How to Learn Stuff

Two people from my childhood had a profound effect on my ability to think and learn.

One was my father. He taught me to think. He rarely answered a question if he believed I could figure it out for myself. And once he bought us a set of World Book Encyclopedias, the answer to any question was the 1960s version of Google It.

“I bought you encyclopedias. Look it up.”

And so I did. One summer, I read the entire set cover to cover. Aardvark to Zymogen.

The other early influence was my 6th-grade science teacher. She taught us that the average human only uses about 10% of their brain. This fact doesn’t surprise me as much now as it did then, but I digress. She taught us that our brains are capable of so much more than we ask of it. And she instilled in me one fact that I still follow to this day.

“Never stop learning.”

I took that to heart when I was younger. Constantly seeking out knowledge. I tackled the non-fiction section of the library with a vengeance, reading about every subject the Dewey Decimal system had to offer.

I absorbed knowledge. I learned a lot. That’s why I am so good at playing trivia today.

And that is what I learned for the most part; trivia.

Because, until much later, I didn’t learn how to learn. I didn’t learn the right stuff. I learned random things in random order.

It wasn’t until the ’80s and my first computer that I began to learn how to learn stuff. At the time, I knew exactly two other people on the planet that owned a computer besides me. One of them taught me the immersive technique for learning and the other told me to research Pareto’s Principle.

First, the immersive technique, as that has served me well ever since, and combined with Pareto’s Principle becomes an unbeatable powerhouse of acquiring the right knowledge in the right order.

When I first tackled the limited world of computing on my Apple IIe, only the geeks at DARPA had the Internet, and the World Wide Web was a pipedream over at CERN. There were dial-up Bulletin Board Services (BBS), but that was a difficult and slow method of acquiring knowledge.

So, we learned the old-fashioned way; with books.

Whether it was a programming language, a hardware concept, or a new piece of software, I would buy two massive volumes of information. One was of the “Complete Guide to,” variety and the other was a reference manual. Then I would lock myself in the room with the computer and those two books for a minimum of four hours at a time. I would begin reading the guide book cover to cover, stopping to apply each new nugget of knowledge on the computer looking things up in the reference as needed.

I would do that for however many days it took me to get through the books or I mastered the subject, whichever came first.

This worked well in the first year or two of computing when things were much simpler. But technology moved at a breakneck pace in those days, and the scope of knowledge far outpaced my ability to learn and absorb it.

So, I remembered Pareto’s Principle. You may know it by its more common name; the 80/20 rule.

The original principle by Vilfredo Pareto specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs.

The modern version states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort or variations thereof. In terms of learning stuff, this simply means, learn the important stuff first.

Learn the right stuff in the right order.

Of course, first, you have to determine what is the right stuff, and sometimes you have to learn stuff in a more general sense before you can determine what is the right stuff. More importantly, you need to be able to recognize the right stuff when you see it. For me, this usually comes when I realize I’m spending too much time on the wrong stuff.

There are two examples from my later years in technology. This wasn’t the ancient days of the Apple IIe, but it was still the wild west. Windows, GUIs, and the World Wide Web were still new. Search engines were innovative and wonderful toys, and more programming languages were popping up every day.

I decided I needed to jump on the Windows bandwagon and learn to program GUIs for the various applications I was developing at that time. So, I tackled C++ and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). I slipped back into my comfortable immersive techniques and delved into the new concepts with a passion.

The promise and the problem with OOP were that you were developing modules of code that could be used for anything. Components that could be plugged in and reused in many different applications. This was all well and good, but I didn’t need to write code that could do anything. I needed to write a specific code for a specific application to perform a specific task. I was writing reams of OOP to accomplish what could be done with a few lines of code.

Soon after that, certification became the thing. Getting Microsoft Certified Something was a big deal. There were several paths including networking, programming, and software. I ran down those paths as hard and fast as I could. After a few months, I achieved my first certification. I can’t remember the name, but it came with all sorts of diplomas and pins and badges, oh my.

Then, I continued onto the next level, studying the manuals and taking courses that taught you how to pass the tests. Wait a minute. What? Taking a course to learn how to pass a test? How about just learning the material? Then I backed up and looked at the big picture.

I was spending 80% of my time learning how to get certifications and 20% of my time learning the skills I needed to do my job.

Pareto would be appalled.

So, I quit that whole endeavor and began focusing on the 20% that would get me the 80% rather than the other way around.

And I’ve carried those two lessons with me to this day. I still love and learn about technology. But as the scope of what that means has grown to be so all-encompassing, I find the need to focus on narrower and more refined skills. But first, I have to identify exactly what I need to know. Tech doesn’t just mean programming in obscure languages anymore. Everything we do touches technology. It has finally become the means, not the end.

Take writing for instance. Of course, I’ve been writing since first grade, but actual writing didn’t happen until my days of applying the immersive technique to learning WordPerfect. That wasn’t my first-word processor, but it was the one I used for years until I was dragged kicking and screaming into Windows, where Microsoft Word took over.

But as each year passed, the 20% I needed to know came out of a smaller slice of knowledge, as my needs became more specific. I didn’t need to know how to write, I needed to know how to write for clients. Recently, I began writing for Medium and the game changed again. Now, I had to apply my immersive technique to simply learning how to write a title.

The skills I had to hone to write successfully on this new platform were unusual to me and very specific. I almost had to relearn how to learn. But I have since taken on a new training process that brings all my years of learning together to a single sharp focus. I have taken up the guitar and after a few weeks of flailing about, I decided I needed to apply my immersive technique, Pareto’s Principle, and even a little OOP to the process.

You see, playing the guitar, and probably any instrument is about doing several things both independently and simultaneously and doing them smoothly and consistently. Add to that the variety of guitar styles and musical genres, and I was quickly overwhelmed.

So, first I stopped and applied the 80/20 rule. What, specifically, did I want to learn and where did I need to apply that 20% of my effort? Well, I bought an acoustic guitar with steel strings, so that narrowed the scope a bit. I already knew I can’t sing, so that left out accompaniment. This left me with playing solos using chords and notes with my left hand and mostly picking individual notes with my right.

But I’m still trying to learn two things at once. Remember the old game you played as a child where you tried to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? It’s like that only farm more complicated. Then I remembered Object-Oriented Programming. What if I learned to program a single module and applied my immersive technique to that?

So that is what I have done, and my guitar has improved exponentially. I spent hours each day immersed in only doing something very specific with one hand. Doing it until I could do it in my sleep. Then, the same thing with my other hand. And finally, putting the two together.

It’s like juggling. You need to learn how to toss and catch one ball. Then, you learn how to do the same thing with two balls, one in each hand, catching them with the opposite hand. Once you have mastered that, all you do is add the third ball and you are juggling.

Putting the skills I learned with separate hands together, quickly became playing the guitar.

So, I backed up and applied those principals to my writing. I have spent days perfecting my technique for finding ideas to write about. You can read the results of that here. I spent several more days learning and honing my process for creating killer headlines. Next, I spent time understanding the best way to format my articles and make them easy to read.

Finally, after mastering those techniques separately, I began putting them all together in my articles. And that is when some of my work first began to go viral.

Learning anything new and doing it efficiently requires taking the right steps in the right order.

Identify specifically what you need to know to get the job done.

Break that down into finite and separate components.

Immerse yourself into learning those components one at a time until mastered.

Put everything together for the final process.

Apply these concepts to anything new you need to learn, or to things you have already learned but struggle to master.