My Trick For Learning Anything Fast And Well

image: businessinsider.com

Besides French which I have accepted will take me a lifetime to learn, I have done pretty remarkable in learning every other thing I took interest in.

Between last year June and now, I have learned the following:

1. How to create video training content using my room as a studio and doing the production myself. I recently got another pay check from Udemy for last month earnings from the online training course I produced myself.
2. How to write, edit, design and publish a book on Amazon. This alone saved me about $500 I would have paid someone else to have it done. All I had to pay was $20 (or $10) to a graphics guy in Europe (or Asia, can remember) for a well-designed cover. That book has sold over 550 copies already. 
3. Balanced Scorecard Dashboard. September last year, I took up a volunteer job for a UN partner NGO operating in 16 or so Caribbean countries to develop a Balanced Scorecard dashboard for the management. I had to learn a lot from scratch. Now I am about to clinch a Balanced Scorecard dashboard project for a big multinational company operating in Africa. I plan to charge them well too.
4. To become a bad-ass financial modeller. This is the one I am most proud of. Just yesterday I got my latest financial modelling project for a multinational technology company. And I might likely get another one from one of the biggest company in Nigeria before the month runs out. Also, I am currently training the management of a financial consulting firm on financial modelling and the feedback has been more than awesome.
5. R programming language. In fact, I will be facilitating an intensive business analytics course by month end. And data analysis using R is among the list of what I will be covering.
6. Power BI. By that I mean Power Pivot, Power Query, Power Map and Power View. Microsoft has changed the names of Power Map, Power Query and Power View; but I can't remember the new names. What's most important is that I now use them to get customers' work done and I get paid.
7. Professional PowerPoint presentation design. This is one of my most financially rewarding new skill. I find it a lot easier to get the amount I charge when I send a PowerPoint proposal. And I assume it raises us above the competition. It was hard and expensive to learn. I spent weeks making my first professional PowerPoint slides and had to buy many professional templates online. Now I spend a day to make eye popping and delivery perfect PowerPoint slides.
8. C#. I used to dread the C# programming language because I felt it was very difficult to learn, especially when compared to the Visual Basic I am very familiar with and use to build Excel macros/programs. Now I feel at ease using C# and have begun some web programming projects with C#. I plan to make companion web apps that I will sell alongside my Excel programs to companies. I am already close to making money of this skill too.

So what's my trick for learning fast and well enough to make a living from the knowledge?

The trick is to be unreasonable and fervent. Or how best will you regard buying 100s of books you can't finish reading in two years. And then not stopping there but also buying audiobooks and video training materials. Then ignoring the fact that you have income generating activities to do while reading the books.

I have a book on swimming. Two books on driving. Close to 10 books on writing and grammar. Probably 30 books on French.

I buy a book on anything I want to learn. I make sure I don't download free books or just read freely available materials online. I go on Amazon and read through 100s of reviews to buy the best book available. And I then go on Udemy.com and buy a video training course on it too. By spending my hard earned money on those materials, I increase my chances of reading them and paying attention to the content. And somehow, the little I end up reading lead to results that exceed my expectations.

The only way you can beat your expectations is to aim unreasonably high, and fervently go for your aim. 

It's just like William Clement Stone said, "Aim for the moon, if you miss you'll land among the stars." Just that this time around you know you'll miss. You have an impossible aim. But still you'll achieve the remarkable. I guess that's same as landing among the stars. And that's my trick for learning anything fast and well. I simply set an impossible goal and don't beat myself up when I fail.