The Science of Self-Learning: How to Teach Yourself Anything, Learn More in Less Time, and Direct Your Own Education (Learning how to Learn Book 1)

by Peter Hollins

Having a schedule helped him feel more organized and productive, even if he didn’t follow it 100% every single day.

Give yourself a couple of daily blocks to focus on your primary work. But give yourself as much flexibility within those blocks to mentally wander.

Schedule some time for recreation, leisure, personal reflection, or socializing with family and friends.

Treat your personal goals with the same respect as your professional goals—in other words, schedule your self-learning with the same priority as your other responsibilities.

Spend a relatively equal amount of time planning, ruminating, analyzing, and preparing as you do actually taking action.

These two habits of Benjamin Franklin—creating overarching goals and plans and adhering to a daily schedule—are habits we can emulate.

You should try to establish goals that are realistically achievable and not so easy that achieving them won’t make you feel a sense of accomplishment.

SMART acronym. When you’ve come up with a goal for learning, evaluate it to ensure how it meets five standards—that your goal is the following: Specific: clear and definitive Measurable: easy for you to track progress Achievable: within your reach but not too simple Relevant: personally significant to you and your life Time-based: organized to some kind of schedule

If you can center your planning on self-education goals that you can obtain with the resources you currently have, it will give you a better point of view and structure for the course you’re learning—and

But all this information isn’t going to teach you by itself. All it will do is present itself. The data you get doesn’t necessarily explain its significance, its context, or meaning.

Questions are the tools that you’ll use to decipher and analyze all this information.

three-dimensional understanding of the nuances presented to you.

the point of critical thinking is to increase your mental engagement with a certain topic.

Rather than provide a rock-solid, inarguable conviction, critical thinking merely expands your viewpoint and gives you several ways to look at a situation or problem.

challenge the answerer to probe the reasons for a subject’s importance, its origins, relevance, and countering or alternative beliefs.

The goal isn’t to get you to agree or disagree with a given doctrine, but just to understand the totality of its meaning.

The first few questions should address the structure of the conclusion, whether it comes from a sound basis in reasoning.

A second set of questions addresses instead the quality of the conclusions and supporting arguments.

1. Gather information. The first step is to retrieve as much data about a topic as you possibly can.

Organize the information you gather into general topics, arguments, and opinions.

2. Filter your sources. Now that you’ve got all the information you need, it’s time to identify what your sources are, what kind of information they present, and whether it’s good or not. This step could reduce the amount of information you’ll study by 75% or even more.

You’ll get a sense of which are the most popular or common outlooks (the majority), which are the rarer or more unusual viewpoints (the minority), and which ones are straight-up crazy ramblings from the minds of lunatics (the crackpots). You’ll be able to divide up the sources and retain the ones that are most reliable and helpful.

3. Look for patterns and overlap. As you’re viewing and reviewing all your source material, you’ll begin to notice recurring topics, stances, and ideas.

You’ll start getting a better idea of the primary points, secondary points, and boundaries of the subject you’re looking into. You’ll also be able to build bridges between parallel ideas and points of overlap.

identify the major components of your topic and the most prevalent thoughts and beliefs.

4. Seek dissenting opinions.

Without knowing the full extent of opposing arguments, you won’t have the complete picture that you need to understand the issue.

question your own viewpoints by playing devil’s advocate.

Finding dissenting opinions is an important step in avoiding the all-too-common plague of confirmation bias—our human tendency to hear and see only what we want to hear and see.

You’ll comprehend your own beliefs more fully and understand why others may have different ideas. You’ll be able to articulate precisely why you believe what you believe.

5. Put it all together. This is the point where you make your statement—only

You can explain all aspects of the topic or issue you’re talking about. Write, speak, outline, or mind-map confidently about your new area of knowledge.

summarize your expertise: put everything together to show how you understand the whole situation,

The Skill of Self-Discipline

Keeping an eye on your long-term goals, though, will help you power through these negative emotions. When they hit, just acknowledge them, validate their reality, and call up the reasons why you’re undertaking this endeavor: for the long term. Then move ahead.

if you adopt the long game and acknowledge that the pain won’t last: you’ll either get used to the discomfort or the discomfort will dissipate.

Confusion endurance is all about being able to stay with a task and persisting instead of abandoning it when things get too difficult.