BZ Book Review 01: <Learn Better> by Ulrich Boser
Key Takeaways
1. Some strategies and tools that can help your learning
Leverage learning strategies - Techniques can help you avoid a lot of unnecessary hustles
Self-quizzing - Particularly useful for language learning and memorizing
Earplugs - Block the external world to conduct deep learning. For details, you can refer to <Deep Work> by Carl Newport
2. Six Steps you can improve your learning skills
Value. If you find the value or meaning of the skills you try to learn, you will be more motivated to be proactive and take the initiatives. e.g. You want to build a close connection with your grandpa who only speaks German. Learning German will have a clear meaning and value for you and you are more eager to memorize those vocabularies and practice your daily conversations.
Breaking larger goals into smaller targets. Everyone has these things or skills you have always wanted to do/acquire but have trouble following through every year. They repeatedly appear in your New Year Resolution and every time you saw them it reminds you how you failed to do it last year! Well, here is the simple rule I am following to tackle this problem. Break it down into small pieces and focus on the action instead of the overall goal. You don’t have to be great and you just need to start somewhere. That is why I started this blog and you guys can be my witness.
Getting Feedbacks. You don’t know what you don’t know. Sometimes a brand new perspective could help you tremendously in the long run. Even though they may appear to slow you down in the beginning. Give it a try and get some feedbacks from the five people you spend majority of your time with. In addition, what being tracked is what get improved. Track your performance, record your mistakes and do a periodic review. You will notice the changes and improvement you have over the year.
Immerse yourself in the field and keep absorbing. There is always someone out there who is better than you. In order to continue to grow, you need to immerse yourself in the filed and surround yourself with people have the same interests or expertise. Continuous learning is the key because stay where you are is like moving backwards since all the rest of world are going forward. A further technique is to visualize imagines with your mind’s eyes. For example, if you want to remember a whole deck of cards, place each of them on a furniture and treat them as part of your house. Order them by what you see first when you enter the room.
Relate and develop an understanding of the relationship between concepts. If they taught you one thing, internalize it and use it in three different places. This can help you really grasp the meaning of the concept and be able to use it freely in different occasions.
Rethink and review what you know. Success can breed success. Continuous success can also blind you from other alternatives. Sometimes only after admitting your lack of knowledge, could you develop a better understanding.
Call To Action
Next time when you try to learn a new skills or prepare for some interviews/exams, try the above six steps.
For example, you try to learn Machine Learning
What is the value to you to learn it?
Improve my technical skills and make myself more competitive in the job market
Align with my career goal to become the Chief Analytics Manager to understand the trend, basic algorithms and concepts
Align with the my industry focus - Blockchain in Real Estate
Break down the learning process
Pick one course either from coursera or other resources and follow it through
Practice with real project examples
Getting feedback
Join hackathons and get feedback
Join online challenges to get feedback
Talk to my SE friends to get their advice on learning and next steps
Immerse and expand
Join Machine Learning groups and surround yourself with people who is in that field or interested in learning
Visualize the algorithm I am learning
Relate
Propose a project at work that you can leverage Machine learning skills for
Rethink
After several projects, you need to review the alignment between my skills and the initial goals to see what else do I need to learn.
