How To Learn Like A Superhero: Best Mental Models

Deliberate practice fits as it is the mother of learning. It emphasizes intentional, concentrated efforts to build skills and knowledge. Unlike traditional, dry repetition, deliberate practice is concentrated and directed towards learning the most material in the least amount of time. Deliberate practice pushes you slightly past your comfort zone where your learning is accelerated and expertise is gained at super speed by virtue of timed, targeted feedback loops.

Leverage allows you to amplify your efforts. That is, you use tools, systems, and other people’s expertise to achieve big results with little effort. Applied to learning, this refers to finding ways to maximize your input-output ratio. Using efficient resources. Hiring mentors. Utilizing technology. Everything available to maximize learning efficiency.

Second-order thinking encourages you to think beyond immediate consequences. It gets you to consider long-term outcomes. This deepens the insights you get from just about any material. It helps you internalize complex ideas faster as you reckon with them in different situations. The bird’s eye view also empowers you to see where theory meets practice: where you can use a skill or theoretical concept in your life. That’s a bonus.

Anchoring underscores how initial information, impressions, and assumptions withhold your thinking. Grasping this cognitive bias reminds you to critically assess data. Your reasoning might be flawed. Watch out. Anchoring is hard to stymie, but if you remain open-minded and adaptable to new evidence, you shouldn’t fall victim to it too often.

Inversion is a mighty learning tool because it forces you to think backward. To drive your brain in reverse. Rather than figuring out how you might succeed or become more productive, you consider what would cause you to fail or get distracted. This reframing works to deepen your understanding and unveil blind spots. Put two and two together, and mastery is gained faster because you learn from errors in strides.

Similar to leverage, the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle optimizes your input-output ratio. It shows that 20 percent of your learning efforts produces 80 percent of your results. Identifying the critical 20 percent—the key concepts, practices, tools, subjects, topics—concentrates your energy on what matters. The vital few. The most impactful areas. The result is a drastic spike in efficiency.

Diminishing returns satisfyingly ties that knot. If leverage and the 80/20 rule help you identify the highest return on investment learning activities, diminishing returns tells you when to stop. It reminds you to balance effort with effectiveness. The point of diminishing returns is when additional effort yields little to no improvement. That is when you redirect your focus on a more productive, weak area, avoiding fatigue while maximizing your results. Win-win.

In learning, the concept of half-life reckons with the forgetting curve. How quickly information becomes outdated or forgotten. Understanding this encourages active recall and a method called spaced repetition. The crux of it is regularly reviewing essential knowledge and learning in short bouts, not cramming. This ensures you retain and refresh what matters most, meanwhile introducing new topics to yourself.

The curse of knowledge is when we know something so well we forget what it is like not to know. It’s hard to teach or explain, or market concepts when our thinking is fogged by this bias. Thus recognizing it is synonymous with being mindful of where the bounds of your knowledge are. That brings us to our last point.

The newbie mindset. Stay curious, open, and willing to embrace mistakes. Think of what a newbie would think and do. Those qualities typically stimulate experimentation, and therefore learning. A newbie mindset sheds the fear of appearing inexperienced. That’s kind of the aim. You create fertile grounds for new knowledge to sprout when you are in a state of excited experimentation and discovery. Explore with the gleaming eyes of a beginner, not an expert cursed by their knowledge. Pick the vital few, the points of leverage, the 20 percent of material that determines 80 percent of your performance. Don’t cram your learning, and instead space it out. Learn until the diminishing returns phase every time. Lastly, drive your brain in reverse, think long-term and short-term, to deepen your thinking, and thus to facilitate memorization. Good luck!