(• Reading Time: 3 minutes •)

Reading to improve your skills and knowledge is an excellent move. But reading alone is not enough.

“Knowledge is power? No. Knowledge on its own is nothing, but the application of useful knowledge, now that is powerful.” ― Rob Liano

Unfortunately, many stop here and brag about the number of books they read each year. But, if you're serious about growing your skill to the point of mastery, you need to go beyond.

Link to illustration by David Somerville
Link to illustration by David Somerville

 

Follow these steps to build mastery:

  1. Start with a huge information dump.
  2. Compare new learnings to what you already know before.
  3. List out the ways that the old information differs from the new ones.
  4. Test yourself by writing your learnings from scratch. This will reveal holes in the concepts you learned.
  5. And finally, teach someone else. Teaching is an opportunity to internalize what you've learned and re-express it in your own words.

These steps are compressed ideas from books, courses and personal experience in the last decade.

As you apply them in one area, you'll see the spillover effect of doing well in another area of your life. To be honest, this feels magical.

It's like you're more efficient because you ARE efficient.

Take them. Apply them in any discipline and you'll see results.

 

Thanks for reading

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Heads Up - I love research so I tend to back my advice and approach with concepts from Behavioral Psychology and Neuroscience.