6 Steps For Mastering Or Learning Anything Really Fast

Being able to pick up a new skill quickly is an asset in today’s workplace, but our typical learning habits aren’t always speedy enough. By breaking your goal down into smaller parts, you can actually speed up your learning time.

Why? Because many complex skills from playing a musical instrument to learning a language–are just bundles of smaller sub-skills. By deconstructing the larger skill into all its component parts, you’ll not only be able to chip away at each one piece by piece, you’ll also be able to understand how they all relate.

As an entrepreneur, it’s almost a necessity to be able to learn things fast and master skills quickly. Over the years, I’ve spent quite a lot of time perfecting my ability to learn things. In this post, I’m going to share with you 6 steps for mastering or learning anything really fast:

1. Set A Goal

Knowing your end goal is the critical first step to learning anything. It’s what will keep you moving in a consistent direction, especially when things get tough which they probably will at some point. It’s important you define your goals as concretely as you can.

When you set your goal, try to identify the bigger purpose that’s motivating it. Why do you want to learn this skill and not some other one? What will you do with it once you learn it? These questions will help guide your learning and keep you motivated as you master it.

2. Stop Multitasking

Multitasking is a guilty pleasure we’ve all developed in the age of constant notifications and mobile applications. From checking our emails every ten minutes to scrolling through our Instagram feed, we are all guilty of doing it at some point during the day. Multitasking can be one of the biggest hurdles preventing us from learning faster because it removes your complete focus and attention from the task at hand.

3. Stop Reading, Start Doing

Keep the “rule of two-thirds” in mind. Spend only one-third of your time studying and the other two-thirds of your time actually performing the activity. Practicing. Testing yourself. Get your nose out of that book and get out of the classroom. Whatever it is you want to be the best at, be doing it. The closer your practice is to the real thing, the faster you learn.

4. Deconstruct The Skill To Be More Efficient 

Most of the things we think of as skills (like “public speaking” or “playing the guitar”) are actually bundles of smaller sub-skills that are used in combination. By breaking the skill into more manageable parts, practice becomes way less intimidating and you can work on improving one sub-skill at a time.

Like so many things in life, skills follow the law of critical few (often referred to as “Pareto’s Law” or the “80/20 principle”). Breaking down the skill into smaller parts is the first step in figuring out which sub-skills are critical. Most skills follow a similar pattern and if you can master the pattern that it takes to learn something, you’ll be very efficient in learning how to apply it.

5. Commit To The Long Term

Asking someone “How long are you going to be doing this?” was the best predictor of how skilled that person would end up being. Merely committing to the long haul had huge effects. The commitment is the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice showed that they could master the skill in no time at all. Commit to the long haul and don’t even think of giving up.

6. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

This is the part where most of us struggle and what many of us don’t want to hear is the rule that mastering anything faster requires practice. Learning requires a frequency of and persistence in performing the same skill over and over again. You must continue doing this until you can do it subconsciously, without having to think about it.

Conclusion

Taking small steps may not sound sexy, but it has been the proven path to follow for anything you’ll want to achieve in your life and business. In this post, I shared with you 6 steps for mastering or learning anything really fast.