How to become a Rapid Learner

Learning Well Depends on More than Just Your IQ

Intelligence and talent play a role in how quickly you learn. But eventually everyone, no matter how smart, comes up against a learning challenge that threatens to break them. For some people this point comes in high-school, for others it will be in college or in their profession.

Whether you adapt and push through that challenge or give up depends a lot on having the right methods. If you’ve learned how learning works, you can confidently tackle any challenge, even one that you don’t feel smart enough to solve right now.

You can’t change your genes or natural talents. But with good learning techniques, you can push the limit of what you think you’re capable of. Learning how to learn helps you become the best version of yourself.

Imagine Confidently Acing Your Classes

Imagine going into any class, no matter how difficult, with a clear strategy. You know how to analyze the class and break it down into particular learning challenges. You know how to organize your time and learn every part efficiently.

When you get stuck, you’re equipped with dozens of different methods for handling any type of problem you might encounter. Too many facts to learn? You can apply SRS, mnemonics and distributed practice. Can’t wrap your head around an idea? Break it down with the Feynman technique or 5-Year Old Method.

Best of all, because you know what you know, you can walk into any exam with confidence.

Accelerate Your Career by Learning the Skills that Matter

What would your career look like if you could learn faster? For starters, you could quickly become proficient at the work you’re doing now, so you can work with less stress.

Next, you can figure out what skills you need to reach the next level and learn those too. You’ll advance faster than your colleagues. More importantly, you’ll become good at what you do. Work will be more enjoyable because everyday you can say to yourself, “I’m good at this.”

Switch from falling behind to keep up to accelerating your career by investing in your learning process.

Accelerate Your Career by Learning the Skills that Matter

Become a Smarter, More Knowledgeable Person

What would you learn if you knew you’d be successful? Would you become fluent in multiple languages? Would you learn to play piano or guitar? Would you become an expert in your finances, relationships or psychology?

Learning can be a frustrating experience when it doesn’t work. But if you can do it well, it can be one of the best experiences in life. The feeling of getting good at something you didn’t know before is addictive.

Many polyglots, people who learn multiple languages, go onto learn many more. Why? Because once you figure out how to learn one language, the process goes from being frustrating to fun. Once you crack the code of learning a language, you want to do it over and over again.

There is a code to learning anything. Crack the code and you can enjoy learning anything, from French to finance, computer programming to quantum mechanics.

Why Learning Can Be Frustrating

How well you learn touches virtually every area of your life. Despite this, learning how to learn is a subject rarely taught in schools. As a result, most people’s studying methods are based on their own trial-and-error attempts to find the best methods.

Sometimes this process works—you’ll stumble upon the right combination of habits and methods and learning will feel easy. You’ve probably experienced some situations in your life when learning seemed to happen smoothly and automatically.

Unfortunately, whether this happens or not often depends on luck. You’re just as likely to fail to pick up on the right strategy, and therefore, struggle painfully through some skills, subjects and classes.

Sometimes I just don’t feel smart enough.”

Have you ever felt like you’re just not smart enough to learn something you need to learn? Maybe it was a class you took that destroyed your confidence. Maybe it was a particular domain of learning—that you’re not good at math, that you didn’t inherit the "gene" for languages, or that you’re not artistic or athletic.

Many people have convinced themselves that learning some things are impossible for them. They’re convinced they simply don’t have the gifts that other people seem to have.

While people do vary in ability, I’d like to offer a counterexplanation: you haven’t found the right methods yet. I’m convinced that everyone is capable of learning anything that anyone else can learn. It might take some people a little longer, but nothing is “impossible” to learn.

Find the right method and you too can learn anything.

I can’t keep up with everything I need to learn.”

Do you ever feel like you can’t keep up with everything you need to learn? Maybe you’re swamped with classwork, wondering how you’ll possibly learn everything before the final exam. Maybe your work is evolving so quickly you feel that by the time you learn a new tool, it’s already outdated.

Good learning methods don’t just make learning possible, they also make it faster. Choose the wrong method and while you may learn eventually, it can take much more time. By investing in understanding how learning works, you can eliminate waste and save hundreds of hours.

I know this firsthand. During the MIT Challenge, I watched lectures at 1.5x the speed, slowing it down whenever I didn’t understand something. This allowed me to invest more time in selective practice problems, a more efficient approach to learning the material. Similar method choices also allowed me to learn Spanish better in three months than I could with French over a year.

If you feel like you can’t keep up, you have to first stop running in the wrong direction.

Can You Learn an MIT Degree in One Year? Learn Four Languages in 12 Months?

I’m a learning enthusiast. For the last ten years, I’ve maintained a blog about my own adventures in learning. My perspective is a blend of hard-won practical insights from my many learning experiments and my own private study of cognitive science, memory and neurobiology.

In 2012, I completed the MIT Challenge. This was an effort to pass the exams and complete the programming projects that make up an undergraduate MIT degree in computer science. The purpose of this project was to show that you could approximate the education of an elite school with a fraction of the cost and time, all from the comfort of your home.

Two years later, I completed a second challenge, The Year Without English. In this challenge, a friend and I travelled to four countries, learning Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean. To show that I’m not special, and that method really does make a difference, my friend, Vat, also learned all four languages despite never having learned a new language as an adult before.

Later I decided to see if I could apply the same insights to a different kind of skill: drawing faces. How much better could you get at drawing in just thirty days of practice? Although drawing, languages and computer science may feel different, the general strategies for learning efficiently are often the same.

Learning is my passion and I want to take the years of experiments and research I’ve done and condense it into a format that you can use to quickly improve your ability to learn.

Who is Rapid Learner For?

For Students...

Rapid Learner is well suited for middle, high-school, undergrad and graduate students. The format of the course will teach you how to break down any classes you might have into simple actions you can take to learn anything.

This course is about the act of learning, not tricks to pass a particular exam. That’s why it works for students of nearly every subject. Although the contents of subjects differ—medicine, physics, architecture and history—there are patterns that underlie learning anything. I teach you how to recognize those patterns, so you’ll know which method to apply when and where.

For Professionals...

The format of this course doesn’t apply just to students. If you need to learn for your job—needing to pick up new skills or bodies of knowledge—this course will also work for you.

Because professionals are often more time constrained and have less structure than students, knowing how to learn efficiently is even more important. Rapid Learner will give you the tools to keep up with the cutting edge of your field, learn new skills as you need them and systematically become an expert at what you do.

For Anyone Who Wants to Learn More...

Would you like to learn new languages? Understand business, psychology, relationships or technology? Learn an instrument or sport? Read more books and remember it for years afterward?

Learning how to learn is one of the best investments you can make in yourself.

Rapid Learner will guide you through
a process for learning anything.

BUY NOW!

1. Project - Ensure success before you start

Learn how to take any learning task—classes, self-education or professional development—and turn it into a learning project.

What you’ll learn:

How to break any learning goal into weekly chunks
Find the right materials to learn effectively without getting overwhelmed or distracted
Smooth your schedule to prevent stress and burnout
How to design projects to learn practical skills