Note: This is a guest post from Scott Young of Learning on Steroids

We’ve been taught how to study, but not how to learn.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw when I watch otherwise intelligent people spend hours cramming for exams, while failing to understand the material being taught.

Studying tends to focus on repetition. If you study a formula enough times, it will magically glue itself in your head. The more you repeat, the better you remember.

Learning isn’t just about repetition, it’s about making connections. Simply staring at the same formula a dozen times isn’t learning, even though we’ve been told it qualifies as studying. Learning a formula means understand what its components are, reviewing the proof or relating it to similar formulas.

Instead of trying to memorize by rote, you should be learning by connections.

Learning Hacks to Allow You to “Get” Any Subject

I’ve aced tests without studying for them. Over four years of university, my GPA has always sat between an A and an A+. I even placed first in a regional academic competition, without having taken the course being tested.

But in the grand scheme of things, my accomplishments are relatively modest. I know polyglots who can speak 8 languages, students who graduated from competitive programs with triple the normal courseload and learners who went from C to A+ averages while studying less than before.

The underlying trend in all of these learners is their ability to learn by making connections. Instead of relying on memorizing material repeatedly, they weave any new information into their existing knowledge.

During the years since I’ve been writing about this idea, I’ve managed to identify some of the main tactics these learners use to connect ideas together. Here are seven:

#1 – Analogies and Metaphors

Whenever you learn a fact, ask yourself what the idea is similar to. You can learn abstract processes by creating metaphors for more common events. Variables in computer programming become jars. Derivatives become the speedometer and odometer on your car.

#2 – Mental Pictures

Have you ever tried to visualize a mathematical formula?

It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. If you break apart a complex formula into components, you can try to imagine what it would like as a graph or how each component influences each other.

I used this to remember how to calculate the determinant of a matrix. Instead of just memorizing rules, I created a mental picture of my hands scooping through the diagonals, adding and removing the numbers.

#3 – Dig a Foundation

Do you ever get surprised how easy early subjects appear, once you advance in them. Arithmetic looks easy once you start with algebra, which seems trivial once you go onto calculus. Going a bit further in the progression means you still struggle with the furthest ideas, but the earlier ones become easier.

What if you applied this in reverse: did a bit of extra research on your most difficult topics. You might not understand the further research perfectly, but it would make understanding your testable material much easier.

#4 – Become the Teacher

Try switching roles: how would you explain what you’re learning to someone else? The act of explanation creates connections. Teaching also forces you to simplify and break down complex ideas, another good step to foster learning.

#5 – Stop Taking Rigid Notes

Are you trying to learn, or create a courtroom transcript of the lecture? My suggestion is to free yourself from rigid notes, and instead write down ideas in branches and connections. Add your own thoughts, diagrams and arrows linking ideas so you have a web of information.

#6 – Diagram

Remember when your teacher told you to stop doodling in class? Well recent research suggests that drawing can actually increase your concentration.

I’d guess that if you were actually drawing out information related to the class, that might improve your concentration even more. I don’t know if a picture is actually worth a thousand words, but it can often be worth many connections towards a greater understanding.

#7 – Pegging

Mental magicians actually use this tactic to memorize any number. The tactic is a bit complicated for a brief article, but the basic idea is to attach each digit to a specific consonant. So 1 = s, 2 = k and 6 = r.

The next step is to put these consonants together. So 16578 becomes s, r, d, l, p. You can then insert any vowels within these letters to create nouns. So srdlp becomes sword and loop. You then string the nouns together in a story: “The sword cut through the loop before Jonathan…”

Then, even to remember hundreds of numbers, you only need to remember the story and letters key.

Scott Young is the author of Learn More, Study Less. He runs a program designed to teach rapid learning tactics. The program is currently sold out, but you can go here to get on the announcement list for when it reopens.

Photo by Hermés

Note: This is a guest post from Bob Hartzell of Get Degrees

When I went to college, I was right out of high school, overwhelmed by the freedom and very quickly baffled by the academic expectations. Today’s college students are often much more mature, more experienced – and in many cases, returning to school to improve a life. More often than not, college students are working as well.

Whether you’re eighteen and new to it all or you’re back in the classroom to try and make academics work for you again, college can be rough water if you’re intimidated and/or pushing yourself with family/job/education. Here are some suggestions to maximize the value of your time spent in the academic fold:

1. Don’t let a pile of overpriced books and a quicker learning pace make you think you’re in over your head. It’s just a new environment.

2. No matter what the professors think, classes probably shouldn’t be optional. Look at it this way – until you’re sure you don’t need it, take advantage of all the help you can get.

3. Take notes you can read. If what you’re hearing is too much to process on any given day, find a classmate to bounce your questions off of. But don’t think you have to learn to be a court reporter overnight.

4. This might be counterintuitive or difficult as hell – but asking a few questions of the lecturer doesn’t hurt either. Give yourself a chance to feel like you have an investment in all that academic achievement as well – have a good conversation with someone who is opening up new intellectual doors for you can be an enormous boost. There’s more payback to those classes than credits and a grade.

5. All that reading isn’t insurmountable a chapter at a time. If you break it into manageable bites, you can get through it with a lot less indigestion – and learn more from it in the process. Besides, ignoring it will drive you crazy.

6. You have probably heard this during your previous fifteen years in school – but plan your studying. That’s not to blow a hole in your day, it’s so you won’t blow a hole in your semester. If you do it and stick with it, life gets easier.

7. Weekends may not always be for playing anymore. If you’re working and going to school, for sure they won’t be. Once again, the idea is to make school manageable, which makes it tolerable, which eventually may make it…really intriguing. You can build an afternoon on your bike or a few hours in front of a football game into any schedule if you hit the books when you have it pencilled in. Otherwise you’ll be trying to read a textbook during the beer commercials and not enjoying the game nor learning much either.

8. Always do a draft. As good as you are at slamming a paper together, do yourself the favor of time for a rough draft. Bang it out like it’s a first and final, but leave time to review it anyway. You’ll be amazed at how little adjustments can make a major improvement and once again, what was once anxiety and pressure becomes a manageable chore that may just become an achievement.

9. Now about those exams – they’re going to weigh on you no matter how well you’ve covered the material. The key to taking an exam with confidence is to do as thorough a review as you can and see at least seventy five percent of the material for at least the second time. There’s a difference between holing up for a final review and cramming.

10. Put your best into it and then consider college the art of the possible. If you’re going through the learning process with newly tested initiative and applying standards you’ve never held yourself to before, than you can call that a victory. If you get a little better at it the first few weeks or the first few semesters, there will come a day when you know you’re doing an efficient job. That’s all you can ask of yourself.

Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides. It’s your college career, your major, your degree. Resumes aside, the value of an education is an intensely personal thing, so don’t demean it by thinking you should be some other kind of student. Every school experience opens up new horizons, but you won’t see them if you’ve got misguided expectations blocking your view.

Bob Hartzell is a freelance writer for Get Degrees®. They feature 100’s of online degree programs from accredited online colleges and universities worldwide.

Photo by orangeacid

Being good at things is the key to success. Painfully obvious, right?

That means being good, having mastered skills, ranks far higher than other commonly touted “keys” to success, such as:

• Overcoming fears
• Just getting started
• Rejecting societal norms
• Having the best attitude

Sure, being a terrified, procrastinating, peer-pressured, pessimist probably won’t help you master skills. But that doesn’t remove the fact that mastery, both in your career and in your personal life, is the most important element.

Why Being Skilled Matters

For your career, the argument is simple: we live in a capitalistic world where, all else being equal, the people with the rarest and most valuable skills get the biggest rewards. Assuming you can convert those rewards to what you desire in life (do you want a big house or location independence?), mastery leads to career success.

For your personal life, the argument is subtler but I believe the same logic applies. If you have skill, achieving success becomes easier in almost any area of life:

1. Health - mastering a sport or exercise routine will keep you healthy, while mastering your own habits and willpower can ensure that they stick.
2. Relationships - mastering your interpersonal communication helps, whether you’re trying to find a new relationship or sustain an existing one.
3. Learning - improving the way you learn has a ripple effect, where ideas you pick up can be integrated into any other area of life.

Even if you disagree that mastery is the most important element, I think most people can agree it is at least a very important part of living a successful life.

What Encourages Being Skilled?

The biggest gains in skill come when you are situated on edge of your current competence. If you stay with what you’re already good at, you won’t improve much.

Being way outside your level of skill isn’t conducive to mastery either. Unless you can receive positive feedback, or regular wins amidst failures, it is difficult to learn from your mistakes. The best way to train as a sprinter isn’t to run against Olympic athletes from day one. It’s to race against someone just a bit faster than you, so you’ll know when you make improvements.

Therefore, practicing for improvement should always be at the edge of incompetence. Where you have enough skill for positive reinforcement, but not enough skill to be considered good–yet.

Living on the Edge of Incompetence

If you accept the first premise: that mastery is an essential ingredient to successful living. And, you accept the second premise: that mastery requires an environment of being on the edge of your incompetence. Then the conclusion is difficult to escape: successful living requires living on the edge of incompetence.

For the last several years I’ve made a deliberate effort to live on my edge of incompetence. I make an effort to choose goals and projects that are not just difficult, but require skills I don’t currently possess.

In the business projects I’ve undertake with this blog and website, I’ve always chosen ones that were slightly outside my skill level. I wrote and designed a free ebook, then created one for sale, then created one with an affiliate program, finally now I finished a hybrid between an information product and a monthly coaching service.

Successfully executing the latest project would have been a certain failure a few years ago, but I slowly advanced my edge of incompetence. And I did that by living on it.

My other goals have also put me on the edge of incompetence. From learning French, taking salsa classes, practicing to cook more elaborate dishes or training to do a pistol squat and handstand pushups. The goals weren’t just difficult (although challenge is important) they also pushed me beyond my current skills.

Hard Goals vs Skill-Acquiring Goals

It’s possible to set a difficult goal that doesn’t explicitly require gaining new skills. For example, let’s say I set a goal to give up junk food. This might be a difficult goal, but after having done 30-Day Trials as a method for changing habits for years, it probably wouldn’t improve my skills significantly.

Similarly, I could set business goals that don’t really express what skills are going to improve. I have a goal to increase my business income to a minimum of $3000 per month. That will be a challenging goal to meet, but it doesn’t make it clear what skills I’ll need to improve and where I’ll be sitting on the edge of my incompetency.

Deciding exactly how a particular project will push you to learn new skills is an often neglected step. It’s the difference between aimless and deliberate practice.

Setting up Camp at the Edge of Incompetence

I feel, for many people, they want to get out of their edge of incompetence as soon as possible. It’s cold, painful and irritating outside. Far nicer to be safe and warm within your existing skills.

So when they live their life, the venture to the edge of their skills only lasts as long as it needs to be. When they need to pass a test, they study really hard. However, when the exam no longer threatens their security, they don’t bother reading a book on a difficult subject.

Not only do I feel this is suboptimal, since these people will only increase their skills when forced to, it is also a lousy way to live.

If you set up camp on the edge of your incompetency, you get used to scaling your frustrations and learn to tolerate the uncertainty. So when most people are complaining about being outside the comfortable home of their skills, you feel fine because you never closed the door.

I’m a fan of meta-skills. These are the skills that allow you to learn faster and master new disciplines more quickly. I love meta-skills so much that a good portion of this blog writing, and my entire upcoming program are devoted to them.

One of the most important meta-skills for becoming good at anything is being able to push through the frustration barrier. This is the early phase of skill acquisition where you suck at it. The skill isn’t fun, because you haven’t reached the level of proficiency where you can actually enjoy it.

A perfect example is learning a foreign language. When I started learning French, the process was difficult. Speaking French wasn’t enjoyable. I had difficulty understanding simple things and the effort wasn’t rewarding.

Now, I’m still not fluent, but I actually enjoy French. I’m reading my first novel in the language (The Count of Monte Cristo) and I’m currently spending my winter holidays with a Belgian family, speaking French exclusively. These are experiences I wouldn’t have enjoyed if I had got stuck at square one.

How the Frustration Barrier Cuts You Off From New Experiences

The frustration barrier doesn’t just make learning more difficult, it also cuts you off from new life experiences. When you face the barrier repeatedly in one area of skill, you may confess to yourself that you are simply not born with the talents necessary to be successful in that area.

In my life, an interesting consequence of this was dancing. When I was younger, I was a bit clumsy and introverted. Therefore I never tried dancing, and when I did I was lousy at it. I had just accepted that I might not possess the gene for uninhibited party enjoyment.

But, being the optimist that I am, I signed up for dancing classes one day. After a brief introduction (note: overcoming the frustration barrier) I found out I actually liked to dance. To the point where I love going to nightclubs and dancing.

That’s a simple example, but I think many people get in there head a false belief that, “I’m not born with the talents to do ____” simply because they never invested the initial effort to overcome the frustration barrier in that area of their life.

The Meta-Skill of Rapid Learners: Dominating the Frustration Barrier

I later discovered that most people can become good at almost anything (not necessarily spectacular, but good). The key is mastering that meta-skill of overcoming the frustration barrier. Once you defeat the early part of skill acquisition where learning is painful, you can start reaching the part where mastery and hard focus feel good.

I don’t believe there is one grand key to overcoming the frustration barrier. But I do believe there are many heuristics you can use to help yourself push through this difficult phase.

As always, practice is important. If you practice running headlong into the frustration barrier, it is easier to do it again. This is why I believe people like Tim Ferriss, Benny Lewis or other seemingly statistical anomalies in learning exist. They have mastered the meta-skill of frustration barrier ascension, so that any new skill is comparatively easier to acquire.

Here are some of my favorite heuristics for overcoming this initial phase:

#1 – Admit You Suck.

Let go of the ego. When you just flatly admit you aren’t very good, you stop trying to protect your self image and appear qualified.

This may go against the traditional confidence hypothesis, until you understand that the goal isn’t performance. It’s to embrace your awfulness and use that embrace to keep you going despite your missteps.

#2 – Surround Yourself with People Who’ve Done It

You need to believe it’s possible. The only way to do that is to be immersed in people who have succeeded in the path you are now going through.

Not only will their great ideas for success rub off on you, you will be able to face the frustration barrier knowing that, at one point, it will get easier.

#3 – Study the Mastery Process

Or, as Cal Newport would suggest, invest a non-trivial amount of time into understanding how to master your chosen skill. When you do research two things happen:

1. You expose yourself to great ideas for improvement which shorten the time to mastery.
2. You gain confidence in the process of mastery, making it less likely you’ll give up out of frustration.

#4 – Enjoy Being Awful

I’ll admit, it’s easier to enjoy things your good at. However, just like you can have fun on a cloudy day, you can have fun being lousy at a skill as well. Fun is mostly about creative perception, so if you learn to enjoy the intensity of the challenge you are under, you can surmount the frustration barrier.

#5 – Commit to Mandatory Practice

Sometimes the best way to beat the frustration barrier is just through discipline. If you commit to practicing a certain amount, every day, you can eventually defeat the beast just by putting in enough time. I’ve done this for numerous fledgling skills where my internal resistance would otherwise defeat my desire to become good at it.

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Of course, having a community of enthusiastic people and regular follow-up doesn’t hurt either. That’s the main reason I created Learning on Steroids, to create an environment to teach these sorts of meta-skills (while at the same time employing some of the tactics above to make it easier to overcome the frustration barrier).