Learning How to Learn – The Most Important Skill

Learning how to learn is the most important skill.

Why? Because it improves the acquisition of every other skill.

Mathematically, learning how to learning is the single most important skill. Even if learning how to learn takes you 100 hours, it will save you thousands of hours down the road. The person who learns how to learn will have a perpetual edge of someone who never learned how to learn.

Strategic sequencing of decisions

At any given point in time, there’s a single decision which is the best decision you can make. The single best decision is often not the best in the short term but it is in the long term. That’s because of how it creates some sort of strategic unlock.

This is true of learning how to learn.

If the world is a strategy game, then learning how to learn is a very high ROI investment decision.

Beyond learning how to learn, I think more people should think about the sequencing of decisions and the implicit tradeoffs being made. If you choose to pursue one great initiative for your company, you’re implicitly choosing to not do many other potentially great initiatives. If you choose one life partner, you’re implicitly saying no to many others. If you work at one job, that trades off against other jobs you could work.

How to learn how to learn

1: Lay the foundations

A: Cultivate a love for learning

First, it’s helpful to lay several foundations for learning how to learn. That actually starts with cultivating a love of learning. If you turn perpetual learning into something which is fun rather than a chore, you have now made all future learning easier.

Typically, self-directed learning is fun whereas ‘other-directed learning’ is a chore. That’s why young children love learning until they get to middle school when they start to hate learning. Learning is self-directed in childhood but becomes other-direct in school. As a result, we become conditioned to hate learning. This needs to be reversed by cultivating genuine curiosity. This should be selfish. You should learn because you selfishly want to learn. This means pursuing topics that interest you. Or understanding the utility of learning for your goals.

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B: Understand the learning compounds

Second, it helps to understand that learning compounds. This is important because it means that you will get increasingly fast at learning over time. The idea of the “rich get richer” also applies to reading and learning.

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C: Invest into foundational skills

Third, it’s useful to invest into the foundational skills of learning. These include effective note taking (I use Notion extensively) and speed reading. I believed this was useful enough that I actively worked on increasing my reading and listening speed by 300% relative to the normal person.

2: Know where to learn

A: Everywhere every day

A big part of learning how to learn is knowing where to learn. The biggest unlock in this regard is realizing that every moment of every day is an opportunity to learn.

Even the most mundane moments are opportunities for learning:

You can learn from everyone, even boring people. Everyone has a unique interest that they know a lot about or an opinion that shows a different way of thinking. Learn from this.

You can learn from every restaurant or shop you walk into. How is it organized? How many staff members are there? What is good and bad about the fit out? What is the economic model? Why did they price this way and organize the place this way?

You can learn from watching people on the street. What does good posture look like? What can you understand about someone from their body language? What does confidence look like? How do people interact with the built environment and why?

B: Books & modern books

Warren Buffet spends 80% of his working hours reading. When asked how to get smarter, Buffett said, “Read 500 pages every week. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest."

Elon, in his teenage years, would read two books per day. His reading spanned philosophy, programming, science fiction, religion, engineering, physics, product design and more. When asked how he learned to build rockets, he replied: “I read books”.

Podcasts, articles, online courses and discussion forums are the books of modernity. Books tend to be more original in their ideas, but these alternative information sources are also valuable.

C: Doing shit

Everything above is great, but most learning comes from taking actions — particularly scary, high-risk, high-reward actions — in the real world.

Apply for that job, start that company, reach out to the investor. Typically, the downside is far less than you think. In fact, often the downside is a positive in that it’s a moment for learning.

What should you learn first?

We now get back to the invest vs exploit strategic decision making. I believe that you should invest heavily into foundational skills early in your career.

Examples of foundational skills include:

• Health & nutrition: sleep, meditation, breathing, exercise, nutrition
• Productivity: systems, time management, habit building
• Psychology & cognitive biases
• Communication & persuasion
• Statistics & probability
• Risk taking & agency
• Business & investing
• Biology & evolution
• Economics

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