10 Ways to Learn Faster - Speed Learning

10 Ways to Learn Faster - Speed Learning

By Jim Estill

I spend a good portion of my time learning and I wish I could learn at a tremendously greater rate because I believe knowledge can be a competitive advantage. Knowledge is power; knowledge allows me to continue to thrive. As a result I have studied how I can learn faster. I blogged about learning faster a while ago.

Some tips are:

1) Repeat: Sometimes some of the things I need to learn are a little bit boring and I found the best way to learn them is through repetition. Space it over a bit of time for even better retention.

2) Use multiple senses: I learn when I listen to an audio program. I learn better when I listen to an audio program and make notes.

3) Take a speed-reading course: I have found that the greatest source of knowledge is through reading so it only makes sense to use the tool of speed-reading. Some people say they don't want to speed-read because they enjoy reading. Trust me, speed-reading does not take out the enjoyment of reading. If anything, it enhances it because you can read more. Others do not want to speed-read because they feel their comprehension will decrease; however, it won't. Trust me your comprehension will actually increase if you speed-read.

Consider speed-reading to be one of the best long-term investments that you can make.

4) Practise learning: I have a belief that we have multiple areas and facets of our mind and we tend to not exercise many parts of it. As a result I tend to do exercises for my mind outside of the area that I normally study. For example, I am not naturally a musical person so if I would try to do something musical, that stretches my mind. For some people, it might be learning a foreign language.

5) Exercise: I have read a lot on how to make a brain better and one of the repeated themes is to be healthy. The simplest of things is to create movement and exercise. This is everything from small passive movements to active engaged exercise. This is something I practise well.

6) Eat right: Eat nutritious food so that it will fuel your brain.

7) Sleep right -- yes, I finally said it. In my earlier time management seminars I often preached that sleep was for wimps. I have now changed my mind and believe that a lack of sleep causes a lack of learning, lack of memory, lack of retention and it just is not healthy. Because I want to be so involved in the world, it often bothers me that I have to sleep and I am afraid that I will miss things. I am not purposing that people over-sleep and I think seven hours is adequate for most people; but I do believe cutting sleep to less than five or six hours on a consistent basis is a bad idea.

8) Change: I find that learning for me tends to max out after I have been absorbed in something for a period of time. The easiest way for me to get around this is to change something else. It doesn't mean that I can't start learning something different but I tend to lose my focus, lose my learning energy after about 20 or 30 minutes. (I might be ADD.)

9) Have a learning plan: Like everything I do in life, having a plan helps me to move forward on things. There is no reason not to have a learning plan. What are the things that you want to learn, what are some tricks that will help you learn them?

10) Copy: One of the easiest ways to learn is to copy what others do and how other people learn. Simply copying how other people do things is often enough to get things done.