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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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I do improvisational theater. I’ve been doing it at an amateur level for three years now. My favourite exercise is to stand on stage, in front of an audience, and be given a word or sentence. Then, I have to spontaneously tell or act some kind of story revolving around that word or sentence, lasting exactly thirty seconds.

Like, someone says Asparagus and I’ll act a scene where I put on some boots, gloves and a radiation suit, open a fridge and complain about my spouse’s cooking.

Of course, when you have to do something like this, you simply cannot plan in advance everything you are going to do before you start. In fact, you can’t even plan how it is going to end. You just don’t have time to think in that split second between the moment you hear the word and the moment you start acting. You have to start acting right away. So, choose an action and do it. Anything. You hear Asparagus and you start tying your shoes slowly because you just feel like it. This leaves you a few seconds to think about who your character is, and why he is taking that specific action.

Once you have a good character in mind, it’s easier to act in character, even without a clear objective. This leaves you with some time to choose that objective and decide how the act will end. You will spend about fifteen seconds looking for an idea, so you just have to have a character or you’ll be naked.

There are good characters and bad characters. A bad character is a noun. A policeman. A chef. An extraterrestrial. A lightbulb. A good character is a noun and an adjective. An allergic policeman. A sexy chef. A tax-evading extraterrestrial. An imaginary lightbulb. The adjective adds depth to the character : that’s where great acting and great ideas come from. In fact, the further apart you choose your noun and adjective, the greater the potential. A policeman whose defining characteristic is allergies is a lot more unusual than a policeman whose defining characteristic is strength.

This also works outside of improvisational theater. It is by combining ideas from different areas of life, in ways that seem completely crazy, that entire philosophies and ways of understanding emerge.

Applying insight you get from a certain area to another will improve your knowledge and understanding of the latter.

On the other hand, we’ve been incessantly told that analogies are a bad idea. Smart, credible people have determined that you need ten thousand hours to become an expert at anything. Movies show that you can’t just copy-paste your expertise as a fisherman to be a loving and caring father. An expert baseball coach, no matter how experienced, will never be able to understand nuclear physics by applying his baseball expertise.

The natural reaction of anyone is to take their experience from whatever area they are an expert in, and use it to improve their skill in a new area they are beginning to discover. This never works. You just end up with baseball loonies explaining quantum mechanics in terms of batting averages.

By definition, when applying your experience to an area you are unfamiliar with, you cannot tell if what you are doing is right or wrong.

On the other hand, learning about baseball might just give a quantum scientist that little nudge in the right direction to form a new theory or solve a difficult problem. The history of science is filled with epiphanies that came from completely unexpected directions.

So, stop thinking about your job all the time. Do something new, like baseball or fishing or improvisational theater or knitting or reading yaoi fanfics. And every time you see something new, ask yourself what it teaches about your own craft. When everyone around you does a good job, be the one who does an allergic job.

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