How to Learn About Everything

How to Learn About Everything

Studying to learn about everything

To intellectually ambitious students I recommend investing a lot of time in a mode of study that may feel wrong. An implicit lesson of classroom education is that successful study leads to good test scores, but this pattern of study is radically different. It cultivates understanding of a kind that won’t help pass tests — the classroom kind, that is.

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
   
2. Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
   
3. Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
   
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
   
5. Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
   
6. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.
   

Why is this effective?
You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary. With comprehension of words and the unstructured curriculum of life came what we call “common sense”.

The aim of what I’ve described is to learn an expanded language and to develop what amounts to common sense, but about an uncommonly broad slice of the world. Immersion and gradual comprehension work, and I don’t know of any other way.