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Learning something on your own is very different than learning with a teacher. A good teacher helps you in all kinds of different ways. They understand the discipline really well. They understand the key skills, the concepts, and ideas
Learn 7 practical tips for effective self-directed learning from Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD, to master any skill without a teacher.
Key Takeaways
- Specificity and clear goals are essential for effective self-learning.
- Active engagement in core activities of the discipline accelerates learning.
- Multiple resources provide richer understanding than a single source.
- Consistent, spaced practice leads to deeper, long-lasting learning.
- Feedback and expert comparison are critical for improvement without a teacher.
What the video covers
- Learning on your own differs from learning with a teacher who understands key skills, concepts, and learning trajectories.
- Tip 1: Narrow down what you want to learn to specific skills and have a clear reason for learning.
- Tip 2: Identify the key activities that drive learning in your chosen field, such as modeling in applied math or proof techniques in pure math.
- Tip 3: Use at least three different resources to gain diverse perspectives and deepen understanding.
- Tip 4: Schedule regular, spaced learning sessions rather than long, infrequent ones for better retention.
- Tip 5: Seek feedback through automated signals, online communities, or by comparing your work to experts.
- Tip 6: Study experts closely to understand what they do differently and how to emulate their success.
- Tip 7: Be flexible and revise your goals, activities, resources, and schedule every few weeks based on progress and interest.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Differences Between Self-Learning and Teacher-Led Learning
- 00:52Tip 1: Narrow Down What You Want to Learn
- 01:43Tip 2: Identify Key Learning Activities
- 02:37Tip 3: Use Multiple Learning Resources
- 04:35Tip 4: Scheduling and Spaced Practice
- 05:31Tip 5: Importance of Feedback
- 06:26Examples of Getting Feedback Without a Teacher
- 07:25Studying Experts to Improve Your Skills
- 08:34Setting Goals and Measuring Progress
- 09:55Revising Your Learning Plan and Staying Motivated
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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they're trying to get across. They understand the learning trajectory, so they know where students usually get confused or mixed up, what's easy, what's hard, and how to sequence things in a way to help the students learn more effectively. When you're learning on your
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own, you don't understand the key skills or the concepts or ideas. You don't understand the typical learning trajectories, and you don't have a good sense of how to evaluate your own learning. Learning on your own is difficult, but it's not impossible. In
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these next few minutes, here are my seven best bits of advice. Tip number one: you want to drill down deeply into what you actually want to learn. A lot of people say things like, "Hey, I want to learn how
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to cook," or "I want to learn math," or "I want to learn how to play the guitar," or "program," or something like this. Those topics are just too big at first. First, to get a handle on making things
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specific offers a couple of benefits. One, it eliminates wishes. So you know, "I wish I could play 20 instruments and speak 40 languages," but am I willing to put in the work to actually reach those accomplishments? Probably not. The
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other thing it does is that it helps to create structure. Most topics are just too big. You know, you want to learn math. What part of math? If you want to learn how to cook, what kinds of things do you
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want to learn how to cook? I like to use a question to help narrow things down, which is, "I want to be able to do something so that I can do something else." I want to be able to program so that I can
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make a mobile game. I want to be able to program because I want to change industries and go into, say, machine learning. This kind of formulation lets you identify a skill or maybe a bunch of skills. You might write down a
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bunch of these sentences, and it gives you a reason for doing it. You want at least one reason for doing this. Now, my second tip here is that as you drill down into what you really want to learn,
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you want to be thinking about the key activities that are going to drive learning forward. Say you wanted to learn math. Something that a lot of people might do is to say, find a good website that has lots of articles about math, or
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maybe find a YouTube channel, or, you know, go on Khan Academy to brush up on the basics, or something like this. And that's not bad necessarily, but these things are really to help support you in your learning journey. If you're
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interested in learning math, you need to figure out what it is that you're going to do. Like, what it is that mathematicians do. If you're learning applied math, that's going to involve a lot of mathematical modeling. You want to
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be evaluating mathematical models, creating mathematical models, applying models, iterating on models. So that's the activity that you're going to be focused on improving. If you're interested in more pure math, you're going to be learning proof techniques. You're going
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to be evaluating proofs. You're going to be creating proofs. You're going to be learning how to communicate proofs. It's the central activity that you are doing that is really driving learning forward. Figuring out what that activity is is
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kind of part and parcel of getting more specific about what you want to learn. Tip number three is about resources. So you're not going to get very far if you are not using resources of some sort, whether those are online classes or
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textbooks or blog posts or YouTube channels or something. My basic recommendation is to use at least three resources. Why do you want at least three? Well, you want to get different perspectives on the same topic. Now, you can sit there and do one cool course and
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go through this course, but that's just giving you one teacher's perspective. When you use all three of these resources together, what you're doing is gaining a deeper understanding of the field and hopefully just learning a little bit more effectively. Now, tip
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number four is about scheduling. You need to figure out the times that you are going to be devoted to whatever it is you're learning. Ideally, you want to spread out your learning sessions over a longer period of time. That is going to
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lead to deeper, more long-lasting learning. You could say, "Hey, I've got Friday afternoon off. I'm going to spend five hours on Friday afternoon dedicated to learning this new thing," but I think it would be better to actually spend, say,
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three hours over the course of the week if you could manage that. If you miss a session here or there, that's fine. The important part is that you come back. You come back to it again, and that requires
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making space for it. Tip number five is about feedback. Feedback is a really critical component of moving your skills forward, and in a lot of environments, you have a kind of automatic feedback built in. You know, when you're playing tennis,
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whether the ball goes in or out, at least most of the time. You know when your program doesn't work, usually. You know when you're playing the guitar when you play a wrong note. This kind of automated feedback is really helpful. I mean, if you
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couldn't tell whether your ball went in or not, you'd probably have a lot harder time learning how to play tennis. But the most valuable kind of feedback is the kind of feedback that tells you what to do differently in the future to achieve
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a different outcome. Usually, the people who are in the best position to give you that kind of feedback are mentors or teachers or coaches. Because you're watching this video and you're trying to learn something on your own, I assume you
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don't have any of these people around. In that case, there's a couple of different things you can do. There are lots of places on the internet where you can go to get advice for free from communities of experts and amateurs all learning the
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same kind of thing or interested in the same topic. The quality of the advice you get could vary tremendously. It can be amazing. Maybe it's a little lackluster, but it is a way of getting some outside input or perspective on what you're
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doing. Another way is to find ways to compare your performance to an expert's performance. How you do this depends on what you're learning, but let me just give you an example. I play a card game called Magic, and it involves picking
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cards out of groups of cards. Part of the game is to pick the right card out of this group of cards. I can go online to an app, and I can see what a professional player's picks were, and I can even work
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through it so that I pick my card first, and then I see what card the professional player picked. Now, this is a really valuable experience because I get to see the gap between where I'm at and where they're at. Another example is if
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you are learning to play music, you might record yourself playing music because it's hard to pay close attention to both playing and listening at the same time. So you can record yourself playing the music, you can play it back later, and try to
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identify mistakes you made or even compare that recording with a recording of, say, a better player playing that song. In this way, you can start to kind of bootstrap yourself forward. Often, it's not enough to just say, "Well, I did the
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right thing," or "I did the wrong thing." You want to think about, "Well, if I didn't quite reach the expert's level, what exactly is the expert doing, and how are they going about doing it?" I don't think people study experts enough. You look at
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someone who says an amazing basketball player, and you just marvel at how good they are. You just, "Wow, they're amazing," but people don't tend to sit there and try to study what it is that this expert is doing that makes them so good and how
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can I do the same thing? Feedback is not just about what you are doing. It's about how you're perceiving things. Now, as you get better, you'll be able to perceive your own skill more accurately. Tip number six here is about goals. A l...
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people Advocate setting learning goals I'm a little bit indifferent to this creating Stakes for yourself like hey I'm gonna perform in a concert well that's a really good incentive to get you to improve say your guitar but I'm
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against the idea of setting time sensitive learning goals and the reason comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this video when you don't know the area that you're learning very well it's really hard to set
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realistic learning goals you're not even quite sure what you are supposed to learn and you don't know how long it's going to take you to learn that stuff and so setting realistic goals is hard but there's another deeper problem and
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this has to do with what's known as good Hearts law so what happens is that you set a Target and you set a way to measure this Target and you kind of Orient all of your effort to meeting
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this target well if that Target is not exactly the same as what you're trying to accomplish you end up warping The Learning Experience so that you've kind of narrowly chased this target when actually this target was just a a little
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slice a little way of measuring whether you've been making progress there are ways of measuring your improvement without having a strict time sensitive learning goal when we're talking earlier about recording say a session that you have a song that you want to play well
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you can you know record this once and record it two weeks later and you can see the Improvement that you've made the important question to ask your yourself is what is the next thing I can do to improve my skill sometimes you're going
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to answer that question wrong but if you keep that question in mind it's very hard to go wrong in the long run okay finally we are at tip number seven here which has to do with revising your plan
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we have to come back to this point about learning without a teacher when you don't have an in-depth understanding of what it is you're learning and of course you don't because you haven't learned it yet then everything is up for revision
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you can change your learning goals you can change your key activities you can change which kind of resources you're using for support you can change your schedule everything can be revised and should be revised every three weeks or a
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month or something like this you want to sit down and see if what you're doing is still working this means sitting down taking stock of what you understand so far how well your skill is developing and what you think the major gaps are
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what directions to move in this is all a kind of metacognitive knowledge which is knowledge about your skills and what you're learning that enables you to make better decisions as you improve in your skills you might even decide to quit
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entirely and I actually think that's okay when you're learning something on your own it's a bit of an exploratory process and you might find out that things are not like you thought they were I wouldn't want to quit just
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because things got hard lots of worthwhile Things become hard and challenging but if things are not what you thought if this is an area that is not as interesting as you thought you found other topics or other interests
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that interest you even more I think it's perfect perfectly okay to say Hey you know I spent a month doing this or I spent a couple months doing this and I'm good I'm moving in a different direction now now a key quality to cultivate here
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is the ability to be open about being wrong because when you're learning on your own it's a constant progression of realizing that there are things out there that you didn't know yet or things that you couldn't do things that you still can't
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do and that you're trying to accomplish even though learning on your own is really hard a lot harder than learning with a teacher or Mentor or coach I have found it to be something that is deeply fulfilling and worthwhile so I wish you the best of
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luck on whatever it is you are learning and I hope to see you in some of my other videos and I'll try to answer any questions I can in the comments below alright take care
Topics:self-learninglearning tipsindependent studyskill acquisitionBenjamin Keeplearning strategiesfeedbacklearning resourcesgoal settingtime management
