Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0481: Breaking a learning project into small goals

Episode Date: January 11, 2016

Caleb is working on his drawing skills, but he feels frustrated with the speed of his progress. How can he break this project down into manageable goals so that his progress remains tangible and encouraging? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army […]

Master of Memory 481. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Caleb says, I'm trying to learn how to draw better. I'm drawing one to two hours a day, but I'm frustrated with the speed of my progress. I often struggle with what to draw. The subject matter I need to learn is quite broad, as well as how much time to spend on certain techniques. I'm most interested in pen and ink, but my foundational skills,

drawing with a pencil, still need a lot of work. What percentage of my time should be spent on inking a drawing, finish a drawing versus pure pencil work . How do I keep from becoming overwhelmed when faced with a huge learning challenge? How can I break it down into manageable chunks so that I might be able to see some sort of a finish line in sight to keep me motivated? Thanks for all you do. So Caleb, this is a great question and this is one that I'm very happy to address because I find it very useful when I'm in any learning project to find a way to break it into small goals so that the finish lines are in sight, as you say.

In the case of drawing in particular, which is something that I'm pretty interested in, I would suggest that you actually make those small goals based on less stuff than more stuff. So you're describing how you have lots of different types of subject matter you need to learn, but the techniques are frustrating you because there's no end line in sight. So in order to simplify this, I might actually just in the first place, make your first goal just focused on sketching proportions. So it may be frustrating to have to throw everything else to the side, but if you can focus for, let's say, a week or a month, whatever it is, on just drawing proportions, and you can really perfect your skill in doing that,

then you can get back to the ink later and in all the finishing techniques and really focus on that at a different point. I know, again, that does seem frustrating because you're kind of throwing away your favorite aspect of the project, but it is worth it because in the first place, it's exciting that you can see an end in sight and exactly what you're working on. And in the second place, you won't have to focus on that part

that you don't like so much when you're back to working on the inking and when we get to that. Now, as far as how to do that, maybe this isn't conventional, what I'm going to describe here, but a goal that I would actually set is to sketch the same picture many times until that one picture becomes second nature. So this is actually a principle that we apply in language learning as well. If you master one, let's say, you know, 200 word dialogue and deeply understand it and understand what you're saying and can use those sentences yourself, you've really learned the language if it's a good dialogue, if it's, you know, fulfills certain

requirements, but we won't get into that. So what we're going to try to do is maybe you can choose, I don't know, as an example, a photo of an armchair in your parents' house. And you're just, every time you're going to sit down and practice, don't just do something spontaneous that you've never done before, but sit down and sketch that same armchair and do that several times, maybe alternating between sketching it from sight, looking at the photograph, and from memory, just remembering the proportions and so on. And see how quickly you can perfect your proportions in this sketch until you can always infallibly sketch that armchair exactly the way it looks in terms of proportion in that photo and anyone would be impressed by how well you did that. Again, it does seem weird and unconventional

that we're focused on just one picture, but it allows you to go deep into refining certain aspects of your abilities in drawing proportions. Next, you'll eventually move on to another image, maybe a very different image like somebody's face or a landscape or something like that, but do the same thing. Sketch it many times, perfecting your proportions and practicing both sketching it from sight and sketching it from memory, alternating between those. Test yourself much later by trying to sight sketch a photograph that you've never seen before. So once you've really perfected these things you've seen a million times and are completely sick of, then sit down, take a photograph you've never seen before, and just test yourself and see how you've improved and how well you can sight sketch that. Now I want to emphasize that you should not overdo this. Just like actually conversation practice is overrated when learning a language, the best learning does not happen in conversation practice. It happens in preparing for that conversation practice.

And then when you get to that conversation, it's a good gauge of where you are. So try that. Sit down and sight sketch something. You're really, make sure you know that you're not learning anything and you're not really practicing anything in the most meaningful sense of it, but you are testing yourself to see how good you are at the moment at sight sketching something. So sit down and do that. Now once you've done that, you can next move on to doing the same thing, like drawing a picture over and over, but doing that with finish work instead of with proportion work. So get out your ink and practice finishing the same image over and over. Maybe it's a picture of your best friend's face and you just keep finishing it, maybe with different styles and in different ways, but the same picture over and over so that you can practice your techniques

without having to, you know, you've eliminated certain aspects of what you're doing. You're not trying to do new things. It's actually, you've simplified the project significantly by drawing the same picture over and over. And it might be an exercise from a drawing textbook or maybe from some photo. I don't know. Whatever works best for you. But this is really what I would suggest. And this is exactly what I would do if I was working on drawing again, which is something I really want to get back into. So yeah, this question was really fun to address. I hope that you find it useful, Caleb. And for everyone listening, to check out some of the rationale behind some of these techniques and these accelerated learning principles that I bring up, go to masterofmemory.com

slash start for a free complete starter guide on mnemonics and accelerated learning. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question like Caleb did, and I'll talk to you again soon.