on learning how to learn

a short guide on the key to mastering everything else

earlier this week on twitter, hayden adams asked, “If you could add one subject to every US high school, what would it be?”

I scrolled through dozens of response and not a single person mentioned my favorite. I think there is an objectively best answer to this question, and its “learning how to learn”.

let me explain why:

• she who has learned how to learn can master any subject.

• she who has learned how to learn has the right mindset to keep growing and pick up new things every year, compounding her knowledge and skills over time

• the more and the earlier she improves her ability to learn, the bigger this effect of compounding, the same way that wealth compounds. remember how the terminal wealth of investing an initial $100 at 5% vs 10% over 50 years is $1.1k vs ~$12k. the effect of compounding is massive, and you should seek it out wherever you can.

why should you listen to me on this subject?

• I’ve managed to rise to the top of two different unrelated fields (poker and crypto), in purely autodidactic fashion.

• while I’m above average intelligent, millions of other people are more intelligent than me. rather, I can point to the year I became interested in learning as a field of study as a complete gamechanger for the trajectory of my career.

without further ado, here is what I would put into a “learning how to learn” course.

Laying the Groundwork

growth mindset

• before anything else, you need to believe that your path in life is not preordained. your intelligence and skills are not fixed, but can be improved with the right effort and strategies.

• you are a person who can grow, in fact, you can reach anything, you can do it through your own effort. with every small success that you get, this belief will deepen until it becomes unshakable.

• having a perpetual well of motivation matters a lot, and people with a growth mindset have a much easier time to keep learning, bounce back from mistakes, and ask others for help.

metacognition (thinking about thinking)

• believing you can grow is the first step. but how do you figure out the best way to learn and adapt? that’s where metacognition (thinking about thinking) comes in. metacognition means to develop an awareness of your own thought process. in your learning journey, you can use this to ask what methods are working for you and which don't.

• start taking a strategic approach to learning, review occasionally, and make changes over time.

• there are very different types of learners, and the earlier you learn which type you are, the better. finding what motivates you is a big part of this. for me, I found that I crave two sensations above all: 1) the “aha”/click moment that sometimes occurs during learning (intrinsic), and 2) helping others through explaining stuff and being right. when you know that about yourself, its much easier to build a feedback loop around your learning practice, which we will discuss more later.

physiology of learning

• before we dive into specific methods, it helps to know what is (literally) happening inside your brain, at the hardware level.

• learning involves creating and then strengthening neural pathways. connections that aren’t reinforced weaken over time - that’s why regular review is so effective

• understand the difference between extremely limited short-term memory (can hold no more than 5-9 items of information) and the practically unlimited long-term memory. through processes like encoding and consolidation, memories can be made to last a lifetime.

• sleep is insanely important for learning for a multitude of reasons - its where the brain reorganizes, memories are formed, and metabolic waste products are cleared.

• your motivation to do anything in life is driven by dopamine, so developing a good feedback loop around your practice, and associating learning with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards can be a powerful technique

Practical studying techniques

chunking

• now that you understand how the brain physically processes information, and especially how limited working memory can be the bottleneck - there is a technique to get around these limitations.

• chunking the ability of our brain to treat increasingly complex concepts as “one unit” e.g. a chess player can memorize a board more easily than a non-chess player, because they simply see a group of positions, not a random organization of pieces. chunking = compression for memory.

• chunking is the way to establish patterns and relationships among ideas. it works in both ways. for one, you can start from individual pieces of information and group them together. and you can break complex subjects or skills into smaller, more manageable chunks that can be trained individually.

• to stick with the gaming analogies. if I think of a random poker hand history, I can group the same piece of information many different ways. while a new player would be overwhelmed by the many decisions made at several points, for me it would be a routine structure seen many times before. I can zoom from the big chunk into the hand and review any decision individually, but I can also zoom way out and treat it as a group of situations in the overall game tree that might demand a similar way of playing.

active recall

• chunking makes it easier to handle big ideas, but how do you make them stick?

• actively trying to retrieve information from memory has been shown to dramatically improve memory retention and understanding

• the prime example for me is stopping after a paragraph or chapter to try to summarize what I just read.

• you can apply this in many situations, e.g. while reading, while writing, in conversation, and in spaced repetition, which I discuss next.

spaced repetition

• if active recall is about testing yourself and retrieving items from memory, spaced repetition is when to optimally do it.

• reviewing information over gradually increasing time intervals, optimally right before you forget it

• e.g. review a note after 1 day, 1 week, then 1 month will strengthen the memory pathways

• adopt a flashcard system (I recommend anki or paper) to automate the spacing progress

taking good notes

• it is much easier to schedule reviews when you have a solid set of notes to draw from. that’s why I’m a taking notes all the time.

• your notes form the foundation of the review process

• note-taking is also shown to reinforce memory, help organize your thoughts (which creates structure and helps with chunking), and create material for retrieval practice

• I’m also a huge believer in “atomic notes”, the idea of creating a personal wiki with a short note on any concept I care about, all interlinked to each other

how to read

• good notes start from good input; and reading is the biggest (though not the only) input source for many. learning how to read actively and critically, instead of letting the text wash over you, is extremely important.

• I’m a very avid reader, aside from reading crypto-related things about 50% of my day, I read 50-60 books per year. reading is a huge topic for me and I could write a dozen newsletters only about that

• I strongly recommend reading How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. published in 1940, the principles in this book are fantastic and timeless. among others, it recommends that

  • you should use active reading, and make reading into a dialogue with the author and material

  • a text wants to be talked to, summarized, taught/explained to others, challenged, framed in the bigger context, and compared to other authors/texts/arguments

interleaving

• reading, summarizing, and reviewing one subject is a good start, but creativity and mental agility are often at the connection of different topics.

• interleaving is the mixing of related topics or types of practice problems in the same session.

• its shown to train your ability to switch between ideas and discover new connections.

encoding

• when interleaving, you create more “hooks” for storing the information in memory. in other words, you are changing how the information is encoded.

• encoding is the process of converting information into a “file format” in your memory.

• the three types of encoding are visual (e.g. diagrams, videos), acoustic (conversations, podcasts, speaking to yourself out loud), and semantic (meaning, the underlying concept or context).

• the more senses are involved in encoding, the stronger the memory enshrines in your brain. that’s why, when I immerse myself in a subject, I will read, write, talk, watch, and listen to podcasts about it at the same time. another example is to read a text, then write a summary, read it to yourself, and draw a diagram from it.

• the biggest hack I know is to give things meaning (semantic coding). you get that whenever you connect the new thing to a thing you already know. this is also why that memory of being embarrassed at school will never disappear. its emotionally encoded.

Putting it all together

interdisciplinarity

• encoding becomes even more powerful when you connect ideas across fields — suddenly, the same fact can have a richer context.

• interdisciplinarity is all about seeing patterns that span multiple subjects. its learning the big ideas from multiple different fields will routinely allow you to discover connections where others don't see them

• as charlie munger writes:

“what you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And you hang your actual experience and your vicarious experience that you get from reading and so forth on this latticework of powerful models. And with that system, things gradually get to fit together in a way that enhances cognition.“

working with others

• exploring multiple fields can expand your perspective, but you don't have to do it alone. collaborate with others to spark creativity, challenge assumptions, and help reinforce what you’ve learned.

• engaging on ideas with others will often unlock creativity and strengthen memory, as you recall ideas in conversation, and encode information on multiple dimensions

• personally, I love reaching out to people and ask them questions. you would be surprised how easy it is to get people to engage with you, especially if they are a curious type themselves (curious types feel challenged by explaining something well)

• social media is a trove of good reading material, and instead of doomscrolling I would challenge you to start “active reading” on some of your most interesting follows

exercise self care & healthy habits

• no matter how you learn, and how many of these techniques you apply, you also need to take care of your body and mind.

• getting 8h+ sleep, eating well, and exercising regularly have been show to dramatically improve focus, memory, and performance, and can thus supercharge all of the other strategies.

• stress is an interesting subject, because in small doses it can often feel like an attention sharpener. however, too much stress will prevent new memories from forming and impair your cognition in all kinds of other ways. the optimal state for true absorption and synthesis is when you are calm, focused, and open to new information.

finally: establish feedback loops

• even if you’re doing all of the above, you’re learn more efficiently and have more motivation and fun doing so, if you close the (feedback) loop.

• for myself, I make the biggest progress when I write about things I study (supercharges understanding, improves recall), and then publish them (engage on ideas with others, dopamine boost from attention)

• there are many things here that work, and what we’re looking for is things that feel fun/rewarding for you, and forming “combos” of actions that work well together.

  • for example, if you actively read on twitter and challenge the material, it will improve your understanding and recall.

  • if you write your own shorts educational threads, it will reorganize the material, enforcing semantic encoding.

  • if you build a network, it will give you more opportunities to ask questions to experts, learn together, strengthen ideas in conversation, as well as explain things to others.

---

that about wraps up my short overview of how i’d structure a course on learning how to learn. obviously, I’m just using the school prompt as an excuse to talk about learning, a subject I deeply enjoy.

to reiterate — learning how to learn isn’t just another subject. its more of a metasubject or foundation on top of which all other other learning and growing can flourish. and its the one whose absence I felt the most growing up, and which led to dramatic improvements in my career when I started to understand it.

as a final caveat, all of the techniques I mentioned today are scientifically validated and proven to work for a large number of the population and across subjects. but there are both people who benefit more from other techniques (e.g. bodily experience), and there are techniques beyond the scope of this text that are also highly effective (e.g. imitation). so consider this text as a more of a starting point for your own research, rather than the destination.

let me know if this has been helpful to you, and if you have any follow-on questions.

PS, my challenge to you:

1. pick one technique to try out this week

2. apply it to a subject you care about, can be inside or outside crypto

3. put a reminder to review in one week how you’ve done

---

thanks to larry sukernik and dataalways for reviewing an earlier draft of this article.