The hardest thing about learning is figuring out what you don’t know.
If you can key in on the small concept you don’t understand, you can avoid having to repeatedly sift through the entirety of the subject matter, hoping to get pricked by that elusive needle as you fist through the haystack.
This may seem obvious, but it’s difficult to remember to do this when you’re frustratedly reviewing a mountain of information for the third time.
When I’m tasked with researching some obscure point of law, it’s very easy to get lost in the details of each case I’m forced to read. It’s usually easy to form a broad understanding of what’s going on, but it’s often more difficult to understand how all these things affect my unique problem. If I don’t stop and identify exactly what it is I’m after, I can spend hours reviewing an endless number of cases, hoping understanding will strike as I blindly comb through them.
This isn’t very efficient.
Instead, any learning process should focus on the missing pieces, the important concepts you don’t understand. You can identify these gaps any number of ways, though practice problems and the Feynman Technique work particularly well. Then, focus on conquering those bits you don’t fully grasp, and the rest will fall into place quite easily.
Even though this incredibly effective, most people won’t do this. There’s a psychological barrier: it’s far easier to practice doing the things you’re already good at than it is to admit you don’t understand something and then confront it. So break through that barrier. Not only will you be much better off, others are unlikely to follow.
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