What if you could discover how to learn faster in anything—whether it’s a new language, skill, or subject?
Faster learning skills give you a massive edge for your career and can be very fulfilling for your personal life. Yet, most people struggle with this because they use outdated learning methods that slow them down.
The good news? You don’t need to rely on your past success in school or innate talent to build lifelong learning skills. All you need are a few simple first steps and effective learning strategies to get there!
In this guide, we’ve tapped into top books from our ReadinGraphics library to help you learn the basics of lifelong learning. We’ll unlock your full learning potential so you can master any skill or subject in no time.
Why Is Learning Important? Debunking Common Learning Myths
Often we have limiting beliefs that hold us back from learning anything new. So let’s debunk a few common misconceptions and rediscover why learning is a valuable life skill.
Myth # 1: Some people are slow learners / have low IQ.
“I’m a slow learner since birth, it’s not something I can change!”
Truth: If you’ve always seen yourself as a slow learner or having low IQ, you might be judging yourself too soon.
There are many ways to boost your learning. Our brains are more adaptable than most think, and learning ability or speed isn’t fixed. You can improve with the right techniques and strategies.
Myth # 2: Our brain stops learning when it gets older.
“I’m too old to learn new things.”
Truth: While brain stops developing at early adulthood, this doesn’t mean your learning journey stops at that age. There are inspiring cases of adults and elderly engaging their learning capabilities much later in life.
In Jim Kwik’s Limitless, he says that the brain remains adaptable through neuroplasticity. This allows you to form new connections and acquire skills at any age. You can learn more about this through our Limitless free book summary here.
Myth # 3: People learn enough from school already.
“I already graduated, why do I need to learn again?”
Truth: Even if you graduated from a good school, the world is constantly evolving. School only teaches the basics, and they end up become outdated when applied to real life today.
To stay competitive and adaptable, lifelong learning is essential. In fact, continuous learning helps keep the brain sharp. This makes it easier to adopt new skills and knowledge easier and faster.
Myth # 4: We have different learning styles.
“I’m a visual/right-brain kind of learner so it’s hard for me to learn this.”
Truth: People don’t have a single learning style. When they do stick to just one, learning ends up being less effective and more boring. According to Mind of Numbers, your preferred learning style does not lead to better learning efficiency.
Instead, look at how you extract ideas and construct a coherent structure around what you learn. This opens you up to different forms of learning.
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Myth # 5: Overlearning leads to bad learning/burnout.
“If I push too hard, I’ll burn out and forget everything anyway!”
Truth: Excessive memorization and repetitive learning is a bad idea and can cause burnout. However, overlearning can actually solidify your learning. Instead of fearing it, use it to sharpen your skills further and build long-term retention.
What you learn fades overtime. When you continue practicing, what you learn becomes muscle memory and second nature to you. This way, you can direct your energy to push your knowledge boundaries and expand what you know.
Overcoming these myths need a shift in perspective and a few foundational learning skills. Let’s dive into them.
3 Foundational Learning Skills for Adults
To make learning an effective and lifelong practice, you need a solid foundation. These three learning skills are the essential building blocks for better learning.
#1. Growth Mindset
Your ability to learn isn’t fixed—it can expand with enough effort, the right strategies, and the right mindset.
Instead of seeing failures as stumbling blocks, a growth mindset helps you see them as opportunities. In Carol Dweck’s Mindset, she outlines to difference of maintaining a fixed versus a growth mindset:
Leaning towards a growth-oriented perspective also augments your cognitive abilities, especially your neuroplasticity. This enables your brain to form new connections through continued learning, despite the setbacks.
By embracing failure as part of the learning process, you’ll grow resilient and adaptive from it. And as a result, you’ll help your brain build its neuroplasticity for more effective learning over time. You can learn more about growth mindsets through our Mindset free book summary.
#2. Habit-Building
Procrastination, distractions, and poor time management are common barriers to learning. So knowing and creating the right conditions for learning is as important as the learning process itself.
By building these habits, you’ll break through those barriers, and prime yourself for better learning:
- Regular Learning Routines – Assign dedicated and regular time or day for so you don’t neglect or forget them. It’s critical to also schedule time for breaks and getting enough hours of sleep. This will help manage your energy level and avoid overwork, sleep deprivation or burn out.
- Anti-Procrastination Habits – Use techniques like Mel Robbin’s 5-second rule or the Pomodoro technique to stay on track and build momentum.
- Focus and Concentration Habits – Turn off notifications, remove distracting clutter from your desk, and notify others about your study session so you don’t get disturbed.
Habits are a great way to boost your productivity and learning. To learn more about how to learn and build new habits that last, check out our article: How to Make Habits Stick.
#3. Goal-Driven Learning
Having a goal-driven approach to learning ensures that your efforts are meaningful and effective. You can achieve this by building your own meta-learning map to help you discover why, what, and how you will learn:
- Align Learning with Your Identity and Purpose – Connect your learning goals to who you want to become and what excites you. Whether you want to grow your career or feel fulfilled in life in general, defining who you wish to be will keep you motivated.
- Clarify Your Desired Outcome – Go deeper and more specific by visualizing and clarifying what success looks like for you. It could be aiming for expertise to level up your career, or wanting to share a hobby with your partner or friend. This will help you get focused on the concepts and processes that will actually bring success.
- Plan Your Learning Structure – With a clear vision in place dedicate 10% of your total learning sessions towards creating your own individualized learning plan.
Make sure to build achievable objectives if you are engaging in self-directed learning—whether it’s mastering a new language in six months or learning to code by building a project.
If you’re unsure where to start, you can even research how mentors and role models have mastered the skill. Take that research and break it into essential components to create a roadmap.
These efforts will ensure you’re learning efficiently instead of picking up random information and binge learning (which is ineffective!). Remember, you don’t need a perfect plan, but only a solid kick-off point to get you on the right path to more efficient learning.
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Is learning a new language / concept / instrument / skill hard to learn?
Different concepts and skills have varying levels of complexity. But, it’s possible to keep things simple by constructing your personal learning plan with a specific focus.
Once you have mastered that current level, you can expand your learning path outward, increasing complexity as you go. This process lowers the learning curve as you ease into more difficult concepts of your chosen subject.
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How the Brain Learns
Before we start our learning path, it’s important to understand how we acquire new learning and use it to our advantage. The book Make It Stick highlights 3 major steps for how learning occurs:
Step 1: Encoding – Taking in New Information
When you first encounter new information, your brain processes and stores it in short-term memory. However, short-term memory has limited capacity. Without reinforcement, most information is quickly forgotten.
To encode information better, you must actively engage with it. Passive reading or listening isn’t enough. Instead, explaining concepts in your own words or adopting interactive learning and memory games helps strengthen your initial memory retention.
Step 2: Consolidation – Strengthening and Storing Information
To make learning stick, the brain must consolidate new knowledge by strengthening neural pathways on a deeper level. In this step, the brain links short-term information to your long-term memory.
These cognitive tasks becomes easier when you revisit material over time. This means re-learning over several learning sessions, rather than cramming or binge learning everything at once.
With proper memory consolidation, information becomes more crystallized through long-term retention and is less likely to fade over time.
Step 3: Retrieval – Reinforcing Learning Through Recall
The final step in learning is retrieval, where you actively recall and use stored information. The more you practice retrieving what you’ve learned, the stronger the memory becomes.
Retrieval isn’t just about remembering—it’s making knowledge accessible and adaptable. This allows you to apply knowledge in situations when you need it.
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What is the best way to learn new things?
There are many tips and strategies out there on how to learn faster. But it’s important to stick to techniques that align with how your brain actually learns and how it works.
Techniques that support your brain’s ability to take new information, store it effectively, and retrieve it for later use potentially yield better results.
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You can learn more about how the brain works and how to use it to your advantage through our free Make It Stick book summary.
How to Learn: 5 Core Learning Tips and Techniques
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus hypothesized that we have a “forgetting curve”, and that we tend to forget 75% of what we learn in just six days. However, you can reinforce what you’ve learned with the right techniques in place.
In our research, we’ve handpicked top effective strategies for learning, based on various authors from our ReadinGraphics library:
1. Be the Teacher: Feynman Technique
Teaching a concept or topic forces you to simplify and clarify ideas, making them easier to grasp.
Try to explain topics as if teaching a child. This will reveal gaps in your knowledge and strengthen your understanding.
You’ll end up reinforcing what you know through active learning and develop a deeper grasp of the materials or methods.
2. Use Chunking and Memory Cues
Your brain processes manageable chunks of information more effectively compared to large pieces.
This chunking method helps you group related concepts together and reinforces memory consolidation. It becomes easier to adopt associative learning and create easy-to-remember memory cues.
So when something seems complex, break it down into smaller, manageable chunks. This method is particularly useful for mastering foreign languages, math, or technical skills.
3. Practice Spaced Repetition
Earlier, we talk about rest as a critical part of your learning habit. That’s because spacing out your learning can actually help improve it. Instead of binge learning, space out your study sessions to reinforce learning over extended periods of time.
Each time you revisit the information after a period of rest, you strengthen neural pathways. This reduces the chances of forgetting and builds long-term retention.
You can also elevate your spaced repetition by adding varied repetition. For example, if you are learning a new motor skill such as dancing, you can use different styles of dance instead of repeating the same routine over and over.
4. Build Learning Structures and Mental Models
Your ability to learn improves when you structure information in your brain more effectively. This goes beyond creating a lesson plan, and goes into how you build knowledge in your brain.
Learning systems can help you build better connections and foster deeper understanding. This makes it easier to absorb and retain new knowledge.
5. Reinforce Through Active Recall and Feedback Loops
Active recall strengthens memory by forcing your brain cells to reconstruct information. Instead of passively reviewing notes or materials, you can use more active learning techniques. You can try testing yourself, practicing without looking at references, and explaining concepts aloud to practice active memory recall.
Another way to refine your learning is to welcome and get immediate feedback. You can get this by asking feedback from friends, mentors, or even native speakers if you’re language learning.
Also, you can also engage in deliberate self-practice. This involves targeted, structured efforts to actively refine mistakes and improve.
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How long does it take to learn?
Some books popularize that you need 10,000 hours to master a specific skill. However, this process takes time, and not everyone needs to achieve this level of mastery to use what they’ve learned.
In some cases, even a few hours of focused, deliberate learning and practice is enough to get you started. You’ll learn more when you actively apply the basics and develop further from there.
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Book Recommendations for Learning Skills
What books should you read if you want to enhance your learning? Here are ReadinGraphics top picks to help you boost your learning process:
The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman
Many people feel overwhelmed by the idea of mastering a skill before using it. Josh Kaufman’s book shows that deconstructing skills can make learning feel achievable.
Ultralearning by Scott Young
Young’s book offers an intense, self-directed learning approach. Deep diving into techniques like problem-solving, deliberate practice, and feedback loops make it perfect for highly motivated learners.
A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
In A Mind for Numbers, Oakley explains how the brain processes information. With this knowledge at hand, she offers a few techniques like chunking and using different forms of thinking to enhance learning. This book is perfect for those looking to improve memory and study techniques.
Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel
Backed by cognitive science, this book debunks learning myths like cramming and passive review. Instead, it introduces proven techniques like retrieval practice and spaced repetition. This book is essential for students, educators, and lifelong learners.
Limitless by Jim Kwik
Jim Kwik’s holistic approach to learning enhances memory, mindset, and motivation. This book helps with overcoming mental blocks about learning and lifelong brain performance.
Ready to Kickstart Your Learning Journey?
Learning doesn’t have to be difficult, and it doesn’t stop after high school or university. Whether you want to switch careers, develop a new skill, or expand your knowledge, the right techniques make the process easier, faster, and more effective.
It isn’t just about absorbing information and achieving academic success. Applying what you know to achieve real success in your career, personal growth, is a worthwhile learning endeavor.
With the help of effective strategies, learning becomes a powerful tool that unlocks opportunities, fuels progress, and turns challenges into achievements. Start today, and take the first step toward lifelong mastery.
If you’re ready to dive deeper, explore Readingraphics’ detailed summaries of the best books on learning. With actionable insights and visual aids, they’ll equip you for more effective and lifelong learning. Take the first step today—Subscribe to access all these great titles AND more than 300 other best-selling book summaries, to begin your learning journey!
