How to Learn Massive Amount of Content Quickly

We live in a content-driven world. Content has exploded in the last decade. The disciplines have become complex. The issues faced by businesses and society have multiplied by several folds. Tons of research studies have been conducted by scholars. Practitioners bring new business frameworks into the market. The compound effect of these forces is that most academic and professional programs are now loaded with a vast amount of content that students are expected to master.

Graduates and professionals alike are expected to learn massive content, books, and theoretical and practical information and be able to show a good amount of retention on the concept studied. The duties in modern college are indeed demanding, leaving little personal time. In such moments, thoughts like “who can write my essay for me” or “I need help, I can’t handle it myself” often arise. You have to understand that these thoughts are common among most students; it’s the reality of our world. So, don’t hesitate to ask for help from friends, family, teachers, and ultimately professional writers for hire.

While we have subject matter teachers, hardly any college or school trains their teachers to become learning experts before embarking on becoming teaching experts. Ironically, the skills to learn at a faster rate are not taught in our fundamental learning institutions either. In this article, I will share a simple 3-step technique to master a large amount of content in a short period of time.

Get there faster with me

I am a performance scientist specializing in accelerated learning. My work revolves around speeding up learning. My primary focus is on professional learning, which is different in nature and composition from academic learning or the learning required to study something.

When I was a kid, I contracted polio. That took away my ability to walk and a large part of my mobility. Tied to a chair and isolated in a room, I had no other weapon than to depend upon what I could learn from books. My challenge and goal at that time were to be able to learn faster to get noticed by others and teachers. Perhaps that was my way of thinking that people would forget about my disability if I shone in learning faster.

In that zest, I probably read every single accelerated learning book available. I must admit there were hardly any books back then on this topic in my early childhood years. Sadly, none of those worked well enough. I had a very analytical, critical, and experimental mind. So I embarked on a journey to find what could accelerate my learning. Later in my journey, I taught the same to my peers and classmates, and it worked wonders for them, too.

Later, I wanted to take up those experimentations professionally and conduct systematic research. During my explorations, I realized that while there are several theories and frameworks to learn faster, not all of them are research-based. As a scientist, I appreciate a framework, method, or strategy that could replicate in different situations and be applicable or usable to most people. A while ago, I conducted a detailed review of major titles available in an online marketplace with words such as ‘accelerated learning’ in their title or subtitle.

Then I reviewed the author’s personal, professional and educational accomplishments. My goal was to see if the author’s academic or educational achievements speak as evidence of accelerated learning. I would have expected someone advocating an accelerated learning framework or strategies to have produced a long list of educational degrees, credentials, certifications, or things of that nature for themselves first. Sadly, I did not see a strong connection or evidence. Sometimes things people teach or preach could be applicable in limited scenarios.

Notwithstanding the lack of rigor in this direction, I have embarked on my professional and personal journey to live a truly ‘accelerated learning’ path myself. I have gone through an extensive self-learning journey. I have earned over 100 international and educational credentials and two doctorates in a short amount of time. As you may have guessed, conducting research and successfully accomplishing a doctoral degree revolves around a massive amount of content. In my last stint, I went through over 5000 journal articles spanning over 10000 pages and read over 100 research and business books. Mastering such an enormous amount of content and information and then translating it into condensed research observations requires several techniques working in unison.

How did I do this? And can you reproduce it? Can you learn some of those techniques?

Among several techniques to learn a large amount of content in a short time, I will share one which has helped me tremendously to accelerate my learning path massively.

Multi-layer Mapping Technique

This technique is called multi-layer mapping to train the brain with several contextual relationships in the content that helps the brain absorb more learning in lesser time. When you have a large amount of content to master, you need to train your brain with overall and detailed navigational aids, just like a map of a large city, made up of several district maps and several streets making the map of a district.

Step 1: Start with a city-level view

You would not start with learning the content in this technique. You would take a book and analyze how the overall content is organized as chapters, how the chapters are connected, and how the chapters are sequenced. You would run through the entire content from a bird’s eye view, not necessarily trying to remember it at that stage. With a high-level view, you build a larger first layer (city-level) map of the content. It can be in the form of a mind-map, concept map, or even matrix, or any other blueprint depending on how your brain thinks.

Step 2: Build a district-level view

Then you take each individual chapter, run through the content at a slightly deeper level, and repeat the same process for each chapter to create a second layer district-level map.

Once you are done with the map for each chapter, you go back and connect it conceptually and analytically to the city-level map you created earlier. You may have to go over this process a couple of times, debating and questioning your own logic, like how you set up the connection and abstraction of your city-level and district-level maps.

At one point, through interactions, your mind will be trained to see how to layer one city-level and layer two (district-level) maps are connected and fit into each other.

Step 3: Navigate the street-level view

Finally, take each chapter, and read it through as attentively as you can. But before you try to figure out all mysteries, you would build the map of each major section street-level.

Go back, physically or mentally, to connect to the district-level map and see if you can mentally connect the street-level to district-level to city-level and make sense of the overall context.

Once you can visually and vividly recall these maps, even when you are driving, that’s when you would actually start learning each section, chunk-by-chunk deeply till you master that chunk. Every time you learn a chunk, you take 5 minutes to mentally tie it back to street-level, district-level, and city-level maps.

While this process may seem like slowing you down initially when creating maps, surprisingly, it makes the last layer of learning so much more effortless that you can learn the total content in almost half the time compared to what others would take. And also retain it vividly.

Debunking some misconceptions

Using the above technique needs some discipline. But once you master it, it becomes an integral part of your learning process.

At this stage, I would like to debunk some misconceptions:

First, you might be fearful that it is slowing down your progress through the chapters, but keep in mind that the goal is not speed reading. When the end goal is to gain a deeper, better, and more thorough understanding of a subject matter in a shorter time, you need to drop your preference for speed reading. Several folks misinterpret that reading faster means learning faster. There is no connection. For instance, you may memorize a formula to solve something. Still, you have to internalize the method of solving something novel thoroughly. In the latter case, memory enhancement or memorization would not help you.

Second, you may be concerned that you are not taking enough time to memorize the content, which is the foundational need for passing exams. Again, memorization is not learning. Thus, improving memory or striving for memorization does not necessarily mean that you can master the content better or faster. Long-term retention of the content does not come by memorization. It comes with multiple exposures of your brain to the content in various shapes and forms.

Third, you may feel that you are not completing a given book or text in a short time. Accelerating learning has been misunderstood. It is neither speed reading nor finishing something faster. But it is to speed up the comprehension and understanding of content, information, and concepts faster.

Lastly, I must set the grounds right. Learning the content alone (and for that sake, memorization and speed reading) is a small part of the bigger equation of learning faster in professional settings for a job or business. There are things beyond the content you need to master your job or become an expert on something. While content learning is really important, do note that the learning that matters the most in today’s world is professional learning. This is not an ordinary learning mechanism that you typically learn in school or otherwise. The goal of professional learning is to help you achieve desired or targeted outcomes for your job. Thus, it is far more focused, sharper, and meant to make you a performer.

This article first appeared in Brainz Magazine on 2nd May 2022 available at this link: How to Learn Massive amount of Content Quickly.