The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition: Advanced Methods to Learn, remember, and Master New Skills and Information by Peter Hollins

– This is a self-published book that has no copyright date, citations, or index. It does have a summary guide at the end. The content rings true to me and fits well with other books summarized on this blog. Give it a shot. It’s a easy read.

1. Learn with Rapid Skill Acquisition

• Information on almost any topic is almost instantly accessible cheap or even free. We just need to learn how to learn. Traditional schools mostly engage students in passive learning, which is inefficient. You need to start with goals that are important to you. These goals will either help you on the job, gain you a new job, help you with your life outside of work, or give you a new hobby.

2. Strategic Planning

• You need to start with a well constructed plan. Most new skills can be broken into sub skills. You need to determine which sub skills are the most important and focus on them first. For example, if you want to learn another language you need to learn the most common words first. As you gather learning resources and weed some out, make sure they follow this idea. It may be easy to find written material, so be sure to also search for videos and ways you can learn actively.
• Reading or listening to a lecture may provide 5% TO 10% retention. Audio/visual content can take that up to 20%. Demonstrations are more like 30% and group discussions may take it to 50%. Real-life experience takes it to 75% and teaching others is at the top with 90%.

3. It’s Just Practice

• Practice needs to be deliberate. This kind of practice is focused. Try to catch yourself from being mindless or sloppy. Determine the proper amount of time for the skill you are working on. You should interleave the practice of several skills rather than doing just one for a long period of time. Such practice should be repeated over time, perhaps daily. Doing some practice each day is much better than cramming. Try to work on recalling or self-testing rather than rereading if you can.
• Problem-based learning is more effective as it deals with the real world. It requires that you determine what you need to know that you don’t know yet and devise a plan to learn it. This lends itself to group work. As you work you need quality feedback from someone who knows more than you do like a mentor or a coach. You also need to learn how to self access. There are 10 questions here that can help with that. Be sure to schedule your learning and Peter recommends five-minute breaks every 25 minutes.

4. Deep Comprehension

• One way to deepen your comprehension is to engage in elaborate interrogation. This can be likened to a child asking endless “why” questions. As you interrogate yourself, you can discover gaps or blind spots. One kind of elaborate interrogation described here is the Feynman Technique. The keys to it are to simplify how you explain something and creating analogies.
• As your learning progresses, you will go through the six steps of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They are remember, apply, understand, evaluate, analyze, and create. If you fully understand something you can use it to create something brand new. Curiosity isn’t required to learn something, but it makes learning easier. It can be the simple joy of learning something new. It can be apprehension due to lack of knowledge. It can be the stress you feel when you gain knowledge that is stressful. It can be the curiosity you feel while getting to know other people, or it can be the knowledge you gain while engaging in thrill seeking experiences.

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