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Learning an entirely new concept does not happen overnight. On the other hand, there are ways you can follow to make it happen faster or avoid reaching a dead end. Here are seven simple, three-word steps you can follow:

1. Find someone knowledgeable. By this, I mean a real person that you can meet face-to-face or on the phone, not some random person on the internet or, worse, a manual. Then, ask them to talk about the topic. If you found someone who is passionate, they’ll throw a flurry of sentences at you that are probably way too complex for you to understand. Grasp what you can, ask questions if it helps, and don’t be afraid to come back later if you have more questions or need written references.

2. Write everything down. If you’re not familiar with a topic, you are bound to forget everything you hear or read. By writing things down, you are doing a second pass on your short-term, which helps you commit that to a longer term. And besides, you’ll have it in writing for future reference. Mind maps do help: they don’t contain a lot of details, but their graphical nature helps bring back detailed memories.

3. Unravel the threads. Any domain is like a web of related concepts. You ultimately need to understand all the major concepts and relationships, and you will learn a lot of minor details along the way. So, follow the links as often as you can: every word you hear, every concept you discover should be written down so that it can be explored later on. This is a good time to start looking for manuals: Wikipedia can do a fine job explaining the general idea, but you usually need more practical textbooks or courses for the finer details.

4. Never stop exploring. It can be tempting to decide that you understand a given concept. In fact, we do it all the time because we simply don’t have time to become an expert at anything. Think you know what a backorder is? There are probably many concepts you have never heard about, or never thought were relevant, that may completely change how you look at backorders if you take the time to examine them closely. Every new concept we discover can change the way we look at things we took for granted.

5. Try explaining it. Find an audience that is unfamiliar with the topic and make yourself understood. Participate in online forums and discussions on the subject (you might want to do it anonymously at first). Thinking of an explanation or practical application for your theoretical knowledge will highlight any grey areas you might overlook. Confronting human intelligences with your ideas follows the nothing ever goes according to plan theory, which forces you to look at the subject in a different light in order to communicate.

6. Sleep on it. When you keep a lot of concepts in short-term memory, it’s easy to forget what is right, what is wrong, and what is an outdated assumption. Flushing things out of your brain by sleeping or doing something else for a while will keep only whatever ended up in your long term memory. Then, you can go back and fill the holes through more thinking or reading, thus eliminating any inconsistencies as you find them.

7. Practice, practice, practice. No amount of reading or thinking about a topic will make you into an expert. The devil is in the details, and most teachers or resources take those details for granted… or left as an exercise to the reader. Do your homework: you can learn what? from books, but how? is something taught only by experience and why? is for you to meditate on.

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How often do you get paradigm-shifted by a new discovery that changes everything you thought you knew about something? This once happened to me very often, but the frequency is starting to decrease. I must be getting close to knowing everything

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