When you are learning something, try to get the big picture first. What is the history? Why is this important? Who are the main players involved? What are all the different angles or perspectives on it.
2. Find Analogies
Find analogies to what you want to learn. For instance, if I want to learn about investing, I can look at "Game of Thrones". There are many similarities between an investment and a Game of Thrones plotline.
A character (like a stock) can rise suddenly (like a stock rising 200%) but then fall just as quickly (like a stock falling 50%). And there's always some sort of drama behind it (the drama behind Tesla right now).
I wrote about this in my article 'How to Learn' but there's also an episode about it here: .
3. Reverse Engineer It!
Reverse engineer what you want to learn. Take apart that thing into its smallest parts and figure out how those parts work together. Then figure out how those pieces work together until you understand everything that makes up that thing or idea or concept or process. This will help you understand not only the specific thing you are trying to learn but also related things so you can connect them back together again with more ease later on. For instance, if I am trying to understand how Twitter works I might start with how a tweet looks like in HTML, and then I would look at how HTML works and then I would move onto Twitter's codebase and see exactly what is happening when someone clicks "Tweet". Or for instance, if I am trying to understand chess openings, instead of memorizing every opening there is, I will probably reverse engineer each opening by looking at each piece on the board and figuring out what each piece does and then figuring out from there what moves make sense for each side in that opening. This way I know not only every opening but also why they work or don't work and why other openings might be similar or different from these openings. This way when someone says "it's like such-and-such" I have an idea immediately of where that move goes in one opening versus another one because I've already reverse engineered those two openings before so they are all stored in my brain now as part of my knowledge base on chess strategies. This method should be used for EVERYTHING you want to learn since everything is made up of smaller pieces which fit together in different ways depending on what they are trying to accomplish (or do). For instance, if we were going to build a website we would need HTML for displaying pages; CSS for styling; Javascript for making interactive elements; maybe server side languages like PHP/Ruby/etc for making pages dynamic; databases like MySQL/Postgresql/etc; etc etc etc . Each one of these pieces has sub-pieces within them so it's good to know all those sub-pieces too so when someone says "it's like X" you have an immediate understanding that yes, it is similar or no, it isn't similar at all because your understanding goes beyond just one piece but rather all the other pieces as well so now your knowledge base has more information than just one piece alone could give you. Again, this method should be used for EVERYTHING because everything is made up of smaller pieces which fit together in different ways depending on what they are trying to accomplish (or do). For instance, if we were going to build a website we would need HTML for displaying pages; CSS for styling; Javascript for making interactive elements; maybe server side languages like PHP/
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