When you’re learning new concepts, there is a way to supercharge it and make it go faster and more ingrained in your long term memory.
Liken it to something you already know.
When you’re hit with a new concept, just ask yourself “what does this remind me of?”
If you can find any way to connect the new concept with and old one, you instantly learn a whole bunch of points that you start from rather than starting from zero.
There are even things you can learn by eliminating ideas. When you compare, there will be things that are not the same. Those become the things that the new idea is NOT. Now you’re creating a more vivid picture of the new idea. You can quickly know some things that it is, some things that it is not, and then work on any additional knowledge about it.
And if you come up with not just one thing, but a list of things that the new thing is like, and most of the time you will, then you very quickly start to get a really good idea of what this thing is like, how it behaves, and what you can expect from it.
So you can learn new things very quickly.
I had an experience recently where I was working on a dog cage we were repurposing as a quail run. I needed to cover the larger spaces that the quail could exit through and smaller birds could enter through.
I had never done this exact task before. But I have done things before that I could use concepts from to get this done.
Here are a few things I thought of. I’ve put a giant shade on the top of our pergola and also added fence slats to cut down some of the sun and heat that comes into our back door windows in the summer. I’ve wrapped presents. I’ve created a chicken wire barrier to keep our chickens in one area of the side yard.
I could use all this experience to come up with something for the quail run.
We bought some nylon mesh online. Using that and some left over fence slat pieces, I covered the top and sides of the dog cage with a combination of (removable) wooden roof and almost invisible protective cover made of the nylon mesh for the sides.
You may be thinking that those two things are so similar, it makes sense that you could do both.
That’s the point.
It’s like riding a motorcycle and snowboarding. Like painting a fence and basting a turkey. Making a bed and wrapping a present (I used that one to nicely wrap the nylon mesh around the dog cage).
Most things are so simple and obviously alike, but often, we don’t see it. We just see something new and we think “but I’ve never done that before.”
You have done that before. It just wasn’t called the same thing.
So look around and start seeing how things are the same. Then you can know exponentially more and more every day.
The other thing you can do with this tool is teach others better. When you present an idea to someone else and they are new to that thing, you can ask them if they are familiar with something like it. When you hit something that they are familiar with, you then go over all the things that are the same, ways they are different, and all the stuff that is unique.
Don’t keep reinventing the wheel. Learn concepts and apply those where ever you can.
Boom. You just became a master learner and a master teacher.
Go forth and increase knowledge.
