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

Franklin also differentiated between work he had to focus on exclusively (in those bigger morning and afternoon chunks) and work he could do while he was doing something else, like overlooking his accounts and conducting his personal studies.

Simply having something to refer to with premade decisions can lend guidance and structure to a day that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Give yourself a couple of daily blocks to focus on your primary work.

What are my daily block times?

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. What went well and what didn’t?

The first guideline is to accept that you don’t really know what you don’t know yet, and you’re not going to find out until you finally know it.

But you should make sure it is just the right amount of challenge for the right moment.

There’s a sweet spot as to how the goals you set can keep you motivated.

Everyone has different levels of what challenges them, and it’s up to us to set goals that keep us moving toward them.

One handy mnemonic device that can help guide your goal-setting is the SMART acronym.

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 For

So you’ll have to be proactive about figuring out what all this new data means to your course of study.

You’ll have to do the investigative work to understand the framework and substance of all these bits of knowledge.

We call this pulling information, because it means dragging what’s important and creating significance out of the huge mass of info that’s ...

Questions are the tools that you’ll use to decipher and analyze a...

You need questions to develop open avenues of perception and full comprehension of your subject—not just th...

The questions you’ll ask will penetrate far beyond simple common knowledge and will fill in the complete p...

known as critical thinking, and it’s the act of delaying gratification in lieu of accuracy and a three-dimensional understanding of the nuances presented to you. It’s not terribly popular as a way of navigating life, but it’s how you are going to learn to pull information out of your sources.

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

critical thinking merely expands your viewpoint and gives you several ways to look at a situation or problem.

No course of self-learning can succeed without critical thinking.

critical thinking go beyond standard “just the facts, ma’am” inquiries. Instead they challenge the answerer to probe the reasons for a subject’s importance, its origins, relevance, and countering or alternative beliefs.

How can we steer clear of questionable sources and make sure our research will bear fruit?

It’s important to hit all five steps without skipping any.

1. Gather information. The first step is to retrieve as much data about a topic as you possibly can. Collect anything and everything from as wide a range of sources as you can manage.

The point isn’t to get immediate answers; it’s to get an initial, panoramic overview of the subject you’re investigating.

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

What’s important is that you have everything in front of you, from shallow to deep and from correct to dubious.

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.

Your goal here is to draw out the good sources and disregard the bad ones.

A good source backs up its arguments and ideas with solid data, confirmable truth, and careful examination.

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).

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.

When you see a point repeated by multiple sources, it’s a good sign that you should consider it a major point or theme.

You should understand what the main points and arguments are (and why), as well as a few of the minor ones, by the end of this step.

But if you stop here, you risk falling prey to confirmation bias and not knowing what you don’t know.

Seek dissenting opinions. By this point, you’ll no doubt have a theory or opinion in mind.

now’s the time to look for sources that disagree with you.

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

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.

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

Don’t forget to start your organization immediately by grouping and categorizing thoughts and opinions.

Look for patterns. Examine your sources for repeated mentions or descriptions of similar events—say,

Examine all the views you can find: majority opinion, minority opinion, and even the crackpot ideas. Finding repeated patterns will give you a more three-dimensional view of the landscape.