I’ve got one new favorite book: On Writing by Stephen King. It was a great experience reading it. Not only did I learn a lot from the book, but also I love the writing style. I wish I could write like that!

Moreover, I found that many lessons from the book are applicable not just to writing, but also to life and career in general. They are essential for being successful in what you do.

Here are 17 lessons I learn from On Writing:

1. Do what you love

I know that this advice has been repeated many times. But it’s true. And King put it in a way I’ve never seen before:

For me, not working is the real work. When I’m writing, it’s all the playground…

I love the way he put it. Not working is the real work. Writing time is all the playground. Can you say that about your work? I enjoy what I’m doing, but I still can’t say that not working is the real work. This guy loves his craft at a different level and he’s serious about it. He made similar statements several times throughout the book.

Now, what if you do something that you don’t love? King’s advice is to move to something else:

If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where… the fun quotient higher.

How high is the fun quotient of your work? Is there joy in it? Or is joy the last word you would associate with your work?

2. Practice, practice, practice

Hard practice is a must for being successful. In fact, this is why it’s important for you to do what you love. If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll be able to endure the hard practice needed for success.

The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate – four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things…

… practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all)…

If you don’t enjoy the journey, it’s unlikely that you will be able to pay the price for success. Joy is a big factor that makes the difference between those who make it and those who don’t.

3. Be serious

If you can take it seriously, we can do business.

Only if you are serious about what you do can you expect to achieve meaningful results. Many people enjoy what they do but they do it only as a hobby. Being serious means being committed to master your field.

4. Ignore naysayers

If you write… someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Naysayers are there. It’s just a fact of life. There are always people who try to discourage you no matter how hard you’ve tried. So rather than getting discouraged by them, simply ignore them and move on.

5. Have a supporter

Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.

This applies not just to writing. Whatever field you choose, you need to have someone who support you. You need to have someone who still believes in you when others don’t.

6. Immerse yourself in the field

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

Do you want to get good at something? Fill your life with it. Live it and breathe it. More than just making you familiar with the field, it sharpens your intuition to the point where you can make sound judgment intuitively (like what Malcolm Gladwell discussed in Blink).

7. Be consistent

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words… only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shutdown before I get my 2,000 words.

The longer you keep to these basics, the easier the act of writing will become.

Being consistent isn’t easy, but it pays off. While what you do daily might seem simple, doing it consistently will make a big difference in the long term.

8. Study the work of others

You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so.

Studying the work of others gives you two important benefits. First, it teaches you about the right way to do things. Second, it teaches you about the wrong way to do things. Both are useful.

9. Study the market

You should also pick up the writers’ journal and buy a copy of Writer’s Market…

… the most important thing you can do for yourself is read the market.

In addition to studying the work of others, you should study the market. You need to know what the current state of the market is. What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? Where is the market going? By understanding the market, you’ll be able to make the right decisions.

10. Spot ideas

Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

To get ideas, rather than trying to find something new on your own, you just need to spot the ideas around you. That’s why one key to innovation is being a good observer.

11. Keep the momentum going

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to.

When the momentum is there, you can complete your work with much less time and energy. So keep the momentum going and don’t lose it.

12. Get the first draft out as quickly as possible

…downloading what’s in my head directly to the page, I write as fast as I can…

Don’t try to be perfect the first time. Simply get the first draft of your work out and refine from there. Working in iterations is the best way to get something done.

13. Get rid of the inessentials

When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

In your first iteration, there is a good chance that many unnecessary things are still there. That’s fine because your job is to get the first version done as quickly as possible. But in the next iterations, you should get rid of them. Leave only what needs to be there and nothing else.

14. Be your own first customer

I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader.

When you become the creator of a work, it’s often difficult to see from the perspective of the customers. But that’s important because otherwise your work might go to the the wrong direction. So be your own first customer. Take a critical look at your work. Is it something that you want to use? Is there anything that you need to change?

15. Don’t do it for the money

Do you do it for the money, honey? The answer is no. Don’t now and never did… I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it.

Money is a bad motivation to have. It could make you ignore your heart and you might end up living someone else’s life instead of your own.

16. Do it for the joy

I have written because it fulfilled me… I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

This is perhaps the most important lesson in the book. If you do something for the joy of it, not only can you endure the difficult journey to success but also your life will be fulfilling. What’s better than that?

17. Do it to enrich others and yourself

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous,… In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.

A nice conclusion of the book. If you live a life that enriches others and yourself, you’re living a great life.

Photo by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego

Do you love to read? I definitely do, especially non-fiction. I don’t read as much as I want but I enjoy my reading time. It’s great to learn about new things in the world and new ways to improve my life.

When it comes to reading, one important problem is how to find good books to read. After all, the goal of reading is to get as much value as possible. Don’t read just for the sake of reading. Read to somehow improve the quality of your life. That’s why it’s essential to find books that are worth your time.

To find good books, here are two steps I do:

1. Find interesting books that might be worth reading
2. Make sure that the books are indeed worth reading

Let’s look at them one by one.

9 Ways to Find Interesting Books to Read

Here are nine ways to find interesting books to read:

1. Check Amazon’s lists

Amazon has many book lists through which you can find interesting books. You can start with Bestsellers to see the current best sellers and Hot New Releases to see the popular new books.

But don’t stop there. Many good books never appear in these global lists, not because they aren’t good but because they appeal to smaller group of people. For example, if you are interested in agriculture then you are unlikely to find any book in those lists. For that reason, you should also explore topic-specific lists. Here, for instance, are the best-seller lists for Management, Science, and Gastronomy.

Checking Amazon lists is something I do regularly. I create a bookmark folder in my browser that contains all the lists I want to check. Then, about once a week, I open the folder and scan the lists. By doing this, not only can I find interesting books to read but also I can keep myself updated with the world of books.

2. Find books that are related to a book you like

In addition to the lists, Amazon has a nice feature which helps you find other books you might like given a book you like. Just visit the Amazon page of your favorite book and look at the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought section. There is a good chance that you will find something interesting there.

3. See Amazon’s recommendations

One more useful feature from Amazon is its personalized recommendations. To see them, log in to your Amazon account and visit Recommended for You page. There you will find books that Amazon thinks you might like. To increase the quality of the recommendations, you should actively rate the books you’ve read. The more information you give to the system, the better it can learn about your taste and the better its recommendations would be.

4. Use What Should I Read Next

What Should I Read Next does what its name says: it gives you recommendations about what books you should read next. Give it the details (title, author, or ISBN) of a book you like and the system will give you a list of books it recommends.

5. Follow interesting people at Goodreads

The web is becoming increasingly social and the world of books is no exception. There are book-centered social sites out there where you can find and follow interesting people. One popular site is Goodreads. If you know someone whose reading list is interesting, you can follow her there to stay up-to-date with her reading.

6. Read book blogs

Book blogs can give you a lot of information about the world of books. AllTop shows you the latest posts of some book blogs.

7. Browse Gutenberg’s list

If you like old books, there are many of them at Project Gutenberg. There you can find classic books like The Prince or The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. To see which books are popular, visit the Top 100 list. Best of all, you can download the books for free.

8. Use StumbleUpon

Have you ever used StumbleUpon before? This service gives you random web pages in a channel you choose. Whenever you press the Stumble button in the toolbar, it will give you a new page that it thinks you might like. Set the channel to Books and you are on your way to find interesting books you might never hear about before.

9. Use delicious

With delicious, you can find popular links in practically every field imaginable. For popular links related to books, visit this page or this page.

You may combine multiple delicious tags to find book-related links in a certain field. This way you don’t have to go through books in fields you aren’t interested in. Here are two examples:

• Business books: this page or this page
• Science books: this page or this page

Is A Book Worth Reading?

Before committing your time to reading a book that looks good, it’s better to ensure that the book is indeed worth reading. Here are two ways to do that:

1. Learn more about the book

Whenever I find an interesting book, I open the book’s Amazon page for more information. Here are several things I usually check in a book’s page:

• Product description. Obviously, I need to know what the book is about. Sometimes I find a book with interesting title that doesn’t have the content I want. In such a case, I just close the book’s page and move on.
• Sales rank. Amazon’s sales rank doesn’t guarantee that a book is good, but books with high rank rarely disappoint me. A book’s sales rank is like a social consensus about the book’s quality. I usually look at the rank in the context of publication date. A book that still ranks high years after its publication is usually a good book. Having said that, sales rank isn’t a mandatory factor for me. If I already hear good things about a book, I don’t care about its sales rank. But for books that I’ve never heard of, sales rank is a good indicator to use.
• Table of contents. What topics are covered in the book? I find them out by looking at the book’s table of contents.
• First pages. I don’t always read the first pages of a book, but sometimes I do. They give me a feel of how the book is written.

Of course, if you are in a book store or a library, you can get all the information above (except the sales rank) by simply browsing the book.

2. Test it with time

An important sign of a good book is it passes the test of time. Let’s say you come across an interesting book and you want to read it. Will your desire to read it last? Would you still want to read it after one week? One month? If you wouldn’t, then it’s probably not a good book to read.

Let a book sit in your Wish List (or a similar list) for some time before deciding to read it. It helps you filter out many temporary impulses. After applying this principle, the quality of the books I read increases significantly and I get much more value from my reading time.

***

What about you? How do you find good books to read?

Photo by Photos8.com

Do you have idle potentials that you don’t develop? I have one: coding.

I remember that when I was in high school I often spent time coding just for fun. At that time, I had a 80386 computer with 4 MB memory (it’s amazing how people could live with just 4 MB memory back then – it’s not enough to run even an empty browser window today!). I could spend hours writing programs (mostly simple games) and enjoyed every moment of it. But in the last few years I no longer did any serious coding. I still coded a bit because I teach programming, but I no longer considered it a fun it used to be and spent most of my time on other interests instead.

I recently realized that to live my life to the fullest, I need to make the most out of my potentials. Just think about it. If you are capable of doing something but don’t do it, can you say that you are living your life to the fullest? I don’t think so. You can only say that if you develop your potential.

That led me to redevelop my coding talent. It’s something I enjoyed doing, but for years I’ve left it gathering dust. I’m digging into it again these days and what an exciting world I find! There are many possibilities today that weren’t possible even a few years ago.

So back to the question: what idle potentials do you have? Here are three ways to discover them:

1. Remember the things you enjoyed doing. Is there anything you enjoyed doing in the past that you no longer do these days? It could be an old hobby or the way you spent your spare time. Whatever it is, there’s a good chance that you can develop it.
2. Remember the things you’re trained in. If you’ve been trained in a particular skill in the past then you can work on it again. You may later use that skill to complement your other skills.
3. Ask people around you. People who are close to you can give you hints about your idle potentials. They could remind you of an event in the past that you’ve forgotten about. Ask them about it and listen to what they say.

After discovering your idle potentials, here are some tips to develop them:

1. Find the fun. It’s hard to dig into something if you don’t enjoy it, so try to find the fun in it. Remember what made you excited about it in the past. Was it the sense of challenge? Was it the thrill of accomplishing something? Once you find the fun, the rest is easier.
2. Find good resources. It will be much easier for you to develop your potential if you have good resources at hand. Obviously, you can use search engines to find them. You can also find relevant links at Delicious. For instance, delicious.com/popular/design gives you popular links in design. Finding relevant videos at Youtube or other video sites is also helpful because it could be more fun to learn something through videos.
3. Work on projects. The best way to develop your talent is working on projects. It doesn’t have to be a big project; it could be a small project that you can finish in just a few days. The nice thing about working on projects is that you put your talent to practical use and you feel the satisfaction of getting tangible results. That will motivate you even further.
4. Find companions. Having good companions around you helps you develop your potential faster. You can brainstorm with them and encourage one another. At the end, everyone wins.
5. Synergize your potentials. Rather than just developing your potentials independently, find ways to synergize them with your other skills or knowledge. If you have a project using talent A, find ways to use talent B to add value to it. This way you will create a lot more value for other people that will in turn open new opportunities for you.

What do you think? How do you develop your potentials?

Photo by ralphbijker

Do you want to boost your knowledge? There is one way that has become a new favorite of mine: listening to lectures. Among others, doing that has allowed me to write a post on overconfidence.

I’ve been a fan of audio learning for a long time, but in the past I mostly used the time to listen to podcasts. Recently, however, I spend more and more time listening to lectures. There are three reasons for this:

1. Lectures give me deeper understanding of a topic
   Unlike podcasts which could be all over the place, lectures are designed to dig deep into a topic. I love the depth of understanding I get from listening to lectures.
2. Lectures satisfy my curiosity
   I’m curious about many things and listening to lectures is a good way to satisfy my curiosity. There are lectures available on practically every topic imaginable. Furthermore, there is something different about listening as compared to reading. It gives me a fresh way to look at a subject.
3. Lectures give me competitive advantage
   In A Simple Guide to Finding Opportunities, I wrote that unconventional resources give you competitive advantage because less people use it. Audio lectures can be considered unconventional. Many people listen to podcasts, but how many of them listen to lectures? Not many, I believe. This is a good opportunity to increase my value.

Moreover, as with audio learning in general, I don’t need to spend extra time to listen to them. I can just use any low-intensity time I have. How good is that?

Now that we’ve seen some benefits of audio lectures, how should we learn from them? Here is how I do it:

1. Find interesting lectures
   My favorite place is iTunes U. It has tons of high-quality lectures that you can easily navigate. The important thing is to find something that’s interesting to you. This won’t be a problem if you are a curious person.
2. Download the lectures
   I usually listen to the lectures while doing something else, so I just download the audio version. Of course, you may download the video version if you want to.
3. Find low-intensity time
   You need to find low-intensity time for audio learning. In my case, I can’t do it while reading or writing. But for other tasks that require less concentration, I can usually parallel them with audio learning. Your commute or gym time can be used for this. There are more tips available about it in 6 Low-Intensity Moments for Audio Learning.
4. Take notes of key terms
   I don’t take extensive notes since it will take too much time. Instead, I just write the key terms I find. Since I already learn about the terms in the lecture, simply reading the list reminds me of the whole concept. On the other hand, the list can help me learn more about the topics that interest me.
5. Read relevant Wikipedia articles
   This is where my list of terms becomes useful. Since I already know the terms, I can easily find relevant Wikipedia articles that cover them. This deepens my understanding of the subject. I don’t apply this to all terms but only to those that I find interesting.

I believe that this single habit can make a big difference in the long term. I’m inspired by the breadth of topics that Bill Gates learns and this is the best method I’ve found so far to achieve similar results. It won’t give me as deep understanding as it would be if I fully follow the lectures, but it helps me learn the most important concepts. Later on, if I want to learn more about them, I already know where to go since I have the context in my mind.

Photo by Zitona

In the post 4 Lessons on How to Get Things Done, there is an interesting comment by Mark Foo:

Bill Gates once remarked that the key to succeed in business is to innovate and make yourself obsolete. If you don’t make yourself obsolete, your competitors will make you obsolete.

I agree completely. We live in a fast-changing world. What is current today may already be obsolete two years from now. For that reason, it’s important to know how to improve yourself. You need to make yourself obsolete. If you don’t, someone else will.

I once read that when a Sony team in one floor launched a product, another team at another floor was already working on a new version of the product. And yet another team was working on an even newer version of it. That’s a company that works hard to make itself obsolete.

The same principle, I believe, applies to individuals. You should improve yourself and make yourself obsolete. Here are some ways to apply it:

1. Upgrade your tools

Can you imagine the difference in productivity between those who use a typewriter and those who use a computer? This example is a bit extreme, but it illustrates the importance of upgrading your tools. If you don’t upgrade your tools, you risk being left behind by those who do. They will produce far more output with better quality than you.

But be careful, don’t spend too much time researching and experimenting with new tools at the expense of doing real work. Remember, your goal is getting things done. Set aside some time to experiment with new tools, but spend most of your time doing real work using the tools you are already comfortable with.

2. Upgrade your workflow

More than just upgrading your tools, you should upgrade your workflow. Find ways to improve your productivity system. Is there any leak in your system? Is there anything you can simplify? Do you take full advantage of your most productive hours? Tune your system to improve your ability to get things done with minimum overhead.

3. Upgrade your knowledge

Living in the Internet age is a great blessing because there are abundant sources of knowledge available. All you need to have is the desire to learn. That’s why curiosity is important. With knowledge being so readily available, the eagerness to learn makes the biggest difference between those who thrive and those who don’t. Curiosity makes it much easier for you to learn about pretty much anything.

4. Upgrade your skills

With the pace of the world we live in now, your skills would quickly become obsolete.I remember a few years ago I learned hard to earn a certification. Now, just a few years later, the certification is practically useless. That’s how fast the world is moving. If you don’t constantly upgrade yourself, you may soon find that the world has moved beyond you.

One important thing to remember is you shouldn’t just upgrade your current skills. What if your field of expertise became irrelevant in the near future? What if the world no longer needed it? So, instead of just improving your current skills, open your eyes for new skills to learn. Is there a skill that could be in high demand a few years from now? Is there a skill that becomes increasingly necessary? Don’t just be a specialist. Be a versatilist.

5. Upgrade your mindset

This is perhaps the most difficult one to apply. People tend to always use the same lens to see the world through. They always see the world the way they are accustomed to. But you need to upgrade your mindset before it’s too late.

Here is an example of mindset change: instead of looking at yourself as an employee, look at yourself as an independent company. Your employer is actually just a client of yours. You should serve them well, of course, but you should also improve yourself and find other potential clients. Your progress is your responsibility. Can you see the difference this mindset has on your attitude?

To upgrade your mindset, you need to admit that the world changes. Don’t expect that the world you live in today works the same way as it did ten years ago. Nor should you expect that the world ten years from now will work the same way as it does today. Admitting this will make it easier for you to change your lens.

***

Improving yourself means that you should constantly move beyond your comfort zone. Stretch yourself. Challenge yourself.It’s easier said than done, but you will come out as a winner.

Photo by ground.zero

The more I observe brilliant people, the more I notice that one distinguishing characteristic they have is immense curiosity. I’m reminded of this quality when I read two articles by Bill Gates where he listed his favorite Teaching Company courses. There are two things I notice:

1. He watches a lot of courses in addition to reading a lot of books.
2. He watches courses on diverse topics, ranging from economy to chemistry to linguistics to medicine.

Another good example is Nathan Myhrvold (whom I wrote about in my post about polymaths). Just watch his talk at TED and you will see that his interests range from cooking to photography to nuclear technology to archeology and more. I can give you other examples but I think the point is clear: immense curiosity is a distinguishing characteristic of brilliant people.

Why Curiosity Is Important

How does curiosity contribute to someone’s brilliance? Why is it important? There are two reasons I can think of:

1. It gives you a fresh perspective. Most people have just one or two lenses to see a problem through, but curious people have many different lenses. As a result, they can see something that many other people can’t. That’s what happened in Nathan Myhrvold’s company when someone found something that had eluded experts in the field:

Wood was a physicist, not a doctor, but that wasn’t necessarily a liability, at this stage. “People in biology and medicine don’t do arithmetic,” he said. He wasn’t being critical of biologists and physicians: this was, after all, a man who read medical journals for fun. He meant that the traditions of medicine encouraged qualitative observation and interpretation. But what physicists do—out of sheer force of habit and training—is measure things and compare measurements, and do the math to put measurements in context. At that moment, while reading The New England Journal, Wood had the advantages of someone looking at a familiar fact with a fresh perspective.

A physicist who “read medical journals for fun” is definitely a curious person. And he had the advantage of a fresh perspective.

2. It gives you fresh ideas. Using the term from The Medici Effect, curiosity gives you Intersection experience where concepts from different fields collide with one another and produce fresh ideas. Since curious people get more Intersection experience, they consequently get more fresh ideas.

Seven Ways to Develop Your Curiosity

Now that we’ve seen how important curiosity is, how can we develop it? Here are several things you can do:

1. Don’t label something as boring. This is the first thing you should do. Whenever you’re about to label something as boring, stop yourself. Why? Because doing that will close one more door of opportunities. What might seem boring at the surface may actually be interesting if you just dig a little bit deeper.

2. Expect things to be fun. Rather than expecting things to be boring, expect them to be fun. This small change in your mindset can make a big difference. Once you do it, it will be much easier for you to find the fun side of practically anything.

3. Absorb other people’s enthusiasm. Often something seems boring because it’s delivered poorly. That’s perhaps one thing that makes great teachers great: they can connect their students to the fun side of what they’re teaching. So one way to develop your curiosity is to watch the talks of those who are enthusiastic about their fields. Don’t just absorb their knowledge; absorb their energy too. One good place to start is TED.

4. Question relentlessly. Whenever you deal with a topic, have questions in your mind. Find their answers and raise new questions. Questions keep your mind engaged. They can change your learning process from something dull to a treasure hunt.

5. Create a challenge. By creating a challenge, you will want to prove to yourself (and perhaps to others) that you can make it. One good way to do that is by creating a project: build something real out of what you learn. Another way is to create a contest with your friends to find out who can do something faster or better.

6. Connect to what you already know. Things will be more exciting if you can connect what you’re learning to what you already know. Why? Because that improves your understanding of the world and allows you to see new possibilities you’ve never realized before.

7. Diversify. Avoid boredom and find new possibilities by exploring new topics. Read books in new genres. Meet people with different professions. Add variety to your life.

The core is simple, actually. All the advice above can be summarized to just one: make things fun.

Photo by fdecomite

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).