A Simple Guide to Learning Hard Things

Hard Things are Worthwhile

Hard things are new skills that enable you to accomplish new things or to achieve familiar things faster than before. Even if there is no tangible benefit regarding job opportunities and career growth, you will gain confidence.
You are someone who is capable, someone who is consistent. Smart. Hard-working. Resilient. Someone who sets an ambitious goal and achieves it.

Great!

Now we know why you should learn hard things. The downside is, that hard things are, well, hard. The same things that make things hard are the things that make learning them worthwhile. What follows is my advice on mastering this challenge. I hope they are helpful.

Just Start

The first step in learning hard things is acceptance.
Because the thing you chose is hard, it will take time. Before starting, you are at most vaguely familiar with it. Therefore, you can solely estimate how long it will take. I found it helpful to let go of any notion of a timeframe or deadline. Mastery takes the time it takes.

Not committing to a set timeframe does not mean you should not plan. While the plan is useless, the planning is vital.
Initially, time spent researching how others achieved what you set out to do, building a roadmap, and collecting resources, is time well spent. However, the marginal utility of planning quickly declines. While you may not find the best path in a couple of hours, you will find a good enough path quickly. After this point, your time is much better spent on actual learning than curriculum fine-tuning. Don’t get lost in the meta. For the most part, fundamentals, the obvious things, are the shortcuts.

Every now and then you can pause, take a breath, and revisit if your current plan is still sensible. Updating your roadmap is not a failure of initial planning. On the contrary. Because you now have first-hand experience learning what you set out to learn, you have more information. You know how well you can work with the resources you choose. If you don’t like it, switch it up. A plan, iteratively updated while you work through it, is almost always superior to anything you could have come up with before you started.

Keep Going

When the most important thing is getting started, the second most important thing is to keep going.

You have two main levers to achieve this: the cadence of your study sessions and their duration.

Longer study sessions allow you to cover more material. Additionally, you save on the ramp-up time you need every session to find your way back into the material. At some point, though, you will get tired and the effectiveness of time spent (as well as your enjoyment of the work) starts to decline rapidly.

A faster cadence has the benefit, that what you are learning stays in the working memory, and the contents of your last session are still fresh. Probably more important, a fast cadence signals to your brain that what you are learning is important — after all you recall it often — and your knowledge is more likely to be stored in long-term memory.

Before you now go off and block daily eight-hour learning slots, it is important to be honest with yourself. Your learning routine is an optimization problem and you should optimize for sustainability, not daily progress. Consistent work over months hands down beats you crunching for two weeks, burning out, and giving up.

So ask yourself: what is a pace that you can sustain for a long, potentially indefinite amount of time? Life still happens and sports, friends, and work, they’re important. You cannot indefinitely pause your life to learn, but you must integrate your development into your daily routine.

A steady pace wins the endurance race.

Continuously Improve Your Process

Besides pacing yourself, you can switch things up to improve your session effectiveness. Change cadence, session duration, or something else. Treat your learning as an ongoing small-scale experiment and tune your experience. Change one thing at a time and keep what is working, revert what does not. Which process works also depends on the type of learning you do. If you learn a skill, then repetition may be your friend. When learning theory, mixing different media such as textbooks and podcasts might help you.

One criminally underestimated factor in improving your learning experience is how enjoyable it is to you. Maybe making yourself a cup of good tea, reading the textbook at the lake, or learning with friends are things that make you look forward to your next session. That may be a little less efficient than working at a desk, but this loss of efficiency is temporary and well spent if it makes you go on for some more weeks.

You are accomplishing an incredible feat by learning the hard thing.
Treat yourself, you deserve it!

Measure Progress on large Time Scales

Now that you have been learning for a while, how do you know how well it’s going? To gauge where you are, you need a point of reference. Comparing yourself to others is only partially useful. While it helps to give you a notion about what is possible and what works (both in terms of process and goals), the most important comparison, is with yourself.

When you start, you feel tempted to self-assess daily. But that is nonsense, the noise is too large. Rather probe your progress after some time, say a couple of weeks. With that timeframe, you should be able to see a clear trend in skill development. You can also use this reflection to gauge the effectiveness of the resources you are working with. Are you progressing slower than usual, do you look forward to learning? Because you have dedicated a significant amount of time, you have much more information about your requirements and can make a more informed decision to change.

Summary

That’s it. Learning hard things is no rocket science.

Successfully learning hard things comes down to
1) start,
2) keep going,
3) continuously improve your process,
4) measure progress on large time scales.

When you think about it, 3) and 4) are just a bonus.

Many people drop out of learning after a short time, many more only daydream about what they would like to learn.

Be different! Commit, stick with it and, I promise you, in six months you will be astonished by your progress. Six months, that’s not that much time when you think about it.

Good luck!