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

An autodidact is, most simply put, a self-educator.

Mark Twain and Albert Einstein, both legendary autodidacts—have expressed skepticism about the limits of traditional education.

With self-learning you can develop habits, skills, and interests that will prepare you for learning for the rest of your life by deepening your expertise in a subject and keeping up with the latest developments.

You can develop self-discipline. Charting your own course in education involves planning, personal management, commitment, and execution. When you can develop those skills yourself, they become more meaningful than when someone else tries to force them upon you. Building self-discipline is one of the handiest “by-products” of self-education because it can be replicated in all other areas of your life.

motivating someone to learn by threats or reproach isn’t just ineffective—it’s impossible. If one is feeling hurt or mistrusted, or if they’re dealing with depression, stress, difficult personal issues, or fear, they don’t have any resources left to help them learn.

There’s not a single subject you can’t understand with perseverance and the occasional stretch of hard work. Resolve yourself to not giving up. Make plans for how you will learn. Be forgiving of yourself if you need to take a lot of time and mark your progress as you go along.

Self-management. The next tier in the learning success pyramid is organizing one’s time, resources, tools, and communication to ensure effective learning.

The best way to combat this “brain drain” is by working on self-management skills, particularly organization. This simply means taking a lot of time ahead of any task to set up systems, routines, and actions that will make the task easier to execute on an ongoing basis.

For the self-learner, this process means organizing yourself and your materials to facilitate gathering information, studying, comprehending, and testing yourself on what you’ve learned.

How will you schedule your reading time? What resources will you use to track your progress and determine where your knowledge gaps are?

example, consider the following original text:

picked up at first and put concepts and ideas

topics. Think of this step as the natural

On the right side will be as much as you can capture. It won’t be verbatim, and you’ll probably need to write in short phrases.

there are four stages of learning: taking notes, editing, analysis, reflection. Cornell notes force you to go through all four stages and help you organize information better with three sections to enforce information.

Peter Brown, author of the book Make It Stick

start with the journalistic questions (who, what, where, when, why, how), then move on to contextual questions (how did this happen and what happens after) for a good, thorough start to understanding.

The Feynman Technique

The Feynman technique,

Stop Subvocalizations

Start by picking out any word in a paragraph and look at it for a moment in total silence. Look at it, and instead of repeating the word mentally, think about what it represents and means. Think about its meaning. You can even just describe it mentally instead of reading it out loud inside your head. There will still be a slight bit of subvocalization, but by merely observing words without the desire to pronounce them, the new habit will begin to form on its own.

All that you need to be concerned with is looking at words without the desire to hear the way they sound.

First, picture it visually in your mind. Second, hum to yourself as you read it, so you literally can’t read it because of the humming. Third, in the same vein, you can practice reading while chewing gum on the same premise that it makes it difficult to subconsciously subvocalize. You are just occupying your inner voice with something else but allowing the processing to occur.

Train Your Eyes

The first is to use your finger, or any other object, as a pointer.

The second is to strengthen your peripheral vision and learn to focus on chunks of words rather than individual words.

recognizing how much your eyes move while you read.

Strategically Skim

Focus and Attention

Peter Drucker,

The Effective Executive

“How to Read a Book”

personal reflection and understanding what went well and what needed to change during the day.

Personal reflection helps with learning what to do differently the next time, what worked and what did't.

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? Make sure you’re doing the right thing instead of the easy thing and that you learn from your mistakes and inefficiencies.

In self-learning—frankly, in any ambitious goal—you’ll often be coming face to face with the unknown. It’s uncomfortable at best. You need to understand that and not let it scare you off from making the goal, because that’s exactly what it does to a lot of us. Your goal is to learn things you don’t know, anyway. It will inevitably feel like a challenge.

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

Researching from Scratch

It’s important to hit all five steps without skipping any. You’ll be able to understand a concept, issue, or problem from a variety of angles and approaches.

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. At this early stage of research, don’t be too discriminating. Get as much as you can from wherever you can find it. Think what it would be like if you searched on Google about a certain topic, got 10 pages or more of results, and clicked on every single link. The point isn’t to get immediate answers; it’s to get an initial, panoramic overview of the subject you’re investigating. So don’t be too restrictive—open the floodgates. Organize the information you gather into general topics, arguments, and opinions. You might find that you are more confused after this stage than when you started—that’s fine and natural. 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. This step could reduce the amount of information you’ll study by 75% or even more.

A bad source is generally more interested in persuading through emotions and hyperbole and might rely on misleading or utterly wrong data to do so.

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. Certain points will crop up more frequently, and some will only appear once, seemingly randomly. 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.

4. Seek dissenting opinions.

By this point, you’ll no doubt have a theory or opinion in mind. You’ll also have whittled down your sources to support that. So now’s the time to look for sources that disagree with you. This is a hugely important step. Without knowing the full extent of opposing arguments, you won’t have the complete picture that you need to understand the issue. No matter how convinced you are, try to find one.

5. Put it all together.

This is the point where you make your statement—only after you’ve considered all the above, rather than “shooting first and asking questions later.” This is a point of clarity for you. 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. Here’s an easy way to think about how you summarize your expertise: put everything together to show how you understand the whole situation, including the small and nuanced points: “X, Y, and Z because… however, A, B, and C because…” If you can’t do this with certainty, you may need to go back a step or two in the process.

Gather your info. Accumulate all the information you can without discrimination: history books, news articles, biographies, blogs, History Channel videos, websites, Congressional minutes, newsreels—anything.

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

Filter your sources. Do you have news clippings from established sources like The New York Times or Time magazine? Are the stories verifiable? Do your biographies and nonfiction books provide meaningful information that’s backed up, or are they thought pieces that don’t rely on much data at all? Are the blogs you’re looking at dependably referenced, or are they sloppily put together and filled with hyperbole? Are you actually just watching Drunk History?

Look for patterns. Examine your sources for repeated mentions or descriptions of similar events—say, the Civil Rights Act, the assassination of JFK, the 1968 Democratic convention. Look for similar trends across varied eras: economic status, unemployment rates, election results, specific gatherings, or protests. The more often a certain event or trend appears in your review, the more likely it is to have been truly impactful on the subject. 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.