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To survive and thrive in life, irrespective of personal preferences, learning is super essential and acts as a drive source to your personal or career goals. Whether motivated by obtaining a job, advancing in our careers, or establishing or expanding a business. Learning is necessary. In this article, I'll show you some of the methods I've used to learn new skills such as programming, graphic design, driving, and so on.

What makes a good learner?

Because there isn't a good learner that is born and destined for learning, you can make yourself a good learner by accepting that you don't have sufficient knowledge and committing yourself to learning. Guess what? That's called interest. With interest, you are able to learn because your brain is asking for this particular knowledge and is set to learn it if you actually give it a chance with the right resources.

Throw out the notion that someone you admire was born an expert and master in their field. If you could go back in time and examine this person's path to mastery, chances are he/she made a lot of sacrifices, grit was involved, and resilience was put to the test to get to where he/she is now.

What is learning

According to Wikipedia, "learning" is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.

There is a distinction between knowledge and education, and to my understanding, education is more related to school, where you force yourself to memorize something you are only partially interested in in order to pass an exam, whereas knowledge is something that is stored back in our subconscious mind because it is something we are interested in and we give it enough time and adequate resources to master. Interest fuels knowledge in a specific area, whereas education is typically fueled by fear, which can be fear of exams, society, or other factors.

According to Google, the primary difference between the two is that education is a formal process, whereas knowledge is an informal experience. Education is acquired through formal institutions like schools, colleges, and universities, whereas knowledge is gained from real-life experiences.

How to learn

Abraham Lincoln once said, “If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.” This applies to learning too. You must intentionally prepare, and this simply means gathering the necessary resources that are going to reduce the learning curve and time to increase our chances of grasping whatever we are learning effectively in the shortest time possible. Below are some of the ways I've used and still use to learn new things I'm interested in.

Start with the basics

Fundamentals are the backbone of every discipline; they are the bread and butter of every skill you want to master; if you have your fundamentals down to a tee, you can quickly progress from newbie to advanced. I would prefer to hire someone with solid fundamentals over someone with advanced skills but little basic knowledge on the same discipline.

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” -Bruce Lee

Learning a new skill can be intimidating, especially for those with complex learning curves, such as programming, where you cannot compromise on the fundamentals. Learn the fundamentals before moving on.

Chunking

Chunking is the process of dividing tasks or problems into smaller components, and the benefit of this principle is that it helps you concentrate on one thing at a time, makes it simple to keep track of your learning process, and makes it easy to identify where you are lagging behind and be able to go back and learn again before proceeding forward, as opposed to learning something as a whole, which most of the time doesn't really work out as expected because our working memory most of the time can hold about seven items of information at a time, and so dividing into smaller chunks and learning them one by one.

"One of the first steps toward gaining expertise in math and science is to create conceptual chunks—mental leaps that unite separate bits of information through meaning."

For divide and conquer to work when it comes to learning you have to follow three simple steps which are

• Focus To get the most out of what you're learning, eliminate unnecessary distractions and focus on one main thing. When it comes to learning, multitasking should never be an option. If you have trouble focusing for more than an hour, take breaks in between. For example, after every 20 minutes, take a 5 or 10-minute break, then resume and focus for the next 20 minutes. Pomodoro can greatly help you achieve this.

• Understand Learning can be a waste of time if you do not understand and grasp concepts; understanding will allow you to interpret and teach these concepts in your own words.

• Contextualize

Find a mentor in your area of interest

You can find a mentor in books, videos, or social media personalities; this can be on Twitter or LinkedIn. Just do what they do, and where possible, engage with them and ask for advice; you'll find that most of them will be more than willing to help you achieve your goals.

Join a community

We live in an age where there's a lot of information that is readily available and mostly free, especially on the internet, and the good thing about this is that most of these content creators are the ones who form communities just to nurture and attract people of similar interest, and platforms have been built for this very purpose. Platforms like Discord, Slack, Telegram, Meetup, and even Twitter have been built to bring people from all over the world together to have constructive conversations on particular topics revolving around a certain area of interest or expertise, and these are communities that grow people because this is where you find experts with very interesting views and answers to the problems you're facing in your learning journey.

Practice Practice Practice

This can never be emphasized enough. You can never perfect your craft if you craft nothing. If, for example, you are trying to learn how to code or write articles, you must get your hands dirty and build something, not just read and copy other people's code. Try building something of your own and stumbling through bugs and errors. This will push you to research how to solve them, and you know what we call that process, learning. Write as many articles as you can whenever you have the time, and in no time you will be the greatest writer of all time.

So go out there and learn that skill you've always wanted to grasp.

Happy learning.