10 Techniques Very Smart People Use To Learn and Adapt Quickly
10 Techniques Very Smart People Use To Learn and Adapt Quickly
As we all know, Internet marketing is a notoriously fast changing field, where the knowledge you have right now can get quickly outdated in a matter of months.
This is why it is important not only to know a lot, but also, to be able to learn new things quickly.
Learning new things quickly is a skill in itself. We all need to get good at it, since traffic channels, offers, rules, competitors and regulations change pretty much from day to day.
So what learning strategies do people who are “quick learners” follow?
Here are 10 of the best practices for optimizing the learning process, along with the latest in productivity research, below.
1. Use the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule states that you get 80% of your value out of 20% of work. In business, 20% of activities produce 80% of results that you want. Fast learners apply the same logic to their research areas.
When I look at a book, for example, I look though the contents page and make a list from 1-5 with 1 being the chapter with the most relevant material. When looking through a instructional video, I often skip to the middle where the action or technique is being demonstrated, then I work backwards to gain the context and principles.
This works since the beginning of most videos will be fluffed with exposition, and most books are layered in with filler to make length requirements. So with a little cunning, you can extract most of the knowledge from those materials while investing a fraction of the time.
2. To understand a problem, ask “why” five times.
In “The Lean Startup,” author Eric Ries offers the “Five Whys” technique for getting to the root of an issue. The idea is to get to the underlying cause of a superficial problem — one that, more often than not is more human than technical error.
To see the quintuple-why strategy in action, lets look at his hypothetical startup example:
a) A new release disabled a feature for customers. Why? Because a particular server failed.
b) Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way.
c) Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer who used ...