How to learn (and remember things)

We're all familiar with the sinking feeling we acquire (very quickly) after finishing a book. You're lucky if you remember half in a week, and a quarter in two.

The fact of the matter is that most indirect learning is a fragile façade which crumbles easily at our first need for retrieval or practical application.

Our education system, with its obsession for standardized tests and rote memorization, has done nothing good for the science of memory. If anything, it has had a decidedly negative impact on our ability to learn, and has created generations of insecure and vulnerable learners.

So how do we cut through the noise and build robust, antifragile knowledge structures? We need strategies for information acquisition and retention.

How do we learn, and how we ensure that what we do learn, isn't forgotten? Here are a few of my strategies.

Learning

Be interested

As a rule, I don't learn about things that don't interest me. If they don't interest me but are necessary, I find a way to get interested. As a starting point, it's extremely difficult to get to any kind of depth in a subject without a genuine intellectual curiosity.

Metalearning

Before diving into anything, chart a map of the territory. Spend time understanding the structure of what you're about to learn. This is absolutely not trivial; it's your insurance policy against drowning in irrelevant details. I have three visual approaches I like to utilize:

1. 30,000ft to 1,000ft

I've used this for literally everything - from consulting on massive digital transformation projects to learning languages. You take a complicated, scary concept, and start with the simplest possible interpretative framework.

For example, when we did transformational consulting work for large commercial banks; we had to operate in an environment in which we never had visibility over all the data we needed.

Our core framework to navigate ambiguity and the unknown was: "Why Change -> Future Direction -> Roadmap"

These 3 steps fed into each other and set the foundation for everything we built underneath.

• Why Change -> What factors are driving the necessity for us to change what we're doing?
• Future Direction -> What does the available option space look like to us to meet the change, and where is the highest potential ROI?
• Roadmap -> How are we going to set ourselves on these avenues and get to our desired outcome? How will we measure progress and make sure we're on track

This is how you take a simple framework, and use it to guide the direction of your efforts. How does the learning effort look at 30,000ft - and slowly start building the scaffolding downwards such that you get to a level of depth where you can go top-down and bottoms-up seamlessly with no breakage in logic, and this is a killer framework for understanding where you are relative to your overarching objective.

2. Starting with the outcome in mind

Similarly to the 30,000 ft -> 1,000 ft, this is simply a slightly less intellectually rigorous approach to start with the learning objective and work backwards. In cases where the subject is not overly complex, it can be a less cumbersome and more motivating approach.

Start with your overarching goal, and back into what you need to learn in order to achieve those goals, from a strictly practical perspective. Those formulate your learning goals.

3. Decision trees

Speaking of intellectually rigorous approaches, McKinsey has perfected this to a science. Just go look at any of the existing material on this subject. Decision trees are generally used for root cause analysis, but as a function of starting with the outcome in mind, they can easily be applied to work backwards into what you need to learn in order to get to your goal.

Set big goals

This ties in with learning by practice below but as a principle goes even beyond learning. If there are external benchmarks for competency, for best results, go above and beyond what you need to learn.

With a language learning example, if your goal is to reach conversational fluency, aim for fluency instead. Be aggressive. Worst case, you get to conversational fluency way faster. Best case, you surprise even yourself.

Learning by practice

To the greatest extent possible, learn by actually doing what you want to learn. The closer you can connect your learning goal to the specific context of how you will actually apply that knowledge, the more effective and efficient you will be.

Whether it's learning a language or learning to code, you have to overcome your fear of looking and feeling stupid, and instead break learning into projects. Formulate the critical path of neural connections - aka tread the path for the first time - then go back and forth.

You'll pick up additional context and skills along the way, but they're going to be directly related to your learning project. And once this is done, if there are adjacent or auxiliary concepts to learn - they'll actually stick because they'll connect back to the path you've already created.

This is directly antithetical to classroom learning which tends to be divorced from practice, and anecdotally is one of the primary reasons I see people study languages for years in classrooms only to fail to reach any minimal conversational ability in the target language. The closer you get to application, the better you'll learn, and the more likely it'll stick.

Remembering

Spaced Repetition

This is a powerful technique for both acquiring and retaining knowledge that leverages the power of time and consistency. The concept is simple: as you learn, you should review what you've learned at progressively increasing intervals. Start with frequent reviews, then gradually space them out.

Where applicable, Anki is my all-time favorite app for spaced repetition flashcards and it does the time-interval spacing on autopilot. It's like resistance training for your memory.

Connect the dots

Think of your knowledge as a vast, interconnected web. Connecting the dots is how you integrate new information into this existing network. When you learn something new, actively seek connections to what you already know. Ask yourself: "How does this relate to X? What similarities does it have with Y?"

The more connections you create through this exercise, the more resilient your understanding becomes. This anchors your learning and helps adopt what would otherwise be isolated facts into a more robust, integrated knowledge structure that's far less likely to fade over time.

Retrieval Practice

This is a concept I picked up from "Ultralearning" by Scott H. Young and its worked wonders for me. It comes from the perspective that your brain is not a database, it's a muscle. You need to exercise it regularly by recalling information without any sort of support.

What this means is that you benefit more from painfully struggling to recall something without the use of any study aid than you would repeatedly skimming your notes or study materials. This includes avoiding the use of prompts like Anki.

Teaching

Explain and debate concepts with others, and solicit critical (constructive) feedback. The simple act of articulating knowledge both reinforces memory and helps you identify and confront gaps in your understanding.

Metacognition

Over time, become aware of your learning process and what works for you specifically. Monitor what works and what doesn't. Don't just do things because they work for someone else. Do what works for you.

Closing

True learning is not about accumulating and hoarding facts the way we were taught in classrooms. Learning is about building a resilient knowledge base that is easily retrievable, applicable, and flexible to the occasion.

It took me a long time to re-learn how to learn and remember. In a world obsessed with efficiency, sometimes the most efficient path is the one that seems inefficient at first glance.

This is why in a world that's still largely obsessed with credentials and certificates, the most valuable learning often happens outside formal structures. Embrace the struggle. Court difficulty and plan ahead. Learn by practice.

Recommended reading:

• Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything