Hey there fellow Apprentices,
I’m super excited to share with you this discussion piece that I’ve co-authored with one of my closest friends and deepest thinkers in the education space, Nikita Khandwala.
Nikita is a fellow multipotentialite in her 20s who, having graduated from Oxford with a degree in Linguistics, is double-downing on the intersection of people, education and the future of work as a writer and consultant.
She’s been a source of inspiration from the first day I landed on her LinkedIn profile and decided to shoot her a DM. From what started as a lockdown friendship, we’ve partnered on several projects since and will inevitably end up doing something very cool together in the future. Oh yeah and did I mention? She has one of the best newsletters I’ve ever read called
. Definitely worth checking out.This is one hell of a piece. So, buckle up, grab some popcorn and let’s create you a learning system that will accelerate your 20s.
Introduction
The age of edutainment is in full ascent.
It mesmerises us with addictive content loops that combine the weird, the wonderful, and the wicked into a relentless onslaught of short-form videos, Twitter threads, and audio snippets that are more addictive than heroin.
Each teaches us new skills that we can apply in every corner of our lives - from making lettuce last longer in the fridge to exploring new east Asian countries to visit next Summer. Easily justified as time well spent (because there will definitely be a good use for that new drying technique!), the minutes bleed into hours and the hours into days as the infinite scroll refuses to release us from its unrelenting grip.
Navigating the sea of information before us is one of today’s greatest challenges. It requires us to be selective with where we spend our focus, how we consume information and who we decide to trust with our attention. For we are all limited by the hours in our days.
Defining our learning pathways and how we collect & sort the information to get there is one of the defining challenges of our times - one that we, Nikita & Charlie, are going to explore in this co-authored piece with you today.
Consuming
With access to self-education democratised by the internet, the opportunities of online learning are almost endless. The hard part is knowing which learning resource to use for which purpose so that you can commit your focus to what really matters.
To do this, ask yourself these questions:
“What is the goal of education for you?”
“How much time can you commit on a weekly basis?”
“How important is it that your learning is verified?”
“How much money are you willing to invest in self-education?”
“Are you self-motivated to learn? Or do you require accountability?”
Then use this handy (and overly simplified) table below to narrow down your decision on where to invest your time, money and energy.
You are also free to combine multiple learning types together at once across the different disciplines you find interesting. As a rule of thumb, if you’re exploring an entirely new area and are unsure on the exact role it plays in your career or life, start small and then make larger commitments over time.
Summarised, take this approach:
Explore - sign up to a newsletter, read a book & join a community.
Commit - complete an online course or join a cohort.
Qualify - get a professional certification or university degree.
But, if discovery is your main aim and you’re not even sure where to start, consider taking the tiny, but effective step of changing up your social media feeds. By following new creators on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram you’ll immerse yourself in their worlds over time. Just remember to be conscious with who you decide to give a follow to for their presence in your digital world will serve as a reminder, both good and bad, for the activities they endorse.
Capturing
With whichever learning path you decide to take, capturing the information you find will become incredibly valuable. It will both solidify your learning and provide you with your own interpretation of knowledge that you can refer back to at any time. To get you there, there are a wide range of solutions from good old pen and paper to investing hours into setting up the perfect digital second brain - in fact, there’s a whole book on this here.
So, the harder question becomes “how do you go about capturing information in a useful, but time-effective way that becomes habitual for you?”.
The exact apps and systems will depend a lot on you as an individual, but there is a simple yet effective way of sorting information regardless of the tools you use. Named the PARA Method, it’s Tiago Forte’s useful approach to managing your life areas:
(P)rojects - “a series of tasks linked to a goal, with a deadline” - ie. write a blog post, attend a business conference, launch v1 of an application.
(A)rea of responsibility - “a sphere of activity with a standard to be maintained over time” - ie. Finances, Travel, Hobbies, Writing, Health.
(R)esource - “a topic or theme of ongoing interest” - ie. project management, online marketing, interior design.
(A)rchive - “inactive items from the other three categories'' - ie. projects you’re no longer working on, responsibilities you no longer have or irrelevant resources.
Which when applied can look like this:
Area of Responsibility = Health
→ Project = Finish Ironman 70.3 World Champs in 2023.
→ Project = Climb Mount Everest before the end of 2025.
→ Project = Run London Marathon in under 2hrs 30mins.
→ Resource = Nutrition guides, Swimming techniques.
Applied to a simple Google drive as a sorting system, it enables you to start new documents in places that you’ll always be able to find. Especially when you provide searchable, practical titles on every item you ever use. Take it a step further and you can even add tasks to every project so that you always have a place to add in rough ideas or random thoughts.
But, if you are into investing hours into creating databases of information you’ve discovered in your time, check out Obsidian or Roam Research. They give you the power of backlinks, knowledge blocks and plugins to make your dream of a second brain a reality. Expect a steep learning curve but a highly rewarding system of note-taking should you see through the up-front cost of your time.
Just remember, the goal is not to create a capture system that you’ll actually use and if that means notes on your phone or a basic google drive, that’s more than okay. There is no best way to do this - only the one that is right for you at this moment in time.
Learning
It’s hard to make time to read, right? What if we told you that you read the equivalent of J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit every single day. A report by the University of California-San Diego concluded that the average American consumes over 34 gigabytes of data and information daily. But there’s a big difference between consuming an avalanche of information and distilling it to its essence, so you can incorporate that knowledge into future work. The price we pay for unparalleled access to information is a frighteningly limited working memory.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus created a visual representation of how the information we absorb fades over time. Interestingly, he found that the most acute ‘forgetting period’ occurs right after we first learn something.
So how can we retain information more easily and halt the dreaded Forgetting Curve?
1) Regularly review and refresh information you learn
Have you ever wondered why last minute cramming for those dreaded university finals worked wonders the next day, but 5 years later, when someone asks what you learnt in your degree, you struggle to remember the content that ultimately bagged you that 2.1? By using a technique called “spaced repetition”, which refers to having regular review sessions separated by increasingly long periods of time, we train our brains to remember information for a longer period of time.
2) Assign meaning to everything you learn
Give Boris Konrad 30 seconds and he’ll be able to memorise the order of an entire deck of cards. The World Memory Champion was not born with an innate superhuman memory. Instead, he credits his success to systematic memory techniques–such as the well-known Memory Palace–to assign meaning to every piece of information he learns. By constructing an imagined palace and attaching certain words or numbers to each room in the palace, Konrad takes advantage of the memory’s innate ability to store spatial locations and make associations. He makes things truly memorable.
3) Overlearning
Another way to overcome the steep drop at the start of the Forgetting Curve is to put more effort into learning a piece of information than you ordinarily would. Overlearning at the original learning stage cements the knowledge more, slowing your descent down the Forgetting Curve.
Expressing
Consuming, capturing and learning are all critical parts of building your own learning system. But Einstein famously said that if you can’t explain something to a 6-year old, then you don’t understand it well enough yourself. Perhaps ironically, teaching is one of the best methods of cementing your learning. By distilling and expressing the information you learn in a way that is easy for others to understand, you are not only adding value to their learning journeys, but also boosting your own understanding of a concept. Whether this looks like starting your own blog or Youtube channel, or simply sharing your newfound knowledge over the dinner table, expressing your knowledge in new and creative ways is one of the most critical elements of your learning journey.
Conclusion
Learning is a journey we all go on, but we all experience it in different ways. The exact path you take depends on your goals, how you intend to apply the lessons learned and where you expect the knowledge to take you next. Whichever way you walk, we’d emphasise the importance of making learning a habit throughout your entire life. You don’t suddenly stop having to learn once you leave education anymore. Since the world is changing at an exponential pace, you need to be constantly learning new knowledge that will keep your skills and understanding relevant for the increasingly complex present world.
We hope that the techniques and mental models we’ve given you here provide you with a starting point to intentionally take on the pathless path of learning ahead of you.
How do you consume, capture, learn & express what you find most interesting in the information age?