If You Say Yes to Any of These 10 Questions, Science Says You Definitely Learn Faster Than Average

Who you know obviously matters. But when you’re trying to accomplish a huge goal, like starting and growing a business , or changing professions, or becoming an expert in your chosen pursuit… what you know, and what you can do with what you know, matters a lot more. Which means the faster you learn and the more you retain, the more successful you can be . Here are ten ways, backed by science, that show you know ways to learn faster than most people: 1. You "chunk" your study sessions. You’re busy. So you wait until the last minute to learn what you need to know: A presentation, a sales demo, an investor pitch… Bad idea. Research shows "distributed practice" is a much more effective way to learn. Imagine you want to nail your investor pitch. Once you’ve drafted your pitch, run through it once. Then take a few minutes to make corrections and revisions. Then step away for a few hours, or even for a day, before you repeat the process. Why does distributed practice work? The "study-phase retrieval theory" says that each time you attempt to retrieve something from memory and the retrieval is more successful, that memory becomes harder to forget. (If you go over your pitch repeatedly, much of your presentation is still top of mind… which means you don’t have to retrieve it from memory.) Another theory regards "contextual variability." When information gets encoded into memory, some of the context is also encoded. (Which is why listening to an old song can cause you to remember where you were, what you were feeling, etc., when you first heard that song.) That context creates useful cues for retrieving information. Regardless of how it works, distributed practice definitely works. Give yourself enough time to space out […]

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