I love learning, learning anything but sometimes it takes so long. Having been a student of life and academia I’ve always been trying to find shortcuts for how to learn faster, more efficiently but still in a fun way. In this post we will start to deconstruct becoming an accelerated learner, i.e. how do you learn something in a significantly shorter time. Tim Ferris calls this ‘learning the meta skill of meta learning.’ Learning how to learn. There are techniques where you can work out what is the smartest first step, how you can apply the Pareto Rule of 80:20 to all your learning. This stuff works regardless of your age, it’s all to do with your openness to accepting that it works!

Malcolm Gladwell tells us it takes 10,000 hours to be a master at a skill, and he might be right, but how can you learn the minimum of what is needed for you to master any skill from swimming to kickboxing to memorising the Qur’an to learning a language? With the right framework you can perform miracles. I have seen it through children who have studied for an IGCSE in 6 months and gone on to get an A* grade (they were 11 years old, by the way) through to adults who have learned to swim at the age of 30.

When I was 23 years old a friend of mine challenged me to do a half marathon. Being young and feeling invincible (like most people in their 20’s do) I said yes, challenge accepted. Problem was that I only had 6 weeks, yes six weeks, to train for this thing. I was in reasonable shape for someone a little overweight – I could run for a bus without dying – but I had never run for anything else! How on earth was I going to train for this thing? I did what most people who accept a challenge do in the age of the internet. I searched on yahoo (no google back in the day!) and found magazine articles. I also had a friend who was a runner. I asked for advice on what were the minimum things I needed to do in order to be able to run 13 miles (21km) in a reasonable time.

So could I pull this off? Absolutely, and I did it in a time of just under 3 hours which isn’t bad considering it was my first race, and I had a small visit to the St Johns Ambulance for blister treatment!

More recently, Tim Ferris has said that everything you need to know about accelerated learning can be observed by watching two youtube videos related to freestyle swimming. One is by Micheal Phelps the swimmer and winner of what seems like a million Olympic Gold Medals (well, 23 Gold medals – you can find a fill list of them here. The other is Shinji Takeuchi. Phelps learned to swim when he was 7 years old and Shinji learned when he was 37. This gives me some hope because I cannot swim properly and I am going to learn from Phelps and Shinji and make an effort to learn to swim in an accelerated manner. Mr. Ferris calls this process meta-learning.

What I find fascinating when analysing Phelps and Shinji is the different approaches to their learning, yet both were successful. This gives us a lot to reflect on when it comes to accelerated learning. Phelps is the Formula 1 of swimmers and Shinji’s technique is beautiful to watch, it’s effortless. A wise man once said about exercise ‘The top 1% often succeed despite how they train, not because of it. Superior genetics, or a luxurious full-time schedule, make up for a lot.’ I think you can apply this to anything.

And motivation is key. So I look at people around me who have learned amazing skills (memorising complex data in minutes, run at top 5% speeds and are able to produce the equivalent output of someone working a 60 hour week but doing in 20 hours – more about that in another post!) and want to know how can we (you) do it to?

Here are the things I have observed.

1. Be specific on what you study. This is more important than anything else, even more important than how you study. If you pick the wrong material or wrong text book or wrong teacher then it doesn’t matter how keen you are it just won’t happen. I know this from when I was studying Arabic. The greatest progress came when I had the right materials (Bayyinah and a course at Ebrahim College). This worked when I used the couch to 5k program to re-learn running (not when I joined a gym).

2. Work out what are the essential things you must learn – apply the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, the idea that 80% of your consequences stem from 20% of your actions but apply this to your lifestyle strategy. For example – look at 80 percent words – they have a free online resource that helps you to memorise you the most common words in the Quran and once you have memorised them then you are able to understand 10%, 20%. . . 80% of the Qur’an. It’s amazing.

3. Learning strategically is much more effective. There are patterns which when observed enable you to accelerate your learning. Think of it like this – when we are learning a language there are keywords that will give you a significant payoff. For example – learning how to say me, I, hello, goodbye, the verb structures of sentences; things like this can get you a long way in terms of language learning and use. What sentences do you use on a regular basis in your own language? Learn them in another language and then experiment with using different words. Be strategic about what you learn, when and how.

4. What is your ROI (return on investment) for learning? If it will take you 20 years to learn something, is it an effective method? No. So how do you find an effective method? Ask the experts what short cuts they would recommend.

5. Is the method of learning sustainable? Can you be consistent at it? Will you stick to it until you have mastered that skill? Your brain is wonderful at picking up small patterns not seeing more strategic ones- the larger ones, the ones that will help you with accelerated learning. Be aware of this and ask yourself, what are the bigger patterns you are missing? Tony Buzan’s memory work helps to increase your awareness of the bigger patterns.

Have you ever thought about how you learn how to learn? When you get this then you are an accelerated learner. Going back to Tim Ferris for a moment, he has a great acronym for this which I will borrow here. Tim says ‘use the DiSSS method.’

Deconstruct – what is the minimum that you need to start with?
Selection – what 20% do you need to focus on for 80% of the outcome?
Sequencing – in what order do you learn the blocks?
Stakes – how do you set up stakes to create real consequences and follow the program? (Most important one in my opinion!)

He also has some secondary principles called ‘CaFE’ –

Compression – can you encapsulate the most important 20% to an easily graspable 1 page?
Frequency – how frequently should you practice? What is the minimum effective dose? What schedule should you follow?
Encoding – how do you anchor the material to what you already know for rapid recall (like the DISSS and CAFE used here, Tony Buzan’s work on this is awesome!).

(In case you’re wondering, don’t worry about the e and i, they are here for you to remember the acronym!)

And here is the most amazing thing. Once you have learned how to apply accelerated learning to one topic you can apply it to any other subject area in your life. Perhaps I learned more than I thought when I completed that half marathon at 23 – maybe that was the start of my accelerated learning. It’s just taken me another 20 years to work it out!

The thing with accelerated learning is that it gives us the ability to learn something more quickly. I know Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to master something but does it really? At a business retreat I attended we were asked to plan an epic journey and we were told how far we had to travel and in how much time. What is incredible is that we were given 10 minutes for the task. So there were 7 teams competing for this, and within the space of 10 minutes teams managed to plan a journey of 4km as well as one of 400,000km to the moon and back. This tells us that we are able to do the impossible, even within short time constraints. So if you want to become an accelerated learner really all you need to do is start, right?

So if you want to become an accelerated learner really all you need to do is start, right?