It is a safe bet for me to assume that people in the self development field want to learn. But I fear that a lot of people don’t distinguish between two different types of learning and consequently neglect one or the other.

The two types of learning are:

• Learning in the area of study [Substance-learning]
• Learning about how to learn in the area of study [Method-learning]
  

Now these may seem obvious but most people will let them blend together as one and this hampers our ability to learn efficiently.

An example is necessary.

When we want to learn about the effects of anger in our life there are a multitude of methods around. All of them provide Substance-learning when applied to our lives. Taking retrospection as one method, we wonder(as all good learners do) if there is a more effective way to learn about our anger.

So we engage in some Method-learning and discover the method of self observation during our day. We apply it and discover some gains as we gather some more substance data about our anger.

This an example of Method-learning in it simplest form. But the realm of Method-learning is much greater than this and benefits even more so.

Methods of Method-Learning

1. Discovering new and improved methods

   This is the method used in the above example. It is a method of discovering and utilising the knowledge of others who have gone before us.

   I have just started learning Japanese and consequently I have been diving into the research areas of language acquisition and memory (There are a lot of chinese characters!). The rate at which I can learn jumps every time I come across a fundamental discovery in the material.

2. Extracting general principles

   Whenever we are studying a particular area there will be many different ways to learn about it. Among these different ways there will always be some common principles. When you can identify commonalities among methods that bring results you can start to do two things. Throw away the excess edges that don’t benefit the methods and you can focus your effort on improving your utilisation of the effective principles.

   When I was learning to play the guitar I was taught to practice slow lots and independently I read about the concept of muscle memory. Looking at both of these methods there was a clear overlap. They both emphasised the importance of training the muscles to do the right thing. Consequently I learnt that the fastest way to learn to play guitar was to practice perfectly lots.

   Sometimes I like to think of common principles as Super Methods that others are a subset of. This is because too often ‘principles’ are forgotten, thought of as having only theoretical value. Calling them super methods reinforces their supreme power and effectiveness.

3. Fine tuning for personal use

   Everybody has different learning strengths and learning weaknesses. Because of this it is necessary to look at our methods and consider how we might tune them to be more effective for us. It is important to note that just because we all learn differently that it is not an excuse to say some methods do not work for us in cases where we simply have not invested enough time in learning how a method works.

   Fine tuning is largely a combination of experimentation and application of general principles. We have to take our current methods and tweak little aspects of them in order to see if we can improve them for us. The tricky part here is consistently trying our modification for a long enough period of time to see if it benefits us.

A Learning Formula

Amount of Substance Learnt = ∑t Effort Perseverance during t * Invested Effort in Method Learning at t

Excusing my poor attempt at a mathematical formula in wordpress this is what I am trying to say.

The amount of substance that we learn is a function of how long we persevere multiplied by how much we have already learnt about how to learn in our desired area.

If we just keep exerting time and effort we will basically learn at the same rate. If we invest time in learning how to learn better then our time and effort spent learning will be more effective now and in all future efforts to learn.

This is key, don’t neglect explicitly putting in time to learn about learning and reviewing the results.