10 Steps to Learn Anything Quickly

Mike is a learning machine. He zips through podcasts at 2X speed on his commute, devours online courses at his desk with lunch, and juggles 2-3 technical books between the Kindle app on his iPhone and the dead trees by his bed. He does all this because he’s seen how fast things change in software development. Since he cut his teeth as a programmer at 9 years old (Turbo C for MS-DOS), Mike’s seen entire languages and platforms come and go: VisualBasic, ActiveX, ColdFusion.

He converted from VB6 to .NET, then learned PHP and the LAMP stack. He invested heavily in Dojo (before jQuery killed it dead). He flirted with Silverlight and Flash until plugins became evil and HTML5 rode in to save the day.

Today he's wrestling with massive frontend frameworks like AngularJS and Ember, weighing which JavaScript AMD loader to use and wondering whether Grunt or Gulp will eventually “win.”

Most nights you’ll find him plugging away on one of a half dozen side projects. Code at work, code at night, lifehack all the time.

Mike loves learning and he loves his job. But even with all the extra hours he's putting in, he can't escape the sense that he's... 

Slipping A Little Further Behind Every Day

Just about every day he hears about a new “it’ll change your life” tool. Or a coworker shoehorns yet another v 0.1 JavaScript library into the codebase…

His brain is already red-lining.

What happens when he gets that title bump—and suddenly the meetings wipe out his lunchtime learning session?

And will he be able to keep up his side projects when the new baby arrives?

I totally identify with Mike, because a few years ago, that was me.

My name is John Sonmez. I’ve been writing code for more than 25 years.

I’m also a software consultant to companies like Hewlett Packard and Verizon (who pay upwards of $500 per hour for access to me)…

A career coach to thousands of developers through my Simple Programmer website (which receives more than 1.8 million visits a year)…

John Sonmez has published more online developer training than any other programmer.

And the guy who’s produced more online training for software developers than anyone else alive.

I’m not saying any of this to brag—I just want you to take seriously what I’m about to say next:

Today’s Software Devs Are

Under More Pressure To “Stay Sharp”

Than Ever Before

A few years ago, web developers could pull down a decent salary armed with nothing but a text editor and a solid understanding of HTML, plus maybe a little CSS and JavaScript.

Those days are gone. Today’s employers want “full stack” developers—software storm troopers who can parachute in and:

• Spew out frontend MV* code in AngularJS, Ember AND Backbone
• Spin up scalable, performant server-side code in .NET
• Maintain data integrity while passing objects between not one but four different ORMs (including one homegrown hairball everyone’s afraid to touch)
• Memorize every quirk and twitch of 5 major browsers (and 4 versions of IE)
• And don’t forget about testing, build automation, mobile responsive layout, HTML5 video encodings plus a million more “critical path” topics…

And if you're looking for things to get easier, I have some bad news...

This Breakneck Pace Is Accelerating,

And There’s No End In Sight

Technology enables technology. The faster our hardware gets, and the more efficient our runtimes and processing engines get, the more demands there are on you, the developer.

New languages and platforms to build multi-threaded apps. New standards and specifications. New frameworks that promise to hide all the hideous complexity—but turn out to be yet another leaky abstraction.

Most developers I know are responding to this by hoarding information.

They’re driving themselves to the brink of burnout to cram every scrap of knowledge possible into their brains.

They’ve been fed a lie—that their knowledge of the latest and greatest languages, tools and platforms is what determines their value.

I used to believe this lie too. For years I dedicated every moment I could spare to consuming books and pounding through video courses.

But as I gained experience, I realized that this was a game I could never win.

Because 5 years from now 50% (or more) of what you “know” will be obsolete.

And I came to see that it wasn’t my knowledge of C# or SQL that was the key to advancing in my career.

The Most Important Skill

Any Software Developer Can Have Is…

Knowing How to LEARN

And I’m not talking about just squirreling away knowledge for “someday.”

Today’s successful developer is a master at diving deep into a new piece of tech, slicing it into bite-sized chunks and absorbing the critical 20% that lets him work productively while other developers are still scratching their heads and searching Stack Overflow.

I have this ability today—but I didn’t always.

A few years ago, learning any new technology felt like embarking on an endless trek to Mordor.

Here’s what I’d do:

• Hit up Amazon and buy every book that looked remotely related.
• Pick up the first book I bought and plow right through from page 1 through to page 876.
• Repeat for 5-10 more books.
• Track down video courses by well-known experts and buy them.
• Sit down and watch the course end to end.
• Repeat with every video course and YouTube series I could find.
• Scour the web for blog posts and add anything that seemed important to my reading list.
• Spend hours poring through the blog posts, looking for new scraps of information that I’d missed.

This whole process was REALLY time consuming. I’d spend weeks or even months to get my arms around a new programming language.

And every time I thought I had a good handle on the topic, I’d stumble across some new rabbit trail that I hadn’t explored yet.

The goal posts were always moving. The longer and harder I studied, the more the topic seemed to expand in all directions.

I never got that satisfaction of “done”—and eventually I’d just get overwhelmed and move on to something that seemed more interesting or urgent.

Worst of all…

When I Tried To Apply What I’d “Learned”

I Couldn’t Remember Half Of It!

As frustrating as all this was, I just assumed it was part of the process.

That is until I made a discovery that changed the way I learn forever.

Several years ago, I took a side job creating online training course.

At first I was in heaven—I was getting paid to teach what I knew about software development.

Pretty soon, though, I hit a little snag… I ran out of things to teach.

Google had just released Go, so I thought, “What the heck, I’ll do a course on that.”

After cruising through my courses on Java, Android, iOS and several other languages and platforms I knew well, this Go course felt like slamming into a brick wall.

Suddenly I realized how horribly inefficient and painful my way of learning really was. I was spending weeks and weeks to create a single course.

My old approach to learning wasn’t going to cut it. I had to adapt, and FAST.

So I Threw Out Everything

I “Knew” About Learning

I stopped trying to brute-force the information into my brain until my eyes bled and my brain begged for mercy.

I took charge of my own learning, rather than letting book authors and other “experts” push their preconceived ideas on me.

I found a way to get down to the bare essentials that would give me a productive, working knowledge of the topic in the shortest time possible.

That Go course took four long weeks to create.

But with the discoveries I made about learning efficiently, I was soon producing courses in three weeks… Then two weeks…

Until I was cranking out a new course every 8-9 days.

I’d cut my study time down to barely a third of what it was. And what really surprised me was this:

The Faster I Learned, The More I Retained

This really caught me off guard.

My motto in life is that nothing is free—there’s always a tradeoff. So I expected that the tradeoff for rapid learning is a shallower understanding and less ability to apply what you’ve learned.

Turns out, it’s the opposite.

As I improved my learning efficiency, my ability to retain and apply the information went through the roof.

That’s because I wasn’t cluttering my brain with trivial details. Instead I zeroed in on the key concepts—then applied the knowledge as I learned, locking it into my long-term memory.

Not only was I learning 3X faster, now I didn’t need to constantly circle back and relearn the basics over and over.

I realized that…

Most People Approach Learning

Like A Noob Writes SQL

What happens when you use 10 different queries to build up a dataset? It works, sure, but it is SLOOOOOOOW.

Any programmer with a rudimentary knowledge of SQL can throw in a handful of JOIN statements, and BOOM, that 60-second operation finishes in 3.

Learning is the same way.

There’s no advantage to spending 4 weeks to learn something you could master in 1.

All you’ve done is burn time and brain cycles.

I ran with this mind-bending insight and continued to refine my new way of learning while creating course after course.

Over the next 18 months, I tackled more than 30 topics, including Dart, Lua, HTML5 game development, MeteorJS and Redis.

I knew I was on to something when other developers kept commenting on how “sticky” my trainings were. Because I was embedding my learning approach into my courses, my students were retaining more too.

Without trying, I had stumbled on…