7 Ways to Learn Faster and Shortcut Your Learning Curve to Success

What if there were a way to learn faster and shortcut your learning curve to success? Don't you think you're going to turn into an incredible superhuman? Learning can be challenging and stressful, so even though we all know how important it is, most of us don't want to learn.

To begin with, you have to be open and discard any knowledge you may have that is not beneficial to your life. Also, it takes conscious effort to build your learning muscle. You should take the same care of your mind as your body. Just as developing muscles requires hard work and discomfort, so does accepting new information swiftly and efficiently assimilating information need constant mental exercise and challenge.

Success Requires Learning and You Can Faster the Process

It is impossible to stay the same or stagnate if you want to succeed. Your knowledge and information dictate where you should be in life, so altering your mindset and way of thinking is necessary if you want to progress.

The knowledge you currently possess has brought you this far, and you'll remain in your current position if you believe you already know everything. Change is only possible if you improve yourself and adopt a new perspective. Consequently, you need to start changing your mentality if you want to succeed greatly in life. When doing so, everything will change.

We know that acquiring new knowledge can significantly impact our lives; however, time is the issue, as we only have 24 hours a day, and we spend most of the time sleeping and working

How can we learn faster and shortcut the learning curve?

1. Measure and Evaluate Your Progress

First, measure and evaluate your progress. You cannot tell if you are moving forward or backward without measuring your progress. Let’s say your goal is to get better at a skill; How can you know if you are improving or getting better if you don’t measure your progress? The legendary management consultant Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Therefore, without measuring your progress or knowing where you are, you can never improve it.

Action Steps

Here are some suggestions for what you can do to measure your progress. Write down what you have learned each day, week, or month. Get a journal and record the things that are working for you, what you have done wrong, and where you can improve. Do this every day, week, or month, and then review your progress regularly.

Schedule your calendar and make time to do this. It can take about 15 to 30 minutes, but the result will be amazing. This activity helps you become more effective, and at the same time, it helps you understand yourself better, too.

2. Follow the Best Approach

You don’t need to create something new. We all want to do something different and never done before when it comes to succeeding, especially in business. We want to adopt an idea that no one else has thought of before.

Let's face it, an idea that nobody has thought about before usually won't work. Therefore, you have to understand that it is not about copying an idea, it is about improving it. So, you don’t have to start from scratch and find an idea that no one has thought about before. Instead, you need to start with an idea to improve the existing method.

You don't have to try to do it yourself and find your own way to learn anything you want to learn, like investing, building a blog, starting an online business, or learning how to play the guitar. All you have to do is follow the best approach or practices. You must push yourself to learn the fundamentals, especially at first.

Think about making money from a blog. Most people want to sell something from their blogs or they want to earn advertising income. The problem is that if you have no role models to follow, it will be extremely difficult for you, especially in the beginning. Therefore, you must find out who are the best bloggers or the top talent in your industry, and then model them and do what they do.

Nobody can become a great blogger or writer right from the start, as we all learn from other successful people and we are inspired by their work. So, don’t start from scratch and try to find your way there; instead, learn from the top leaders in your industry and master the basics first.

Action Steps

Identify the best in your industry and model their success. Make them your role model and follow their work and what they do on social media. If they published books, read their books. If they give talks or seminars, attend them.

3. Learn from Feedback

Learning from feedback is the fastest way we can grow, although we all hate feedback, as we don’t like people telling us what we do isn’t effective or simply wrong.

People don’t like to hear that what they do is incorrect. However, it is also an essential message telling us where to improve.

Imagine performing a guitar piece in front of an expert musician who provides feedback on your areas of weakness. If you are a blogger and you send your best piece to a recognized authority in your field, you are asking for their assessment of its quality. Don't you think you can get much better if you take in the feedback and advice from experts?

Consider the Feedback Source

While getting feedback is crucial, you also need to take the source into account. You want to avoid taking in any feedback from anyone.

For example, if you want to invest in the stock market, you sure shouldn't take advice from people who have never invested in stocks before. You only want to learn from people who are qualified and who have the skills and knowledge.

Action Steps:

People will never give you feedback or advice without your consent, so ask for it. Approach experts and present your work to them, rather than waiting for their advice on how to improve.

Play the guitar in front of a teacher and ask for advice if you want to improve your guitar skills. Seek their feedback so you can advance and become better.

You want to learn from the best and grasp the fundamentals first. At this point, you don’t want to start from scratch or even try to figure ways on your own.

Only after you have mastered the fundamentals can you begin to use creativity to refine your techniques or create something original. You can shorten your learning curve and learn things more quickly by doing this.

4. Put in More Effort

You need to put in more effort if you want to learn faster. In other words, work harder. Spend more time on the subject matter and put in more of your effort.

Malcolm Gladwell, a best-selling author, introduced the 10,000 Hours Rule in his groundbreaking book Outliers: The Story of Success.

The rule is that if you want to master something, you must put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. Therefore, just work hard and put in more effort at where you want to improve.

• Do you want to be a successful blogger? Invest more time in your blog posts.
• Do you want to be a successful investor? Invest in the time and energy necessary to learn and master investing.
• Do you want to be an excellent chef? Spend more time cooking.

This makes sense. The more effort you put into something, the better you become.

Deliberate Practice

Although the 10,000-Hour Rule is a helpful guideline, it is not enough; deliberate practice and concentration are still necessary.

You have probably seen people put years of effort and a lot of work into something, but they never seem to reach the master level.

Consider this: Does an hour of daily running for years qualify a person for the Olympics? Absolutely no.

Deliberate practice and concentration are crucial. You must put in a lot of effort and deliberately practice your skills. Avoid working for an hour while making two cups of coffee and checking Facebook three times at that hour.

Action Steps

Schedule time to practice your skills and deliberately train yourself to improve yourself. If you can, find a mentor or coach. More importantly, focus on what you are doing.

The secret is to stay focused. The amount of concentration you put into your work will determine how good you are, not how much time you spend on it.

5. Get a Mentor or a Coach

You need help from a mentor or coach if you really want to shortcut your learning curve and achieve success faster. Sometimes, the best and fastest way to learn is to have someone to show you the way.

You'll notice that none of the extraordinary people succeed independently. In addition to coaches and mentors who provide guidance where they need improvement, they have friends who serve as a constant reminder of their goals.

Often, we are blind to our weaknesses and strengths. Therefore, we need someone to point out our weaknesses to overcome them. Also,  we need people to believe in our strengths to succeed and shine.

Action Steps

Follow the experts and the best people in your field. When the time is right, get yourself a coach or a mentor to guide you toward success.

You must choose your mentor wisely, as the consequences of choosing the wrong person could be far worse than not having a mentor at all. Make sure the mentorship is effective. Therefore, don't settle for anyone; find the right person.

6. Develop a Learning Mind

Learning is the simplest way to shortcut your learning curve. Therefore, make conscious efforts to learn by watching informative videos, listening to podcasts, and reading books.

Creating an active learning routine is the goal. It is not something you want to leave to chance. Without consciously attempting to better yourself, improvement is impossible. You must go through the process if you want to learn and get better. Simply cultivate the habit of learning to achieve this.

Action Steps

The simplest way to learn is to read, although it might not be as effective. Listen to podcasts instead of reading if that's not your thing. Some people prefer to listen than to read. Furthermore, you can learn a lot from YouTube; it is a great platform for learning as people share their knowledge through videos.

However, be careful to concentrate on learning rather than aimlessly wasting time watching unrelated videos that will distract you from your task and eat up time.

7. Challenge Yourself and Go Through the Pain

There’s a proverb that says, “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”

Do you realize that going through pain is the best way to learn? You really don't learn much from easy things. Consider your life at this moment, you gained the most experience from those challenging times.

Therefore, don't get it wrong by believing that learning is simple. Furthermore, fast does not equate to easy. Sure, you want to learn and improve your skills fast, but to learn the most, you have to be willing to challenge yourself to do the hard things.

Similar to writing an article. It is hard when you first start. You'll discover that writing articles and putting thoughts on paper are difficult tasks. It might also take you several hours to just write a 500-word article.

However, once you have mastered it, it becomes simple. You can express your ideas through writing as you think. It only takes 30 minutes to write a 500-word article. This is what we mean when we say "challenge yourself."

You have to occasionally make things difficult for yourself because you will become comfortable with it, and there won't be any growth if things get easy. As they say, "no pain, no gain."

You must challenge yourself to step outside of your comfort zone and accept the pain. Discomfiture and pain are indicators of learning.

How would you feel if you could write a 10,000-word article or read a book daily? This is how you can grow and improve at what you do. Therefore, challenge yourself and take on the difficult tasks.

Action Steps

Strive to do something uncomfortable and challenging regularly. Learn a new skill like cooking or playing the guitar. If you have never read a book, get one now and start reading.

The key is to force yourself to undertake a challenging task that you have never done before. Your mental toughness and resilience will increase as a result of this.

This concept is summed up in a motivational quote by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as he says, “The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens.”

In Conclusion

All of us desire to learn faster and shortcut our learning curve to success. Therefore, we have provided you with some incredible tips on achieving this.

Everyone aspires to be great in life; however, most people are unwilling to grow, change for the better, or learn new things. While learning is not always simple, the rewards are immense.