Most people learn through multiple methods but favor one or two. Use your preferences to your advantage.
Be wary of past memories that tell you to stay away from certain things. This can soon inhibit you from trying a lot of new things if taken to an extreme. As you grow you develop more experience, coordination, responsiveness, and confidence that one experience can’t teach, but you can apply to re-learning an old experience. For example, if you had a bad experience riding a horse when younger, not getting back on a horse when you’re older and calmer might mean you miss out on a trek of a lifetime. Or, you might have hated certain sports, tastes or activities when younger because of your lack of experience, strength or maturity. All these things change as you mature, develop, and adjust to new environments. Be careful not to let past experiences like these cut off opportunities for you now.
Even when you’re learning the things you have to, such as on-the-job knowledge, seek to go beyond what you’re being asked to learn. Look at the history, case studies, different applications, etc. , to make your learning experience much more well-rounded.
Mix learning the basics with more fun learning, like intellectual hobbies and games. Don’t space them out so far that you forget what came before in a sequence; a half-class or class every day or two might be a good pace. Check into DIY U for a list of colleges and institutions that offer low cost or free courses. If you find complex math very unintuitive in isolation, you can look it up as you learn things that use it. Without seeing the applications, it’s hard to distinguish the concepts you need from the computational tricks most people don’t. Read books by people who experienced difficulties with the basics of math, science or other subjects but have still managed to find workarounds without giving up. Their ways of learning might help you to improve your own.
Read all sorts of books. Just because you’re usually a mystery fan doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try nonfiction now and then. Don’t limit yourself. Recognize the educational value in whatever you read. Nonfiction, of course, teaches about its subject. Fiction, freed from that constraint, can teach more about good writing, storytelling, vocabulary, and human nature generally. Indeed, fiction will tell you a great deal about the mores, morals, thinking and habits of the time during which it was written, and it is also said that fiction readers are more empathetic than those who avoid it because it teaches us about interacting in the social world. [3] X Research source Newspapers, magazines, manuals, and comic books are all worth reading. As are websites, blogs, reviews and other online sources of information.
Refine your existing skills. Are you already good at fly fishing? Computers? Teaching? Playing saxophone? Hone these skills and take them to the next level. Try new things, both inside and outside your preferred skill areas.
Respond to what you observe, and notice and examine your own response. Be mindful; if you find that it’s difficult to observe things for long enough, consider meditating. This will help you to learn to see things you haven’t noticed since you were a young child.
Several of the world’s best universities provide videos and materials for their courses free over the Internet as the “Open CourseWare” project[4] X Research source . The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an exceptional contributor, with hundreds of courses. [5] X Research source You can also use iTunes University, which can be viewed via your computer or your portable electronic devices.
Sometimes a response is difficult to understand. Feel free to take notes, ask more questions and to break down the response into smaller components to try to make sense of it. Return to your preferred learning style––if something is easier drawn in pictures, then draw it out to help make better sense of it. Keep a journal or notebook to record what you learn and what questions you still have. Questions can teach as much as, or more than, answers. A journal or notebook can also record your progress.
Read How to develop critical thinking skills and How to improve critical thinking skills for more ideas on ways to evaluate what you’re learning.
Joseph Joubert once said that “To teach is to learn twice. " In teaching others how to learn things, you will find that you learn even more than the students. Not only will you need to have a good grasp of your materials, you will need to respond to the querying minds of your students and extend your understanding beyond what you have considered it to be up to the point of each question asked of you.
