Find Your Learning Style

Identify your preferred learning styles — whether it’s visual, auditory, or kinesthetic — and tailor your study methods to match. For example, visual learners may benefit from diagrams and charts, while auditory learners may prefer listening to lectures or discussions.

Working within your capabilities to learn will keep you motivated and make more progress, such as identifying how long your attention span is, how much time you can dedicate to learning, and other resources that may support your progress.

Concepts Come First

Start with researching the topic basics. Understand the concepts before jumping into the nitty gritty details.

It’s important to lay a solid foundation for developing specific knowledge and skills later. Understanding concepts will help you to learn and adapt quickly to similar tools and skills. For example, the concept of understanding your audience is found in marketing, business, and design. Do you see how far applications can extend?

Avoid focusing on details for now as these rabbit holes will eat up your time and may lead you on the wrong path. Explore multiple viewpoints on a subject to deepen your understanding, and consider alternative opinions. This approach fosters critical thinking and broadens your knowledge base. It’s helpful to look at several resources that cover the same thing; it will provide you the opportunity to review what you’ve learned, and gain insights from a different perspective.

Below is an example of concepts to understand first, and details to learn after you’ve understood the concepts well. This will help you to discern any bad techniques or poor advice.

Learning how to Cook
Macro View (Concepts)	Micro View (Details)
How is heat used in different cooking techniques?	How to grill a fish on a gas stove
Food cutting techniques	How to use a mallet
How to practice food safety	Is plastic or paper better for storing food?

Start Somewhere

After you have a decent grasp on the concepts and essentials of a topic, start planning a general learning framework. Allow for a flexible schedule, keeping in mind that life never goes exactly as planned. Don’t be discouraged when you are unable to put in as much effort as you had expected.

You can plan and plan but at some point, you must take action. There’s no such thing as a perfect plan. Learning is all about knowing how to change course after acquiring new information.

Track Your Progress

Checklists are a great way to set goals and develop a sense of accomplishment. Taking notes of what you’ve learned so far will help you to assess what areas you can move on from and what areas you need to invest more time in.

Don’t look for instant results; it takes time to see the impact of your time and effort. Be flexible with your schedule while staying persistent in your efforts. Trying to make up for any time you’ve missed all at once will lead to a quick burnout.

Practice Makes Perfect

The best way to retain knowledge is by putting it into practice to strengthen your knowledge, and build connections between different concepts. In cases where you have a teacher, let them teach you, practice alongside you, then observe as you practice on your own. Afterwards, they can provide you with further feedback and guidance.

To prevent your skills from getting rusty, you’ll need to continue using the information you’ve learned – you don’t use it, you lose it. Don’t forget to visit the basics once in a while.