PDF Summary:The Master Guides: Learn Anything, by Shortform

Whether you’re in school, starting a job, exploring a new hobby, or keeping up with an ever-changing workplace, the need to keep learning is a basic fact of life. However, you may have self-defeating attitudes that stop you from achieving everything you can. Thankfully, research shows that you can learn anything you want at any point in life. More than that, it’s now widely established that learning itself is a skill that can be learned.

In Shortform's Master Guide, we’ll draw from the work of 13 educational experts to lay out how to master the skill of learning. This begins by adopting a healthy mindset, adapting your schedule to facilitate mental focus, and making the best use of educational tools such as memorization, comprehension, learning from mistakes, and self-testing. We’ll also use illustrative examples to show how the principles of learning can be put into practice.

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Jack and Sara’s Calendar

As a single parent, Jack has little time in his schedule to focus on learning guitar. To find more, he decides to limit his TV time and practice in his basement instead (where the noise won’t be distracting to Sara). Sara’s challenge is that she has a full load of classes, plus extracurricular activities and friends. While maintaining a balanced life is important to stave off burnout, her physics class is the most essential to getting into the college program she wants. As such, she sets aside time every evening in which she turns off her phone, retreats to her room, and focuses exclusively on her physics homework.

Use Your Learning Toolbox

Once you begin the learning process, it only makes sense to use every appropriate tool you have available. After all, learning isn’t a singular process but is composed of many facets that all work together. These include committing information to memory, drawing a deeper understanding from new knowledge, developing skills through trial and error, and repeatedly testing your comprehension.

You may not always feel enthusiastic about the learning process. In Learn Like a Pro, Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe recommend three types of goals that can strengthen your motivation and reduce the need to exert self-discipline. Long-term goals (like starting your own business) keep you focused on and excited about the future. Stepping-stone goals (like getting your MBA) are closer in time and help you reach your long-term goal. Process goals are short-term, actionable learning tasks (like studying for your MBA) that build to your stepping-stone goals.

Jack and Sara’s Goals

Jack’s long-term goal is to eventually perform for other people, perhaps at an “open mic night” at his favorite neighborhood bar. His stepping-stone goal is to reach a skill level where he can learn new songs quickly, either by ear or by reading sheet music. His process goal is to learn one song well enough to play it from beginning to end.

Sara’s academic goals are easier to define. Her long-term goal is a career in engineering. One stepping-stone goal is to get accepted into college. Her closest process goal is to pass her next physics exam.

Memorization

Often, the first step in any learning process is to absorb and memorize new information, whether it’s a list of historical facts, scientific concepts, or steps to perform a task. The trick is to do it in a way that lets you retain what you’ve learned and access it when needed in the future. For this reason, it helps to understand how memory works, what practices help strengthen memorization, and what mental techniques make it easier to recall what you’ve memorized.

Oakley and Schewe write that before knowledge can enter your long-term memory, it first needs to go through your working memory. Working memory temporarily holds facts, thinks through information, and solves problems. It’s a crucial part of the learning process, but it has limits—working memory can only hold three or four thoughts at a time, and if you try to think about more than that, you’ll likely forget some of those ideas. However, the neural connections that your working memory creates eventually enter your long-term memory once those connections have been sufficiently strengthened.

So how do you pass information from your short-term into your long-term memory? Jade Bowler states that your brain remembers information best by engaging with it repeatedly over time. Each time you review information, you’ll be able to remember it longer, eventually ingraining it into your long-term memory. You can also enhance this by connecting information to concepts you already know. For example, to remember the purpose of white blood cells—to fight disease—you might associate that information with a concept you’re already familiar with, like the mythological “white knight” who comes to someone’s aid.

Oakley and Sejnowski explain how this works on the neurological level, in which memories are based on neural connections. Connecting a new neural pattern in your brain (such as facts about white blood cells) to an existing one (the myth of the white knight) makes the new data easier to retrieve. One example of how to connect neural patterns is to create mental pictures to represent the concept you’re learning, especially if the concept isn’t visual. Pictures are easier to commit to memory than abstractions like words and numbers, so if you can link a fact to a mental image, you not only create more neural connections, but you connect them to something (namely the picture) that’s easy to retrieve from memory.

Many people try to burn information into their memories by rereading, but the authors of Make It Stick say this approach only commits the information to your short-term memory, making it a waste of time in the long run. Instead, the most effective way to improve retention of new information is through retrieval practice, which is any exercise that requires you to recall what you’ve learned. You can practice retrieval with classroom quizzes, flashcards, self-testing, and reflection, when you assess how you approached a particular problem and how you can improve next time.

Jack and Sara Fill Their Heads

Both music and science require memorizing information so well that you can recall it on command. For Jack, this means learning chord shapes and string-picking patterns, which he does by endless practice and repetition while associating the tactile feel of his playing with the different sounds that he produces.

In physics class, Sara has to memorize many physical laws and how they’re represented in mathematics. To do this, she associates each mathematical formula with a mental image of the physical reaction that each law represents. For example, to remember that an object’s momentum is equal to its mass multiplied by its velocity (p=mv), she imagines a giant boulder (the mass) rolling quickly downhill (its velocity) as Indiana Jones tries to outrun it.

Comprehension

It’s one thing to memorize facts and ideas, but true learning requires actually understanding what you’ve committed to memory. Comprehension, also known as conceptual knowledge, is the understanding of how individual ideas relate to each other. There are techniques to develop conceptual knowledge, use it as a basis for even further learning, and free up mental resources that were previously taxed by memorization.

The authors of Make It Stick suggest that instead of simply memorizing information when you’re learning something new, you’ll gain a more meaningful understanding if you identify the underlying principles that will guide you when you use your new knowledge. One way to extract the main principles is to look at multiple examples at once to see the common thread more clearly. If you examine two different problems at once, you may notice similarities or differences that illuminate the underlying rules. Once you’ve found them, connect those principles with prior relevant knowledge. This process creates context, which deepens your understanding, helps create mental models, and brings together interrelated concepts.

Scott Young asserts that deep comprehension gives you a solid foundation that lets you build on your knowledge to understand even more complex ideas. For example, you must have a deep understanding of algebra before you can master calculus. However, Young says that when you think you understand something more than you actually do, you keep yourself from learning. Therefore, you should frequently question yourself to avoid overestimating your knowledge. Always ask, “Do I understand this well enough to explain it?”

According to Boaler, another advantage of conceptual understanding is that it takes up less memory than lists of memorized facts. Furthermore, understanding how different ideas relate to one another creates new avenues for problem-solving. For example, if you were to memorize a separate list of driving directions to every place you regularly visit—the grocery store, the post office, a friend’s house—that would be a hundred times more taxing than simply building a mental map of your city and how its major roads intersect.

Jack and Sara Make Progress

Through repeated practice and applying what they’ve learned, Jack and Sara both start to rely less on memory and more on their personal understanding of their subjects. When solving problems in class, Sara finds that she no longer has to strain to remember the basic laws of physics—they come to her intuitively. Likewise, Jack discovers that the shapes of many basic guitar chords are now second nature, and he can focus instead on learning chord progressions and complicated rhythms. The information that once took up a lot of mental space has now been compressed into more efficient neural patterns in their brains.

Trial and Error

While memorization and comprehension may seem straightforward in theory, it’s important to keep in mind that learning isn’t a linear process. Instead, one of your most important tools is trial and error—the process by which you use your mistakes as a springboard for growth. Though learning from mistakes is a proven educational tool, it often requires an attitude adjustment. If you see mistakes as a sign of failure (as part of a fixed mindset), you’ll instead need to embrace a growth mindset by viewing your struggles as signposts to where you should direct your attention.

In The Art of Learning, chess champion Josh Waitzkin explains that when you make mistakes, you can reflect on your errors and grow your skills. Each time you act, err, adjust, and repeat, you make an incremental improvement. You take one step at a time, sometimes succeeding, but often slipping up. For example, imagine playing a chord on a guitar. It doesn’t sound right, so you adjust your fingers and try again. Each time you do it incorrectly, the feedback tells you how to correct your form. Eventually, you’ll find the correct finger placement. Every incremental correction builds your knowledge—in other words, success lies on a mountain of mistakes.

This goes against the way many of us were taught as children. With its emphasis on testing and grades, traditional education punishes mistakes instead of valuing them as an educational tool. Jo Boaler argues the importance of overcoming this unhelpful fixed mindset. Instead, you should view mistakes as a sign that you’re on the right track. Just as physical exercise can be painful, struggling with an intellectual concept is a sign that you’re working your brain’s metaphorical muscles. You can reframe any fears you may have about a subject by reminding yourself that just because you don’t understand it yet, it doesn’t mean that you won’t.

One strategy to embrace this growth mindset is to focus your efforts on addressing your mistakes. Scott Young refers to this as “drilling,” in which you isolate a weakness in your learning process and concentrate intensively on it. The aspect you isolate will often be an integral component of the overall skill or subject you’re studying. In mastering it, you unblock areas of learning that are impeding progress. By addressing the most difficult aspects of the process, you reduce delays, learn to confront your weaknesses, and improve overall proficiency.

Jack and Sara Stumble and Keep Going

For Jack, the process of learning guitar is one of constant errors and correction, so much that he almost gives up once or twice. After a while, though, he notices that the mistakes he makes aren’t the same as the ones he made in the beginning. Thanks to his incremental progress, the skills that tripped him up in the past aren’t the same that challenge him today.

Sara notices something similar. To her, it feels that she’s struggling just as much in her second semester as she did in the first. However, when another student asks her for help with solving a problem, she realizes that concepts she wrestled with early in the academic year are now so intuitive that she can teach them to another classmate. Her early struggles resulted in those ideas becoming firmly implanted in her brain, while her current struggles are indicative that she’s still challenging herself to grow more.

Self-Testing

Another misconception you may have learned in school is that testing comes at the end of the learning process. Rather, many experts agree that testing is a vital learning tool for improving your ability to recall and synthesize information. Self-testing engages your brain in different ways than simply absorbing information, and by using appropriate techniques to your advantage, you can strengthen both your memory of a subject and the skills involved with it.

Oakley and Sejnowski write that the most effective form of studying is active recall, which consists of reproducing or rephrasing ideas from memory, rather than passively rereading them. If you’re memorizing facts, try to recite them or write them down from memory—don’t just reread them in your textbook or from your notes. If you’re learning a problem-solving technique, work through an actual problem—don’t just read an example solution. If you’re learning a hands-on skill, practice doing the work instead of watching someone else. When you actively test your knowledge, your brain strengthens synaptic connections in ways that passive learning doesn’t.

Scott Young writes that, when learning new information, you should use flashcards or free recall (writing down what you remember from what you studied) to force your brain to retrieve information on its own. This helps you commit the information to memory. When testing yourself, Young also advises giving yourself time between study and active recall. He cites research suggesting that this small delay makes it more difficult to recall information, giving you a mental challenge that effectively improves learning.

The authors of Make It Stick echo Young in suggesting that self-testing’s corrective feedback is most effective when it’s slightly delayed. Immediate feedback can become a crutch—like learning to ride a bike with training wheels. The correction is so automatic that you begin to rely on that support, which inhibits you from truly learning and mastering a skill.

They also emphasize that self-testing should be difficult and frequent. More difficult retrieval leads to better retention. The harder your brain has to work to retrieve the information, the more firmly it cements it in your memory. Frequent testing also improves retention by deepening your comprehension and improving your ability to apply the knowledge in different contexts. And the longer you continue regular testing—even after you feel that you’ve mastered the skill—the longer-lasting your retention will be.

Jack and Sara Never Stop Learning

To follow her dream, Sara has to pass her high school physics class and the standardized tests used for college admissions. To prepare for her exams, she takes practice tests, reviews her answers, and tests herself again. At the same time, her father is working up the courage to perform in front of a crowd of total strangers. He plays “dress rehearsals” in private, which he records and listens to later. From those, he can identify problems with his technique that he doesn’t notice while he’s playing.

It’s a happy day when Sara receives her college acceptance letter. To celebrate, Jack gives her a present—a private concert of five songs he’s learned specifically for this occasion. Neither has achieved their long-term goals yet, but they’ve both worked diligently to learn new skills and have crossed the next stepping stone to realizing both of their dreams.

Shortform Resources

For more on the science of learning, see the following guides:

• Mindset, Carol S. Dweck
• Limitless Mind, Jo Boaler
• Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski

For strategies to improve your learning ability:

• Limitless, Jim Kwik
• Make It Stick, Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel
• Ultralearning, Scott Young
• The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
• Learn Like a Pro, Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe

For specific tips on academic learning:

• How to Become a Straight-A Student, Cal Newport
• The Only Study Guide You'll Ever Need, Jade Bowler