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

It’s an essential aspect of self-learning because there is no educator to impose rigidity upon you—just yourself. You are both the teacher and the student, and that comes with the task of self-motivation. There are three main aspects of intrinsic motivation to keep yourself moving toward your goal of self-learning: autonomy, mastery, and purpose/impact. The intangibles tend to be far more powerful than what you would traditionally consider motivating.

The traditional classroom setting of reading and regurgitating certainly isn’t the most effective, but it’s the only model most of us know. Robinson’s approach is suitable for more than just reading: your entire study plan can be modeled on Robinson’s method and adapted to your self-learning. The technique is called The SQ3R method, named for its five components: survey question

read recite review Survey. The first step in the method is getting a general overview of what you’ll be reading. Textbooks and nonfiction works aren’t like fiction or narrative literature in which you just start from the beginning and wind your way through each chapter. The best works of nonfiction are arranged to impart information in a way that’s clear and memorable and builds upon each previous chapter. If you go dive in without surveying first, you are going in blind, without understanding where you are going and what you are trying to accomplish. You should get a lay of the land first, before you delve into Chapter 1. The survey component is for you to get the most general introduction to the topic so you can establish and shape the goals you want to achieve from reading the book. It’s just like taking a look at the entire map before you set off on a road trip. You may not need all the knowledge at the moment, but understanding everything as a whole and how it fits together will

In the SQ3R method, surveying means examining the structure of the work: the book title, the introduction or preface, section titles, chapter titles, headings and subheadings. If the book is illustrated with pictures or graphics, you’d review them. You could also make note of the conventions the book uses to guide your reading: typefaces, bold or italic text, and chapter objectives and study questions if they’re in there. In using the survey step, you’re setting up expectations for what you’re going to be reading about and giving yourself an initial framework to structure your goals for reading the material.

Beyond books, you should survey all the important concepts in a discipline. If you can’t find it within a structure like a book’s table of contents, then you need to be able to create it for yourself. Yes, this is the difficult part, but once you are able to lay all the concepts out and understand how they relate to each other at least on a surface

level, you will already be leaps ahead of others. Use the survey component to form an outline of what you’ll learn. In a sense, it’s more like you’re plotting out a metaphorical “book” for yourself. You want to form a general outline of what you’re going to learn. Since you’re studying this on your own, there might be a few gaps in what you think you’ll need to know. So in this phase, you’ll want to determine exactly what you want to become knowledgeable about, as specifically as you can make it. For example, if you want to learn all about psychology, that’s going to take a significant amount of time. It won’t happen in one shot. You’d want to specify it a little more: the early history of psychoanalysis, the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, sports psychology, developmental psychology—the possibilities are plenty.