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How to learn

15 Insights From Learning Science That Help You Master New Things Faster

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Vital lessons you likely didn’t learn in school.

Source: Created by the author via Canva

Learning how to learn is the meta-skill that accelerates everything else you do.

Once you understand the fundamentals of learning science, you can save hours every time you learn something new. You become more strategic in approaching new subjects and skills instead of relying on often ineffective learning methods many pick up in school.

I love the science of learning, an interdisciplinary domain that builds on cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, and more. I can spend hours learning about how our brains absorb and retain information (here is a list of the recent books I’ve read).

Below are key insights I’ve learned about how we learn. Every single one will help you understand how your brain learns. By doing so, you’ll make better decisions on your journey to wisdom.

#1 Unlearn this common learning myth

You don’t learn better when you receive information in your preferred learning style (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic). There is no evidence from controlled experiments that suggests teaching in a person’s preferred learning style will help them learn.

“​Brain imaging shows that we all rely on very similar brain circuits and learning rules. The brain circuits for reading and mathematics are the same in each of us, give or take a few millimeters-even in blind children. We all face similar hurdles in learning, and the same teaching methods can surmount them. Individual differences, when they exist, lie more in children’s extant knowledge, motivation, and the rate at which they learn.”

— Stanislas Dehaene in “How We Learn”

#2 Forgetting is not your personal flaw

I always thought forgetting was a character’s flaw. But it isn’t. Forgetting is no error in an otherwise functional memory system. While science is not clear yet about the exact rate of forgetting, there’s a consensus that your ability to recall things from memory decreases over time. The most effective learning strategies interrupt the process of forgetting.

For example, spaced repetition, which allows some forgetting to occur between your learning sessions, strengthens both the learning and your capability to use the routes and cues for retrieving that piece of knowledge.

“Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you’ve got to work harder to recall the concept. What you don’t sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger.”

— Brown et al. in “Make it Stick”

#3 Human memory works in these three stages

In the acquisition phase, you link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, you store it; and in the retrieval phase, you get information out of your memory.

Adapted by Dunlosky et al. (2007) based on Nelson & Narens’s (1990) framework for metamemory.

Storage and retrieval strength are two factors that determine whether you’re able to remember and recall what you learn. Storage strength shows how associated or “entrenched” it is with everything else in one’s memory. The retrieval strength of an item in your memory determines how easily you can access it.

“Current retrieval strength is assumed to determine completely the probability that an item can be recalled, whereas storage strength acts as a latent variable that retards the loss or enhances the gain of retrieval strength.”

— Brown et al. in “Make it Stick”

#4 Move things from your short-term to your long-term memory

Your working memory is limited, but schemas stored in your long-term memory aren’t. So the goal of learning is to move things from working memory into your long-term memory.

Several methods have received robust support from decades of research. Below are two highly effective ways to make learning deeper and more durable:

  • Elaboration. When you elaborate, you explain and describe an idea in your own words. Thereby you connect and relate the new material to what you already know (=more meaningful encoding).
  • Dual coding. Using visual and verbal cues, you can more effectively keep information in your long-term memory. The next time you try to remember information, attach an image or picture to visualize it.

The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.

#5 Focus on these two factors for meaningful practice

Repetition by itself does not lead to good long-term memory.

Practice doesn’t make perfect.

Practice makes permanent.

You can repeat a specific behaviour indefinitely without getting better at it. All you do is manifest the existing technique. It depends on how you learn and practice.

One thing that helps is adding variability to your learning. Work with different teachers, peers, and styles. Mix up your problems.

The second thing you want to include is feedback. To improve, you need to know what exactly you’re striving for and become aware of your shortcomings. Feedback helps you manifest the correct revisions rather than repeating ineffective behaviour.

“Purposeful practice involves feedback. Without feedback— either from yourself or from outside observers — you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.”

— Ericsson and Pool in “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise”

#6 The reason why learning needs repetition

In the past decades, neuroscientists argued neurons in gray matter would be a key factor for learning. But more recently, neuroscientists revisited this assumption. They used magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brain’s structure while learning.

Below the gray matter surface lies the white matter. It’s white because it contains billions of axons coated with a fatty substance called myelin.

Myelin is a critical factor for learning as it determines your brain’s information transmission speed. Myelin makes signals faster, stronger, and more precise.

Every time you repeat a practice, the myelin layer thickens. The more you practice a specific skill, the better insulated the circuit becomes. In return, your thoughts and behaviour become faster and more precise.

#7 Don’t reread a book or a presentation but test yourself

When it comes to learning, don’t trust your intuition — it can lead you to pick the wrong learning strategies. While rereading feels efficient, it is less effective than retrieving (trying to recall something from your memory).

When you practice retrieval, you withdraw learned information from your long-term memory into your working memory. While this requires effort (and increases germane cognitive load), it directly improves your memory, transfer, and inferences.

“Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illusion of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be fooled.”

— Brown et al. in “Make it Stick”

#8 For optimal learning, use both of your brain modes

For effective learning, you need your brain’s focused and diffused mode.

In focused mode, you think based on prior knowledge and rely on often-used neural connections associated with problem-solving on familiar tasks.

The diffused mode, on the other hand, feels like daydreaming and enables unpredictable, new neural connections.

Many people optimize their days for focused mode thinking — through deep work, flow states, and other work sessions. Learning can happen during focused attention.

But the diffused mode is equally important. Diffused thinking only occurs when our minds can wander, for example, during a shower or while going for a walk. While this feels like taking a brain break, our mind continues to work for us.

To integrate the two thinking modes into your daily schedule (and to beat procrastination), you can use the Pomodoro technique — focusing for 25 minutes and giving yourself a pleasurable 5-minute brain break afterwards.

“Learn a new skill in short blocks of around 20 minutes followed by short rest periods. Why? Because mind wandering will occur after 15 to 20 minutes. This finding calls for professional moderation of any event at which people participate. Skill development involves periods of growth followed by periods of consolidation or even lack of growth.”

— Hattie and Yates in “Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn”

#9 Fact-learning is essential for mastering “21st-century skills”

Declarative knowledge (such as facts) is needed for procedural knowledge (such as skills). It’s not either facts or skills. You need both.

If you don’t memorize facts to encode them into your long-term memory, you’ll never have the same processing fluency and thought quality as someone who has. It’s as if you’re trying to win a race walking barefoot while the other person sits on an e-bike.

Your long-term memories can store thousands of facts that form a schema. This schema helps you learn new facts about that topic and is the foundation for conceptual understanding. While you’re problem-solving, you have more working memory capacity available because a lot is stored in your long-term memory.

The benefit of remembering information is not in the knowledge itself but in the way you can deploy it. You build a mental structure that helps you develop new thoughts and knowledge through memorization.

When solving problems, thinking critically, or generating new ideas, you don’t rely on your limited working memory capacity but on your basically unlimited long-term memory.

“Our long-term memory does not have the same limitations as working memory. It is capable of storing thousands of pieces of information. This allows us to cheat the limitations of working memory in lots of ways.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

#10 Your brain’s capacity is basically unlimited

There’s no such thing as a full brain. What can feel like juggling too many pieces at a time is a high cognitive load on your working memory.

Your long-term memory capacity is unlimited — and the more you learn, the more possible connections you create for future learning, which makes additional learning easier. There’s no limit to how much you can remember as long as you relate it to what you already know.

“It is far easier to build on existing knowledge than it is to learn new material from scratch. New information, which cannot be related to existing knowledge, is quickly shed.”

— Hattie and Yates in “Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn”

#11 Pay attention to attention

Attention is the gateway to learning: you can’t remember any information if it hasn’t been amplified by attention and awareness. Become a master at directing your attention to what matters.

#12 Active learning always trumps passive learning

Learning does not occur passively through simple exposure to data or lectures. Ideally, you are active, curious, engaged, and autonomous in your learning.

You learn best when you’re focused and engaged through questions, reflection, or discussions (rather than passively listening to lectures or watching videos).

“Growing bodies of research and practice, from early childhood to university classrooms and beyond, demonstrate the benefits of moving beyond traditional lecture-driven approaches in favor of ‘active learning.’”

— Hirsh-Pasek et al. quoting Yannier et al. in “Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Joyful Classroom Practice”

#13 Set yourself a learning objective

You learn best when the purpose of learning is explicitly stated. Before you dive into practising, consider which goal you want to achieve. Set clear learning objectives for yourself.

Break down your ultimate goal into sub-steps. Instead of saying you want to become better at playing the guitar, focus on one specific part of it, e.g., learning three new strumming patterns or five new chords. One clear outcome is a thousand times better than overarching terms such as “succeed” or “get better.”

#14 Eliminate any distractions that distort your focus.

How easy you find learning something depends on your cognitive load. And while you can’t influence the intrinsic cognitive load (= the difficulty of the subject you want to master), you can optimize for extraneous cognitive load — by using great instructional design and minimizing any distractions.

When working on hard tasks, remove triggers towards other tasks. For example, close your tabs and e-mails, and put your phone on flight mode.

#15 Appreciate your progress rather than talking yourself down

Feeling appreciated and the awareness of your progress are rewarded in and of themselves. Let go of anxiety and stress as much as possible and focus on your effort and progress. Low emotions crush your brain’s learning potential, whereas providing the brain with an encouraging environment may reopen the gates of neuronal plasticity.

Want to feel inspired and become more thoughtful about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning. I’ll share my Top 10 All-Time Articles immediately as a thank you.

3 Teaching Principles to Help Your Students Achieve More

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Science-based strategies your students will thank you for.

Source: Canva

I worked hard when I was a teacher for 100 students in a secondary school. But I didn’t use evidence-based methods. I did what everybody else was doing, unknowingly replicating methods that don’t work.

And many popular methods don’t work.

There’s no evidence for the learning styles theory — the belief students learn better through their preference for auditory or visual material.

Eliminating fact-based learning or direct teacher instruction is one of the worst things to do. Factual learning is a precondition for acquiring twenty-first-century skills such as problem-solving, creative and critical thinking.

“When one looks at the scientific evidence about how the brain learns and at the design of our education system, one is forced to conclude that the system actively retards education.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

Evidence-based teaching strategies aren’t part of most teacher training. On the contrary, many educators rely on ineffective teaching techniques.

This is the article I wish I had read during my time as a teacher. There are two key resources I used for writing it:

  • Visible Learning, a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in school-aged students. The author is John Hattie, a distinguished education researcher, and this work is the result of 15 years of research.
  • Seven Myths About Education, a thoroughly researched book by Daisy Christodoulou, a former teacher and Head of Education Research, Ark Teacher Training.

What follows are science-based principles for teaching and increasing student achievement.

1) Give This Kind of Feedback

Since the beginning of behavioural science, we have known that feedback is vital for academic achievement. And yet, the variability of feedback effectiveness is massive.

“The key question is, does feedback help someone understand what they don’t know, what they do know, and where they go? That’s when and why feedback is so powerful, but a lot of feedback doesn’t — and doesn’t have any effect,” John Hattie said in a recent interview with EdWeek. “

So what exactly makes feedback effective?

  • Ditch lengthy, hurtful, or personal feedback. Instead, be clear about what you want your students to achieve, know and do.
  • Focus on the future. Students want to know how to improve so they can perform better the next time.
  • Provide concrete steps. Help students understand where to go next.

The following chart is a helpful template you can use. It is differentiated between three learner stages (novice, proficient, and advanced) and provides you with phrasing examples.

Source: Brooks, C., Carroll, A., Gillies, R. M., & Hattie, J. (2019). A Matrix of Feedback for Learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(4). Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol44/iss4/2

2) Teach High-Impact Learning Strategies

Different meta-analytic studies (such as this one or this one) evaluate effective strategies for learning.

Researches find that learning strategies help your students achieve higher academic results. Specifically, the following three learning strategies have a high impact on student learning (high impact equals the average effect sizes across different meta-studies).

Elaboration — integrating with prior knowledge

Research shows students learn better when they connect new knowledge to what they already know. Help students link what they’re learning to prior knowledge.

For example, ask your students a couple of questions before they begin to engage with a new topic.

  • Does it confirm what you already knew?
  • Did it challenge or change what you thought you knew?
  • Is it similar to related things?

Outlining — identify key points in an organized way

Outlining supports students in organizing, clarifying, and structuring information and ideas. There are different strategies for visual, written, or combined outlines.

Source: https://www.evidencebasedteaching.org.au/learning-strategies-you-must-teach-your-students/

While many strategies have their own research behind them (e.g. mind maps), research shows the overarching strategy is impactful for student achievement.

Retrieval — cement new learning into long-term memory

Learning and memory need two components: the learned information itself and a so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the learned material.

Retrieval is a powerful learning strategy because when you recall a memory, both it and its cue are reinforced. With every additional retrieval, you strengthen the connection and can access your memory faster.

Here are two easy-accessible ways to bring retrieval into your classroom:

  • Brain Dump. Set a timer to 5–10 minutes and ask students to write down everything they know about a specific subject or concept without using any assistance. Then, ask your students to find out what their neighbour wrote down. Finally, turn it into a whole-class discussion.
  • Low-stakes quizzes. Prepare tests that won’t be graded for the start or the end of your lessons. You can also use Kahoot or Poll Everywhere.
Source: https://www.learningscientists.org/retrieval-practice

3) Harness the Power of Direct Instruction

Remembering my own school days, I demonized direct teacher instruction. It seemed passive and boring.

When I became a teacher, I thought it’d be best if students discover knowledge on their own through a learning environment that’s designed for them.

Paulo Freire, a leading advocate of critical pedagogy, talks in his widely cited book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” about the co-construction of knowledge. Teachers are students, and students are teachers.

He writes, “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction SO that both are simultaneously teachers and students.”

Freire goes on to explain why teaching facts to students prevents understanding. Other educationalists, such as Russeau, join his reasoning.

If you’ve read about 21st-century skills, you will likely have stumbled upon sentences such as an “education that requires you to memorize facts will prevent them from being able to work, learn and solve problems independently.”

Daisy Christodoulou analyzes that Ofsted, a school inspection service that influences teaching practice in the UK, sees “teacher-led fact-learning as highly problematic.”

But all of the above is wrong. Again Christodoulou:

“They argue, correctly, that the aim of schooling should be for pupils to be able to work, learn and solve problems independently. But they then assume, incorrectly, that the best method for achieving such independence is always to learn independently. This is not the case.”

“Teacher instruction is vitally necessary to become an independent learner.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

John Hattie’s evaluation of over 800 meta-analyses comes to the same conclusion. Teacher instruction is the third most powerful influence on achievement.

“While the final aim of education is for our pupils to be able to work independently, endlessly asking them to work independently is not an effective method for achieving this aim.”

— John Hattie

So how does direct instruction work? John Hattie explains:

“In a nutshell: The teacher decides the learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to the students, demonstrates them by modelling, evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding, and re-telling them what they have told by tying it all together with closure.”

One example I do in my writing online course is the “I-Do, We-Do, You-Do” model. I explain why we learn something and how we define success; I then model the desired skill by doing it myself, we then do it together in a plenum before students go off themselves to breakout rooms or working time and apply it for themselves.

In Conclusion

About a hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin seemed to have said, “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.”

Hundred years later, most teachers and students are still unclear about the best learning methods.

But thanks to the science of learning, a mix of cognitive and social psychology, neuroscience, and educational sciences, we do know a lot of what works and what doesn’t. The above strategies can help your students achieve more.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

I Asked a Guy Who Studied 20 Languages About the Best Way to Learn

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How you can become a better language learner.

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

Mathias Barra is a polyglot. He has studied about 20 languages and is fluent in six.

But Mathias didn’t grow up bilingual. Nor was he a natural talent. “In Spanish classes at school, I didn’t listen at all,” he told me last week.

How can you transform from an average student into a polyglot? And what are the best approaches to learning languages?

The interview is well worth your time, but if you’re in a rush, skip to the key point summary at the end.

Mathias, how many languages do you speak?

I’ve studied about 20 languages, and I feel comfortable in six languages. In order of proficiency, these six languages are French, English, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.

So what about the other 11 languages?

I typically don’t list them as I don’t have the comfort level as in these other six. For example, I’ve been learning German for a while now, but I don’t consider myself able to hold a fluent conversation. I use your podcast as a listening practice.

How did you become a polyglot? What’s your learning approach?

This has changed over the years, as my goals have also changed.

My first language was English. I learned it in school. But I wasn’t a good language student. I took Spanish and Latin classes but didn’t listen or learn.

I had this friend who was fluent in English. And I asked him, „How did you do it?“ And he told me he learned English through pure exposure to tons of TV shows. So I did that for a year, and I watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of English. First, with French subtitles and after two months, with English subtitles. Then, I disabled them completely.

For Spanish, I had classes in high school. I was pretty bad at it. At one point, I did a six-month internship in Spain. This allowed me to transform the bit of knowledge I had from high school into active knowledge. ​While in Barcelona, I also learned Catalan.

Japanese was the language I approached in the most organized way. I learned it out of pure interest. I studied a bit on my own and had two years of evening classes. I studied 300 characters in about a month and took a university exam. I also studied grammar patterns, watched anime and Japanese dramas, and read as much as possible in Japanese.

At the same time, I studied Korean. After about two months, I took intermediate evening classes. I started way behind everybody, but I watched a lot of Korean stuff. I studied with different textbooks and went to Korea for two months, which unlocked everything.

And I learned Chinese mainly by working on an Assimil book, a collection of books with bilingual texts and not much grammar. I watched tons of Chinese TV shows and movies, especially the Voice of China with subtitles in Chinese. And after three months, I had my very first Chinese conversation without any problem.

You said you like studying grammar. How do you do it? Can you be specific?

This has evolved over the years, and I’ve not always done it like this. I now focus on patterns I actually want to know.

I usually go through standard constructions, for example, the language word order. Is it Subject Object Verb or Subject Verb Object?

I learned standard sentence structures such as I want to, I think, I could, I can, I should, and so on. And I learn a few keywords, such as FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So).

Then, I use technical elaboration to make these sentences my own. I take one simple sentence and expand it. Here’s how it goes.

  • I go to Germany
  • I go to Germany next month
  • I go to Germany next month because I study German
  • I go to Germany next month because I like German and I want to study German

I elaborate with as many grammar patterns as I can.

Once I’m satisfied with a very long paragraph, I take another topic and reuse the same grammar patterns with new vocabulary, so I can really cement the knowledge of those grammar patterns.

So when you do this, do you have a textbook or Google Translate next to you? Or do you recall things from your memory?

It’s pretty much a bit of everything you said and depends on my proficiency. If I have a comfortable level in the language I try to do it all by heart with no support.

Google Translate is not always right, so I sometimes also use a platform called HiNative to ask native speakers whether my paragraph is right or wrong.

Mathias uses HiNative to get answers from native speakers. Source: HiNative Landing Page

Which tools do you use to learn a new language or to improve existing skills?

On HiNative I ask questions such as „Hey, is this correct?“ Or „Can you pronounce that sentence for me or check whether my pronunciation is correct?“

And then, I use Anki, a computerized flashcard program. I use it not for single words but to focus on context. For example, I make sentence cards or cloze-deletion cards.

Then I still use Journaly, a platform that allows you to type a text that natives correct.

And then there’s radio.garden to listen to any radio in the world. I use that to have background sounds of the language I’m studying at the moment.

What I like on top of these tools is Slowly, a language tandem exchange that sends replies in the time a letter would take.

Collect stamps from across the globe through language tandems. Source: Screenshot from Slowly.

If we look at language learning from a meta-perspective, what’s the best approach? Immersion, active conversation practice, learning vocabulary by heart?

Before you start, you need to be clear about your timeline. By when do you want to have achieved which type of skills?

Many people online rush into language learning. But I think it’s better to take your time. The most important thing is to find some activities that you actually enjoy in the language.

The best way to study languages is not to limit it to study time, but to make it part of your life, for example, through exposure.

Learn basic Grammar and practice with a tutor or a partner through iTalki. You can also record yourself for HiNative to get some feedback. And you can use Speechling to work on listening comprehension.

In essence, there’s no single best way to study languages. I approach every language I learn differently. In Thai, for example, I rely on written stuff while in German I use more audio input.

The most important thing is to find some activities that you actually enjoy in the language.

Can you share examples of how you integrate language learning into your daily life?

I don’t have a routine for language learning anymore. It’s part of whatever I do. For example, whenever I watch something on Netflix, I always use Language Reactor. The free browser extension adds dual language subtitles and a pop-up dictionary.

Watch Netflix with double subtitles. (Source: Screenshot of Language Reactor)

I also have background music from Radio.garden or listen to a podcast. Right before our call today, I listened to a Chinese podcast.

I also hang a lot of stuff on my walls and keep looking at specific words. And I write my diary entries in Korean.

I put my phone in a different language. Right now, it’s German.

And I regularly chat with friends in their native language, which helps me practice without actively trying.

I recently started studying two languages at a time, rather than one. In this way, you can alternate whether you want to do A or C. While progress is slower, you can alternate between the language you feel like learning.

I don’t have a routine for language learning anymore. It’s part of whatever I do.

How do you prevent yourself from forgetting a language?

First of all, I accept that I’ll forget stuff. But I regularly review my Anki decks, keep talking to friends in foreign languages, or schedule intense study periods for certain languages.

For example, last year, I had an intensive Spanish period where I binged, watched a Mexican TV show in Spanish with Spanish subtitles and read a Spanish book.

What are the most common mistakes you see most people making when learning languages?

The worst mistake is that most people rely upon Duolingo as the only method. The app is great because it makes language learning more approachable. But too many people think it’s enough.

And the other mistake is learning a list of common words. It’s not useful. You might not need many of the words and don’t learn with context. Even if you know all the words but don’t know how conjugation or clauses or genders work — how are you going to make sense of all of it?

It’s better to construct your own sentences. Write the word down that you want to know and practice with it. That’s what makes your studying time more useful.

Duolingo is one of the reasons so many people fail to learn a foreign language.

— Mathias Barra

Thanks for your time Mathias. How can people learn more from you?

I write and publish on Medium (Mathias Barra). And I run the average polyglot newsletter on Substack where I write seven bullet points about language learning and cultural differences each week. And I tweet regularly.

Key Takeaways

While there’s no single best way to learn a language, mixing methods does help (hint: Duolingo is not enough). Tools that can help include HiNative, Journaly, Anki, Slowly, iTalki, and Speechling.

Combine studying on your own and in structured settings, such as online communities on Discord or iTalki. Learn grammar by elaborating on standard constructions.

Find activities that you actually enjoy in the language and make it part of your life, for example, through:

  • watching a Netflix series with subtitles, Mathias uses the Language Reactor extension)
  • reading a book in the language you’re learning, Mathias loves easy readers
  • listening to radio shows or podcasts in the language you’re learning, for example, on radio.garden
  • switch your phone settings to another language
  • write your diary in the language you’re learning

Whatever you decide to do or not do, enjoy your language learning journey.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

How to Write Great Flashcards so You Can Remember Anything You Want

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Computerized flashcard programs make memory a choice.

Photo by David Cassolato from Pexels

How often have you read something thinking, “I should remember this,” only to forget it a couple of hours later?

Don’t blame your memory. Forgetting is part of how our brains work.

And contrary to common belief, our brains work not too different from each other (hint: learning styles don’t exist).

Recent advances in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience reveal how humans learn.

Here’s what our brains have in common and how you can make the most of it.

How to prime your memory to remember anything

Memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation/retention, and retrieval. And you need to utilize all three stages to remember anything your want forever.

If you encode something, for example, through watching an online course but don’t practice retention and retrieval, you won’t be able to recall it when needed.

If you hear or read something just once, let’s say by reading a book or watching an online course, you’ll very likely forget it a couple of days later.

That’s the reason why most people can’t recall something from a book they read a while ago when they’d need it.

But you can hack your memory by interrupting your forgetting curve.

Forgetting Curves with and without spaced practice. (Source: Hannah Lenitz for Eva Keiffenheim).

Encoding knowledge into your memory works best when you reproduce the same piece of information from your mind over increasing time intervals.

And it’s easy. Brilliant minds have come up with software and workflows that help you interrupt your forgetting exactly when you should.

Computerized flashcard programs, such as Anki or Neuracache, help you learn anything by heart forever. In my TEDx talk on mastering learning, I talk about the power of these programs.

You apply the effective learning strategy of self-testing and the software manages your forgetting curve for maximum retention.

“One-shot learning is not enough. Routinization frees up our prefrontal and parietal circuits, allowing them to attend to other activities. The most effective strategy is to space out learning: a little bit every day.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

If you can answer a question correctly, the time interval between reviews gradually expands. So a one-day gap between reviews becomes two days, then six days, and so on. The idea is that the information is becoming more firmly embedded in your memory, and so requires less frequent review.

Soon you’ll only need to test yourself on information for a few seconds once every one and a half years. Scientist Michael Nielsen has used this system to memorize 20,000 cards and estimates he only needs about 5 minutes of total review time for one piece of information over the entire 20 years.

In essence: spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice.

But why would you want to remember something forever? There are use-cases that go way beyond exams.

Use cases for hacking your memory

You can learn and all countries of the world and impress your former geography teacher.

But you could also choose some of the following cases and make flashcards really useful for you.

Here’s what I currently use my memory system for:

  • Relationships, remembering birthdays, preferences, or experiences. When is Torben’s birthday? What’s Anna’s favourite meal?
  • Hobbies, memorizing anything that’s useful for you. What are the first three steps for beatmatching? What direction do my elbows point when doing barbell squats? What should I pay attention to in the cobra yoga pose?
  • Job-related information, for example from relevant papers, conferences, or conversations. What were my three biggest learnings from the Education Futures conference in Salzburg? What are the three actions for shifting power in education transformation?
  • Habit Stacking, anything you want to do after another habit. When do I practice Anki cards? Which mac command do I use when searching my browser history?
  • Random stuff such as favourite places or memory from a holiday, pokemon names, or reflections from your yearly review.

While there are many pre-written decks, you can now see why writing cards yourself is even more meaningful.

“Cards are fundamental building blocks of the mnemonic medium, and card-writing is better thought of as an open-ended skill. Do it poorly, and the mnemonic medium works poorly. Do it superbly well, and the mnemonic medium can work very well indeed. By developing the card-writing skill it’s possible to expand the possibilities of the medium.”

— Andy Matuschack and Michael Nielsen

Four rules for writing great flashcards

Creating the cards by yourself is an important part of understanding and committing.

Here are five rules you want to keep in mind when creating flashcards.

1) Decide whether it’s relevant

It’s tempting to memorize everything you read in books, but you really want to keep it relevant.

Create flashcards for anything that’s worth about five minutes of your lifetime. Because that’s the expected lifetime review time. Michael Nielsen has applied this system for four years and he says it takes < 5 minutes to learn something… forever.

The goal of remembering everything you want is not a self-serving purpose. You ultimately want to apply your knowledge in your day-to-day life; for your job, relationships, or decision-making.

If you try to learn something you don’t care about, you’ll soon stop learning altogether. So choose the stuff you really care about.

“Memorisation is really important, but you have to memorise the right things”

— Daisy Christodoulou
2) Keep the cards really simple.

One of the biggest mistakes new flashcards writers make is creating too dense flashcards.

Simpler is better — stick to the minimum information required, instead of overloading a card.

Here’s an example:

Source: SuperMemo — Twenty rules of formulating knowledge

The simpler the easier it’s to remember it and the more flexible you are in its application. However, keep in mind to always add the basics before you dive into the specifics.

Name the main theories of learning (behaviorism, cognitive, constructivism, humanism, and connectivism) before you go into the details of them.

3) Add personal context

Remember the first memory stage? Encoding works best when you add personal context and meaning to it.

Use your own words to describe a concept rather than copy and come up with personal examples to make learning easier for you.

4) Include real-world retrieval cues

Remember the second and third memory stage? Sorry to do this, but you know you remember best when you recall something from your memory.

So consolidation/retention and retrieval are as crucial as encoding.

There’s a difference between the availability and accessibility of knowledge.

Even if a piece of information is encoded and consolidated, you might have trouble retrieving it (known as the tip of the tongue phenomena).

To memorize flashcards in a way that you can apply them in your life, you want to add retrieval cues.

You can do that by asking questions that are similar to your real-world situations.

For example, instead of asking, what’s the mac shortcut for retrieving your chrome search history, I asked “When researching an article I haven’t saved yet on my Mac, which chrome shortcut do I use to browse through my search history?”

In Conclusion

Spaced repetition memory systems, such as creating flashcards with Anki, make memory a choice. You can remember anything you want, forever.

The goal of fact-learning is not to learn just one random fact — it is to learn thousands, which taken together, form a schema that helps you solve problems, think critically, and make sense of the world.

“Anki isn’t just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It’s a tool for understanding almost anything.”

— Michael Nielson
Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

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What Most People Get Dangerously Wrong About Building a Second Brain

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And how to fix it.

Source: MART PRODUCTION on Pexels

Knowledge management expert Tiago Forte writes:

“Your professional success and quality of life directly depend on your ability to manage the information around you. […] Now, it’s time to acknowledge that we can’t ‘use our head’ to store everything we need to know and outsource the job of remembering to technology.”

Tiago is partly right.

Note-taking systems can improve your life. A well-organized knowledge base can give you clarity of mind and save you time. RoamResearch, for example, reduced the time it takes me to write an article by 50 per cent.

And yet, Tiago is also dangerously wrong.

With the following insights from neuroscience and cognitive research, you’ll understand why the belief to outsource your memory to technology is terribly wrong and how your brain indeed can store everything you need to know.

How Your Brain Actually Works

You likely know your two memory types: short-term and long-term. The key difference? Duration and capacity.

Your short-term memory can only store about four to seven items for a very short time (15–30 seconds). It’s what helps you remember a phone number until you get distracted.

“Short-term memory is the brain’s short-term buffer, keeping in mind only the hottest, most recent information.”

— Stanislas Dehaene in How We Learn

If you ever felt your brain is juggling too many pieces at a time, it’s your working memory. Your long-term memory capacity is vast.

Learning expert Daisy Christodoulou explains:

“Our long-term memory does not have the same limitations as working memory. It is capable of storing thousands of pieces of information. This allows us to cheat the limitations of working memory in lots of ways.”

So if you manage to transfer information from your short-term to your long-term memory, you can store as much as you want for as long as you want.

This disproves Tiago’s claim. You can indeed use your head to store everything you need to know.

All you need is to transfer new knowledge from your short to your long-term memory.

How to Store Things in Your Long-Term Memory

You encode new information in different brain areas.

Some of your neurons respond to what you see (in the inferior temporal region), some to what you hear (in the superior temporal region), and others to the layout (in the parahippocampal region).

To transfer what you want to remember into your long-term memory, you need spaced repetition, learning scientists agree.

“Repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved.”

— Roediger et al. in Make It Stick

Because when you recall a memory, you reinforce it and its cue. With every additional retrieval, you strengthen the connection and can access your memory faster.

To remember what you learned in high-school geography, you need to recall the material over increasing time intervals, first every few days, then weeks, then months, etc.

Got it? You’re ready to bust the second brain myth.

Why You Can’t Outsource Your Brain to Technology

Remember, you can only hold four to seven items in your short-term memory.

When you look something up (e.g. in your second brain on Evernote), you use up the limited space and not much capacity is left to process the new information or combine it with existing things, so you have new ideas.

​Daisy Christodoulou writes: “So when we want to solve a problem, we hold all the information relating to the problem in working memory. Unfortunately, working memory is highly limited.”

If you don’t memorise facts to encode them into your long-term memory, you’ll never have the same processing fluency and thought quality as someone who has. It’s as if you’re trying to win a race walking barefoot while the other person sits on an e-bike.

The benefit of remembering information is not in the knowledge itself but in the way you can deploy it. You build a mental structure that helps you develop new thoughts and knowledge through memorisation.

When solving problems, thinking critically, or generating new ideas, you don’t rely on your limited working memory capacity but on your basically unlimited long-term memory.

And that’s why the second brain belief is dangerous. When you outsource the job of remembering to technology, you’re neglecting most of your brain’s potential.

“Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”

— Radvansky in Human Memory

What to Do Instead

In essence, you want to find the most effective way to store everything you need to know in your long-term memory.

Imagine all things that are useful for you would be stored in your long-term memory, giving you an edge in every conversation, brainstorming or deep work session.

We know from learning science that transferring information into your long-term memory works best when you reproduce the same piece of information from your mind over increasing time intervals.

Remembering everything you want forever is not nearly as hard as you might imagine. Computerised flashcard programs, such as Anki and Neuracache, manage your forgetting curve and maximise your retention.

Unlocking the power of these tools works in three steps:

  1. Create digital flashcards. You enter a question and a corresponding answer for anything you want to keep in mind forever. (Hint: ask yourself whether knowing this is worth about 5–7 minutes of your life because that’s how long you will need to see a flashcard to remember something forever).
  2. Retrieve information from your memory. When the program shows you a card, you actively recall the answer from your memory. Look at the answer afterwards.
  3. Self-assess. The software asks whether you know the answer or not. Based on your self-assessment, the software manages the review schedule for you.

The goal of fact-learning with your real brain is not to memorise just one random fact — it is to learn thousands that help you solve all kinds of problems without you needing to rely on your restricted short-term memory capacity.

Where to Go From Here

Should you stop building a digital knowledge management system? No.

Tools such as Notion, RoamResearch, xTiles, and Evernote, can help you organise your research and your life.

But stop thinking of these tools as your second brain.

The assumption that you don’t need to remember anything yourself will prevent you from thinking critically and having great ideas.

Instead, build and augment your long-term memory through applying proven learning strategies.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

The Key Idea All Great Books on Learning Have in Common

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And how you can implement the powerful way to learn.

Source: Created by author

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn.

After reading more than 30 books on learning, I noticed a recurring principle.

It’s a clear practice that integrates almost all of the most effective learning strategies:

  • Retrieval practice: recall something from your memory
  • Spaced repetition: repeat the same information across increasing intervals
  • Interleaving: alternate before each practice is complete
  • Elaboration: rephrase new knowledge and connect it with existing insights
  • Reflection: synthesize key lessons taught by experience
  • Self-testing: answer a question or a problem and identify knowledge gaps

The following lines will not only reveal the key idea and how it works but also show you an efficient way to integrate it into your daily life.

The Principle All Great Books on Learning Agree On

I spent countless hours trying to find a process that integrates all of the above aspects into a learning habit. For example, one result was an efficient (yet time-consuming) way to remember everything you want from non-fiction books.

Luckily, there’s a more efficient way: teaching in public.

Here’s why and how it works.

When you teach, you first have to retrieve what you know from your memory.

And the good thing: you don’t need to feel fully knowledgeable about the content before you instruct others. You’ll understand the material by teaching.

Dr Barbara Oakley writes in her book:

“You may think you really have to understand something in order to explain it. But observe what happens when you are talking to other people about what you are studying.

You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding.

This is why teachers often say that the first time they ever really understood the material was when they had to teach it.”

Moreover, by teaching, you make new material stick to your memory.

Learning through teaching is efficient because you have to rephrase new knowledge in your own terms and connect it with existing insights — the essence of elaboration, as the authors of ‘Make it Stick’ define it:

“Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”

Moreover, knowing you’re learning something to explain it to somebody else transforms how you process the material in the first place and includes a second repetition loop.

Jim Kwik, a renowned expert in memory improvement, explains in ‘Limitless’:

“Everything we learn should be learned with the intent to teach someone else. When we know we have to present information to someone else, we pay attention differently than when we learn just for ourselves.

So if we can take that mentality and apply it to everything we want to learn, we can increase our retention and understanding. The thing about learning to teach is we actually get to learn twice. The first time when we learn it ourselves, and the second when we teach it to someone else.

The information gets cemented through their questions and observations, making learning an interactive process instead of a passive activity.”

Effortful learning is far more effective than passive content consumption. And teaching is one of the most active things you can do.

The more work your brain does, the more connections you establish. And as you know, more connections increase the chances of remembering what you learn.

By teaching, you have to recall things from your memory actively. The authors of ‘The New Science of Learning’ state::

“To make good use of your study time, don’t just look over the material or read over the material passively, but actually try to recall the material.

Each time a memory is recalled, both it and its cue are strengthened, and you can access the desired information in your brain faster. Simply reading the material over is much less effective in building a strong memory process.”

Lastly, teaching helps you identify knowledge gaps and review the material strategically.

Award-winning science writer Benedict Carey explains why teaching something to others is so effective:

“These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying — the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 percent more powerful than if you continued sitting on your butt, staring at that outline.

Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, and what you’ve forgotten — and fast.”

Now that you know why teaching is so powerful (it naturally includes retrieval, spaced repetition, elaboration, self-testing, and reflection), let’s see how you can put this into practice.

Created by Eva Keiffenheim

The Best Way to Teach and Maximize Your Learning

You can do many things, but many of them are inconvenient. Likely, you don’t have the time or resources to give lectures, host a podcast, or have patient friends who listen to you trying to explain newly learned concepts.

I tested various ways to teach in public before finding the most effective way. For example, I created YouTube videos about cryptocurrencies or recorded Podcast episodes about communication and polyamory.

While I enjoyed the process, it was time-consuming and filled with secondary tasks (video and audio cutting).

Writing in public is the best way to teach what you learned to the entire world. It comes with less friction (you can write anywhere) and minimum time commitment (no video or audio skills required).

Since I’ve started writing in March of 2020, I learned more than in the combined five years of university education.

When you write, you put pressure on your thinking. It forces you to make your thoughts crystal clear. In this process, you learn and understand.

Writing helps you see how seemingly unrelated thoughts connect. That’s why writing is a mind-expanding, often even enlightening experience.

Through writing, you realize whether you truly got the concept or swim in the illusion of knowledge.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” learning scientist Doyle states. And when you write about your newly learned knowledge, you do the work.

“I’ve learned more in the course of writing and researching the thousands of articles to date than in all the years of my formal education combined.”

— Maria Popova, author of The Marginalian

How You Can Create a Consistent Writing Habit

A replicable writing habit is not as simple as having an idea, writing it down, publishing.

New writers often fail to acknowledge the micro-steps that are neccessary to move from idea generation to a well-articulated article.

Here’s what you want to focus on to stay consistent and create your personal learning engine.

1. Start with the right mindset

Write and publish 30 articles before expecting any joy or return on your time investment.

When you start out, writing can feel challenging. Words don’t come easily, and writing might feel slow and painful.

Likely, with every step of your writer’s journey, things become more complicated — you’ll become aware of everything you don’t know yet. But be sure that this is a sign of progress, not of desperation.

Just like any habit, it’s easy to stop after your initial enthusiasm. Answering the following questions early on have kept me going.

  • How does writing online fit into your story?
  • Why is writing online the right thing for you to do right now?
  • What might get in your way and prevent you from completing this course and publishing consistently?
  • How do you prevent this from happening? Can you use the energy from this fear to help you?

2. Set a clear goal and schedule

Again, the first few months of writing are tough. You will struggle to put words on paper, and nobody will be interested in your work because it’s not good enough (yet).

You don’t have external recognition; you don’t have the skills to write fast and good; you don’t have a backlog of content you can recycle; you don’t have a large following waiting for you to publish, which will increase your commitment.

Remember that building a writing habit is not linear but exponential. You will have to practice a lot before your words resonate with readers. In the early days, you will write in the void.

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim

What you want is to set up a routine and structure that carries you towards writing your first 100 articles. A couple of questions that can help you:

  • How many articles do you want to publish until the end of this month and year?
  • When and how often will you write? (days, time, duration)
  • What do you need to stop doing so you find the time to write?
  • How will you protect your writing time?

3. Get help and join a tribe of fellow writers

Steven King shared a piece of wisdom in his book on writing: “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

I agree. And yet, while you have to do the work yourself, the right tools and tactics can fuel your growth.

That’s why I started the writing online accelerator — a three-week cohort-based course that will help you transform from a dreamer into a doer. You will learn how to create your learning engine and attract a broad audience. You can pre-register for free here.

Writing is one of the rare professions that give you a ticket to lifelong learning by turning you into a teacher. Make sure to make the most of it.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

A Clear Guide for Creating an Online Course Your Students Will Love

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The exact steps I followed to reach course-market fit (including templates).

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Many online courses are money machines for course creators but time-wasters for their students.

By creating my first cohort-based course last August, I wanted to do it differently. My goal wasn’t to maximize income but learning effectiveness.

Looking at sales, net promoter score, and completion rate, I succeeded. I sold all 25 available spots, 85 per cent completed all assignments and rated the course with 9.6/10.

Students’ responses to the NPS question of the feedback survey.

The following guide can help you create an online course your students will love. After a brief explainer of why cohort-based courses are the future of online learning and my prerequisites, you’ll find the exact 5 steps I followed to achieve maximum course-market fit.

Why Cohort-Based Courses…

If you went to school, you’re familiar with cohort-based learning. Students take the same lecture, assignments, and tests simultaneously.

In Cohort Based Courses (CBCs), a group of people moves through the same curriculum at the same pace. CBCs often include a mix of life lessons, pre-recorded videos, remote assignments, and peer learning.

… are the Future of Online Learning

In 2011 massive open online courses, so-called MOOCs were praised for revolutionizing online learning.

But data from Harvard University and MIT revealed only three to four per cent complete self-paced MOOCs— a rate that hasn’t improved in the past six years.

On the opposite end, reports about CBCs look promising.

Seth Godin’s altMBA, a cohort-based online MBA, has a completion rate of 96%. Other CBC providers claim to have 85% of their users finish the course they started.

CBCs are designed around best practices in online learning. For example, a study found interaction with instructors affects learner retention. CBCs use online tools like Zoom or Slack to give feedback, host group coaching, or offer 1-on-1 check-ins to help students complete the course.

Source: Eva Keiffenheim

Don’t Compare Apples and Oranges

A friend told me he attempted to copy Ali Abdaal’s structure to make $2,000,000 on Skillshare. My friend soon gave up. He neither had the video experience nor an existing audience that followed him everywhere.

The best tutorial is useless if you compare yourself against someone too different.

Knowing where I started when I built my first course will help you determine whether and which of the below steps will help you.

  • Audience. Before creating the course, I had 15,000 followers on Medium, 2,500 on LinkedIn, 10,000 podcast listeners, and 3,500 e-mail subscribers of the weekly Learn Letter.
  • Teaching experience. In 2018, I completed a six-week teacher training as Teach For All fellow. I worked as a full-time Maths, Informatics, and PE teacher for two years. I hosted about 25 online workshops, and I’ve read around 30 books about how we learn.
  • Additional support. I was accepted to the Maven accelerator and supported by pedagogic, marketing, and point coaches. I also contracted brilliant Eszter Brhlik for e-mail copywriting and operational support.

You can create an effective online course without the above prerequisites. But an existing audience, didactics experience, and support can make building a course easier and faster for you.

The biggest struggle most online creators have is selling their courses. This is so much easier if you have an existing newsletter subscriber base (here’s what I learned from growing my newsletter to the first 3000 subscribers).

But enough with the prerequisites — let’s get started.

1) Collect Data to Make an Informed Best Guess

Source: Eva Keiffenheim

I wanted to run a course on learning how to learn.

Luckily, I learned from my smart fellow writer Julia Horvath that you should first understand your customers before you build a digital product.

In my weekly newsletter, I sent out a couple of questions:

“I’m thinking about building an online course. Which topics would you like to see me cover?”

People replied with questions about how to write online.

In my next mail, I asked:

“What’s the number one biggest challenge when it comes to learning or writing?”

Informed by around 25 replies to these two questions, I wrote this e-mail and created this survey. 200 people replied to the survey, which helped me with the subsequent step.

The e-mail template I used to ask my audience.
The e-mail led to this survey, where I would capture initial interest.

Action steps for you:

  1. Brainstorm 3–5 course ideas informed by what you’re good at.
  2. If you have an audience: Ask them what they would like to learn from you.
  3. Create a survey to learn more about your potential customers.

2) Find a Compelling Course Title and Scope

As a next step, I searched for the intersection between the problems people have around writing online and the problems I can and want to solve.

Narrowing the course scope can feel hard. But if you build a course for everyone, you build it for no one.

The first step I took was copying all survey responses into a visual tool such as Miro. Then, I clustered the responses. After an hour, I realized around 80 percent of the respondents shared the same four pain points.

I decided which of the pain points I wanted to solve and came up with a couple of title ideas. My first three versions for the course name were the following:

  • I help beginner; occasional writers transform into consistent writers that attract a broad audience
  • How to write non-fiction short-form for beginner writers who struggle with publishing consistently
  • How to build an online writing habit to accelerate your learning, express your thoughts, and fuel your impact
Screenshot of Miro, a digital whiteboard I used for organizing the survey results.

Action steps for you:

  1. Analyze the data you acquired from the previous step.
  2. Narrow your course scope by deciding which problems you can and want to solve.
  3. Come up with 3–5 course titles that include whom you do the course for, what they can do based on the course, and which struggle you’re solving.

3) Test and Refine Your Course With User Interviews

Next, I sent out an e-mail to all people who answered the survey. I asked them to book a 15-minute session with my Calendly.

Screenshot of the e-mail for my user interviews.

I felt a lot of resistance in sending out this mail. Until then, I communicated with my audience through writing. I was scared and curious, how Zoom calls would turn out.

After two hours, all 20 available slots were booked. The conversations were interesting and inspiring. During the sessions, I asked the following questions:

  • What’s your single biggest challenge with online writing right now?
  • Name 2–3 areas you are stuck in for reaching your writing goals.
  • How are you currently tackling it? What have you previously tried to achieve your writing goal?
  • What’s your primary goal with writing online?
  • What else should I have asked?

While listening, I took a lot of notes. I organized them on a digital whiteboard.

Screenshot of Miro, a digital whiteboard I used for organizing the user interviews.

Action steps for you:

  1. Schedule user interviews with your potential customers
  2. Analyze the answers to better understand their most pressing problems.

4) Define Your Students’ Transformation

This is what many online instructors spend too little time thinking about — their students’ learning outcomes.

You want to be crystal clear on what your students should be able to achieve with the help of your course.

A helpful framework is the following, suggested by Wes: “By the end of the course, you’ll be able to do X without Y (usual blocker or friction).”

You can replace the verb “do” with anything from blooms taxonomy:

Revision of Bloom’s taxonomy. (Source: Eva Keiffenheim based on Krathwohl and Anderson et al.)

To set the learning outcome, think again about what people told you in the user survey combined with what you know about the topic you’re teaching.

Here are the key learning outcomes I defined:

  • Publishing three high-quality articles within three weeks during the course (and overcoming any mindsets that have held them back before).
  • Discovering, learning, and using the tools that help them with their creative workflow (e.g. for knowledge management and editing).
  • Learning how to use the data they will generate (reading time, views, clicks) to make future content decisions.
  • Starting an e-mail list including landing page, call-to-action, and optimized welcome e-mail that will become their most valuable asset.
  • Having a repeatable and consistent idea-to-paper process that works for them long after the course.

Action steps for you:

  1. Informed by the previous three steps, fill the sentence, “By the end of the course, you’ll be able to do X without Y (usual blocker or friction).”
  2. List all learning outcomes required to make your sentence true.

5) Use Backward Design For Your Course Structure

Traditional curriculum planning uses forward design. People plan learning activities, forms of assessments and only then try to connect them to learning goals.

In backward design, you start with the learning outcome. You think about the destination your learners want to reach and plan the trip to help them get there.

This is more tricky than simply cluttering the curriculum with anything that might be relevant, but it’s far more intentional and effective.

Two questions that led my thinking was: “Which activities would students need to practice to achieve the desired learning outcome?” and “Which input is required so they can best complete this activity?”

Screenshot of the first version of my course structure.

Only once I was happy with the backwards-designed curriculum, started to collect content and resources.

The result were action-oriented sessions that focused on the “how” instead of the why and what:

Source: Eva Keiffenheim

Action steps for you:

  1. Consider the learning outcomes and the necessary practice for achieving them prior to considering how to teach the content.
  2. Design the lessons around action orientation. Provide guided exercises, templates, and step-by-step guides to help your students succeed.

In Conclusion

While getting here can seem tiring, and like a lot of work, the effort is worth every minute. The five steps help you get very specific about the learning design required to help your students succeed:

  1. Collect data to find out what people want to learn from you
  2. Set a compelling course title and scope
  3. Speak to potential users to further refine your course content
  4. Be clear about your student’s transformation
  5. Plan your course structure with backward-design

Building this course has been one of the most rewarding learning experiences of my life (apart from teaching kids at a school). I hope you will find similar enjoyment in building a course your student will love.

Sign-up free for the weekly Learn Letter and register your interest for the second cohort of the writing online accelerator.

Steepen Your Learning Curve with Deliberate Practice

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The four pillars for achieving mastery.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

The 10,000-hour rule is a harmful myth.

Malcolm Gladwell argued in ‘Outliers,’ if a person practices a skill for 10,000 hours, they will become a world-class master in that field.

While this simple rule sounds appealing, it’s wrong in several ways.

Ericsson, a scientist among the study’s authors that Gladwell popularized, debunks this learning myth:

  1. Ten thousand hours was an average. Most world-class performers practiced less or more before they achieved mastery.
  2. Nothing in the study implied almost anyone could become an expert in a given field by practicing ten thousand hours.
  3. Gladwell didn’t distinguish how the hours were used. If your practice is ineffective or flawed, even 10,000 hours won’t help you become a master.

Luckily, there’s a better model you can use to replace the misleading 10,000-hour rule — deliberate practice. Here’s how it works and how you can use the method to steepen your learning curve.

The four pillars of deliberate practice (Source: Eva Keiffenheim).

In essence, deliberate practice means actively practicing a skill while intending to improve your performance. “This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability,” Ericsson writes.

The authors of ‘Make it Stick’ further specify: “If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal-directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of performance.”

So here’s how you can make your practice deliberate.

1) Define a Specific Learning Goal

Before you dive into practicing, consider which goal you want to achieve. Break down your ultimate goal into sub-steps, similar to skill trees.

If you want to become a better guitar player, decide what to focus on. The rhythm? Ear training? Barre chords? Riffs?

By breaking down your desired activity to one specific goal, you’re setting the groundwork for deliberate practice. One clear outcome is a thousand times better than overarching terms such as “succeed” or “get better.”

If you’re unsure where to start, get inspired by Danny Forest’s excellent exploration of Skill Trees. Here’s a beautiful visualization he created for playing the Ukulele for Beginners.

Source: Danny Forest

2) Commit to Absolute Focus

“Where your attention goes, your energy flows,” somebody wise once said. Absolute focus is the most valuable skill of our century. But it requires training.

In Cal Newport’s words, absolute focus means: “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit.”

The key term here is ‘distraction-free.’

Whenever you practice, flight mode your phone and put it in a different room. Turn your computer off. Set a timer for your desired practice time and focus on nothing else.

Distraction-free environments are the crucial factor to unlock deliberate practice. “In tranquil silence, you can do deep work — the real work,” a fellow Medium writer rhymed.

“‘Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there,’ is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.”

— Karl Anders Ericsson

3) Get Immediate Feedback

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. You can repeat a specific behavior indefinitely without getting better at it. All you do is manifest the existing technique.

If you practice soccer with the same ineffective dribbling technique, you’ll never improve. To get better, you need to know what exactly you’re striving for and become aware of your shortcomings.

Feedback is the cornerstone element for deliberate practice.

You’ll understand how the desired skill works and what you need to do to get there. Feedback helps you manifest the correct revisions rather than repeating ineffective behavior.

There are a couple of ways you can use to get immediate feedback:

  • Self-record a video of you practicing a specific skill (e.g., playing an instrument, doing a sports technique) and compare it to an expert’s video.
  • Hire a coach or trainer who has mastered the practice you’re aiming to achieve.
  • Use learning software that provides you with immediate feedback. For example, language learning tools such as Lingvist or Memrise, or programming learning software such as Codecademy, have in-built feedback mechanisms.

4) Aim for Desired Difficulty

Whenever you practice, you want to challenge yourself a bit further than the last time. Desirable difficulty means putting in a considerable but desirable amount of effort into your practice.

“In the short term, conditions that make learning more challenging — such as generating words instead of passively reading them, varying conditions of practice, transferring knowledge to new situations, or learning to solve multiple types of math problems at once — might slow down performance. However, there is a yield in long-term retention,” a Stanford article says.

To steepen your learning curve, practice a bit outside your comfort zone. While additional challenge makes your practice less enjoyable, it will become more effective.

“There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot.…The underlying pattern is the same: Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

The key word is ‘barely.’”

— Daniel Coyle in ‘ The Little Book of Talent’

In Conclusion

Not every practice needs to be deliberate. You can learn a new skill just for fun and doodle around. Hobbies without clear goals or a coach inside your comfort zone can be a source of joy and fulfillment.

But if you’re looking for a way on how to learn a new skill faster, keep the four pillars of deliberate practice in mind:

  1. Specify your goal into a sub-goa.
  2. Schedule distraction-free focused practice.
  3. Find a way to get immediate feedback.
  4. Push yourself outside your comfort and inside your learning zone.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Most Online Courses Are a Waste of Your Time — Here’s How You Know

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A quick guide that helps you find the worthy ones.

Picture bought by the author via Canva.

This year I spent around $5000 on online courses.

Warren Buffet said, “the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you’ll earn.”

But his statement is flawed.

Not all learning investments are created equal. People who’ve excelled at their craft are often not the best teachers. Likewise, creators who write the best sales copy don’t offer the most value.

Here’s precisely how you can spot bad online courses so that you won’t waste your time and money.

1) They Tell But Don’t Show

Most online courses are useless because they focus on the why and what instead of the how.

In a Medium writer’s online course, for example, the instructors spend 90% of the time exploring what writing consists of. They have an hour-long conversation about the importance of consistency. Yet, they don’t show the students how they can write consistently.

The medium star could’ve talked about the roadblocks and how he overcame them. He could’ve shared his calendar or accountability system. He could’ve shared strategies for when you’re struggling to get started. But he didn’t. For me, the course felt like a time-waster.

“Never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead.”

— Steven King

What to look out for instead:

Look for how material instead of endless talks on the why and what. Valuable things often include templates, tutorials, spreadsheets, and screen-sharings.

Here are some examples, so you know how to tell the difference:

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim.

2) Instructors Teach in One Direction

“Active learning works, and social learning works,” said Anant Agarwal, founder and chief executive of edX, in an interview with the New York Times. To back this up, a recent study suggests social learning helps you complete online courses.

Yet, most online course creators choose alow-maintenance model. They pre-record videos so you can watch them at your own pace.

But what’s scalable for the instructors isn’t the best for you. Data from Harvard University and MIT shows only three to four percent complete self-paced online courses.

To increase your chances of success, you need a community.

I love Cam Houser’s comment in a joint Slack channel: “People don’t take courses for information. That’s what google and youtube are for. They take courses for outcomes, accountability, process, community.”

What to look out for instead:

A slack channel or Facebook group isn’t enough. Great courses offer structured space for social learning. You have an accountability group, comment on each other’s work, and have regular live touchpoints with your instructors or coaches.

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim.

3) They Ignore the Principle of Directness

Online courses are often distant from the actual application. You watch videos about your desired skill, but you never actually practice.

Let’s consider one of my favorite examples.

Imagine you’re a frequent flier. Before every start, you watch the video of a flight attendant putting on the life vest. You watch the video again and again.

But as this study shows, actually putting on the inflatable life vest a single time would be more valuable than repeatedly watching another person doing it. You acquire true mastery by performing the procedure yourself.

The author of ‘Ultralearning’ calls this principle directness. It is essential for mastering any skill. Yet, most online courses teach skills far from direct.

What to look out for instead:

You don’t learn by watching things. You learn by doing them. So the more you engage with the content, the likelier it will stick with you.

What’s your desired outcome behind taking the course? Check whether you have assignments that are directly linked to your desired skill. Pick a class as close to your end goal as possible.

If you take a course on e-mail newsletters, write your e-mail and ask for feedback. If you take a drawing class, do your first drawing. If you take a course on online writing, write your first article.

Just like the minimum viable product, find a minimum viable action. What is the simplest thing you can do based on what you’ve just learned?

Foster a bias towards action. You learn best when you do the work.

“Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.”

— Anders Ericsson

4) They Don’t Understand the Science of Learning

Masters might not be the best teachers. More likely, they’re beginners when it comes to instructional design and the science of learning.

Most online courses are built on the assumption that our brains work like recording devices. But students don’t acquire their desired skills by consuming content. Instead, learning is at least a three-step process — we acquire, encode, and retrieve.

Learning scientist Roediger writes: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow. Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.”

Learning through passive content consumption isn’t effortful. That’s why most online courses are a mere form of entertainment.

What to look out for instead:

Look out for active learning elements. Check whether the course uses evidence-based learning strategies such as:

  • retrieval practice ⇾ recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory
  • spaced repetition ⇾ repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals
  • interleaving ⇾ alternating before each practice is complete
  • elaboration ⇾ rephrasing new knowledge and connecting it with existing insights
  • reflection ⇾ synthesize, abstract, and articulate key lessons taught by experience
  • self-testing & calibration ⇾ answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer and identify knowledge gaps

“Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills and processes, is a quest. Don’t assume you’re doing something wrong if learning feels hard.”

— Roediger et al.

Conclusion

Most online courses don’t help you reach your desired outcome. You can spend thousands of dollars and hours without learning anything at all.

Learning doesn’t help you per se — it’s taking the right courses that can make all the difference:

  • Check whether the course curriculum goes beyond why and what and teaches the how to do stuff.
  • Evaluate whether you’ve got regular touchpoints with your instructor and learning opportunities with fellow students.
  • Understand whether you’ll practice your desired skill.
  • Look out for evidence-based learning elements such as spacing, retrieval, or reflection.

I’m building a course on how to write online based on evidence-based practices to make the most of your time. You won’t sit in front of pre-recorded videos and struggle to stick with them. If you’re interested in joining a group of 25 people, you can pre-register here.

3 Binge-Worthy Books for Life-Long Learners

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These resources can help you expand your brain.

Created by the author via Canva.

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life,” Mortimer J. Adler said. I disagree.

Books don’t magically make you live the good life. You can read a book a week without changing at all.

Reading doesn’t help you per se — it’s reading the right books that can make all the difference.

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn. After reading more than 30 books on learning, these three are my favorite picks on meta-learning.

Every single one will help you understand how your brain learns. By doing so, you’ll make better decisions and find yourself on your journey to wisdom.

1) Make it Stick

Did you know rereading and highlighting are the most popular yet the least productive learning strategies?

Revisiting concepts and ideas might feel like learning because you recognize some of them. But you’re not learning. You’re trapped in an illusion of knowledge.

Mastering a text is different from recalling or remembering what you read.

“People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times, you can burn it into memory,” the authors write.

They also why it’s not worth it: “Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time-consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery with the content.”

I used to think learning should feel easy. Slow and difficult meant unproductive. Turns out I was wrong.

Effective learning must feel hard: “Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

‘Make it Stick’ doesn’t stop after dismantling learning myths.

The research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between cognitive science and educational science.

Here are some powerful concepts from the book explores:

  • Your brain’s capacity is unlimited. Contrary to common belief, our brains are never full. The more we learn, the more we can remember. Learning is a virtuous circle. The more cues we have, the easier it is to encode new information to these cues. As long as you connect further information to existing brain branches, you can store much more than you think.
  • To learn, you first need to forget. I always thought forgetting is a character’s flaw. But it isn’t. Forgetting is necessary for new learning. That’s why spaced repetition is among the most effective learning strategies. You allow forgetting to occur and thereby strengthen your memory.
  • The power of reflection. Reflecting leads to stronger learning. To reflect, you need to retrieve, connect, and visualize earlier memories. Often, you mentally practice what you’d do the next time differently. That’s why regular thinking breaks are so valuable.

Last but not least, ‘Make it Stick’ summarizes six evidence-based, application-ready strategies that help you learn better and store new knowledge in your long-term memory.

The six strategies include retrieval practice (recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory), spaced repetition (repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals), interleaving (alternating before each practice is complete), elaboration (rephrasing new knowledge and connecting it with existing insights), reflection (synthesize, abstract, and articulate key lessons taught by experience), self-testing & calibration (answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer and identify knowledge gaps).

“Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills and processes, is a quest. Don’t assume you’re doing something wrong if learning feels hard.”

2) The New Science of Learning

This book should be mandatory for students, teachers, and anyone who wants to learn. It’s based on state-of-the-art science about how the human brain learns. It will help you make learning more effective and teaches how you can retain knowledge and skills for a lifetime.

Similar to the ‘Make it Stick,’ the authors reveal common ineffective learning methods. The authors agree on many levels: “New learning requires a considerable amount of practice and a meaningful connection to other information in order to become a more permanent part of memory.”

To learn effectively, you need to use new information to form meaningful connections to other information. That’s why a multi-dimensional learning experience that involves many senses is effective.

Listen, talk, read, write, and think about the new material at hand to make learning more effective. The more work your brain does, the more connections you establish. And as you know, more connections increase the chances that you remember what you learn.

But it’s not only the learning itself that can improve your memory:

  • Sleep. During sleep, your brain cells shrink, and fluid can wash the toxins out. Sleep is your brain’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy. While sleeping, you strengthen the learning of your day.
  • Movement. Various studies attest to the importance of exercise for learning ability. Move your body to learn better.
  • Environment. A distracted brain can’t study. Prepare your environment for maximum focus. Go to a study room, turn off your phone, and eliminate any other distraction.

“Learning and memory have two key components: the learned object itself and the retrieval cue to find the learned object.”

3) How to Take Smart Notes

Do you finish a book or an article and think you’ve found great insights but don’t know what to do with them?

I read a lot, but I struggled to manage the input and my ideas for creative output. While writing an article, I often remembered I read something related but couldn’t find the source.

As Ahrens writes: “Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas.”

Taking smart notes is the fast track to improve your productivity and creativity. Yet, most note-taking systems are ineffective.

This is one of the books that has forever changed the way I learn. Before, I didn’t know the difference between note-taking, note-making, and note-hierarchies.

‘How to Take Smart Notes’ transformed the way I store and manage what I read. It helped me realize a learning workflow can turn into a virtuous circle.

The idea is not to hoard knowledge but to develop ideas, arguments, and discussions, and the method he describes is called the slipbox.

Niklas Luhmann, a social scientist, invented the slipbox. He wrote 73 books and almost 400 research articles on various topics during his life, including politics, art, ecology, media, law, and the economy.

When someone asked him how he published so much, Luhmann replied, “I’m not thinking everything on my own. Much of it happens in my Zettelkasten. My productivity is largely explained by the Zettelkasten method”.

The slipbox is a fantastic learning tool as it forces us to use all the strategies known for effective learning.

When you read the book, you’ll marvel at sentences like: “We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).”

I love how Sönke Ahrens describes Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method and embeds it into the science of learning. It’s like “Make it Stick” applied to note-taking. This book will forever change the way you take notes.

“To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.”

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Get More Value Out of Online Courses with These Four Strategies

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Knowledge is useless unless applied.

Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

Have you ever paid for an online course and failed to finish it?

In 2020, 183,744 courses launched on Teachable alone. And while the number of new courses keeps rising, their quality doesn’t. Studies show only one in seven people completes them.

In the last months, I spent around $2,000 on online courses. And if I’ve learned one thing then it’s this:

Whether you spend $900 or $50 dollar on an online course, chances are your course creator doesn’t know much about evidence-based learning design.

If you don’t take charge of your learning, nobody else will. Here are the things that will help you make the most of any online course.

1) Start with what you need the most.

E-learning is often ineffective because it’s distant from the actual application.

How often have you watched an aircraft’s safety video? Every time before take-off, you watch how flight attendants put on their life vests. With every flight, you re-watch the video. But it’s ineffective.

This study shows, putting on the inflatable life vest a single time would be more valuable than repeatedly watching another person doing it. You acquire mastery by performing the procedure yourself.

Ultralearner Scott Young labels this the principle of directness. But how you call it doesn’t matter. Simply focus on what you need the most and skip the rest.

How to do it:

Why did you take the course in the first place? Decide on your learning goal and start with the lessons closest to your objective.

When I took my first online courses I felt like disrespecting the course creators by not watching from start to finish. What I didn’t realize is I disrespected my time.

Online lessons aren’t created equal and not every section is worth your time. Many times you find fluffy filler sections. When you see one, skip it.

Treasure your time and jump ahead whenever you feel lessons are a time-waster. Prioritize what you need the most and ignore the rest or save it for later.

2) Find a way to apply what you learn directly.

In my first months of online writing, I took three online courses. And while watching successful writers inspired me, it didn’t help me advance my craft. I ignored that the only way to get better at anything is by practice and application.

“The one who does the work does the learning.”

— Terry Doyle

Online courses can help you create better products, earn more money, and help you live a happier life. But unless you apply the lessons from the instructors, the courses remain mere entertainment. Knowledge is useless unless applied.

How to do it:

Just like the minimum viable product, find a minimum viable action. What is the simplest thing you can do based on what you just learned?

If you take a course on e-mail newsletter, write your first e-mail. If you take a drawing class, do your first drawing. If you take a course on online writing, write your first article. Foster a bias towards action.

You don’t learn by watching things. You learn by doing them. The more you engage with the content, the likelier it will stick with you. Knowledge trapped in online courses is meaningless unless applied to your life.

3) Form an accountability group with fellow learners.

It’s difficult to hold yourself accountable if you’re sitting alone in front of a computer. Last year, I learned it the hard way.

Studying has always been easy for me. I finished my Bachelor and Master studies with great results. So when I started part-time studying philosophy, last year I was nothing but thrilled.

Yet, five months later and I didn’t take a single exam. The reason? I didn’t connect with fellow learners. I lost motivation. I stopped.

I’m only a month into the new semester but my accountability group makes a difference. We e-meet once a week and share tips and resources, ask probing questions, and encourage each other.

Accountability groups add personal layers to online environments. Community-based learning can work on different levels: as a motivational safety net, learning practice, relationship builder, and accountability tool.

How to do it:

If your online course has a Slack channel or private Facebook group look at the most active members. Reach out to them personally, to form an accountability group.

Schedule weekly check-ins. Discuss what you applied. Listen, talk, read, write, and think about the new material. The more work your brain does, the more connections you establish. And the more connections the higher the chances that you remember what you learn.

4) Take effective notes using a Roamkasten.

Our brains don’t work like recording devices. Learning and memory need two components: the learned information itself and a so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the learned material.

In the last years, I experimented with various note-taking systems — outlining, sketchnoting, mind-mapping, Notion workflows, and BulletJournals — before I finally settled on the Roamkasten, an implementation of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten in RoamResearch.

Here’s why this note-taking system beats others:

  • The Roamkasten gets more useful with every additional note you create.
  • The system is built on state-of-the-art learning science.
  • It offers you serendipitous idea discovery.

Through bi-directional linking, the Roamkasten helps you create connections between different domains and challenges your insights while minimizing effort and stress.

Former R&D lead at Khan Academy Andy Matuschak said if you had to set a single metric as a leading indicator for yourself as a knowledge worker, it would be the number of permanent notes they take.

How to do it:

First, decide on a digital tool. You can pick between programs solely built for Zettelkasten, like Zettlr and The Archive, or more functional alternatives like TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, RemNote, Amplenote, and Org-roam. I use Roamresearch ($15 a month) because of its clean design and its Readwise connection.

Second, create a page for your online course where you write down your standard course notes. They include everything the instructor said that you might want to remember. It’s easy to write them because you don’t have to think for yourself. Simply jot them down, one bullet at a time.

Third, create permament Zettelkasten notes. Look at your course notes and ask yourself questions like “Which new insights do you have based on the new material? How does it relate to what you already know? Where in your work or life will you apply it?”

Write exactly one note for each permanent note and write as if you were writing for someone else. Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references, and try to be as precise, clear, and brief as possible.

When you’re done, relate the note to existing notes inside your storage system using bi-directional linking. That way, you implemented two strategies that are known for effective learning — elaboration, and retrieval.

Final Thoughts

Online courses can improve many aspects of your life. But to belong to the few percent who take away a lot from it, consider:

  • Starting with the lessons that help you the most. Skip what you don’t need.
  • Apply what you learn as soon as possible.
  • Form your accountability group to boost motivation and learning.
  • Use a personal note-taking system that helps you remember what you learned.

Don’t feel discouraged by these different ideas. What worked for me might not work for you. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, take what resonates and forget the rest. And most importantly: enjoy your learning journey.

Are you a life-long learner? Get your free learner’s letter now.

Four Great Resources That Will Teach You How to Learn

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Crack the core of education and become a lifelong learner.

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn. Yet, most people don’t know how to master learning.

When asked, “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?” a study by Kornell & Bjork showed about 73% of students answered “no.”

Long after school, we continue to rely on ineffective learning strategies like passive consumption, highlighting, or rereading in the hope new knowledge will magically stick to our brain. Most people ignore that humans don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.

The mediocre majority will continue struggling through life this way, never experiencing the benefits of effective learning. They don’t care enough about the potential benefits to invest in their growth.

Most people ignore the proven ways to improve their learning process.

As a result, their lives stagnate. “Entertainment and distraction is the enemy of creation and learning. They will keep you in mediocrity,” Benjamin Hardy once wrote.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

A life full of meaningful learning and growth is available if you know where to start. In the last years, I read +15 books on learning, taught as a Teach for All fellow, and continue working in education. Here are the best resources for learning how to learn.

📘Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

A research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between cognitive science and educational science. The result of their work is ‘Make it stick.’

The book in one sentence: Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow; learning works better when it feels hard.

Why you should read it: Because of its applicability, this is my favorite book on evidence-based learning. You’ll realize the factors that shape your intellectual ability lie to a surprising extent within your own control. After reading, you’ll understand how to make the best learning techniques work for you.

Time Commitment: 336 pages; 7 hours to read it

Content Sneak Peek: This book explores and summarizes six evidence-based, application-ready strategies that help you learn better and store new knowledge in your long-term memory. The six strategies include retrieval practice (recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory), spaced repetition (repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals), interleaving (alternating before each practice is complete), elaboration (rephrasing new knowledge and connecting it with existing insights), reflection (synthesize, abstract, and articulate key lessons taught by experience), self-testing & calibration (answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer and identify knowledge gaps).

💻 Dr. Barabara Oakley — Learning How to Learn

Learning How to Learn is the most popular Coursera course of all time taught by academic experts Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Oakley’s research has been described as “revolutionary” in the Wall Street Journal, and she won numerous teacher awards for it.

The course in one sentence: Taking responsibility for your learning is one of the most important undertakings you can manage.

Why you should watch it: By exploring effective learning and retention strategies, this course upgrades your learning toolbox. Plus, the course dismantles common learning traps and guides and how to overcome them. After watching it, you’ll feel ready for an effective, personalized learning journey.

Time Commitment: Self-paced 15 hours

Content Sneak Peek: The course explores the modes of thinking (diffuse mode and focused mode), how our memories work (long-term memory and working memory), a handful of learning strategies (recalling, interleaving, and deliberate practice), learning blockers (Einstellung, procrastination, illusions of knowledge, task-switching), brain hacks on a mental level (memory training, environment, Pomodoro technique, habit-forming, focus) and hacks on a physical level (sleeping, naps, workout).

📰 Farnam Street Blog: Accelerated Learning

Shane Parrish, the founder of Farnam Street, was a cybersecurity expert at Canada’s top intelligence agency and an occasional blogger. He promotes proven strategies of rigorous self-betterment as opposed to classic self-help fare. The best articles on the blog explore timeless ideas around learning.

The source in one sentence: You can train your brain to retain knowledge and insight better by understanding how you learn.

Why you should read it: The blog is excellently written and application-oriented. There’s constantly new content, and it serves as a great refresher to the other resources.

Time Commitment: Around 10 minutes per article.

Content Sneak Peek: The blog explores various topics, like deliberate practice, double-loop learning, learning from failure, the half-life of facts, spaced repetition, and the Feynman Technique.

📘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

There’s been a lot of criticism around this book as the studies by Carol Dweck haven’t been replicated. Yet, I benefited so much from the mindset this book taught me that it belongs in this resource list. While reading it, just consider that it’s not peer-review science but rather mindset advice.

The source in one sentence: By distinguishing between a fixed and a growth mindset, Dweck shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor is influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities.

Why you should read it: This book is a must-read for every person looking for growth. After reading this book, you’ll be able to integrate a growth mindset into your life. For example, you’ll see mistakes as valuable learning opportunities. Studying this book can empower any educator to make positive changes in the classroom environment.

Time Commitment: 320 pages, 6.5 hours to read it

Content Sneak Peek: Mindsets shape whether we believe we can or can’t learn, change, and grow. People with a fixed mindset seek approval, while those with a growth mindset seek development. Role models from our childhood strongly influence our attitudes and ideas, yet we can change our mindset even in adulthood.

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset (Source: Author based on C. Dweck)

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