Why, what and how to learn to become successful

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In today’s fast-paced world change is occurring with rapid speed. Not only do we face continuous changes but also more and more complex systems and environments that need to be understood to navigate them effectively. To cope with this efficiently keeping an open mind and being interested in learning new things is crucial.

You should view learning as a continuous process that should never stop. Make it a habit to improve yourself and absorb new information. Information and knowledge have never been easier to access so make use of it.

Some might now ask, why bother? Why should you keep learning and putting in effort when you already got your degree or settled into a job?

My answer to this would be: Your job is not as secure as you thought. It is highly unlikely that you will stay your whole life in one position, and even if, the requirements and tasks will probably change over time and you need to adapt. On top of this, you likely want to achieve more or earn more money, and instead of complaining that someone got promoted or advanced, build your foundation to win this game by making learning a habit. There is the saying that knowledge is power. I would say applied knowledge is power. So always try to figure out how knowledge could be applied to your life or workplace to take full advantage.

This brings me to a core belief that is important, there are people who believe that whatever basic abilities they have are based on talent or some given circumstances and that this cannot be changed.
This is called a fixed mindset. If someone is stuck in this thinking they take care more about documenting their current abilities than developing them.
I firmly believe that almost everyone can heavily influence and develop their abilities and talents through hard work, dedication, and practice. Yes, there are maybe talented people that are better than you, but if this talented person is not working hard on honing his/her skills they will lose out in the long run.
This mindset is called a growth mindset – the belief that you can influence your abilities by applying hard work and learning. Make it a habit to grow. This is quite difficult and it is not something that comes naturally and requires conscious efforts.

Now that we talked about why you should keep an open mind and continuously learn, let’s talk about the what and later about the tactics and practices you can use to learn faster.

What to learn?

Aside from the timeless basics like math, physics, language & grammar as well as logic it is difficult to say with certainty what an individual should learn. I would say it depends on your goals and interests. There is always the question of whether you should specialize and build a specific skill or if you should build broader competencies.

In my opinion, it definitely makes sense to specialize to a certain extent but also continuously build your broader competencies. Hiring and employment statistics have shown that individuals with a specific skill are hired faster after graduation than the ones with a broader set of competencies. Interestingly that no longer holds true the older the employee becomes, especially towards retiring age candidates with broad competencies tend to remain more successful and employed than specialized people.

Consider that nowadays many people work in fields that they did not initially study for.

The economy is changing and the worldwide pandemic seems to have accelerated this. According to the 2020 “Future of Jobs” report of the World Economic Forum, it makes sense to focus careers and skills falling into the following skill groups as they will be the most relevant in the next coming 3-5 years:

• critical thinking and analysis
• problem-solving
• skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility.

Aside from focusing on the above, I would in general recommend that you follow your own radar. As long as you are able to continuously learn you will be able to find success. The way that I go about identifying what best to learn is by asking myself the following questions and picking topics based on my answers:

• Where do I have weak spots? What do I need to improve?
  • Example: How to present, Learning a new cloud architecture concept, etc…
• What interests me and what would I like to know more about?
  • Indulge your interest, even if there is no direct correlation to your current work or tasks it might be handy in the future.
• What might be beneficial for future challenges?
  • Do you foresee a career change and need to learn something new? Is there a big project upcoming and you need to refresh your Project Management skills? You expect your company is moving from classical IT towards the cloud, so you want to read up on the cloud and how it works.. etc.

I would like to end this section with the following citation (unfortunately, I do not know the source):

Don’t just follow your passions, broaden your passions, and your life will be enriched beyond measure

How to learn / Learning strategies

Learning to learn is a skill in itself. Becoming good at learning requires like every capability requires practice and repetition. Luckily there are a lot of studies and information on how to retain information as fast as possible and what techniques work.

Before I go into the techniques I just want to highlight that if you are one of the slower learners, don’t get frustrated with this. Yes, there might be people that can rush through new material and keep an impressive amount of information but consider yourself more like a hitchhiker than a race car driver. The journey of a hitchhiker and race car driver cannot really be compared. The hitchhiker can smell the forest, stop and watch every detail of a leaf and will have a very different experience than the race car driver. What I want to say is, you might consider yourself slow but this is not a bad thing. You will work with the material differently and more intensely and likely retain even more details.

The below section contains learning techniques that work very well for me and have been scientifically proven to be effective. There are of course many more variations and techniques. If you feel those do not fit search for learning methods or practices online.

In most cases, I start learning a new topic by trying to understand the big picture or get a high-level understanding of the material. To do so there are several options:

• When learning with a book or course, review the chapters/index titles and think about what you might learn here and what will be the content of the chapters. When you go through the chapter you already have some questions to ask at the ready.
• Search for summaries of concepts related to the material and read them.
  ATTENTION: Summaries or high-level descriptions are often inaccurate due to the complex nature of a topic. They are helpful to get a first understanding. However, don’t get married to the explanation as it is often an oversimplification.

In general, I always aim to really understand a topic instead of just memorizing it. To get really deep into a material you will have to memorize and practice to get the technical terms and specifics down, but understanding always comes before memorization for me.

Once I have a rough understanding I will go through the chapters and will create my own summaries and learning materials out of the chapters, describing the critical concepts and critical information. Since you are actively working with the material it supports your learning

While working through the information I use recall since it is one of the most effective techniques to retain knowledge. To use recall look or read a page or section of your material. Then look away and try to remember/recall what you know about this section. Repeat this till you are satisfied. It is more effective than just re-reading a page.

Practice & Play or working with the material is extremely effective to transfer knowledge into long-term memory. To truly know a topic you will have to go through iterations of application and theoretical repetition. That being said, one of the most effective ways to understand things is by playing around with a topic. For example, if you learn to program you will learn way faster by playing around, writing programs, and trying to understand what happens. Not all topics are equally suitable to do this, but if you have a chance to let your inner child out, do it!

You probably heard in school that you should start early with learning. The main point is that you can learn across different days and maybe weeks. This is not just something teachers say there is actual merit to this that helps you with learning. It is called distributed practice and means distributing your learning sessions between taking a short nap, a conscious break of a few minutes, a few hours, or a day between learning sessions on the same material. The method is especially effective in situations where you have the feeling that you get stuck with understanding. The reason behind this is that you will engage two different modes in the brain that work best together in tandem. The so-called focused mode and diffuse mode. Both have different functions. Let me explain below:

Focused mode is engaged when you concentrate on something, for example, while you learn new material. Focused mode is:

• narrow and targeted
• Methodical
• Tactical
• Necessary for deep work

Diffuse mode is something that you do not actively engage, it is basically your brain at rest. When in this mode you are not actively thinking about the new concepts or problems that you encountered. Your brain will still do the work and surprise you with new insights. Everyone knows those lightbulb moments:
You are stuck with a problem for a while. Frustrated you give up or engage in different activities and suddenly at the weirdest time, you have a genius idea that solves your problem.
Diffuse mode is:

• Broad and conceptual
• Meandering
• Strategic
• Uncovers meaning and connection

One of my favorite techniques for understanding and retaining knowledge is explaining it to others or self-explanation. The target is for you to explain it as simple as possible with your own words to someone else but without losing the content. Often during the explanation, you will detect where you have gaps in your knowledge or understanding. Since you actively work with the material it also helps with long-term retention.

The technique works also if you explain it to yourself. Approach this as you would talk to another person. I would also like to mention here the Feynman technique which is a kind of self-explanation technique. Try to explain a concept/subject in plain and simple terms on a piece of paper.

• Write concept on top of a sheet of paper
• Explain in your own words as if you would be teaching
• Review what was written and identify what is wrong and go back to the learning material to correct the answer
• Scratch and rewrite the sections where you had issues and use again simple terms or own terms

Those are the main techniques that I use regularly to study or learn new things.

One last thing I would like to say is, even if you do not have a lot of time, make a conscious effort to update your brain. If you would just read 5 pages of a book each day it would translate into ~1700 pages per year. These are two bigger books that you just downloaded into your brain. Continuous growth does not need to happen in bounds and leaps. In fact, it rarely does. Aim to improve yourself a little bit every day and it will compound tremendously! So stop wasting away and go for it!

I would love to know what other techniques worked well for you? Or do you have a story about what you struggled with and why? Let me know about it in the comments!