Introduction

Welcome to the guide about learning! This introduction will be short. (I don’t like wasting time with pointless lengthy introductions.)

Forget everything you think you know about learning. Most of that is informed by our rigid (and flat out wrong) educational systems.

In general, our brain grows through …

• Association: it’s just neurons that can connect. The more connections you make, the more you associate knowledge with each other, the better it is stored.
• Challenge: our muscles grow by breaking first, then growing stronger through repairing. The brain is similar. If there isn’t enough challenge, there is no learning happening afterwards.
• Attention: whatever you give attention, grows. Both good and bad.
• Physical Fitness: good health has been proven to increase brain functionality in all possible ways, significantly.

When none of these are applied, the brain will shrink and you will lose skills or memories. This is important: our brain is not a USB drive that, once it sees new information, remembers it forever. It’s not a book in which you can store endless facts. In fact, we’re quite terrible at storing facts. Because our brain is a network.

That’s why I want to shift focus towards understanding and intuition. Towards only learning what you need to know, and learning it in the most practical way possible. That’s what our brains are good at—and that’s what really teaches you a skill.

In a few chapters, I will also give the practical implementation of the concepts above. Here’s the summary.

• Do: do something with the skill or information you want to learn—“just do it”
• Time: do this a lot, over a long period of time
• Feedback: analyze your results and give yourself feedback (or ask for it, if possible)
• Experiment: try new things and challenge yourself

The rest of this guide expands on all these topics. It provides simple habits and explains why they work, optionally with an example or personal anecdote.

If you want some proof that these techniques work, visit my portfolio. I work in four completely different fields, self-taught. As I write this, I am only 25 and have reached some success in each field. That’s no “proof”, of course, but maybe it inspires or convinces :)

Let’s start!