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

Self-learning benefits from a mindset that isn’t always picked up in traditional institutions, but that can prove to be a major advantage in more than just education. That’s the mindset of the autodidact.

An autodidact is, most simply put, a self-educator. It’s what you’re probably aspiring to. They own the entire method of their instruction, from beginning to finish, from interest to implementation. They’re hungry to learn more about the topics they’re most passionate about, and they’re enthusiastic about learning new subjects from scratch. They manage all the tools they need to learn: books, videos, podcasts, online courses, and even “fieldwork.” An autodidact is comfortable with the notion that they’re both teacher and student, often at the same time.

It actually hinders future learning. After 20 years of force-fed learning—tens of thousands of hours of lecture, reading, studying, and accumulating facts—you’re almost conditioned not to learn in any other way. You don’t imagine that there even is another way, much less that you are able to direct it yourself. You believe learning is to sit and absorb and then demonstrate said absorption.

Many are the students who’ve experienced so much burn-out from institutional learning that the last thing they want to do upon graduation is learn anything.

You go at your own pace, and you are only limited by your motivation and discipline. You can decide your own level of difficulty.

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.

Confidence. At the base of Kruger’s pyramid is the self-conviction that we can learn. There’s no way around this prerequisite, and brain chemistry has something to do with it.

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.

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 produce what you’ve learned—writing, video, a project, or some other means?

Think of this step as sort of a lab report. Before a scientist gets started on an experiment, they write down their hypothesis (or whatever they want to accomplish or prove) and the methods and materials they’ll use to arrive at their conclusions. After each stage of their experiment, they record results and indicate what kind of adjustments they might need to make for future trials. Finally, at the end, they write out the overall results and explain what the conclusions actually mean.

In self-learning, though, you’re your own instructor. The only personality you have to deal with is your own. You might read the opinions and interpretations of other people, but the final funnel is your own brain. You’re tasked with seeking out relevant material and instilling it in your own head.

Self-learning isn’t like typical school, where someone or something else is responsible for setting your goals and motivating you to work toward them. It’s also different from work, where your motivation is simple: finish your job and get paid.

In motivation for self-learning, you might use the factor of autonomy to envision how your life might improve after you gain your knowledge. For example, you might be motivated to teach yourself coding because you can picture yourself running your own web design contract business in the future. You might learn a language because you want to spend some time living in a foreign country.

The point is that it’s your choice alone.

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.

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.

What is it that you want to learn from the topic?

You may not need all the knowledge at the moment, but understanding everything as a whole and how it fits together will help you with the small details and when you’re in the weeds.

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.

The important aspect is that you’ve surveyed the topic before diving in and thus understand what you’re getting into and why.

Question. In the second stage of the SQ3R method, you’re still not diving into the deep end.

You’ll take a slightly closer look at the structure of the book and form some questions you wanted answered or set up the objectives you want to achieve.

In the geology book, I’m afraid there aren’t too many chapter titles that I could rephrase as inquiries. (“Weathering,” “Groundwater,” “Glaciation”—that’s about it.) But there are headings that might work: “Some Effects of Metamorphism on Sedimentary Rocks,” for example, can become “What can happen to bottom-centered rocks through eons of environmental change?” Not only have I changed it to a question, but I’ve paraphrased the title into wording that I can understand even before I’ve started reading.

what specific answers are you hoping to find in your studies? Write them down. This is also a good time to come up with a structure for answering your questions—a daily journal, a self-administered quiz, some kind of “knowledge tracker”? You don’t have to answer the questions yet—you just need to know how you’re going to record them when you do.

Reading. In this stage you’re finally ready to dive into the material. Because you’ve gotten the lay of the land and formed some questions and goals for your studies, you’re a little more engaged when you finally sit down to read. You’re looking for answers to the questions you’ve raised.

Another underrated aspect of formulating and organizing before you actually begin reading is to build anticipation for learning.

Reciting. This step is crucial in processing the information you’re learning about and is the biggest difference between reading to learn and reading for entertainment. Now that you’re familiar with the material, the aim of the reciting phase is to reorient your mind and attention to focus and learn more fully as you go along. In other words, this step is about literal recitation. Ask questions—out loud, verbally—about what you’re reading. This is also the point where you take copious notes in the margins of the text and underline or highlight key points. Recitation is verbal and also through writing. However, it’s important to restate these points in your own words rather than just copy phrases from the book onto a piece of paper.

This makes the information easier to grasp in a language you understand. It makes it significant and meaningful to you.

They include writing more questions of important parts you have highlighted, orally answering some of the questions if you can, reviewing your notes, creating flashcards for important concepts and terminology, rewriting the table of contents using your own words, and building out a mind map.

How would we connect this to UXWell? Is it in our case just supervised self learning? What exercises or types of exercises can we make out of it?

Elaborative interrogation has something in common with that childlike inquiry, except it relates to more advanced topics that adults are (hopefully) liable to investigate. Simply put, elaborative interrogation is an effort to create explanations for why stated facts are true. This is what drives home comprehension, as well as what you don’t comprehend.

In what ways does elaborative interrogation help understanding?

Elaborative interrogation does, however, require some existing knowledge about the topic to generate solid questions for yourself.

What kind of existing knowledge is needed?

The overall point of elaborative interrogation is to make sure there are no holes in your understanding. If you can survive your own questioning, it’s likely you can survive tests, exams, and when other people ask you to teach them.

You can 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.

These two seem similar. Why differentiate?

The Feynman technique is a specific application of elaborative interrogation.

Step one: Choose your concept.

Step two: Write down an explanation of the concept in plain English. Can you do it? Is this easy or difficult? This is the truly important step because it will show exactly what you do and do not understand about the concept of gravity. Explain it as simply, yet accurately, as you can in a way that someone who knows nothing about the concept would also understand.

Step four: Use an analogy.

Did Feynman did that too?

make it usable to yourself at a later time.

In what situations will you need the information?

First, eliminate distractions. There will always be distractions out of your control, but we’re more concerned with distractions that are in your control. Avoid unplanned and unwelcome distractions.

The four levels of reading were developed by philosopher Mortimer Adler in his suitably titled publication How to Read a Book.

These are Adler’s four levels of reading, from simplest to most complex: elementary inspectional analytical syntopical

Elementary. You’re already past this level—this is, essentially, learning to read. It’s the kind of reading that’s taught in elementary school. You’re learning what the letters are, how words are pronounced, and what they objectively mean.

Inspectional. The next level up for readers is understanding the essence of a certain book—but not digesting the whole of it.

Inspectional reading actually has two mini-stages of its own: Systematic skimming. This is casually examining certain elements of a book apart from the body of the text: skimming the table of contents and the index or reading the preface or the blurb on the inside jacket. If you’re assessing an e-book, it could mean reading the online description and customer reviews as well. Systematic skimming gives you enough information to know what the book is and how you would classify it: “it’s a novel about World War II” or “it’s a book that explains how to cook French cuisine.” That’s it.

Superficial reading. This stage is actually reading the book but in a very casual way. You start at the beginning and take in the material without consuming it or thinking too much about it. You don’t make notes in the margins. You don’t look up unfamiliar phrases or concepts—if there’s a passage you don’t understand, you just proceed to the next part. In superficial reading, you’re getting a sense of the tone, rhythm, and general direction of the book rather than absorbing every single element of the narrative.

Analytical. The third level of reading is the deepest level for consuming a single book or volume of work—it’s full digestion of and interaction with the material at hand. The challenge of analytical reading is simply this: “If time’s not an object, how thoroughly would you read this book?”

The goal of analytical reading is to understand the material well enough so you can explain it to someone else without a lot of effort. You’re able to describe the subject very concisely. You’re able to list its parts in order and say how they connect with each other. You’re able to understand and specify the issues the writer’s concerned with and what problems they’re trying to resolve.