As I’m training to become a coach, I’ve been studying a lot of material, including psychology, neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and more. I’ve created a 200-hour study plan, most of which is built around reading.
Leverage Your Strengths
While traditional psychology focused on diagnosing and categorizing mental disorders, positive psychology developed a framework to categorize character strengths and virtues. Here are my top 5 character strengths courtesy of a free survey provided by the VIA Institute of Character:
The premise behind positive psychology is to figure out how to leverage your strengths in your work. And to work in a field where your weaknesses don’t matter as much or to hire people with complementary strengths to minimize the impact of your weaknesses.
In any case, I found that outside of honesty, my top character strengths were all conducive to the learning process I’m going through now. I wasn’t surprised by the test results and thought about how I’d apply this finding to my upcoming coaching career. I realized that in every one of the previous businesses I had built, I eventually got bored or stopped learning.
I started by analyzing my past. I realized that in every one of the previous businesses I had built, I eventually got bored or stopped learning. How I got to that point may have differed. I may have stopped seeing a big enough reason for why I was doing what I was doing (my mobile gaming startup). Or maybe I had hit the point of diminishing returns for learning compared to the upside gained (my daily fantasy analytics business). In any case, the moment I stopped learning was the beginning of the end for each of those businesses.
Given this historical trend and the findings of positive psychology, I wanted to figure out how to create a sustainable approach to my coaching business. That’s when I realized that I wanted to be a lifetime learner of psychology. The great thing is that there are always discoveries being made, so there would be no shortage of new things to learn. And I enjoy the challenge of applying theory to real-world applications.
Since I’m going to commit to being a life-long learner, I started asking myself whether my approach to learning was effective. In essence, I wanted to learn how to learn again. I was reading Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within and early in the book he mentioned that he mastered speed reading at an early age. This helped him voraciously read a lot of books to accelerate his learning.
Increase Your Learning Bandwidth
I immediately did some searching and found a Udemy course on speed reading. I took some speed reading tests and found that I read at around 300-400 words per minute (wpm). I discovered that top speed readers can exceed 1,000 wpm. I was pleasantly shocked. If I could increase my reading speed to 600-800 wpm, I could double the knowledge I could acquire in the same amount of time!
At the time, I had recently read Wait Buy Why’s breakdown of Elon Musk’s new business, Neuralink. A key aspect of the technology was improving bandwidth between the brain and the external world. Internet speeds improved in bandwidth over time from dial-up (50 kb/s) to broadband (50 Mb/s) — a 1,000x improvement (!) — in less than 30 years. Part of Neuralink’s goal is to increase typing, talking, and reading speeds to match thinking speeds.
It all started to come together for me how I could learn how to learn better. An important point to note from the communication speed graph is a quote from Elon Musk: “The data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody’s talking.” So to accelerate my learning, I’d focus on reading as the primary input mechanism and increase my reading speed.
Improve Your Memory
An important early lesson from the Udemy speed reading course was that increasing your bandwidth (reading speed) doesn’t help if your memory storage is limited. Research in 2016 showed that the human brain could store the entire internet, or a quadrillion bytes. So if hardware isn’t a problem, then the software or storage process should be modifiable to increase memory retention.
Here are some tactics to improve memory retention:
- Spaced Repetition
- Mind Maps
- Feynman Technique
- Method of Loci
- Chunking
- Visualizing words while reading
Here’s another Elon Musk quote in a Reddit AMA on order of operations of learning: “One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
As I continue on my journey, I’ll be applying the Feynman Technique by summarizing my psychology learnings and how they apply to startup CEOs.
Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash
