Learning at Hyperspeed
Your secret weapon for today's world
Hello friend.
Welcome to the last full week of (what month was again?)
*checks calendar*
Ahhh right. It’s March.
Okay, moving on…
I have 3 things to share with you today.
Let’s do it.
Main quest 🛡
Remember when people worked the same job for 40-50 years, retired and could spend the rest of the time without worrying about work anymore?
You know, not changing careers or jobs. But spending their time refining their craft or working on the same company.
Yeah, at some point in time… that world ended.
Nowadays people are changing jobs every 4-5 years (well before AI was mainstream that is). There are more and more people who are even changing careers after spending a good amount of time in them.
Our grandparents or even our parents didn’t have to think about breaking into a new industry or leveling up their skills in another area to get a different job.
Their economy was much more stable and predictable.
But for us is a whole different story.
Now, I don’t want to start fearmongering and say that learning skills quickly and using them is the difference between you “thriving or barely surviving”. Or that you’re going to get “left behind” if you don’t do it. (Or that AI will replace us and you know the rest)
Instead, I want to give you options. I want to show you possibilities.
One of them is what I alluded to with the title.
(It’s like travelling in hyperspeed, you get from one distant point to another much faster than you would normally. Speaking of travelling through space-time…)
If you can acquire knowledge fast, get practical experience, and (most importantly) show others what you’ve done… you’ll never have to worry about being “replaced”.
Recent example:
I personally know a couple folks who were doing regular stuff like ecommerce, affiliate marketing, or content creation and then pivoted to learning about AI.
Some got confused by the terminology or overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that exists (and that keeps changing by the month). But others started using it, getting results, building a biz around it and are now crushing it.
(I know that there are some people who got in there with no interest about the field itself, they’re just doing it to profit off of a trend. But then again, we’ve had people like that for decades already. It’s not anything new.)
Learning the skill, (whether it’s AI, digital marketing, web development, etc.), it’s not the important part. Learning how to learn a skill IS the important part.
And doing so fast in a way that doesn’t take you a whole semester (like a college course) or a couple of months (like an online bootcamp) is no longer a “nice to have”. It’s now pretty close to a real-life superpower.
To accomplish that, you need a solid mental foundation (i.e. you can’t talk yourself out of it when things get tough). But assuming you have everything in that area handled, how do you get started making good progress?
Here’s a framework with 3 tools to help you along the way:
First off… Meta-Learning.
This is the whole “learning how to learn” thing. In practice, before you dive deep into a field do an 80/20 assessment. Learn about the field itself. What are the core concepts? Who are the key players? What people say it’s important to do versus what people actually do?
If you want to learn more about it (plus the why behind this publication name) take a look at this one.
Coming up… Just-In-Time Learning.
Stop trying to “learn a skill”. Like saying “I want to learn about writing online, or learn JavaScript”. What does that even mean? When you do know you “finished” learning it?
Instead, set a goal of what you want to do and like Stephen Covey says “start with the end in mind“. Once you do that, your universe of options shrinks quite a lot and it’s easy to know what actions to take one after the other.
Check this post for a deeper dive on the concept.
And finally… Skill Stacking.
Don’t think your starting from zero each time. When you get into a new field, you already have previous context that makes new learning easier. You can relate the new concepts to the ones that you already handle well.
You also have a group of “transferrable skills” that make you more valuable than the regular person who hasn’t been as dedicated and intentional as you.
And in most of the times, your background and previous knowledge can become your advantage or differentiator between a pool of other candidates for a particular job.
This is no longer the era of highly-skilled specialists.
It’s now the era of the “specialized generalists”.
The ones who have unique combinations of different skills.
So remember, the most important part to address is your mental foundation. Over the one that you can build any sort unique skill combinations. Don’t let perfectionism, overwhelm, or procrastination hold you back.
Your ability to learn and adapt quickly is now your most valuable asset right now.
And the way to acquire and develop all those different skills you’ll need, (well there are different ones, some more effective than others).
But what you can use to get more bang for your learning buck is one thing we talk about here pretty often: Supercharged Learning.
Experiments 🧪
Since I talked about testing out a bi-phasic sleep pattern (and getting a few folks curious about it) I’ve tried different ways to manage those 2 blocks of sleep.
I’ve laid out the whole structure and routine of that sleep pattern before.
So this time… It’s a word of warning.
Say you’re one of those rare people who only need 6 hours of sleep to function like normal. You would go to bed at 12 am and wake up at 6 am.
But now you’re trying out the bi-phasic way. And so you do a 90-minute nap and have your “core sleep” block of 4 and a half hours during the night. You would also be tempted to do 2 equal blocks of 3 hours during the afternoon/evening.
Now that’s a problem right there.
Because not all cycles are created equal. There are five stages in a cycle and getting between four to six cycles is the ideal. But at the very least, you need 3.
So, get less than that or do it in a disorganized way, and your body will feeeel the consequences. (My personal experience this week can attest to that…)
Power-ups ✨
This is quite a unusual one.
Normally here you can find tools or resources that will help improve your work or help you in any way. (Ones that I’ve personally tested out first.)
This time, I came across a demo that shifted my perspective of what’s possible.
I had a conversation with an AI and it felt like the shortest 15 minutes I’ve had in a loooong while.
This is all possible thanks to Sesame AI. Saying that it is “mind blowing” is quite an understatement.
(Let me know if you want to hear the highlight of the convo.)
That’s about it for this time.
Thanks for reading.
Enjoy your Sunday and catch you next month.
Cheers,
Juan.