Five things that can make you a super learner

6th: Implement everything that’s given in the blog

10 min readSep 4, 2020

We live an era where we can see most of the jobs require ‘knowledge workers’, isn’t it?

Everything is changing at a super rapid pace, and skills of recent past might be outdated today, and the skills that fetch high-paying jobs might become outdated in near future.

To thrive in this fast changing world, I suggest two steps

Ask yourself, “Do I contribute anything in the economy, can I be replaced?”
Upgrade yourself according to the answer.

In the past decade many manual jobs that required handling of excel sheets have been replaced by automation. But then, who thrived? The people who programmed that automation.

Haha, no, I am not telling you to become a programmer, rather, I am telling you to constantly upgrade your skills continuously, no matter what domain/field you work in. Or, build a Career Capital (as Cal Newport mentions in his book “So good they can’t ignore you”)

Okay Madhav! Enough philosophy, tell me clearly what is this blog about?

As mentioned above —

If your purpose is to not just survive, but thrive in this world, you need to constantly keep updating your skills.
But not only this, you need to be quick in learning and acquiring new skills.

So, my purpose behind writing this blog is to tell you how can you do this.

Continuous self education can let us be ahead of the trends and master new skills flexibly and easily. But, for that you need to learn how to learn.

You must be wondering as to what are the desired skill set a person must possess in order to learn anything they want effectively, efficiently and easily and that’s exactly what I aim to put forward through this blog.

We will try discovering these skill sets and how we can acquire them by following simple techniques.

What distinguishes a learner from a Super learner is not the lack of will to learn and explore but the lack of correct planning and motivation towards the learning.

In this blog I have have tried to mention 5 things you can follow in order to become a super learner and the magic it that it will create in your life.

1. The “Focus and Fun” Technique

Trust me, this technique is going to save your sanity while you work…

I have this (bad) habit of over-working, crossing my limits and getting burnt out, and following this technique actually helped me getting my work done, while saving my sanity.

There are two states of mind —

The Focused State — When you are totally involved in completing the task at hand with full concentration and away from all distractions.
The Diffuse State — (In simple words) The relaxed state of mind, when you are not focused towards a single task, and your mind is wandering around.

A proper balance between the two states enables efficient learning and prevents burnout. So, the idea is to have iterations of focused and diffuse state of mind.

While you are in your focused mode, you can learn efficiently, and focus on the given task at hand and get it done, but, it’s impossible to stay in that state forever.

When you relax your mind by performing tasks that bring happiness or those which you enjoy, you can come back to the focused state with more more efficiency (and, without experiencing the burnout situation).

So, have fixed cycles of fun and learn, sit down to do your work, but put a timer, and after that, go do something that puts your mind in diffuse mode, stay in that mode for a fixed period of time (again, with a timer), and go back to the focused state.

Productivity is not about getting more things done, it’s about doing things efficiently while maintaining your sanity.

2. The Pomodoro Technique

This technique will help you implement the above mentioned “Fun and learn” technique in your daily routine.

Hey Madhav, it looks interesting, what exactly is this pomodoro thing?

There’s no rocket science involved. It is a technique that was used by Francesco and he named it after his tomato shaped kitchen clock timer. It enabled him to be focused and dedicated to his work.

It is basically a time span of 25 minutes which according to Francesco is ultimate concentration or focused state at the task one has to achieve. (There is no hard and fast rule, you can keep it to even 35–40 minutes of concentrated work time)

Post every pomodoro you get a 5 minute break, in which you can go to your diffuse state of mind. During this time you give your brain time to relax and have a cup of coffee or do anything that makes your mind enter that diffuse state.

The effectiveness of this technique is in the undisturbed 25 mins of work you do. An interruption or distraction will make your pomodoro void. There is a very important rule in this -

A distracted pomodoro is not a pomodoro

Also, try not to increase the time of one pomodoro just to complete the given task at hand, try to distribute it in subsequent pomodoros.

Strike a proper balance between the focused and diffused state for best results.

One more thing to keep in mind —

A single task must have more than one pomodoro and not less than 4 or 5 pomodoros. Combine smaller tasks to achieve more pomodoros and break bigger tasks into small tasks to get fewer pomodoros.

Trust me, this technique has done wonders for me and many people who followed this. It can be a turning point in your life too!

I wrote a complete article on how to follow pomodoro technique, you can read that as well in your free time.

3. The Feynman Technique

The teacher learns the most!

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

In the process of teaching we need to read and understand the topic thoroughly and properly. This instills a great sense of confidence about the topic we teach or deliver.

Let me break down the technique in 4 implementable steps —

Decide And Study The Topic Of Your Choice — Choose the topic you want to master and take note of all the information you have on that topic. Keep noting down all the new information that you gradually get.
Pretend Explaining That Concept To A 6 Year Old Child : If you can make a layman/6 year old child (who knows nothing about the subject) understand the concept, there is no doubt that you are a master at that task. Since you have to teach a child your teaching must be clear, simple and concise. You must aim at covering all the information in a way which is crisp and easy to understand.
Remove Gaps : While teaching at start it’s highly likely that you may pause/halt in between and fail at delivering facts clearly. I call these the ‘gaps’ in your delivery. A gap simply means that you need to enhance your knowledge by learning more on that topic (this is the step that enhances your knowledge).
Simplify What You Teach : It is much more easier to understand facts that are put up in a clear and understandable way over those which are demonstrated in a complicated manner. It’s important to break down the entire concept into small, and easy to understand concepts. In other words chunking does the magic. Make sure the chunks are crisp, clear, sequenced, easy to understand and free from complexities.

I wrote a blog on this technique which covered how I used it in my life to be one of the top learners in my university. You can read that in your free time.

4. The Quick Feedback Mechanism

This one is actually put up by me

Unlike the above techniques that were devised by great men and have proper science behind them, this one is something that I developed based on my own experiences and worked very well for me, but I can bet that this can do wonders for you as well.

While we are busy performing and perfecting our work it is very important that we take opinions that matter. These feedbacks have the power to keep us going in the correct manner.

Here’s the thing, do you want to improve quickly? Try to follow my “Quick Feedback Mechanism”.

This method can change your views towards criticism and help you understand how to improve yourself.

There are three types of feedbacks that we get —

Positive Feedback : It can be seen as the rewards/results that you get as an outcome of your hard work.

In your childhood your parents might have bribed you into doing your home work in return of some toy that you really wanted. Getting some award at the completion of a task can be seen as a positive feedback.

This type of feedback can be utilized as the starting force or the threshold motivation. You can award yourself at the completion of some dreaded task.

Let’s say you want to start working on your diet, you can make a promise to eat healthy for 6 days and then have a little cheat meal on Sunday, but if you fail to eat healthy for first 6 days, you will have to start the cycle again.

This type of positive feedback can help you initially to maintain a proper diet. In other words, it can give you the starting/threshold motivation until it becomes a habit.

Now comes the other two kinds of feedback —

Negative Feedback : It is the constructive criticism that you receive on your work.

While the positive feedback only gives you the starting motivation, it doesn’t tell you about the quality of work and how can you improve. To see some real improvement, you need real feedback.

Useless Feedback : (Putting it straight) The meaningless comments/feedback that you receive from meaningless people.

You might face some people in your life who say things just for the sake of saying something, and some people who genuinely hate you, no matter what.

Keep in mind not to get too much involved with the feedback they give, since they are going to say random things that might actually be completely illogical just to confuse you down. Learn to differentiate between a negative feedback and a constructive feedback.

That’s great Madhav, but how to implement this?

Alright, here’s my “Quick Feedback Mechanism” for you. It involves 8 steps :-

Look for a mentor
Look for a group of like-minded people
Keep learning, exploring and doing
After completing your task, ask for a quick feedback from your mentor.
Share your learning with the group of people, listen to their advice
In the beginning, to get over that threshold motivation, reward yourself when you do something good (the positive feedback)
Once you achieve a good level of experience, start looking for negative feedback, and improve yourself
Ignore all the useless feedback (Don’t get stuck on things that are meant to waste your time).

I also have a complete article on this technique of mine, you can give it a read in your free time.

5. Train Your Brain : Spaced Repetition

Hang on a little more, this is the last one :)

Whenever we try to learn something new, we tend to forget things after a while. Let’s call it the retention curve, or the forgetting curve. It looks something like this —

Taking a simple example, the techniques that you read in this blog must be very fresh in your brain right now, but let’s say after 10 days, you might not even be able to recall a single one of them.

So the idea is to revise the concepts at a regular interval of time.

After learning something new, take a break of (say) 2 days, and try to recall the knowledge that you gained, try to write down everything you can recall. Now, revisit the content or slides or your notes, and see how much could you remember.

In first few iterations you might see the retention to be low, but with 4 or 5 iterations, the forgetting curve might flatten, looking like this —

This enhances your retention power, assuring that you can remember the concepts for long now.

I call this technique “The Brain Training”

Here’s my challenge for you!

To implement this technique, one great idea could be to write social media posts or blogs about what you learnt after 2 days of learning it. This will be a good test for your retention power, it will enhance your online presence, plus it will motivate others (who see your posts/blogs) to learn more.

An idea from my side is, write a LinkedIn post or a blog about what did you learn from this blog (Don’t forget to give credits).

That’s it, I hope you liked the article. Do let me know how you implemented these techniques and if they in any way helped in the betterment of your life.Would love to read and learn from all of them :)

Feel free to reach out to me anytime if you want to discuss something :D

I would be more than happy if you send your feedback, suggestions.
Moreover, I love to make new friends and we can be friends, just drop me an email.

Thanks a lot for reading till end. You can contact me in case if you need any assistance:
Web: http://madhavbahl.tech/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theleanprogrammer/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhavbahl/
Github: https://github.com/MadhavBahlMD
Email: theleanprogrammer@gmail.com