Today you’re going to learn how to learn new things.
You probably already know the feeling. You start something new with plenty of energy: a language, the guitar, a spreadsheet tool your boss keeps mentioning. You watch the videos, highlight the book, maybe buy a nice notebook. Three weeks later almost nothing has stuck, and you start to wonder whether you’re simply bad at this.
You’re probably not. The problem tends to be method, not talent. Most of us were never taught how learning actually works, so we fall back on what feels productive: rereading, cramming, doing the same easy drill over and over. Those habits feel good while you’re doing them. They also happen to be some of the weakest tools available.
The good news is that memory and skill research has been running for well over a century, and a handful of findings come up again and again. Below are 13 ways to put them to work, plus a section on what to do when you fall off the wagon (you will, and that’s fine).
1. Pick something you actually care about
It sounds obvious, but it matters more than most people admit. Motivation is the fuel for everything else on this list, and it runs out fast when you’re learning something only because you feel you should.
When Pew Research Center surveyed American adults in late 2015 for its 2016 report Lifelong Learning and Technology, 74% said they’d done at least one learning activity tied to a personal interest in the past year. The top reason, given by 80% of those learners, was that they wanted something that would make their life more interesting and full. Career pressure came well behind. And the outcomes people reported were social and emotional as much as practical: 87% said they felt more capable and well rounded, and 64% said they’d made new friends along the way.
That’s survey data, so it tells you what people say rather than what caused what. Still, it lines up with a simple point. Curiosity carries you through the boring middle stretch, and obligation usually doesn’t. If you’re unsure what draws you, thinking about what gives your days meaning is a decent place to start.
Start small: write down three things you’ve said “I wish I could do that” about in the last year. Circle the one that still makes you a little excited.
2. Shrink the first step until it’s almost silly
Beginners overload themselves. They try to learn chords, rhythm, strumming and reading tabs all in the first evening, then conclude guitar “isn’t for them.”
There’s a mechanical reason this backfires. In his 2001 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, psychologist Nelson Cowan argued that working memory, the mental space where you juggle new information, holds only about four chunks at once. That’s fewer than the “seven” people often quote from George Miller’s 1956 paper, which Cowan treated as a loose estimate. Follow the chain through: new material arrives faster than you can organize it, those few slots fill up, anything extra gets dropped, and you walk away with a fuzzy mess instead of one clear piece. Experts don’t have bigger working memories. They’ve just packed more into each chunk through practice, so a full chord feels to them like one item rather than six fingers.
Say you’re learning to cook. Instead of tackling a three-course dinner, you spend a week learning to dice an onion properly. Boring? A bit. But next week that onion takes up one slot instead of four, and you have room for the sauce. Small first steps also make it far easier to stop procrastinating, because there’s nothing big enough to dread.
Break your new skill into the smallest piece you could practise in 15 minutes, and do only that piece this week.
3. Test yourself instead of rereading
Rereading feels like studying. The words look familiar, so your brain concludes it knows them. Unfortunately, familiarity and memory are not the same thing.
In a 2006 study in Psychological Science, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke at Washington University in St. Louis had 120 students read short prose passages. Then the students either reread a passage or took a recall test on it, writing down everything they could remember with no feedback. Five minutes later, rereading looked like the winner. A week later, the picture flipped completely.
| Time of final test | Reread the passage | Tested themselves |
|---|---|---|
| 5 minutes later | 81% recalled | 75% recalled |
| 2 days later | 54% recalled | 68% recalled |
| 1 week later | 42% recalled | 56% recalled |
The test-enhanced learning study by Roediger and Karpicke also ran a second experiment. Students who studied once and then tested three times recalled 61% after a week, compared with 40% for students who studied four times. Pulling information out of your head, struggling a little to find it, seems to be what locks it in. If you want more retrieval tricks, this guide on how to improve your memory covers several.
Next time, do this: close the book after each section and write or say out loud everything you remember. Only then look back to check what you missed.
4. Space your practice out
In the 1880s, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus did something gloriously tedious. Working alone, with himself as the only subject, he invented around 2,300 meaningless syllables (things like consonant-vowel-consonant strings) so that no prior knowledge could help him. Then he memorized lists of them, timed how long it took to relearn them later, and repeated the whole programme to check his results. He published the work in Leipzig in 1885 as Über das Gedächtnis (“On Memory”).
Among his findings: spreading repetitions over several days worked better than cramming them into one sitting. More than a hundred years later, that result has held up remarkably well. A 2006 review in Psychological Bulletin by Cepeda, Pashler and colleagues pooled 839 assessments of spaced practice from 317 experiments across 184 articles. Spacing helped consistently, and the best gap between sessions grew longer the longer you wanted to remember something.
What does that mean for you? An hour a day for five days beats five hours on Saturday. Treat it like any other commitment you’d keep as a promise to yourself: small, regular, on the calendar.
Your move: plan three short sessions this week, with at least a day between each, and put them in your calendar now.
5. Mix things up
Most practice is blocked. You do 20 scales in C major, then 20 in G major, then 20 in D. It feels smooth and you get visibly better as you go. Mixing them up feels messier. It also seems to teach you more.
Nate Kornell and Robert Bjork tested this at UCLA in a 2008 study published in Psychological Science. They showed 120 students paintings by 12 artists. For six artists, the paintings came in a block, one artist at a time. For the other six, the paintings were interleaved with other artists’ work. Then students had to name the artist behind paintings they’d never seen. The interleaved artists were identified correctly 61% of the time, compared with 35% for the blocked ones. The detail I love is this: 78% of participants believed blocking had worked as well as or better than mixing, even though their own scores said otherwise.
You can read the Kornell and Bjork 2008 interleaving study yourself. One caution: this was about learning to recognize categories and styles, so it applies most neatly to skills where you need to tell similar things apart, like grammar forms, maths problem types, birdsong or tennis shots.
A quick experiment: in your next session, shuffle two or three related things you’re practising instead of finishing one before starting the next. Notice how it feels harder, and keep going anyway.
6. Forget your “learning style”
Plenty of people will tell you they’re a visual learner, or an auditory one, and that they need material served in that format. You’ll hear it in classrooms, offices and online courses. The evidence for it is thin.
Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, has been pushing back on this for years. In a 2018 university article about his latest review, he reported looking at 16 interpretable studies published after 2008. Three supported some version of the theory, and thirteen didn’t. His advice is to stop worrying about your style and instead match your method to the task. Memorizing vocabulary calls for different strategies than understanding a historical argument, whatever kind of learner you think you are. His position builds on a 2008 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork. They found almost no studies with the kind of design needed to prove the theory, and several well-designed ones that contradicted it.
So what should you do instead? Use whatever format suits the content. Diagrams for anatomy. Audio for pronunciation. Your hands for woodwork. And if you’re piecing together material from books, videos and courses, a bit of practice in developing research skills will help you tell good sources from noisy ones.
For your next topic, pick the format that fits the material itself, even if it’s not the one you’d usually reach for.
7. Copy an expert, then compare your work with theirs
Benjamin Franklin wasn’t born a good writer. As a young man he came across a volume of The Spectator, the London essay paper, and decided he wanted to write like that.
In his Autobiography, he describes the method he invented. He’d jot short notes on the idea behind each sentence of an essay, put them aside for a few days, then rewrite the full essay from his notes without looking at the original. After that he compared the two, found where his version fell short, and fixed it. Sometimes he turned the essays into verse and back again to build his vocabulary. Other times he scrambled his notes and tried to put them back in a logical order. His goal, in his own modest words, was to become a “tolerable English writer.” He managed somewhat better than that.
What makes this work is the comparison. You get a clear, honest picture of the gap between you and someone better, without anyone grading you. The comparison is a tool, not a verdict on your worth. If measuring yourself against others tends to sour your mood, it’s worth learning how to stop comparing yourself to others in the unhealthy sense while keeping this useful version.
Give it a go: choose one short piece by someone you admire (a paragraph, a drawing, a 30-second riff), recreate it from memory, then lay the two side by side.
8. Practise the hard bits on purpose
There’s a popular story that 10,000 hours of practice makes anyone an expert. The real research is messier, and more useful.
In 2014, Brooke Macnamara (Princeton), David Hambrick (Michigan State) and Frederick Oswald (Rice) published a meta-analysis in Psychological Science covering 88 studies and more than 11,000 participants. They looked at how much of the difference between performers came down to deliberate practice, meaning focused, effortful work on specific weaknesses. The answer varied a lot by field:
| Domain | Share of performance differences linked to deliberate practice |
|---|---|
| Games (chess, Scrabble) | about 26% |
| Music | about 21% |
| Sports | about 18% |
| Education | about 4% |
| Professions | under 1% |
Practice clearly matters, but it’s not the whole story, and that should take some pressure off you. Talent, starting age, teaching quality and luck all play a part. What the numbers do support is that in structured skills, the kind of practice counts. Noodling around on what you can already do feels pleasant and moves you very little. Working on the passage you keep fumbling is where improvement lives, and if you get the difficulty level right, that focused work is often where you slip into a flow state.
Test it this week: at the start of each session, name the single thing you’re worst at and spend the first ten minutes on it alone.
9. Put your phone in another room
Not face down. Not on silent. In another room.
That’s the slightly uncomfortable conclusion from a 2017 study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research by Adrian Ward of the University of Texas at Austin, with Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos. Across experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users, people did tests that measured how much mental capacity they had available. Those whose phones were in another room clearly outperformed those whose phones sat on the desk, and did slightly better than those with phones in a pocket or bag. Whether the phone was on or off, face up or face down, made no difference. “It’s a brain drain,” Ward said in the university’s write-up.
Why would a silent phone matter? The researchers’ explanation is that part of your mind is busy not checking it, and that effort uses up attention you’d otherwise spend on learning. Treat that as one team’s explanation rather than settled fact, but the fix costs you nothing. If your phone habit runs deeper, these steps to stop doomscrolling might help between sessions too.
Here’s a simple way in: before your next practice session, walk the phone to a different room and set a timer on a cheap kitchen clock instead.
10. Learn it as if you’ll have to teach it
Think about giving a stranger directions. You might drive a route every day without thinking about it, but the moment someone asks how to get there, you realise you’re not sure whether it’s the second or third left. Explaining forces you to rebuild the route in your head, in order, with every turn named. The comparison breaks down a little, since driving is a habit and studying is deliberate, but the core idea carries over: having to explain something exposes the gaps in what you know.
There’s direct evidence for at least part of this. In a 2014 paper in Memory & Cognition, John Nestojko and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, UCLA and Williams College gave students a passage to read. Some were told they’d be tested afterwards. Others were told they’d teach it to another student. Nobody actually taught; everyone took the same test. The students expecting to teach recalled more, organized their recall better, and were especially strong on the main points. Just expecting to explain changed how they read.
You don’t need a classroom. A friend, a partner, a blog post or a voice memo to yourself will do. Explaining things clearly is also a big part of having a good conversation, so you’re practising two skills at once. Before your next session, decide who you’ll explain the material to afterwards, and read with that person in mind.
11. Sleep between sessions
You can’t learn in your sleep, but your sleep seems to do a lot of work on what you learned during the day.
A 2016 study in Psychological Science by Stéphanie Mazza and colleagues tested this with 40 people learning foreign vocabulary. One group studied in the evening, slept, then relearned the words the next morning. The other studied in the morning and relearned that same evening, so both groups had a 12-hour gap. The ones who slept needed about half as much practice to relearn the words, and they remembered them much better when tested a week later and again six months later. It’s a small sample, so don’t treat the exact figures as gospel. Still, it gives you a practical rule worth trying: split your learning across a night rather than piling it into one day.
That only works if you actually sleep, of course. If lying awake is your problem, these tips on how to get to sleep faster are worth a look.
Tonight: do a short review of whatever you’re learning in the evening, then a quick self-test tomorrow morning before you check anything else.
12. Move before you learn
A brisk walk won’t make you a genius. It may give you a small, short-lived edge, though.
In 2018, the US Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee published its Scientific Report, a large review prepared for the Department of Health and Human Services. Its chapter on brain health graded the evidence as strong that a single bout of moderate-to-vigorous activity gives a temporary boost to cognition. That includes attention, memory and processing speed. The timing is interesting: thinking can dip a little in the first ten minutes after exercise, with the biggest benefit roughly 11 to 20 minutes afterwards. Over the longer term, the committee found moderate evidence linking regular activity with better cognition in general.
Keep the limits in mind. These are short-term effects, they are larger in children and older adults, and much of the long-term evidence is correlational. So exercise is a helpful warm-up, not a replacement for anything above.
Start small: take a 15-minute brisk walk, wait ten minutes, then sit down for your practice session.
13. Expect it to feel hard, and read that as a good sign
If you’ve noticed a pattern in the items above, you’re right. Testing feels harder than rereading. Spacing feels slower than cramming. Mixing feels clumsier than blocking. That’s not a coincidence.
Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork, psychologists at UCLA, call these “desirable difficulties.” In a 2011 chapter for the book Psychology and the Real World, they describe how some kinds of struggle during practice trigger the very processes that build long-term memory. The catch is that they feel unproductive in the moment. In one study they discuss, people practising in neat blocks became overconfident because they “misinterpreted their good performance during practice as evidence of long-term learning.” Quick progress in a session can fool you. Slow, effortful progress often lasts.
There’s an important limit in their argument: a difficulty is only desirable if you have enough background to rise to it. Struggling with chapter ten when you skipped chapters one to nine is just struggling. If you tend to read every stumble as proof that you’re not cut out for this, it’s worth working on how to stop underestimating yourself.
Your move: the next time a session feels frustrating, write one line about what made it hard. Look back at that line in a week and check what you remember.
What to do when you slip
You’ll miss sessions. A week of late shifts, a cold, a holiday, a stretch where you just can’t be bothered. This is where a lot of people quit, because one missed week feels like proof that the whole project failed.
The research on habits is surprisingly reassuring. In a 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London followed 96 volunteers (82 completed it) as they tried to build a new daily habit over 84 days. On average, it took 66 days for the behaviour to feel automatic, and individual estimates ranged from 18 days to a projected 254. The finding that matters most here: missing a single day had little effect on how automatic the habit eventually became. What did hurt was missing many repetitions over time.
So one bad week doesn’t reset you to zero. Lots of skipped weeks do add up. The practical answer is to make returning easy rather than to punish yourself:
- Restart with a session that’s smaller than your usual one, so getting back costs very little.
- Begin with a self-test on what you learned last time. You’ll often find you kept more than you feared, and that alone makes the next step easier.
- Ask what actually got in the way (time of day, tiredness, an unclear next step) and change that, not your opinion of yourself.
If a slip leaves you feeling flat, these steps for turning a bad day around can help reset your mood, and this list of good habits to have is a useful reminder that consistency beats intensity in most areas of life, not only learning.
Start with one change
You don’t need all 13 of these at once. Honestly, that would break tip number two. If you change one thing this week, make it testing yourself instead of rereading, because it’s the cheapest switch with some of the strongest evidence behind it. Add spacing next. The rest can follow when those feel normal.
Learning something new is less about being clever and more about being a little smarter with your practice. Pick your skill, pick your first tiny step, and put a session in the calendar today. When you’re ready for more, browse the Education section for more practical guides on learning well.
