Learning doesn’t happen inside your awareness.
Which is a good thing—you don’t have to try and “think” your way to being better at a language, or public speaking, or writing (or doing strength moves)…
If you’ve ever tried, you’ll realise how frustrating and futile this is.
On the other hand, if you’ve ever gotten very good at something, there’s one factor that you may have noticed was absolutely necessary for this to occur (and is present every single time any significant level of skill is achieved).
Time.
But think about it and you’ll realise that it’s not necessarily time spent doing the thing. It’s time that you have been doing the thing.
And this is a critical distinction to make.
Say I wanted to learn to paint and had 100 hours to allocate to practicing. I could spread this effort over two weeks, painting for 7 hours a day. Or I could spread the same 100 hours over two years, painting for just 8 minutes a day.
Which do you think would result in me being a better painter by the end?
Hopefully your life experience allows you to reach the answer intuitively.
But I can tell you from my own experience testing this concept over many years across a range of fields that the result is not even close.
It’s almost insulting how little the actual total invested hours seems to matter, once you control for consistency (showing up every week) and just look at the time elapsed since starting the practice.
So what does this imply for our learning efforts?
How to Guarantee Learning Anything You Want As Soon As Possible
1. Design a process you can repeat daily or weekly with unwavering consistency, regardless of what life (inevitably) throws are you. It therefore must take very little time, or it’s not realistic.
e.g. 5 minutes a day of reading, 1 minute a day of meditation, 20 minutes a week of strength training, 15 minutes a day of each of your most essential business projects, etc.
2. Do it. Forever. Don’t try to be good—just show up. Try your best. Use the skills you currently have and try to be as good as you currently can.
That’s literally all you have to do.
Over time, that level of skill will improve. Suddenly you’re now three months into taking photos, and you realise they don’t suck as much as they used to. You look in the mirror after lifting for a year, and realise you’re suddenly kind of jacked. You notice the anxiety you had going on a date has almost completely evaporated since you started going on them regularly a year ago.
You don’t have to think about it. Let your brain do the adapting for you. Just like you’d let your muscles recover for you.
You can literally SEE this process take place in fitness.
It takes months upon months of repeated cycles of stimulation and recovery to get jacked muscles and a great looking physique (and have the strength to do impressive movements). But that stimulation can be done in well under half an hour a week if you cut the waste.
So why are we so resistant to seeing the human brain (the thing that literally needs to physically restructure itself in order for us to learn anything) as requiring the same timeline for change?
It’s not about time spent doing. It’s about the time in between.
And that time is going to pass anyway. So why not be reshaping your brain into one that can speak that language, approach those people, give that speech, run that business… (just like you may as well be be reshaping your body to exert that force and look incredible naked as a result).
Accelerated Learning – Is It Possible?
So, can you “accelerate” learning? Well, it depends how you define the question.
Can we get a better, faster result than 99% of people when they go to learn a new skill, in a tiny fraction of the time?
Yes.
In my view, the baseline we’re competing with is woeful, because 99% of people:
a) Try way too hard with any given pursuit, set an unsustainable practice for themselves, and give up well before they spend enough time on the thing to accumulate any significant level of skill, and
b) Even if they do stick at it, because they’ve committed to such a time-consuming weekly practice, the quality of that practice is heavily diluted.
For example, although Mike might be spending an hour a day playing piano (or lifting weights at the gym), the five minutes a day that I commit to is FAR more concentrated and intense, and driven by much more enthusiasm and positive emotion (which we know is critical to effective learning). The result is, un-intuitively:
a) Probably very similar results, in terms of piano skill per week of practice (for the gym example, RINGSTRONG has physically demonstrated this in terms of muscle & strength gain)
b) But almost certainly—unless Mike accepts piano as being a major part of his life and decides that it’s worth sacrificing relationships, work, downtime, and/or other pursuits and experiences in his life for—in five years I will still be playing piano, and be far better than Mike who quit after a couple of months because it wasn’t worth it.
Which it wasn’t!
Putting It All Into Practice
You can truly learn whatever you want for such a small sacrifice of your time, it’s embarrassing.
But while it might only take 20 minutes a week, it still relies on you showing up consistently for the next 10 years of your life.
Whatever your chosen skill, choose a practice you can commit to, regardless of how small it is. And then just don’t quit.
Then let those ten years pass. You’ll be shocked at what happens.