How to learn things fast

Heyo 👋 Jordan here,

How do you learn things?

A question that I've never thought about for the majority of my life. You can probably relate.

It's an important question, and we'll circle back in a moment. First:

17 years ago, I accidentally learned to make games.

One day I opened the map editor in Warcraft 3. It allowed me to create my very own adventure (map) — pick the heroes, terrain, and interactions.I was instantly hooked.

1 summer vacation or 400 hours of making custom maps later, I was pretty good at it. Not only that, but I've started learning a valuable skill — programming.

That massive amount of practice got me flying through the beginner programming classes at school, and I was already making games at 16. At 20, I was already comfortably doing senior-level tasks programming-wise (I was doing this non-stop, 100% of my work & spare time).

Pretty fast progress.

How do I replicate this? How do I turn this into a system?

I systematized this when I went to learn video editing. This time, I wanted to do it in just 6 months.

Spoiler alert, I did it twice. I learned to use Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve (along with a lot about camera work, shooting, and lighting).

Here's the structure for learning I used:

One of those 10-hour work sessions + the research after, took me about a week to finish. In 6 months, I must've done about 250 hours of editing to get quite comfy with the whole process.

Now, how to do this in 3 months?

Do it twice as much.

I simply organized my day in a way that gave me another hour/day to edit. Said "no" a couple of times. Didn't go out twice. Nothing big, but enough to carve a ton of extra time in my schedule.

Here's the framework:

🧠 The Learning Framework

1. Play for the first few hours. Don't take it too seriously, go crazy, and spend as much time as you can doing something similar/simpler.

2. Next, focus on the doing. Spend the majority of your time doing things. You should stay here for the majority of you learning anything.

3. Occasionally, stop and reflect on what you've learned. Consult with experts (offline or online). Understand the things you were doing up 'till now better.

4. Repeat.

How do you learn things?

💡 Quote of the week

🔥 Epic things

• Consensus — Consensus is a free app that allows you to search through scientific papers using AI. It's insanely useful to get reliable information!

• You have an internal narrator — do you have an internal narrator in your head or not? Realizing this helped me accept other people's opinions more easily 👀

• The day you became a better writer — a sub-300-word masterclass on writing 🤯

👀 Content I made

• How to get a raise framework — I got inspired to do this from a few friends, who never asked because they didn't know how. I even created a handy framework to follow.

• Recurring tasks in Notion — Notion FINALLY added recurring tasks. I was so sick, but I couldn't not shoot & edit this one 😅

• New Twitter account — abandoning your Twitter for 3 years is not a great strategy. Just sayin'. I got tired of trying to revive it and decided to start from the top. Let's see how fast I get to 10,000 followers this time.

Notable thread to read 👇

Stay awesome, friends!— Jordan