Mastery: How to Learn Anything Fast | Nishant Kasibhatla

I have learned how to learn anything fast form Nishant Kasibhatla in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVO8Wt_PCgE)

He showed us that if we want to achieve mastery we have to do “Deep Learning” instead of “Shallow learning”.

He begins his talk with a demo on how his brain can memorize 30 digits sequence of numbers in less than 3 minutes. Turns out he is one of the guiness world record holder for memorizing numbers. Then he continued by showing us the pictures of Bill gates, Warren Buffets, Elon Musk, and Operah. He asked the audience about the common thing that all of them have. There are lots of answers like billionaire, rich, and inspirational. But there is one common thing that we usually ignore is they are the masters of their own game.

Because of this Nishant said “The learning ability defines someone earning capacity.”

That’s why if you can learn faster you would stand out and has bigger opportunity to achieve your goals.

So how are we going to increase our learning ability?

We can think of learning as a process that takes input (courses, seminars, materials, books, podcasts, blogs, etc.) and produces some output (teaching, products, implementation of what have been learned, etc.).

Most of people only focuses on inputs, they go to more seminars, attend webinars, buy more books, and so on. But they are forget to produce the output of their learning. They forgot to reflect and see what is the main takeaway of something they read.

This process of taking so many inputs without producing any output is called “Shallow learning”. This is not what we want.

What we want is to have deep learning.

We want to learn (takes input). But after that we also want to reflect, implementing, and sharing what we have earned from this input. So there are 4 steps to get deep learning:

• Learn
• Reflect
• Implement
• Share

Learn

We need to ensure that we have high quality of input. Means we are focusing 100% of our attention to the learning activity and not get distracted by other things like smartphone, notifications, etc.

We should not multi-tasking when we are learning. Instead, do single-tasking.

Reflect

Pause for a while and ask your self “What is the main take away of the information I just learn?", “How can I implement it in my work? in my family? in my life?”

When we stop for a moment to answer those questions, it is how learning solidifies.

Implement

This is where the magic happen. We should implement what we have learned so we could get benefit out of it. If we are learning without implementation, we will get illusion of competence. It’s a condition where we think that we are already smart but in reality we aren’t.

So he suggested us to write down actionable items from the information that we gained during our learning process and schedule it in to our calendar to implement it.

For me, this post on my personal blog is one of that actionable items.

Share

Perhaps most of you have ever heard “If you want to understand something more clear, you need to teach it”. This is the main idea of sharing what we have learned. We can pay more attention to what we have learned when we try to teach it to someone else.

If we can categorize these 4 steps, Learn is an input, while Reflect, Implement, and Share are the outputs.

So if we want to do deep learning we need to focus more on the outputs and have the best quality of the input.