Two updates:
- The Writer’s Bootcamp starts in 3 days. Almost the last chance to enroll here.
- Kortex AI V1 is now live. Learn about all the features here (I will give you fun prompts to try in this newsletter)
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Most people don’t know how to learn.
They fry their brain with tutorials and podcasts and textbooks but 6 months later they have absolutely nothing to show for it.
Why are you even learning in the first place if not to do something with it?
Learning, for most people, has become a form of mental masturbation. It’s the same cheap dopamine you get from scrolling on your phone, but even worse, it makes you feel as if you are learning something (News Flash: you’ll forget about it by tomorrow).
Here’s the harsh truth:
You’re learning slow.
And if you can learn 10x faster, you can achieve success that much faster. You can complete the portfolio project. You can start the business. You can articulate your thoughts on that topic with clarity.
Even further, you can probably learn something in 2 weeks that takes everyone else 6 months.
To do that, you need to learn how to learn with:
- The Protege Effect & Feynman Technique
- How to optimize for pattern recognition
- How to use AI to speed up the process
- Project based learning so you actually do something
This is going to be a very practical letter.
Please be ready to have your notes open on the side.
By the end of this, you will have a clear path to learning anything, fast.
The Meta Skill – Learning How To Learn
The mark of a free person is that they learn how to learn.
Because if you don’t choose what to learn, you will be told what to learn, and if your mind is the operating system for reality, the options available for your future will be drastically limited, and you won’t even realize it.
More importantly, the most important thing you can do when the world is changing rapidly is learn. And boy is it changing. Learning is the single most important skill because it’s how you acquire the skills that allow you to take advantage of opportunities that didn’t exist 10 years, 1 year, or even 1 month ago.
But most people learn wrong.
And schools rarely change their curriculum.
Here’s how you take your future into your own hands.
1) Create A Map Of Your Ideal Life
I’ve watched countless hours of videos of people teaching how to learn or study faster.
The single most important thing they’re missing is why they are learning in the first place.
People choose something to learn, but it doesn’t connect to any of their current skills, and it doesn’t connect to the life they want to live.
This is dangerous.
You won’t want to learn if there is no deeper meaning or clarity behind it.
You will need more discipline. And you’ll probably continue to hate learning like you did in school. Or you will feel like your learning is for the sole purpose of getting a job or career that you didn’t care about in the first place.
So that’s step one.
To create an aim for your learning.
That way, you can feel the progress you are making toward your self-generated goals, not the goals society assigned to you. That is a major key of life enjoyment (I’ll spare you the psychology around it for now).
Since I’ve talked about this many times before, and you can fill out this Simple Life Reset for free (try duplicating the document and asking kAI to identify blind spots as you fill it out), let’s keep this part brief.
- Write out what you don’t want in life
- Write out what you want in life
Write 10+ bullet points for each and bounce between them both.
These bullet points are your learning filter.
Without these written down, you will get distracted, and you won’t have a frame of reference that helps optimize for pattern recognition. In other words, your mind won’t notice the things that help you achieve your goals.
Then, try starting a chat with this prompt I found on X. It’s gold:
With that context, you can have kAI give you brutally honest advice about what you do and don’t want out of life. You can come back to that chat when you need life advice, like a running journal.
2) Outline A Project
Read this carefully:
The best way to learn is to build a real world project and only search for information when you need it. How much you learn is directly correlated with how much progress you make on the project.
When you watch endless tutorials, you fill your mind with noise and chaos. Most of that information goes to waste. It leads to overwhelm, anxiety, and slows down how fast you learn.
When it comes time to build the project (the only reason you’re learning in the first place) you feel as if you learned nothing, and have to search for the information anyway. So, if you want to learn faster, skip the tutorial phase. Outline the project first.
Now, this confuses some people.
A “project” can be anything.
Your health can be a project. Your business can be a project. An image in Photoshop can be a project.
A project is simply a structured way of achieving a goal, or making progress toward a goal.
It’s a way to further narrow your frame of reference so your mind biases the right information as you learn.
Again, this continues to optimize pattern recognition.
As you read books, study tutorials, or have conversations, good dopamine will spurt into your brain to signal that information is important for the completion of the project. Your subconscious will munch on problems and send relevant ideas to your conscious mind.
This is what creatives call “shower thoughts,” when the Default Mode Network is active in your brain while at “rest.”
Darwin worked on his projects in focused blocks, then went on long walks. On these walks, his brain was at rest, and potential solutions to problems pop into his head.
When I write newsletters as a small project within a bigger project of my business, I outline the newsletter at the start of the week. This creates my frame of reference. As I’m on walks and having conversations, I feel that sense of excitement when the right idea comes to mind.
This is when I pull out my phone, open Kortex Chats, connect to my newsletter for that week, and save my ideas there so I have it ready the next time I sit down to write during my work blocks.
Here’s how you start a project:
- Choose something to build that moves the needle toward what you want in life (from earlier)
- Create a note or document and brain dump everything that comes to mind
- Save 3-5 sources of inspiration that you want to emulate (if I’m creating a YouTube video as a project, I would save 3-5 YouTube videos I would want to create similar iterations of)
- Study those sources and break down their structure or characteristics
- Outline the project into sections, milestones, images, inspiration, and what you need to know
- Have a place to capture ideas that comes to mind, preferably somewhere you don’t lose the ideas or forget about them
Now that you’re ready to start, don’t start learning.
3) Start With What You Know
Learning comes from struggle, not memorization.
Start the project. No, don’t watch 20 tutorials beforehand. Let it expose the gaps in your knowledge. Try to figure it out. Search for the answer when your mind is most likely to remember it.
Whether you’re learning Photoshop or learning to program, start with what you know.
If you know nothing, at least try to take the first step. Download the software and start playing around. Try to create something. Anything. Just get your mind in a state where it’s hungry to learn. Otherwise, you probably won’t digest the information you search for.
Then, follow this process:
- You don’t know what to do
- You try and fail
- Search for the answer or ask AI
- Try to implement the answer
- Repeat until the project is complete
- If you can’t find the answer, ask an expert
A few years ago, Google searching was a skill.
Now that AI can provide more relevant information fast, prompting is a skill.
Think of AI not as a machine who does work for you, but a creative sparring partner. Sometimes one sentence prompts can do the trick, but the output of AI is only as good as you are when it comes to creative work.
If I’m building a Photoshop project and don’t know how to remove a background, I can simply ask, “How do I remove the background of a photo in Photoshop” to kAI and it will give me exact steps to do.
Then, I can ask it even more questions, like what Selections and Masks are, and learn on the spot. On the Kortex desktop app, you can press Alt or Option+C to open up floating chats and ask AI without going to another website or leaving your place.
3.5) How To Start When You Don’t Feel Like Starting
The Zeigarnik Effect is a psychological phenomenon where people remember unfinished tasks more than completed tasks.
Meaning, if we don’t complete tasks for our project, it’s much easier to find the motivation to get started.
But how do you get started from scratch?
There’s a trick I learned from Justin Sung that he calls the Zeigarnik² Effect. In other words, doing easy tasks before you start to simulate the feeling of having unfinished tasks.
This could be a work ritual like making coffee, cleaning your desk, or going on a morning walk and jotting notes on your phone.
How I like to think of this is breaking down the task you need to start into the simplest possible action you can take.
For something like writing, that’s sitting at your desk, opening up your outline, and simply reading it over. That requires very little motivation.
Now, if you want to take this effect even further, just open up an AI tool and use this prompt:
I told Joey to pop that into kAI and he changed it a bit and… yeah…
Try it out.
4) Create A Study Regimen
Now that you have a frame of reference, project outline, and have started making progress—you can start supplementing with general learning and tutorials.
Create a new chat and try this prompt:
For [topic], you can enter anything from Photoshop to storytelling to content creation.
The best way to structure your learning, in my opinion, is in 3 types of timeblocks:
- 30-90 Minutes Of Building – build your project and search for information when you need it.
- 30-60 Minutes of Learning – follow your study regimen and take notes on what you learn. You can review these notes by asking your notes to be summarized in kAI.
- 30 Minutes of Walking – for YouTube videos, audiobooks, or lectures go on a walk and jot down ideas on your phone as they come to mind.
Those are your keystone habits.
Nobody is going to give you the time to learn and build.
You have to take the time. Put them on your calendar. Wake up an hour earlier or stay up an hour later. Turn it into a ritual.
Grab your coffee, pull up your outline, put on some focus music, and start paving the way toward the future you want to create.
Write To Systematically Reflect On What You Learn
Here’s the puzzle:
- You know what you want for your future
- You have a project (or series of projects) that will take you there
- You are learning and building daily
But there’s one missing piece.
And it turns out, it’s also a way to further enhance how much you learn.
The missing piece is people who care about what you’re building.
I’m assuming you want to do this full time.
You’re learning and building because you want that to turn into some kind of sustainable life. You want to replace your job or career with a calling. An obsession.
To do that you need money. At least enough to sustain your ideal life.
To make money, you need people to care about what you’re building.
To make people care about what you’re building, you need to show what you’re doing in public.
In most cases, the best way to do that is writing.
Teaching what you know and what you’re learning as you build.
Why writing?
Well first, it’s the foundation of media. Two, it’s accessible and anyone can start writing right now, no video editing skills required. Three, it holds much more power than just building an audience of supporters.
Writing is how you systematically reflect on what you learn.
When you teach what you learn, you expose more knowledge gaps. You struggle more to understand. You have more specific knowledge to research.
This is where the Feynman Technique and Protege Effect come into play.
The Feynman Technique is a learning method popularized by physicist Richard Feynman. In short, it’s about deeply understanding a concept by explaining it in simple terms as if you were teaching it to someone with no prior knowledge:
- Choose a concept – Select the topic you want to understand.
- Teach it – Explain the concept in simple language, as if you were teaching it to a child.
- Identify gaps – When you struggle to explain something clearly, identify the areas where your understanding is weak.
- Review and simplify – Go back to the source material, relearn the concepts, and then try explaining them again in even simpler terms.
This overlaps with the Protege Effect which is, in summary, that the teacher learns more than the student.
Teaching what you learn encourages you to make sense of your experience in your own way. It exposes even more gaps in your knowledge, increasing the effect of pattern recognition. Life becomes sustainably more enjoyable and serendipitous because you no longer need distractions for pleasure.
How do we merge both of these with how you are already learning?
By writing on the internet.
We talk about this in almost every newsletter, but I’m not talking about becoming a content creator.
I’m talking about treating social media as your public journal.
That way, you at least have a chance at attracting potential supporters, customers, employers, investors, team members, and anything else you would need to reach the life you want.
It’s less about building a following, and more about putting your work in front of other people. Like when you’re trying to meet new people, it’s never going to happen if you don’t get out of your house, and you’ll grow bitter and angry wondering why you’re all alone. It’s obvious why… because you haven’t given people a chance to know or care about you. Your chances of success are zero.
Here’s what I recommend for starting:
- Write a newsletter once a week to summarize what you’ve learned
- Remember, teach it to them. Don’t make it a boring dump of information.
- Write posts on X, Threads, or LinkedIn (writing platforms, easy to access)
- Talk about your opinions, beliefs, personal experiences, and what you are learning and building
- Tack on “social media” as a skill you need to learn the same way as taught in this letter
- Add one more 30-60 minute time block for writing every morning
- Ask kAI to help you as you write, i.e. “You are an expert at crafting engaging social posts. Whats the best way to start a post on [topic]?” and continue from there.
Personally, writing changed my life.
I was once a freelance web designer who failed at every business he tried prior to that.
I started on social media because I was tired of doing cold outreach to land clients.
As I kept going, I realized how powerful writing could be to get in front of the right people (so I didn’t have to get rejected so much, people came to me).
But it wasn’t just about the freelance work.
It was about how much I was learning.
Every time I hit post, I felt as if I had learned something new.
I could see a path to becoming the “intelligent” person that I had always admired as a kid.
The more I wrote, the more good things happened internally and externally.
I hope that you too can experience that.
Now, you don’t need to enroll in the Writer’s Bootcamp, but it is an option to include in your “study regimen” from above.
The start date is March 4th. 3 days from now. So if you want to learn the ins and outs of newsletters, threads, posts, YouTube video scripts, and building an AI powered second brain of ideas in Kortex, consider enrolling here.
Thank you for reading.
– Dan
