Combining Theory And Application

Now we will see how you can combine theory with application.

Returning to our Renaissance art example, I arrived at three distinct subdivisions within Renaissance art.

This might not coincide with the list of subtopics an expert in the subject might come up with, but my own research influenced me to narrow Renaissance art down into artists and movements in specific countries, and seeing how they converge later in time.

To re-emphasize, you must follow your own method of breaking down subjects into small parts.

You’re organizing the information for your own specific goals, not based on how others have done it.

Perfection is entirely unnecessary.

As you gain more expertise, you’ll learn how to better classify information through the techniques others have used for the same end.

The primary reason behind keeping the scope limited is to avoid being overwhelmed.

Our task in this step is to simply define the essentials we need to learn to grasp our chosen topic.

Initially, we started out with a broad subtopic, Renaissance art, and now we’ve determined which specific type of art we want to learn—Italian Renaissance art.

Step 3: Define Success

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One crucial lesson life has taught me is that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not likely to end up anywhere.

If you want to be successful, you have to define what success is before being able to achieve it.

This is why in step 3, we need to learn how to define success.

For this step, we need to design an objective, measurable criteria for success so that we can know whether we’ve fulfilled it to a mathematical certainty.

We’ll use this criteria to ascertain whether we have met our goal of mastering the topic we wanted to learn about.

Defining and Measuring Success

The best way to effectively complete this step is to consider why you intend to learn your chosen subject at all.

Is there a particular task or function that you’d like to be able to perform through learning your chosen subject? For example, let’s assume you want to learn about digital photography.

In that case, your goal might be something akin to “I’m going to learn how to take a professional portrait and use the settings on the camera in its manual modes while also utilizing lighting appropriately.” The goal of learning digital photography and the criteria of using manual modes along with manipulating lighting are both sound.

To master digital photography completely, you would have to learn about all of its various subtopics, and depending on your motivation for studying digital photography, it might be very gratifying to achieve that outcome through your learning experience.

The essential point to remember here is to have a rigidly defined goal whose fulfillment can be measured by the requisite criteria you determine.

Ideally, your goal should be to learn something that is practically beneficial since using your new skill will reinforce your entire learning process, making it easier for you to retain the knowledge you’ve accrued.

An Example

As before, we’ll now look at a specific example of how to define success.

In my case, I endeavored to learn about Renaissance art.

Then, I narrowed down its scope and arrived at a specific subtopic— Italian Renaissance art.

Next, I will determine what it means to have learned Italian Renaissance art, or the criteria of success.

For that purpose, I’ll use a one line fill-in-the-blank that acts as a template: I will have learned ___ when ___.

In this case, I’ve decided that I will have sufficiently learned about Italian Renaissance art when I can walk through Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy, and pass as a tour guide.

Alternatively, when I can take an online class in Italian Renaissance art, skip all the classes, and still get an “A” on the final exam.

Or as another option, when I can read the top five Wikipedia articles on Italian Renaissance art and not learn a single new thing.

Now that I have some basic impressions of what my end goal and the path toward it appear to be, I can work backwards from that path to reach my goal.

The purpose of step 3 is to define what these steps are, and in turn use them to determine what precisely we want to learn.

Step 4: Compiling Resources

Allow me to describe the wrong way that most people attempt to learn a topic.

I’ve been guilty of using it myself.

This is to visit your nearest bookstore or search on Amazon to find one book on your chosen topic and read that book cover to cover.

The reason why this is a less-than-ideal method is because one book inevitably fails to encapsulate the various perspectives on a given subject.

To take an example from school, have you ever written a book report that only cited one source in its bibliography? Did that fare well with your instructor? It likely resulted in an F because a single source often espouses only one viewpoint.

Yet, we still trust singular sources to learn about topics relevant to our professional lives.

To help you avoid this mistake, step 4 discusses locating resources.

Compiling Resources the Right Way

For this step, what we need to do is compile every resource we can find on our topic without filtering them.

Given the plurality and different mediums used for sharing information, it is advisable to give your method of compilation some lengthy consideration to help you think out of the box.

As one might imagine, books are likely to be the most efficient resources of them all.

Try finding some appropriate books through Amazon, but consider other mediums like blogs, courses, etc.

There are other ways to gather resources too.

Perhaps you have a friend or acquaintance who is familiar with your chosen topic.

You could solicit an expert’s advice regarding the area of your interest.

You can listen to podcasts.

You can rummage through magazine articles.

These are but a few ideas that you can utilize to locate resources.

The goal of this step is restricted to simply finding resources.

Some minimal filtering is in order here, since you don’t want to gather resources that ultimately prove to be ineffectual.

However, the priority is to maximize the number of good resources at your disposal.

To elucidate my point, I’m going to begin my search for resources on Italian Renaissance art.

My starting point will be Amazon, because books generally offer the appropriate information needed to learn a subject.

We’ll analyze our results once we perform a routine search on Italian Renaissance art.

In my experiment, I initially did discover a few books, but none seemed to be pertinent to creating Italian Renaissance art except for one that was out of print and ludicrously priced.

After Amazon, Google is our next database for finding resources on Italian Renaissance art.

Searching for the term yields a massive list of resources with several tutorials on the subject.

After assessing the available options, I’ll create a folder for bookmarks on Italian Renaissance art and fill it with the links I consider relevant.

I’m not arriving at my choices after reading or engaging with any of this content.

They are based solely on what appears to be a helpful resource without any conscious filtration.

In other words, I am simply looking for as many quality resources as I can find.

Following my search on Google, I’ll peruse Facebook and Twitter to locate some individual historians or organizations that could be helpful at some point.

I might seek them out to ask for their advice on how to approach learning a topic, or to use them as a resource if I struggle during my attempts to study the subject.

Step 5: Create a Curriculum

Over the last four steps, you selected a broad topic, narrowed it down to a reasonable scope, and defined the criteria that needs to be met for you to have mastered your chosen topic.

You’ve even compiled some resources to help you in that endeavor.

Step 5 will teach you how to create a learning plan for your subject.

This is similar to creating an outline on what you want to learn.

To complete this step, you need to take the subtopic(s) you’ve chosen and break them down into even smaller parts.

The Role of Modules in a Learning Plan

For the sake of convenience and clarity of reference, we’ll call these subsections “modules.” Each module is either a particular subtopic within the narrow scope that you defined, or it could be framed in the form of a step.

In your plan, you need to determine the different subtopics you need to cover within, to continue with our example, Italian Renaissance art, as well as the sequence in which you need to learn them.

A great way to orient yourself for this step is to analyze the “Table of Contents” in the books, videos, or blogs that you chose earlier.

This will teach you how others have segmented the topic you’ve chosen.

You can borrow their structure and even see how everything begins to converge and overlap.

As an exercise, observe if ten different authors have broken down your topic in the same way.

If they have, you should follow the same structure in your learning plan.

By the end of this step, you should have compiled a range of modules that then need to be appropriately sorted.

These modules must be based on the essentials you need to learn about to get a grasp on your chosen topic.

Based on the ten different authors, you can also get a sense of which perspectives on your topic are less frequently included.

These are likely less popular, and thus you can perhaps pay less attention to them.

Step 6: Filter, Filter, Filter

There are usually a multiplicity of resources available on any given topic, but we simply don’t have the time to peruse them all.

Attempts to read every book, blog post, or article on a single topic are bound to result in failure.

This brings us to step 6, which is learning how to filter our resources.

In this step, our primary goal is to prune our collection of resources to preserve only the best and avoid being overwhelmed by all the materials we’ve collected.

Because we didn't filter our resources at all in step 4, there’s no chance that a good source slipped by us, thus maximizing our potential to accrue the best learning guides.

Knowing what we want to learn, along with the learning plan we created, will be crucial to how we filter our resources.

Doing so will also help you financially, since you won’t need to purchase ten different books from Amazon to learn about a single topic.

Instead, it’s more beneficial to choose one or two of the best books.

You can make your choices either based on whether particular books correspond to the modules you designed in your learning plan, or even just by looking for specific chapters in these books that fulfill that function.

The most important part of this step is to carefully and efficiently scan through your resources to select the best ones among them.

Ideally, the less resources you have, the better.