Learning faster than your competition is the ultimate superpower in business.
I call it velocity of learning, and it’s a skill, just like reading comprehension or time management. Some people are naturally better at it than others, but it can be developed and honed over time just like any other skill—no matter who you are and what your natural strengths are.
And that’s a good thing, because it’s hard to overstate the value of velocity of learning, as a recent LinkedIn survey found. It’s a trait I look for when hiring anyone for my business—whether an account manager, writer, or executive.
There’s actually a really solid framework you can follow to learn new things in business as quickly as possible. In this article, we’ll break it down in detail.
And don’t worry—it doesn’t involve memorization, writing things down, or tapping into your inner consciousness to attract “good energy.”
Key Takeaways
- Business learning has higher stakes than academic learning. To do it as effectively as possible, don’t try to master everything you learn, but do try to understand each subject with a reasonable amount of depth.
- Begin with baseline learning. Identify subject matter role models who are successful at doing what you want to do, and consume their content at a high level.
- Start doing as soon as you have an actionable first step. Learning by doing forces you to tackle real problems as you run into them, and increases focus and information retention.
- Write SOPs before they’re formally needed for training. This will allow you to identify gaps in your knowledge and close them sooner rather than later.
How Learning For Business is Different
The first thing you need to understand is that learning for business is a totally different game than the more academic kinds of learning you might be used to. We’re not learning piano, Spanish, or debating.
The stakes are higher with business learning, since you need to learn if you don’t want to fail. The pressure is higher, but this can actually make the process easier. At least for me, I find that the urgency forces me to learn when I’d otherwise be tempted by distractions.
As you go through this article, here are two key considerations to keep in mind.
- You don’t need to master everything you learn. This is true especially if you’re a manager, executive, or business owner. You want to be dangerous at a lot of different things—but you don’t need to be the best at them. If you’re a business leader, you’ll be hiring subject matter experts to actually do the work—you just need to know enough to understand their work and equip them.
- You do need to understand the function deeper than surface-level. That said, don’t be naive enough to think you can hire and guide an expert front-end developer if you know nothing about coding yourself. Some people think this is totally feasible, acting like they’ll be fine if they just surround themselves with the right experts. This is nonsense. If you barely understand the subject yourself, how will you even review resumes and gauge the expertise of potential employees in the first place?
Begin With Baseline Learning
Baseline learning is where you learn just enough of the basics to start doing.
This is super straightforward. Prioritize YouTube videos, how-to articles, and skimming through books. Definitely don’t spend more than a few days in this stage.
Although it’s tempting, ignore online courses and detailed training programs—even if you qualify for the scammy “limited time offer” that’s actually available all the time. If they’re needed, courses and masterclasses can always be done later, once it’s clear that they’re really necessary.
Right now, it’s all about building the foundation and getting enough information in your mind so you can start doing.
Subject Matter Role Models
When I’m learning something new in business, I never need to reinvent the wheel. There’s always someone else already out there, doing whatever it is I want to learn, perfectly. I’ve found I can save so much time if I go straight to the source and learn directly from these people. These aren’t necessarily teachers, just people who’ve already learned what I want to learn and are putting it into practice.
For example, unless you’re in a super narrow niche, there will be no shortage of YouTubers who are super successful, specializing in exactly what you want to learn. There are probably thousands of them. So once you develop that vision of what you want to do and how you want to do it, it’s as simple as finding the subject matter expert who does it the best, and learning from them.
- If you’re trying to learn economics and investing, check out Ray Dalio, founder of the YouTube channel “Principles by Ray Dalio,” and Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at Stern School of Business of New York University and well-known consultant and advisor.
Whatever you do, never directly copy a subject matter expert. For example, I’ll never dish out the same exact business advice someone else is giving. First of all, probably not many people would be interested, since I’m not providing any new info—and secondly, I don’t believe copied content is even deservant to exist at all, since it’s disrespectful to the original authors.
So always aim to bring something unique and valuable to the table, but when you’re just beginning to wrap your head around things, it helps to learn the basics from a couple of role models who you respect.
Building a list of role models will also come in handy a lot later on, as you get more into the details of the subject. When you’re confronted with super specific questions, you can refer back to the more step-by-step videos and tutorials from your subject matter role models.
Start Doing
Most of the real learning happens when you force yourself to start doing.
How do you know when it’s time to stop the baseline learning and start doing? Once you have a definite first step. If you’re spending more than 20 hours in the baseline learning stage, you’ve probably moved past “baseline” learning and it’s time to move on.
Again for the people in the back: The key to learning fast is simply to start doing.
David Kolb and his wife Alice Kolb back up this theory in their book The Experiential Educator, which goes in depth on how experiential learning often excels over academic learning.
Getting Past Walls
As you move out of the information-gathering stage and actually begin implementing what you’ve learned, you’ll start hitting walls. There’s no way around this—and believe it or not, you should actually want it to happen. This is because the faster you hit walls, the faster you learn. You need to break through the wall if you want to succeed, and the specific answer for how to break through the wall is somewhere out there on the internet, waiting to be found by you.
As an example, let’s think about my main objective, which is growing a YouTube audience. The first thing I needed to learn was obvious: How do I make a YouTube video?
There are tons of different components to this question, and I certainly did not learn them by taking a course. I learned them when I actually decided to create my first video, because I was forced to take each component one at a time as I ran into walls.
- How do I shoot a good-looking video? This was the first wall. At that point, it didn’t matter what I said, or how I performed—could I even get the shot I was looking for? Could I achieve the look? I was forced to focus on this in order to move forward—and guess what happened? I solved it. Once that was dialed in, I continued until I hit the next wall.
- How do I communicate effectively in my videos? This was the second wall. I didn’t want to sound robotic or read directly from a script. I wanted to be relatable and come across as a real person, especially in the age of AI. So I consulted my subject matter role models. I used their advice as a foundation, and added my own unique flair on top.
And so on, until the next wall.
There’s so much information out there, about everything—especially business topics. You just need to know what to look for. And again, you won’t know what to look for if you haven’t started. If you have started, you’ll know exactly what to look for, because you’ll have a wall in front of you that you need to get past.
When I took this approach with my project, I found I was getting better and better without even knowing it, until suddenly I had the realization, “I know how to make YouTube videos!”
Josh Kaufman outlines a similar strategy in his book The First 20 Hours. Josh recommends doing four things to accelerate learning velocity:
- Deconstruct the skill: Break down the skills into manageable parts.
- Learn enough to self-correct: Get just enough information to start doing, and self-correct along the way.
- Remove practice barriers: Eliminate distractions to stay focused.
- Practice at least 20 hours: Commit to a total of 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice to see significant improvement.
Benefits of Learning By Doing
When you learn by doing, other things start to happen as well.
- Urgency and focus increase: When your learning is tied to specific business objectives, it becomes ultra clear why you need to learn in the first place, and your efficiency will get a serious boost. This is the opposite of how I feel when completing an online course, where everything seems much more abstract. When you learn by doing, you have no other option but to focus and get things done.
- Information retention increases: In the same way, learning by doing cements the details in your mind pretty firmly. Because you’ll be solving real problems, you can think back over your journey weeks, months, or even years later and remember the specifics much more clearly. The alternative? Trying to remember massive walls of text from courses or books.
You’ll find that learning by doing never really ends. Almost everything in business is a continuous process of encountering a problem and learning how to overcome it.
Now, let me be clear. I’m not saying that once you get through the baseline learning stage you should only ever learn by doing. There’s a delicate balance with learning—it’s almost an art once you master it.
On the one hand, you want to learn as fast as possible (especially in business), and the best way to do that is to get practical and start doing things as soon as you can. However, this shouldn’t stop you from occasionally taking the time to reflect, review, and brainstorm new ways to improve.
Every time you do this, there’s a good chance you’ll find new ways to streamline your existing processes—especially in the early stages.
Write SOPs
Writing SOPs before they’re formally needed can seriously improve your knowledge.
Of course, everyone writes an SOP when they need one for training employees. I’m saying you should do it even before then—right from the beginning.
This is more of a tactical tip that may seem a bit out of place in an article about learning fast—aren’t SOPs super time-consuming? Well, try it before you knock it.
Writing SOPs Sheds Light on the Gaps
One of the biggest benefits of SOPs is that they allow you to learn things you would have otherwise missed.
Let’s continue with the example of me learning how to shoot a YouTube video. I don’t have a camera man or a film crew, so no one needs to know how to do that but me. But I still wrote out a full, step-by-step SOP document. Everything from the settings on my camera, to the lighting levels, to the audio settings is fully documented.
As you write an SOP, it will become all too clear that even though you may know how to shoot a YouTube video, there are huge gaps in the process where you’re totally clueless.
Maybe your camera has been on the default settings, and that’s worked fine for you, so you’ve never even thought about it. But at some point (and probably in a super high-pressure situation), you’ll turn on your camera and find everything is out of whack. If you’ve taken the time to write an SOP, you can refer back to it and reset your camera settings to normal. If you haven’t written an SOP, that knowledge gap will leave you high and dry.
The point is, writing SOPs forces you to get into the details, consult your subject matter role models, and answer questions you don’t yet know the answers to. This prevents some serious headaches down the line.
Two other distinct benefits come from writing SOPs.
Writing SOPs keeps things fresh. The business environment is super dynamic, which means you might be doing a deep dive into one subject now, but soon you’ll be over that hurdle and onto the next thing. An SOP can sit tight in a folder on your computer until you’re ready to come back to it and brush up on an older topic you forgot about.
Writing SOPs prepares you for delegation. Like I talked about in my last article on content strategy, you’re going to need to delegate certain tasks at some point—and when that time comes, you’ll definitely need SOPs. Writing them now will make your life that much easier when you start hiring.
Writing SOPs won’t feel like a direct boost to your learning velocity—and it’s not. In the short term, writing SOPs takes you longer than not writing them—but in the long run, you’ll solve problems faster and learn in a much deeper way.
Next Steps
Speaking of all this learning—do you want to learn to be an entrepreneur? A business leader?
Whether you’re building a business or simply involved in one, following my content is an excellent first step to upping your game. With years of experience founding and running multiple businesses, I hope to become your subject matter role model for all things business.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel, shoot me an email, follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn—whichever platform you prefer, I love having down-to-earth conversations with people just like you.
Thanks for your time, and I’ll see you in the next one.