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Newsletter #6 14/04/2024

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Hi

When you try to learn something new depending on the skill in question you may be driven by different things. Depending on what drives you determines how passionately you would pursue the new skill.

But often the passion is not enough since no matter what you do, sometimes the new skill does not stick.

There are many ways to ensure what you learn stays with you forever. For me, learning to teach others is what helped me the most.

This newsletter is to share the top 3 ways to learn something to retain it forever.

Challenge Yourself

Picking the same weights every day and doing the same workout will not give the same benefits as challenging yourself to advance to something more. Picking heavier weights with new forms is what pushes your muscles to grow.

When you challenge yourself, you make mistakes, which are a goldmine for learning about possible problems someone using these skills may have. Knowing the problem via mistakes helps you dive deeper and learn something new about the skill. These mistakes act as a feedback loop. This feedback loop is what helps retain skills.

This feedback can be self-learned, or something pointed out by a a peer or accountability coach you work with.

Use Existing Skills

You need not reinvent the wheel every time. Building on your existing is the key to advancing yourself to acquire more skills. When a toddler learns to speak or write they start with easy words, then learn how to connect them, and then form long sentences.

Once you learn how to code, the knowledge is easily transferable across different programming languages, since the core concepts and language are essentially the same.

Above are a few examples of how what you know already can become a reference to improve further. Many learning platforms evaluate you for your existing skills before customizing the learning plan for you. This ensures you adapt easily to the new environment.

You may sometimes charter new territories when learning something new, try to relate it to your existing knowledge. Relating new skills with existing ones increases your comfort with the new task.

Teach Others

This is the most important step of all. Learn with an intent to teach. When your intent to learn something has an added responsibility of teaching the same to someone else, you tend to delve deeper. This happens since you want to be ready with an answer to any question that will be thrown at you.

When you teach someone else you also tend to recall things you learn. When you teach what you learned, retrieving the information helps you retain the knowledge for longer.

Teaching others requires you to structure the information you have. Structuring your existing knowledge in a teachable form is a great exercise that helps retain information longer.

I have written about this in my blog of the week, do check it out.

The person you teach can also provide a great opportunity for you to learn. Provided you are listening to what the other person is saying. Os from Mogul Message covers beautifully in the blog Why Letting Others Talk Leads to a Quality Jackpot.

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