You can learn anything in 2 weeks.
And no, I don't mean you can become a master at any skill or topic. I mean you can acquire the specific knowledge necessary to get results toward a specific goal. And if that doesn't make you extremely excited about how much you can speed up the progress you're making toward the big milestones in your life – like making more money, acquiring a valuable skill, or learning a language, instrument, or software like After Effects – you may not be understanding what I'm saying just yet.
The problem is that people have become wired to think that success stems from 12+ hours of putting your nose in a textbook just to take an exam where 95% of the knowledge you've acquired goes out the window. And when it comes to getting real-world results, less than 1% of that knowledge applies.
In other words, you're completely wasting most of the time you spend learning.
Schools train you to learn extremely slow. If learning allows you to be useful and get what you want, imagine what you could do if you spent time learning how to learn. You'd be able to achieve 10 goals in the time it takes the average person to achieve one.
In this letter, I want to show you exactly how to learn anything fast.
Skill acquisition = technique stacking
Everything you can do is a skill.
Does that not blow your mind?
That fact simplifies life quite a bit. The entire stoic philosophy of "control what you can control" is one of the few master keys that open the door of fulfillment. If you can't control something, you can control your reaction to it. Therefore, that is a core skill for managing much of the pain in your life. If you can control something, then you can practice it to the point where it becomes so second nature to you that you learn to cut through reality with elegance and grace, like a guitarist who doesn't have to expend much energy to nail a complex solo that leaves people in awe.
That said, most people try to acquire skills as a whole. That's a massive disordered task. Choosing to "learn the guitar" is not clear. We're talking about 5 years of extensive study and practice. There are tens of thousands of books, videos, articles, and people who want to tell you the "right way" to go about learning the guitar. They can't teach you how to play the guitar, they can only teach you how they play the guitar.
So, how do we shortcut learning new skills? How do we cut through the noise and ensure we only learn what's necessary? By understanding that skills are composed of techniques.
If I want to learn how to play the guitar, I don't start learning.
I start playing. The entire purpose of learning the guitar is to play a song. That leads to step one: choose a song to play. Start with the purpose. But now you're in a dilemma, you don't know how to play the first note. That leads to step two: search for a resource that teaches you what that note is and the finger placements to play it. If you repeat that process of trial and error over a day or two, you'll probably be able to play the song, even if it sounds terrible with lots of mistakes as you're playing it.
The more you practice, the better you play that specific song.
When you move on to the next, you'll realize that the various techniques you learned for that specific song – bar chords, mutes, etc – make it that much easier to learn faster.
As a more tangible example for creatives (most of you), take Photoshop.
While most people would go straight into watching an hour-long tutorial that goes over every single fucking tool in the sidebar, you start with what you want to do: create an image. You have no business learning Photoshop if you aren't actively working toward a goal that requires it. You learn skills for utility, not entertainment, because you won't actually learn the skill. Read a fiction book if you're bored.
From there, you search for a specific technique, such as a series of steps to remove the background of a tree. Through your research, you find three different ways to select and mask an object (trees are particularly challenging to select, at least before Photoshop made removing the background a button-click away). You try them out, one technique works well, and you solidify that as a tool in your belt. With that alone, you've learned a critical puzzle piece in masking most things in Photoshop. As those techniques stack, you've not only saved countless hours of learning nonsense you won't use, but you can effectively create most things you set your mind to.
Progressive overload of the mind
Skills are a group of neural pathways that form through repetition.
A technique we can think of as a single neural pathway. A single piece of the skill puzzle. When you collect enough pieces to the point of seeing 80% of the image, you can infer most of what you need to get results. If you understand a few techniques to speak Spanish, you can at least string a sentence together to get your point across. You may end up saying, "What can I buy water?" instead of "Where is the nearest place to buy water bottles?" but you'll get the point across and accomplish your goal.
Let's take a look at a more difficult example: making money.
Something everyone wants to do, but few people see as a skill that can be learned, because money (as with other life-changing skills like social dynamics) is deeply intertwined with our self-image, emotions, and survival. It's difficult to see money as something within your direct control because we carry the burden of conditioning from our parents, teachers, and life experiences that influence our perception. We don't control our reactions to impulses, so it creates a veil that disguises money as uncontrollable.
If you were to peel back all of the irrational thought barriers preventing you from execution and actually start doing the thing, you would realize that the ability to make more money can be learned quite fast. Not in a get-rich-quick scheme way, but in a way that's similar to learning how to shoot a three-pointer. A beginner may have a 5% chance of making the shot out of luck, but a pro has a 99% chance without much effort at all.
You start with the purpose: make money. In order to do that, you need a product or service and a customer. You don't have an idea for a product, so you look up a technique for finding a profitable idea, like in this mega guide for creating a product. If you continue to keep your mind at bay, you start building the product without spending a month questioning whether that idea is good, because ideas become clear with action. You don't know how to attract customers, so you look up a technique and discover a few main options, such as social media content, paid ads, and direct outreach. You pick one. You try it. And while you may not be that great at it, you're in luck, because you can simply continue to stack and test techniques, and if you solely focus on that, every technique you learn increases your earning potential.
If you want to bench press 315 pounds, you don't throw that on the bar when you've never lifted a single weight in your life. Nor do you watch endless videos and expect them to teach you anything beyond the fundamentals that allow you to get started (you can watch a 3-minute video on that). Then you go to the fucking gym, put on weight, struggle to lift it, then come back a few days later and see if you can lift more.
Progressive overload.
The missing ingredient to learning absurdly fast
Rapid learning requires pure focus.
I don't think many people in today's world have experienced that.
P u r e f o c u s. Absolutely nothing else. You and the task. No thought. No distraction. A distraction is any person, place, or thing that pulls any thread of attention away from your goal. "You" literally cease to exist. You become one with reality. Input and output merge. Every slice of information that goes into your brain is instantly transformed into raw material that is put into reality like a lock and key.
You understand how to learn. You are close to tapping into this wonderful state of pure focus. Sometimes it happens naturally. You enter a period of intensity where your mind collapses on a clear goal. Pattern recognition kicks into overdrive. Books, content, music, and conversations gain an entirely new dimension. Reality becomes a source of inspiration as it always has been and will be, but you don't have distractions pulling you away from that connection with what is.
Most of the time, this doesn't happen at all. Learning is a boring grind. In that case, you may benefit from having AI coach you into a deep work session. But I do have one tool that I deploy when my mind is filled with dissonance – when I'm tired of where I am and almost clear on where I want to be.
That tool is what I call tactical stress. It is a form of environment engineering.
For myself, I was able to learn After Effects in about 2 weeks because I filled my YouTube video storyboard with animations I didn't know how to make. I have to create videos each week. It's a habit that allows me to survive. If I don't put the video out, entropy releases, and the entirety of my work system starts to unravel. It's much more painful than the process learning something to prevent that.
Tactical stress is when you put yourself in a high-pressure situation that creates a strong deadline to achieve the goal you've been meaning to achieve. Quitting your job to make your business work. Moving into an apartment you can't afford to push for that new career. Saying "hi" to the person you're attracted to so you have to at least start some kind of jumbled conversation. You either make it work, or you hesitate and get crushed. Tactical stress is so effective because most people tend to fall into the idle state. They numb themselves before they hit rock bottom, never allowing the pain of where they are to outweigh the pain of where they want to be. That's when you deploy tactical stress. Right when you notice the pain of your current situation holding you back to avoid repeating the same 6 months for the rest of your life.
Put yourself in an environment that nearly forces you to learn what you need to learn, as fast as humanely possible, to achieve the goal that launches you into the next phase of life.
That, my friends, is how you learn.
– Dan