and I'm far less skilled than he is.

I had to painstaking learn how to understand what he thought, not just copy it word for word, movement by movement with deathly precision.

I knew so many of his moves from watching his reels online, but I wasn't applying them. And when I did apply them, I had to adjust.

Then I started foot-sweeping everyone. I'm by no means a master, but I've made progress compared to who I was 3 months ago; and that's all that matters.

We all have particular needs and limits, and thankfully I've learnt to define my own.

Knowing things is great, but being able to apply what you know to things is even better; learn to do so in complex situations and you'll have gained mastery over that knowledge.

True mastery is adaptable and can overcome problems as they arise involuntarily.

The Foundational Learning Framework

Staring into the abyss is terrifying.

The path before you remains unclear, and that's ok.

Learning is exactly like this; but all wise men were fools once.

This framework will help you to effectively acquire and apply new knowledge and reach topical mastery of any subject or skill.

Step 1: Set Clear Learning Goals with Purpose

The root cause of directionless learning is not having a clear direction in the first place.

You will never be successful if you cannot define what success is to you.

Write down exactly what you want to learn, naming the specific subject/skill and outcome (this is important).

There's a big difference between:

"I want to get better at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu"

versus

"I want to work on improving my standing game: under-hook set ups, retention, and successfully completing 20 takedowns with these 3 options (knee tap, snap-down, foot-sweep) over the next 4 weeks. I want to get better at takedowns so I can score more points and get over my fear of wrestling"

See the difference?

The reason why you're writing down your outcome is to help reinforce the purpose of your learning. This will help give you more precise learning objectives and provide you with your "why."

Write down your "why" in its own line, sentence or paragraph. Get specific.

If there's enough meaning behind what you're learning, the suffering can be tolerated.

Once you've done that, write down 3-5 indicators for success. In relation to my example, they could be:

• Explain the concept of the under-hook as if I was teaching it to a beginner

• Be able to retain and defend under-hooks and not get taken down while doing so for a 3 whole rounds

• Finish 25 takedowns via knee taps/snap-downs/foot-sweeps, mixing the 3 together across 1-2 weeks

Once you have your objectives, it's time to start ticking them off.

This is where the learning begins.

Step 2: Start Learning With Active Recall By Creating Your Own Understanding

Now that you have your learning curriculum laid out, it's time to start the actual learning.

There's a crucial difference between memorizing and understanding something.

Not knowing this difference caused me years of pain and intellectual suffering that I wouldn't wish on any keen learner.

We should not study merely to know what others have thought, but to think for ourselves.

Seneca

In his Moral Letters to Lucilius, Seneca writes about true learning for mastery.

The key idea is to make what you're learning your own through understanding and action.

This is the point where we shift and merge lower order into higher order thinking.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

The best way to learn anything is to build, create, or teach something; this includes your own understanding of something.

Practice active recall through summarizing what you learn in your own words, either mentally or by writing on a page.

Read a chapter, or a passage from a piece of text (based on your learning objectives), then close the book. Practice either speaking out loud or writing down your own summary of what you read. Don't be afraid to link it to other ideas, or draw a mind map connecting the concepts, or just writing down what you're thinking.

This is it - this is learning.

Focusing on thinking up your own understanding.

Consider the Pareto Principle - 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. The same applies to learning something. Map out the key concepts behind what you're learning.

If a guitar solo sounds nice to your ear, find out why it does so.

If a foot-sweep is or is not working when you try it, find out why.

If you're trying to change a particular belief you have, focus on changing the general one which it stems from; the why behind its existence.

Step 3: Apply Knowledge To Your Own Life

Do you know that sinking feeling you get once you've understood something, yet you still manage to forget it over time?

It's because you haven't applied it to anything.

Most learners get stuck by learning facts and statistics, but what of them?

Deliberate practice changes this; it puts information to use and turns it into knowledge via improvement.

The goal of learning is to improve something.

For every concept you learn, think about one specific problem it solves, or skill you can practice with it immediately. Don't wait until you've learned everything; start applying from minute one.

If you're learning jiu-jitsu like me, don't just drill (light sparring) your under-hooks; start doing full force live rounds immediately. This will reveal your knowledge gaps and get you creating new solutions based on your own understandings.

Always be thinking about what worked and what didn't. Any form of failure to solve a problem is a question to be asked, or a knowledge gap to be filled.

Go back and relearn or do some more learning in this case.

Use feedback loops to progress 10 times faster by identifying your intellectual weak points.

Then, destroy them.

Step 4: Build Your Learning System with Spaced Repetition

By practicing spaced repetition, you'll ensure long-term retention of information. This will offset the forgetting curve.

When most people read a book, they get frustrated when they don't "remember everything they read."

Would you expect yourself to understand everything within a college textbook after one read?

Of course not.

Then why is any of medium of information communication any different?

Your brain sees infrequently accessed information as disposable; you need to change this.

Structure your learning as follows (adapt it if you'd like):

• 60% New Learning: Using your active recall method from Step 2

• 40% Review: Revisiting concepts from 1 day ago, 3 days ago, 1 week ago

Give yourself a block of time to study each day or week.

Maybe it's 25 minutes.

Maybe that's too much for you and your personal limits.

This isn't stupid repetition. It's you practicing remembering and retrieving information

Make learning a priority and focus on making it a deep part of how you live your life.

Step 5: Teach to Master

Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak.

Seneca

Teaching is the ultimate form of learning.

You are literally creating your own understanding of a subject or skill, and not only doing so in testing others, but paradoxically, you teach yourself.

Teaching is just another form of self-testing.

It forces you to identify and fill knowledge gaps while building your own understanding.

This is creation.

It's the ultimate form of learning anything.

Choose one method:

• Write about what you've learned in a notepad without looking at any books or sources

• Teach someone else directly at breakfast (I love annoying my girlfriend :))

• Create content explaining the concept on Substack

• Help solve someone's problem using your new knowledge

If you cannot explain something clearly, you've identified your next learning objectives. Expose the knowledge gaps and fill them.

This is the art of learning.

Summary: Learning Framework Checklist

STEP 1: SET CLEAR GOALS

• Write down exactly what you want to learn (specific subject/skill)

• Define your desired outcome (what success looks like)

• Write your "why" - the purpose behind learning this

• List 3-5 measurable success indicators

• Make goals specific enough that a stranger could understand them

STEP 2: LEARN WITH ACTIVE RECALL & UNDERSTANDING

• Read/study your material

• Close the book/source

• Summarize what you learned in your own words (speak or write)

• Connect new concepts to things you already know

• Focus on understanding WHY, not just memorizing facts

• Test yourself: "Could I explain this to a 12-year-old?"

STEP 3: APPLY IMMEDIATELY

• Identify one specific problem your new knowledge solves

• Practice the skill/concept immediately (don't wait)

• Note what works and what doesn't

• Use failures as questions to investigate further

• Seek feedback and adjust your approach

STEP 4: BUILD SPACED REPETITION

• Dedicate 60% of study time to new learning

• Dedicate 40% of study time to reviewing previous concepts

• Review material from: 1 day ago, 3 days ago, 1 week ago

• Set a regular study schedule (even if just 25 minutes)

• Test your recall regularly, don't just re-read

STEP 5: TEACH TO MASTER

• Choose one method: write, teach someone, create content, or solve problems

• Explain the concept without looking at sources

• Identify knowledge gaps when you get stuck

• Fill those gaps and try teaching again

• Help someone else using your new knowledge

DAILY LEARNING HABIT

• Morning: Review what you learned yesterday

• Study session: 60% new + 40% review

• Evening: Summarize the day's learning in your own words

• Weekly: Teach someone else what you've learned

Remember: Learning = Thinking + Doing + Teaching

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I hope that with this letter, I’ve given you some practical wisdom to help you to learn anything. I've wasted so much of my life wanted to learn but never doing anything about it. Aimless, directionless, pointless memorization; it's always plagued my intellectual mind. But that's finally stopped for me, and I hope it has for you too.

That's another reason why I wrote The Golden Habit System (it's free). I was sick and tired of acting spontaneously with my habit goals. Clarity creates an easy destination. Give it a read if you want to take back control of how you live your life; it certainly helped me.

Learning how to learn really is a profound idea.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message or leave a comment below.

I'd love to help you with your self-improvement goals like how these ideas have helped me.

If not, give me your best study tips to broaden my mind on the topic. I'd love to learn what you guys think.

Thank you for reading.

- Profound Ideas