I often write about my ability to learn things extremely quickly. While it may appear to be black magic, there is nothing to it. I’m simply making effective use of the information provided by the internet.

The following is a list of resources that have bean extremely useful to me.

• Wikipedia

  When you first come across a new subject and want a basic grounding in it, the first place you should go is Wikipedia. While it is often cited as an untrustworthy source, as it is written by the general public, the information it contains provides an extremely good overview of almost every subject known to man.

• E-Books

  If you want in depth, technical information about something one of the best sources are E-Books and downloadable PDF articles. These are often free, but some are only available through payment. This mainly depends on the nature of the subject, papers covering technical things such as programming are normally free, less technical media is often payed.

• Specialist Websites and Blogs

  Another excellent source of detailed information are specialist websites and Blogs. The vast majority of the content on such websites is free, though you normally have to spend a lot of time digging through archives. Some web masters sell e-books consisting of a websites archives re-written and formatted, making it more accessible.

• Audio Podcasts

  Textual content is an awesome learning resource, but it demands your full attention and has limited portability. Optimal learning involves making effective use of your down time, time that would otherwise be wasted. This includes things like waiting in queues and commuting. Listening to audio podcasts is an extremely effective way of doing this.

  There are podcasts available for free covering everything you would want to know. Additionally, unlike traditional media like TV and radio, they do not suffer from “dumbing down’ in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

• Youtube

  Like everything, text and audio have there limitations, some things are just better explained through the use of images. While you can include images in written content, video is almost always superior.

  Amongst all of the useless junk on Youtube, there are a large number of extremely useful educational videos. These range from people demonstrating unusual techniques which can be used in some software, to recordings of conference talks.

  Video is the `highest bandwidth’ in terms of its ability to explain things, but it is also the least portable. Video demands your full attention, making it difficult to slot into your dead time. But used sparingly it can be an extremely useful resource.

Invincibility, the ability to take on any problem and solve it with ease, a goal of many but a reality for few. It is widely bereaved to be impossible with many people trying, failing then giving up and falling back to mediocrity.

Regardless of what these people believe, it is possible. Invincibility is not a single action, nor the accumulation of knowledge, or a natural ability that only some have. It is a sequence of events, repetitive failures and learning from them.

Here are 6 things which will help you to achieve the goal of Invincibility:

1. Be self-educating

   It is no mistake to think that the path to invincibility lies in knowledge and ones ability to apply it. Traditionally the only way to obtain said knowledge was through the education system. You can learn much from formal education, but there is one thing that it does not teach you: how to teach yourself.

   The world is constantly changing, in order to adapt to whatever problem gets thrown your way you must be able to learn. Ether you can spend your whole life in education, never getting anything worthwhile done. Or you can learn to teach yourself.

   When you are self-educating, you can pick up the knowledge required to solve a problem while you are solving it. This means that you can always stay up to date with the latest developments with no additional work.

2. Be obsessive

   Knowledge is great, but without the experience to put it into practice, it is worthless. Experience does not come from the class room, it comes from practice, applying your existing knowledge in creative ways to solve problems.

   Ultimately the only way to achieve this is to obsess, devote all of your time to one thing and one thing only. Don’t just practice your passions, live them. As quickly as you can, find ways to apply your knowledge to real world situations, not just made up classroom scenarios. Offer to do volunteer work for people, start a community around your passion or do some freelancing.

3. Never give up

   On the path to invincibility you will fail, a lot. Don’t let this failure get you down, every time you fail you learn something. Although they are worth little on there own, cumulatively these lessons add up to a massive improvement in your ability.

   After each failure you will feel down and may want to give up, don’t. The only difference between the successful people and failures in this world is persistence. Behind every successful person you will find a long road of failures. Where the unsuccessful give up at some point on this path, the successes push through it.

4. Don’t be afraid to break the rules

   Rules are put in place to keep people constrained to mediocrity, to keep people “in there place”. No body has ever changed the world by following the rules, you have to break them.

   As you develop, you will discover that rules are actually a lot less fixed than they first appear. How do you work around them? I leave that problem as an exercise for the reader, it’s a lot easier than you may think.

5. Use “down time” wisely

   The number one excuse people give when they fail is that they did not have enough time. The typical day includes a lot of short blocs of “down time” such as waiting in a queues, commuting or waiting for that email.

   If put to use, these small blocks of time quickly add up and things start getting done. How can you actually use this time? For one thing, modern mobile phones are basically just portable computers and can be used for work, or just reading articles on the net.

   Failing that, you always have access to a scratch pad that no one can take away, your mind. Insted of just doing nothing, plan something in your mind, then write it down when you next have access to a computer.

6. Get rid of your TV

   Passive entertainment like TV is of no use to anyone and prevents you from completing worthwhile work. TV is designed to be addictive, if you sit down to watch one program, you will suddenly realise that the last 5 hours have just vanished.

   If you get rid of your TV, you will suddenly have a massive amount of time available, which you can put to good use doing work that matters.

I have just finished a course and passed it at distinction level. However while many of other students are heading to universities, I chose not to. Now,with the existence of the internet, there is little value that they can offer that is not already publicly available.

The whole education system comes from an age were detailed information about subjects was not publicly available. Colleges and Universities being knowledge stores. People go in one end knowing little, then pop out the other end with a degree in some subject. In the age of the internet, this model just does not suffice any more.

Now, access to limitless amounts of information about basically every single subject derived by mankind is freely available to practically anyone on the planet. The information silos have bean broken open and flooded the world.

If you want to learn about a subject, all you have to do is go onto the internet and Google it, the information you are getting is absolutely up to date with the current ideas and practices. The many to many and completely open nature of the internet allows anyone to post content, thus you can get immediate access to new ideas right from the people who developed them.

I am a strong believer that every person has there own optimal learning methods. When correctly exploited these allow amazing things to be achieved. As I wrote in a previous post, I have bean using my own understanding of my optimal learning methods to learn a lot in a verry short period of tile.

Within the constraints of a university or college, this is not possible. Because of the fundamentally one-to-many architecture, with one lecturer teaching many students. It is not possible for the lecturer to know every students optimal learning method, so a generic method is used instead. While this allows the majority of the students to understand a subject, it is far from optimal and subsequently wastes a large amount of time.
Learning, regardless of the subject, is purely a matter of knowing yourself, exploiting your optimal learning methods and using the subject in practice. The following quote form Fluent In 3 mounts exemplifies this extremely well:

So, if studying isn’t how you learn to speak a language, then what is? I’ll tell you, and it’s going to blow your mind. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Brace yourself! You have to speak it!

Sitting down and studding a subject is just like learning the grammar and vocabulary of a language without ever actually practising specking it. Only knowing fundamental principles, or how to use some specific tool in a software program is not adequate.

Formal education generally teaches subjects like this, only introducing the fundamental concepts with little or no actual problem solving. This results in the production of “cookie cutter workmen”, people who apparently understand a subject, but have no creative spark at all. If they are placed in a situation that there education did not teach them, they completely fail.

Creativity can only be developed by repeatedly applying your understanding to successively harder and harder problems. If you do this, you soon have to start developing unusual and creative solutions to problems, outside the normal capability of your tool set.

Granted, there will always be some need for higher education so long as there is a need for engineers, medical doctors, opticians, dentists and vets. Subjects like these cannot be learnt purely through self study. Universities will become much smaller affairs, devoted only to teaching subjects that cannot be learnt through self study and the internet.

When the platform changes, you ether adapt or die off. This is where universities lie right now. While they have previously bean able to charge ridiculously high prices because of there monopoly over the information, this is no longer the case. As more people realise that they can obtain the exact same information using the internet for free, the number of people attending university will plummet.

The world is currently in a state of transition, where employers are not aware that it is possible to know a subject in great detail without a degree.

The problem remains that the employers are still looking for degrees, even though it no longer grantees that someone knows a subject and is able to think for themselves. Ultimately this will work itself out as the number of degree-less yet highly knowledgeable people increases. Ultimately what is needed is a way to take an exam and prove that you know a subject, without having to go through an entire course first.

Computers are only capable of doing one thing at a time. Although it may appear that multiple things are happening at once, this is nothing more than a illusion. What is actually happening is the machines resources are being time-sheared. With each program getting the chance to run for a small fraction of a second, before being switched out for the next program. As humans have a limited resolution to there perception, switch between tasks quickly enough and no body will notice.

What does this have to do with multitasking in humans? Well, it basically works along the same principles, the human mind is only capable of focusing on one thing at a time. The appearance of simultaneous thought processes being an illusion created by quickly switching your focus between several differed tasks.

Compared to computers, humans have the disadvantage. In computers the very existence of task switching is completely hidden by abstraction. in humans on the other hand, it is completely exposed and manual. When multitasking, every single task that you are working on is all jumbled up together in your short term memory. The more you try to do, the more jumbled it becomes. If your short-term memory becomes full, you start to forget things, unless you made a concious effort to move them into long term memory at an earlier time. If you forget things, a part of the content that one of your many tasks relies on gets lost, resulting in a need to re gain this information from somewhere, wasting time.

Unsurprisingly, there is overhead associated with managing all of this information, worsened by the fact that parts of the information often relate to completely different and unrelated subjects. Maintaining such a large amount of complex information for a long period of time can only result in confusion and loss of focus.

What happens if you are distracted while you are working on your numerous tasks? Say a telephone rings or a collogue asks you for help. Ether you have to quickly try to commit your short term memory into long term memory, or you forget to do this, loosing most of your short-term memory in the proses. Thus when you return to your original tasks you have little to no recollection of what you were thinking.

How do you solve this problem? Simple: don’t multi task! Instead of trying to do everything simultaneously, create a to do list. Create this on paper or digitally so as not to clutter your memory. On this list you should write down all of your tasks, ordered from most to least importance. Each one of the tasks on your to do list should be small, completable in less than an hour or two. Any larger tasks should be broken into a series of smaller ones.

Now that your list is complete, take the most important task off the top, shut down all distractions then just start working on it. Don’t stop until you have finished it and resist all urges to start doing another task. When, and only when you completely finish the first task, cross it off your list, then move on to the next task.

Notice how you are still essentially doing the same thing as when you were multitasking, but with absolutely none of the overhead. It will take time, but once you get used to single tasking, you will start to get your tasks finished much faster and to a higher quality.

I have a skill, one that bewilders many people, including some of my fellow students in collage. The ability to pick up a working knowledge of any subject. Regardless of weather I had any prior experience with it, within a week or less. For example I learnt all the basic programming techniques and was able to design new programs from scratch, while also in full time education. However If I had taken a course, it would have taken anywhere between 6 months and a year to achieve the same thing.

Because of this I am regarded as somewhat of a genius by others in collage. This, however is simply not true. I am not naturally good at learning new things. The only difference between myself and my fellow students is that I use more effective learning methods and unconventional short-cuts or “hacks” to learn more in less time.

The basis of my learning method is simple; Pick a subject, any subject then in all of the time you have available, do nothing besides read about and practice that subject. Stop playing computer games, stop going shopping, stop spending all your time on social network sites then just start practising your subject!

• Want to learn to program? Pick any language, find a tutorial on the internet and start using it to solve problems.
• Want to learn to write websites? Go to HTML dog, open a text editor and start writing.
• Want to learn [insert subject here]? Google it, read a lot about it and most impotently, start practising.

When you are learning your subject remove all destructions: shut down any irrelevant tabs in your browser, shut down your email, disable all email, IM and social networking notifications. Only focus on your subject and absolutely nothing else, if you don’t, you wont be learning optimally. Multi-tasking is an illusion, the human brain is simply not capable of multi-tasking efficiently.

I wont lie, if you are learning something very complicated that you have absolutely no prior experience with. It will take you longer than a week to become good at it. For example it took me about 6 months of solid practice to reach my current ability with 3D computer graphics. This is not about getting good at a subject, only achieving a complete working knowledge, which you can use to practice and increase your experience.

There are many other people using this technique to achieve apparently extraordinary feats, for example, Benny Lewis, the blogger behind fluent in 3 months. Benny uses a variation of the technique described here to achieve fluency in a new foreign language in a period of 3 months. A feat that is completely imposable within the box of the traditional education system.

This post is just a guide. depending on the exact nature of what you are learning, you will start to develop new and unconventional learning methods. You can do anything you like, just don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

The education system is outdated, with the wealth of information available for free on the internet there is simply no excuse for not learning new things. Next time you want to learn something, try passing on the education system and give this method a try. I would love to hear about any success stories you have had, just post a comment.