Accelerated Learning

We have a need to learn more and more, and continuously challenging your brain. We don’t have time for that? Do we?

There lies the reason why accelerated learning comes into play…

If you find yourself wanting to make a game, or learn speed reading, take on a new job skill. That is only going to take 20 hours of deliberate practice to get you to a point where you can apply it.

From there you’ll need to hit that 100 hours as quickly as possible.

Speeding up videos, speedreading, interleaving, and taking in swathes of information is how you can go about doing that.

You only NEED to get to 20 Hours not 10,000

In reality if you want to become better at a skill, more than MOST people, then it only takes about 20 hours.

Deliberate Practice

The reason being that it is only about 20 hours, is that due to your fresh excitement, and everything about that skill being new. That it is a lot easier to get into DILBERATE practice, meaning much more effective practice, when you first start.

Defined by the psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues, Deliberate Practice is “the individualized training activities specially designed by a coach or teacher to improve specific aspects of an individual's performance through repetition and successive refinement” -Source

While the design by a teacher part is key, and that is true. However I do think that your first 20 hours (maybe slightly less for some people), would be akin to that level of training. Simply because you are NEW to that skill.

Going back to the TED talk, he goes into that mindset of acquiring new skills quickly. However I think that AFTER that initial "beginner's gains" as they're called it the fitness world, then you have to find a teacher.

Expertise is a range 8,000-12,000 Hours

In order to accelerate your learning after that initial burst, then you need to take any resource you can find. Scrutinize it, and figure out if it is actually quality material for that area of knowledge.

However you don't know what you don't know yet. Meaning this is why a coach or teacher is helpful. Thus accelerating your learning in that skill.

When I teach swimming I am able to get my students to level up quickly because of how they react. If they aren't responding well to a method, then I switch methods. In order to find the quickest route.

That doesn't mean the old method won't work, but it just will take longer. These are the situations that if you were by yourself you CAN'T know if the path you are on is the quickest or slowest.

Hence why in some cases you can become an expert at less than 10k hours, but for some people it takes MORE than 10k hours.

Learning at a Faster Pace

Let's say you are going the autodidact route, and there isn't a way for you to get a teacher. At least not yet. To be fair besides acceleration, the point of a guru is to get you into a deeper level too. They'll teach you when the learning materials end.

However even if you are by yourself, there are things you can do to accelerate your learning!

Speeding up Videos and Podcasts

This is a skill ^, and a lot of people don't realize that. I trained myself to listen at higher rates. Honestly I still feel like Spotify and YouTube are two separate skills actually, on the same tree. As on Spotify when I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, I tend to listen at 2.6x speed. Whereas on YouTube it will range from 1.8x to 2.5x.

It matters in the context, with just listening you may be doing something else, so you need to have a mental focus to aim your listening to their words, while still watching out for cars if say you were on a walk.

With videos you may have a visual element, and you're sitting so it can be a bit more helpful in that case. This is why I can't watch LIVE streams anymore, as they are too slow! haha

PRO TIP: There are extensions for your web browser to speed up videos via keyboard keys, and they make a night/day difference!

Speed Reading (both types)

This is definitely a harder skill to acquire, and depending on your book. I would warn you that in some cases it is wiser to read normally.

However the way I see it, is that speed reading is good for two circumstances:

1. You're not gonna be able to make time to read the book normally at all. So you might as well speed read and get what you can from it.
2. You have time to read it normal, so you speed read it first for macro comprehension, then you read it normal to cement the ideas.

Speed reading in the context of what I wrote above, I was thinking of the "chunking" or physically moving your eyes across the page faster. It is a unique way of reading compared to reading each word like most people do.

Then there is ANOTHER way, and that is with tools. Where you input your PDF or text file into the app, and then it shows you 1 (maybe up to 3 words) at a time. However at a really fast rate, and then you can take in the information in a focused and rapid manner.

The Rise of AI

I think last year was the golden age of AI tools, and we are going to see a refinement going forward. That is until the next huge innovation happens.

Things like OpusClip are specialized AI models trained for one thing, and in this case editing. There are other tools for writing, and others for note taking, etc.

You can find a tool for your skill and see if you can learn how the AI works, and that will show you the path forward. Also you can use AI to expedite your learning process, by essentially being the guru/coach for you.

Taking this further

Find a new skill, and try to get really good at this week!

The idea here is that you want to learn a skill real quickly, and it is certainly possible. It takes about 20 hours to grasp something really well, and about 100 hours to actually be good at it. From there that goes into Mastery, which is different post.

I’ve gather some quick resources like these videos and links to help you get started.

You could try out and discover Ultra Learning:

Here are a couple of playlists as well:

If you want to keep reading:

Previous Shorter Version:

This was one of my "social articles", an experiment to create medium sized blog posts, akin to newsletters. Across a variety of social blogging networking platforms. Such as Medium, Vocal Media, and Linkedin. Since it didn't quite land; I decided to take these posts and remake them into more full length creations. I'll try to include any interesting links from the original, and sometime the full previous version as well if it makes sense.