We are in a world with lot of learning opportunities. But how many stuff do we really learn ? What holds us back in learning new things faster?

Learning how to learn is the greatest learning of all. I happened to read interesting reading from this blog [1] which had an amazing link mentioning about a guy who learned MIT 4 year course within 1 year.

It starts with

"My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear Algebra to Theory of Computation, in less than one year. More importantly, he did it all on his own, watching the lectures online and evaluating himself using the actual exams. (See Scott’s FAQ page for the details of how he ran this challenge.)"

http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algebra-in-10-days-astounding-experiments-in-ultra-learning/

When i was going little bit deeper in the subject i found another useful resource in one of the ted talks about the time it takes to learn a new thing. Amazingly it is only twenty hours :). Yes it is less than a day to acquire a new skill.

But...

You need to do it in four steps. Four simple steps to rapid knowledge acquire.

1) Deconstruct the new skill.

     divide and conquer small chunks of skill in new skill. Because most of the big skills are set of smaller skills

2) Learn enough to self correct.

 He depicts the most common error we do in learning which is trying to learn everything and start practicing later. But Ideally what you should do is to learn the essential or more obvious things so you
can self correct your self.

3) Remove practice barriers.

The most common barrier i can think of is "Facebook" ;)

4) Practice atleast 20 hours.

"The major barrier to learn new thing is not intellectual it is emotional"

So start practicing what you love to acquire..!!!




[1] http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.pt/2012/11/optimism-is-selection-of-nature.html