Learning How to Learn

One of the goals I set for myself this year was to become better at learning how to learn. There is an enormous amount of information that people come across on a daily basis, and we only remember a small percentage of that. Of that percentage that we remember, we can only recall yet an even smaller percentage. It’s unfortunately a highly inefficient process, which is one of the reasons I decided to tackle this goal.

I’ve always seen learning as more of a framework and not as a chore or something that you stop doing once you throw your graduation cap in the air. Whether it’s a skill needed to boost your professional life or learning an instrument, learning something helps keep me fresh and cognizant of the fact there is so much out there in the world and that we should strive to take advantage of the opportunities given to us to change the way we think about things. Because of this thinking, I realized that the only way to get better at anything I put my focus on is to figure out how to learn smarter and not harder.

Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor at Oakland University and McMaster University, published a book on how to excel at learning new concepts. Although her book A Mind for Numbers focuses on how to learn tough new concepts in math and science, the principles and ideas she explains so thoroughly can be applied to any subject. It really opened my eyes into the way I was learning before and how a few tweaks can help me learn significantly more efficiently. I enjoyed it so much that I went ahead and took her course on Coursera – one of the most popular courses to date on the MOOC platform.

I’m not going to spoil the book or the course, but I will say that they have altered the way I look at learning. Even though I said previously that I see learning as a framework, it was only after going through Professor Oakley’s work that I truly gained a much better perspective on learning in general. From the different types of thinking and battling procrastination to understanding how to chunk concepts together while enhancing your memory through recall, this is undoubtedly one of the goals I’ve undergone that will benefit me over the course of my life.

How does this apply to startups or VC? Well in both, you have so much to learn in such a small amount of time. Not learning the right information or not learning at a high and efficient rate can be the difference between you being a market leader and you being forced to watch others be a market leader. When building a startup, there are numerous things you have to learn that come from doing things yourself. That helps when you need to store things in your long-term memory for later use. As for VCs, learning how to learn comes in handy when performing due diligence on companies, whether it’s investigating the market or understanding a new piece of technology. Even learning how to do cap tables involves certain learning strategies that make it easier to perform these kinds of quick financial calculations.

If there’s one goal a lot of people should aim towards, it would have to be improving the way they learn. By doing that, you become better at picking up unfamiliar concepts at a much faster rate, which leads to bigger and better rewards much more quickly. This is something that will take time to learn, but the payoff is absolutely worth more than its weight in gold. Or information.