Learning is the most important skill you can learn!

I have watched/read Dan Koe’s “The One-Person Business Model (How To Monetize Yourself)” 20+ times.

And each time I revisit it, something fascinating happens.

It’s like a whole new universe opens itself up to me every single time.

I remember one time in particular that blew my mind.

That time was right after I had made my first money online (using some of the information that Dan was talking about).

When I came back to the article, it’s like I had just entered a totally new universe!

Suddenly, I got it.

Like actually got it.

It all made sense to me.

Before that, I was unable to see what was right there in front of my eyes!

Why?

Because I couldn’t relate it to any real-world scenario yet.

After I had made my first money, I was suddenly able to see the depth behind the ideas that Dan was talking about.

What happened here?

Well…

We’ll be answering that question in a minute.

But first, let’s take a step back.

Have you ever wondered why you seem to make no progress — even though you are putting lots of effort into “learning”?

That’s because…

You are not actually learning.

The notion you have of learning might be something like:

• Reading books

• Studying material

• Listening to podcasts

• Taking notes & memorizing that

But that’s not what learning is.

Not at all.

School has led you down the wrong path with that one.

And besides, let’s be honest here for a second:

How many times have you eagerly studied some material, taken notes, and then never looked at them again? Never used them for anything?

This is a major problem.

See, learning is the single most important skill you can develop. You could call it the meta skill. The skill of all skills.

It unlocks every other skill and thing you want in life.

Getting a boyfriend or girlfriend? Learning.

Building a successful business? Learning.

Creating your dream lifestyle? Learning.

Fulfilling your life purpose? Learning.

Becoming enlightened? Learning.

Becoming truly happy? Learning.

Good health? Learning.

The list goes on infinitely.

But the reality is, at least 99% of people haven’t developed a mastery in learning, or even a serious learning ability.

This has dramatic negative consequences, because learning is what’s necessary to increase the quality of your life (and consequently, of those around you).

If you’re not an effective & efficient learner — you are wasting countless hours, days, weeks, months, and even years of your precious time.

What the majority of people call “learning”, is mental masturbation in sneaky disguise. Procrastination, distraction from actually implementing what they are learning.

Sure, they may get the theory part right. But then, what do they do?

They forget about it and never actually make use of the information in their life. 6 months later, and they are still stuck in the same place as before.

Nothing changed.

It’s awful.

To help you eliminate that dreadful possibility, you will be learning how to become a Masterful Learner.

To me, a Masterful Learner is someone who studies the learning process carefully and with the intention of getting real-world results.

Someone that develops an effective system that makes learning anything seamless, and friction-less.

There are a few things that you want to take into account so you can make the most of your learning (and therefore, of your life in its entirety).

Because remember:

Learning is the key that unlocks all the good things in life.

Intentional learning towards a positive outcome, that is.

You are learning every day, whether you make this process conscious or not. But the bulk of that is actually dragging you down even further, instead of pulling you up!

That’s why, if left to their own devices, people tend to get more and more miserable over time. Even more bitter, even more resentful, even more depressed.

They are actively learning to dive even deeper into their suffering, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here’s a harsh truth for you:

Most of your so-called “learning” is you deceiving yourself into thinking that you are learning. And even worse than that, you are learning to take that fiction as reality!

But really, nothing exceptional will ever come from that.

If you actually want to build a great life for yourself, if you actually want to increase its quality — that takes real learning, and not just the front that you put up for yourself (and for other people).

And that’s what I’m here to teach you today.

I’ve developed a powerful framework using some of the best information out there + a lot of my own real-world experience.

My hopes are that you will take this issue seriously, very seriously, and that you will actually use what I’m about to give you — because it is extremely effective in getting true results.

Let’s start off with the simple, yet commonly overlooked, first step:

1. Set An Intention

If you are doing research without having a clear intention, you already failed.

Drop everything and set the intention.

And then you can dive into doing research.

Research should follow intention, and not the other way around!

Get clear on what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it.

Unless your intention is to waste your time? Then sure, go for it. But make it conscious.

You want to have a goal that you can apply the information to, because then you’ll know what to keep an eye out for in the researching phase.

The intention alone can make a gigantic difference in how you perceive the material that you are researching. It’s crazy.

For example: You could read this newsletter to:

• Learn how to learn

• “Spy on the competition”

• Entertain & distract yourself

• Study how I structure my newsletters

• Study how my thought process goes

• Look for insights that are new to you

• Pick out one point of this list & study it deeply

And many more, those are just off of the top of my head.

With each one, you would see my writing with completely different eyes.

If it’s entertainment… at least be honest with yourself. If you want to do some mindless reading, fine (although I don’t recommend it). But at least don’t lie to yourself about it — that makes this really problematic.

Because then, you will have that same attitude to every other piece of content. You will think that you are making progress — but really, you’re just scrolling because you “felt like it”.

You are actively learning to trick yourself this way, and that can have terrible consequences on your life.

Most of you are going to read this article and never put the information into practice. That’s just how it is.

But for the few of you that are serious about creating a great life, you might want to consider listening closely.

So, and here’s where some inception-type action happens:

Set the intention of learning from this newsletter and becoming a Masterful Learner by following this framework.

This is what I recommend, because learning how to learn well is one of the most rewarding things you can do on this planet.

But, you can also use this process for some other topic or skill that you want to study, and that will get you to put this model into pratice.

That’s also great, because then you’ll collect real-world experience. That’s how you really learn.

If that’s you, just replace “becoming a Masterful Learner” with whatever it is that you are trying to learn or get better at.

Whatever the case may be, we will be using this article to walk you through the actual learning process in real time — so you will be able to see how learning actually works!

1½. The Context

Quick point to mention before we dive into the juicy stuff.

Context is incredibly important for what we are about to do.

What does this mean?

Well, this quote explains it well:

That is why some people seem to make progress effortlessly, while others can struggle so much with even the best content.

If you’re experiencing that problem, it’s simply because you don’t have the skills & the information that serve as the backdrop for learning new stuff.

And that’s fine!

So if you are having trouble with this, don’t be hard on yourself.

I’ve actually experienced this myself, because I’ve “wasted” quite a lot of my time before I got on Twitter.

Haven’t really built any deep skills yet, and that’s gonna take a while.

So if you relate to that, have some patience and trust the learning process.

2. Gather Information

Two important points to be taken into account here.

a) The Quality

Having the right intentions, but choosing the wrong research material, is a dangerous trap that you can easily fall into — so watch out.

There are tons and tons of stuff out there — and yet, you take their validity completely for granted!

You don’t know the person behind that book. What if he’s feeding you hot garbage?

What are his credentials? Does he really know what he’s talking about? Is he not only talking the talk, but also walking the walk?

So how do you know which information to trust and which not to trust?

The short answer is, you trust none of them.

The longer answer is, you discount none of them, and you verify by cross-referencing and by using the information in real-world scenarios.

For me, one of the best ways to solve this problem is to sort by creators (and not by general topics).

Of course, some people are much more trustworthy than others.

If they have been able to help you a lot in the past, their other stuff has a high chance of being helpful too!

If you’ve been in the game for a little while, you may have developed an intuition about who to trust and who not to trust (keep in mind that it may not always be 100% right though).

So for example, I trust people like:

• Dan Koe

• Leo Gura

• Julie Ahrens

Leo Gura (actualized.org) especially.

Why? Because they have had a measurable positive effect on my life.

And even further, I have this deep sense of them actually wanting to help others (no matter how harsh and brutal the truths are that they need to deliver).

Of course, I’m not saying that they can’t be wrong, horribly wrong even. Not at all, I’ve seen all of these commit major blunders. So have I!

That’s just what humans do, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But in general, the information that they provide is more truthful and more high-quality than what you commonly get (by a large factor).

This is why I urge you to get your information from trustworthy people, and not from general topics.

Many trustworthy people in diverse areas of life (even if they are quite rare to find).

That’s not to say that people that don’t seem trustworthy can’t say correct things at times.

No, I’m sure that even someone like Donald Trump can say true stuff.

Otherwise, no one would be following him in the first place!

If you want to make a great pick — use your brain, your intuition, your heart, common sense, information, and your wisdom, all in combination.

For example:

If I want to research learning, which of these sources should I pick:

1. “5 Ways To Learn 10x Faster” by Dan Koe

2. Some Twitter account with 17 followers that posts platitudes about learning, or some shady blog post

Yes, this is an obvious choice.

But you’d be surprised at how much horseshit you have already taken to heart. Stuff that you’ve seen in an Instagram post that you accepted as truth, just because it sounded right to you.

b) The Quantity

To become a Masterful Learner, you want to study many diverse, high-quality perspectives and pull insights from all of them.

Perhaps even from lower quality stuff, if you want to go deeper — but for that, you really need open-mindedness, wisdom (a.k.a. keen discernment abilities), and critical thinking skills.

Later in this framework, you will be synthesizing all of those insights and ideas and using the best of all of them to create something new & better (like I did with this exact learning framework).

To give you a better overview of this principle in action, let’s peek behind the scenes of this newsletter together.

Here are some of the sources that I’ve used to create this:

As you can see, I am pulling from many many diverse perspectives — they all have something going for them.

The beauty of this is that, you can literally make creative connections betwen EVERYTHING & ANYTHING, because life is infinitely interconnected!

You don’t even have to study only “learning” to learn how to learn — in fact, making crazy novel connections can lead to something even better!

I have personally taken many elements and ideas from totally unrelated content to write this article.

Crazy how it works, don’t you think?

Alright, let’s give you your assignment now.

Choose at least 3-5 high-quality sources of information so you can study different perspectives on learning.

Again, you can replace learning with whatever you want, but I seriously recommend you to learn how to learn. The return on investment is insane.

As you can see in the images above, I am using ideas from Leo Gura’s YouTube channel, Dan Koe’s blog, and Francis Oleh’s blog.

But that’s just me. I love these creators, and I know they are competent people, so I chose them as information sources.

3. Take Notes & Dissect

Now, note-taking is an art in and of itself.

You have to know:

• What to look out for

• How to structure your notes

• How to organize your notes

• What to take note of, and what not to

Of course, this becomes much easier when you have set an intention!

But I figure that most of you are already pretty good at that, although there’s also much more to it than you would think (as with everything in life).

You can structure your notes however you like.

What’s really important though, is that you:

1. Note down relevant information. For example, my intention was to write a newsletter, and to deepen learning in myself. So I was actively looking for actionable ideas that you can use to build an effective learning system.

2. Have a place to store those notes. If you write down notes and put them somewhere random, you will likely never ever see them again.

3. Organize them well, so you can quickly find them and navigate through them to find what you need for your project or intention.

Alright. Now you have an intention (like learning how to learn), and you have collected diverse high-quality research material.

Now you block off time to listen/read deeply and with full focus.

If you are distracted by your environment, you will suck at taking notes. You will miss important nuances and you run the risk of misunderstanding the big picture (which is the most important aspect).

Pick 1 source at a time, give it your undivided attention, and take detailed notes with the intention to learn how to learn.

So in this case, you can start with this newsletter.

However, I would recommend reading the whole thing once before you even take notes, to grasp the whole concept on a high level.

That way you won’t get confused.

And then, once you have a block of time that you can use (deep work is best for the level of attention that’s required here), eliminate distractions and go to town.

4. Synthesize

Synthesizing is one of my favorite concepts that exists out there.

You could also just call it creativity, but “synthesizing” just has such a nice ring to it — and for me, it fits the description much more accurately.

So what is it?

Well, in essence, it’s:

• studying many diverse perspectives

• extracting the best ideas

• reassembling them in a way that creates something new and unique

• while adding your own personal touch and advancing the field

That’s why I told you to collect and dissect diverse research material!

This is what I did to create this exact framework — can you see how useful this is?

The more perspectives you integrate, the more creative connections you make with life as a whole, the more amazing and unique your work becomes.

If you are looking for the essence of what it means to become “irreplaceable” — this is it. ChatGPT can’t even get close to you if you do this.

Okay, but why do we synthesize to learn?

Hey, great question!

It’s because it brings you much closer to the truth.

If you combine and compare many different perspectives and ideas, you can kind of “triangulate” the truth in-between them.

And there are important nuances that some people make, that others don’t!

Even with stuff like learning… you would think learning is a simple one-way street, but that’s actually not the case.

Just Leo Gura alone has 3 videos on completely seperate perspectives on learning, where learning is defined in a completely different way.

And he said that he will put out more perspectives in the future.

And also…

Learning is only really useful when it’s holistic.

If you are learning some narrow field or skill but it doesn’t integrate into the big picture that is your life and existence beyond that — you fail.

Here’s a great example that illustrates my point:

You want to learn how to build a great life?

Well…

If you only learn how to become successful with money and take that as equal to building a great life, you will become miserable.

There are so many different facets to building a great life, like:

• Health

• Spirituality

• Life purpose

• Relationships

• Emotional mastery

• Financial freedom

• Creative contribution

And many more.

So how does synthesizing work exactly?

Again, great question.

Creativity is not that easy to define because it’s not tangible, but let me walk you through the process so you can see the inner workings.

You have set your intention, collected diverse material, and taken detailed notes.

Now, you start looking for:

• Big ideas

• Similarities

• Differences

• Perspectives

You will be cross-referencing your sources, and you will be doing something that I love to call cross-pollinating.

If you want to do this successfully, you need to understand how your mind works.

Your conscious mind is responsible for processing new data, and for productivity.

Your subconscious mind is responsible for processing all the data that your conscious mind has brought into the subconscious, so that is always changing.

Meaning you will make fresh and unique connections the more you fill your subconscious mind up with great ideas.

Creativity is all about allowing the subconscious mind to breathe.

So while step 3 was all about using your conscious mind (a.k.a. narrow focus; “deep work”) to collect new data by taking notes, this step is about using your subconscious mind.

In practice, that means:

• Meditation

• Contemplating

• Long walks in nature

• Doing something fun

• Walking away from work

Your subconscious mind will start to chew on the new data in the background, and you will start getting random “genius flashes of ideas”.

Be prepared to write them down 24/7.

Some of my best ideas came when I was:

• Bathing

• Walking to the gym

• Making breakfast eggs

• On the brink of falling asleep

• Reading my own content (lol)

• Reading other people’s content (funny thing is, the ideas I got were almost always completely unrelated to the topic of the content, but still… genius)

But, synthesizing is a complex topic.

We will talk more about it in a future newsletter, so get hyped up for that ;)

5. Create A Battle Plan

Imagine you are a general that’s tasked with winning a war.

Really, you are that general. The war is your life.

You can see all the prior steps as collecting intel on the battlefield, and assembling your resources.

Now it’s time to create a strategy for how you will win the battle.

In this case (inception alert), this framework that you are looking at is your battle plan.

Keep one thing in mind:

Your goal with this is behavior change.

The whole objective is to get you to actually learn something — and I’m not talking about the dysfunctional definition of “learning” that your schooling has given you.

Growth and progress come through action and real-world experience, not thorugh memorization of facts.

Yes, of course you need the theory!

But you need to balance (as in, keep it in equilibrium) theory and practice in a healthy way.

We’ve already done the theory part up until this point.

So here’s what you’re gonna do:

Create a list of actions that you are going to take to get real-world results & experience.

Now, to recap, you’ve already:

• Set the serious intention to learn

• Collected high-quality research material

• Read with focus and taken detailed notes

• Contrasted perspectives and synthesized

So in this case, your battle plan might look something like applying this framework to some skill or topic that you want to learn.

Let’s say you want to learn how to write well.

So you go through steps 1-4 of this framework using your resources (like Dan Koe’s “2-Hour Writer”), and then you plan to write a newsletter.

Your battle plan might look something like:

• Outline the newsletter

• Collect research material

• Write each section

• Review & edit

• Schedule

See how there’s a dramatic difference between this and “writing frameworks” that you study and then never look at again?

Here’s a pro tip for ya:

If you want to take this towards maximum effectiveness in your own life, build a habit of writing out how your behavior will change:

• After studying a piece of content

• After big wins or big failures

• At the end of your week

• At the end of your day

6. Start Executing

This is where the rubber meets the road.

Many people fall into the trap of getting stuck at the prior stage, and they never transition into action because they “don’t feel ready”.

Listen. You will never feel ready.

Get over your fear (which, by the way, is an illusion) and execute.

As I’ve said already, learning = behavior change.

Now, keep in mind that this is just one perspective on learning.

But for the sake of this framework, we want to get you real-world results.

Please note:

You can study the theory all you want, but in the end — its worthless unless it actually has an impact on some area of your life, or on the life of others.

If you study recipes and never actually cook them, you’re wasting your time.

If you study weightlifting exercises and never go to the gym, you’re wasting your time.

If you study personal branding and never build a personal brand, you’re wasting your time.

If you study self-improvement and never actually grow as a person, you’re wasting your time.

I could go on and on and on… you get the message.

Don’t let your mind trick you into thinking that you are making progress, when you’re really just stuck in theorizing.

This is, you guessed it, mental masturbation.

Armchair philosophy.

Act on your fucking battle plan.

And in the process, reflect on whether you are actually being effective or not.

No, the work is not over when you start banging your club against the tree like a caveman.

That’s not how you fell a tree.

You have to notice:

“Ahh! I’m somehow not succeeding here. What can I do differently to actually get results?”

All it takes is a bit of common sense and self-awareness.

7. Revisit The Information

As I’ve talked about in the intro, this step is extremely powerful.

And yet, many people tend to skip it.

That’s a huge mistake.

We tend to forget everything after a while, and more importantly, we tend to zip over all the important nuances and details when we read it for the first few times.

I can’t tell you how many times I went back to some piece of content and asked myself:

“Yo, how did I miss this? It was right there in front of me the whole time!”

It’s actually so fascinating to me.

I read one of Julie’s newsletters, and the first time I was like: “Hmm. I think I get it.”

Turns out, I actually didn’t.

I then re-read it like 10 times, and only after the 5th or 6th time did I actually start to grasp what she was saying.

Then it was like: “Ohhhhhhhh. Now I know what she is talking about.”

It felt like I was finally able to see the article from her point of view, and not from my point of view on the topic.

And then, that’s just the theory aspect!

When you take the theory and put it into practice, you gain experience with it. You see how it applies in real-world scenarios, and you take your understanding of those ideas to a whole new level.

When you come back to the information, you see it with entirely fresh eyes.

It’s actually crazy how much our prior experience and exisiting knowledge colour how we perceive new information, or even “old” information (which has so many layers to it that you could say it’s new information).

So please… don’t make the horrible mistake of never going back to it.

Especially if you really resonated with it, and if you thought there was a lot to learn there.

With content like that, you could literally (I’m not saying this lightly, I mean literally) keep coming back to it every month for the rest of your life — and you would learn something new every single time.

Because (surprise, surprise): Everything in life is infinitely interconnected!

So here’s the action I want you to take:

As you are putting this framework to use and learning how to learn, keep revisiting and re-reading this newsletter.

Make sure to put it on a schedule and remind yourself of it.

Otherwise you will forget and fall back into your old form of “learning”.

8. Teach It To Others

Why do you think I’m writing these newsletters?

To help you? Yes, of course — and I love seeing the impact of that.

But for the most part, it’s to advance myself.

I’m doing this to learn, to clarify these concepts for myself, and to make real-world progress towards my goals.

I can’t help the world if I don’t help myself first.

So here’s the deal:

Teaching this stuff to others forces you to get clear on your thinking process.

It exposes all of your shortcomings and weaknesses that need to be resolved so you can effectively help others get results.

And if you manage to do that, you will learn more than any of your students combined.

Create a long-form piece of content where you teach your readers (and more importantly, yourself) how to learn.

Or, whatever you want to teach them.

I recommend you write a newsletter, blog post, ot article about it.

Why writing and not something else?

Because it’s the best way of clarifying concepts and ideas to yourself and your readers.

Plus, you can use that writing to create whatever other content you’d like.

9. Repeat The Process

The process does not end with just 1, 2, 3, or even 10 repetitions.

You can look at the same topic, the same goal, the same problem, and continuosly repeat the whole framework from point 2 on.

Every single time you do this, you will gain an even deeper, even richer understanding of what’s going on below the surface.

You will make new insights that you didn’t even know were there in front of your eyes all the time.

Stuff that will make you question what else you are missing in life.

This process is literally infinite and can be stretched to whatever breadth, depth, scope and size you want.

If you think you know everything there is to know already about whichever subject you’re studying, you’re so wrong.

You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

And on top of that, everything in life is interconnected.

Fitness, writing, spirituality, nutrition, supplementation, productivity systems, you name it.

That means you could literally study anything in life, and there would be new connections to make and new lessons to be learned about your original topic every single time.

Let’s tie all of this up now.

Here’s a recap of the entire process in order:

1. Set an intention

2. Gather research material

3. Take notes & dissect

4. Synthesize

5. Create a battle plan

6. Start executing

7. Revisit the information

8. Teach it to others

9. Repeat the process

Now, I know what you’re asking.

“Tym, can we get a real world example for that so I can get a sense of how this looks in practice?”

And of course, I’m glad to answer that question for you.

So here’s an example:

Say I wanted to build a personal brand.

Okay, great, that’s my intention.

Now I need to gather research material.

That’s convenient, because I’ve already looked into some of that!

For me, that includes stuff like:

• Stephen Houraghan’s YouTube channel

• Julie’s newsletters & other content

• Leo’s “Ultimate Life Purpose Course”

• Various books on personal branding

• And some other stuff…

Okay, great!

Now I dissect and take notes (while always having the intention in mind).

I synthesize those diverse perspetives, and I try to integrate them all to create a cohesive picture of what personal branding is all about.

Next, I create an action plan.

So I would plan to:

• Take Leo’s Life Purpose Course

• Get a few books on personal branding

• Perhaps a good course if I find one?

• Create a personal branding strategy

• Learn graphics design & design my brand identity

• And and and…

And then, actually do the stuff.

While I’m doing that and encountering problems and roadblocks, I might want to revisit some of my research material.

And finally, after all that is done, I can teach my readers (in other words, you) how to build a real personal brand. That will cement my knowledge to the maximum.

And then, once I feel the need to rebrand or go deeper, I can repeat the process.

Hope that cleared things up for you.

Where to go from here?

Again, I highly recommend you put this framework into use.

My recommendation?

Use it to learn how to learn, it will literally serve you in everything else that you do for the rest of your life.

Or, go and use it on whatever skill or topic that you want to learn.

Now, I know that you’re most likely not going to this right now.

After all, you’re just here to read a newsletter, right?

You didn’t plan to start a whole project.

Well, that’s fine.

But the worst thing you can do is to read this, lay it aside, and go back to sleep.

So here’s what you’re gonna do:

You’re gonna set the intention to use this framework, and you’re gonna schedule time where you commit to working through this article in detail.

You probably work a job or go to school.

So plan to do this on the weekend (or whichever day you get off).

And when I say plan, I really mean schedule time where you’re gonna do this!

You’re gonna work through the framework step by step, and you’re either going to use it to learn how to learn, or for some other learning intention.

And then… I have a challenge for you:

Use my framework, learn something (e.g. how to learn), create a long form piece of content (like an article), and send it to me.

What’s in it for you?

If it’s good (meaning I see that you actually were serious about learning), I will give you a shoutout on either my Twitter (1800+ followers), or at the start of my newsletter (192 subscribers).

We need your unique perspective on learning!

Alright, that’s it for this week.

— Tym “The Masterful Learner” Hartwich