How to Retain 90% of Everything you Learn!!

This is an article from PsychoTactics the blog owner Travis @ http://www.enunc8.com has no other affiliation other than reading it.

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Article: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn
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Article: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn

http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/art-retain-learning

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Imagine if you had a bucket of water. And every time you attempted
to fill the bucket, 90% of the water would leak out instantly.
Every time, all you’d retain was a measly 10%. How many times would
you keep filling the bucket?

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The answer is simple: just once.
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The first time you noticed the leak, you’d take action
You’d either fix the bucket or you’d get another bucket, wouldn’t
you?

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Yet that’s not at all the way we learn.
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Almost all of us waste 90% of our time, resources and learning
time, because we don’t understand a simple concept called the
Learning Pyramid. The Learning Pyramid was developed way back in
the 1960s by the NTL Institute in Bethel, Maine. And if you look at
the pyramid you’ll see something really weird.

That weird thing is that you’re wasting time. You’re wasting
resources. You’re just doing everything you can to prevent
learning. And here’s why.

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To summarize the numbers (which sometimes get cited differently)
learners retain approximately:
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90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.
75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.
50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.
30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.
20% of what they learn from audio-visual.
10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.
5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture.

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So why do you retain 90% when you teach someone else or when you
implement it immediately?
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There’s a good reason why. When you implement or teach, you
instantly make mistakes. Try it for yourself. (In this article for
instance, after I’d read the information, I cited the loss rate as
95% instead of 90% to begin with. I had to go back and correct
myself. Then I found three more errors, which I had to fix. These
were factual errors that required copy and paste, but I still made
the errors).

So as soon as you run into difficulty and start to make mistakes,
you have to learn how to correct the mistake. This forces your
brain to concentrate.

But surely your brain is concentrating in a lecture or while reading
Sure it is, but it’s not making any mistakes. What your brain hears
or sees is simply an abstract concept. And no matter how clearly
the steps are outlined, there is no way you’re going to retain the
information. There are two reasons why.

Reason 1: Your brain gets stuck at the first obstacle.
Reason 2: Your brain needs to make the mistake first hand.

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Reason 1: Your brain gets stuck at the first obstacle.
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Yes it does. And the only way to understand this concept is to pick
up a book, watch a video, or listen to audio. Any book, any video,
any audio. And you’ll find you’ve missed out at least two or three
concepts in just the first few minutes. It’s hard to believe at
first, but as you keep reading the same chapter over and over,
you’ll find you’re finding more and more that you’ve missed. This
is because the brain gets stuck at the first new concept/obstacle.

It stops and tries to apply the concept but struggles to do so. But
you continue to read the book, watch the video or listen to the
speaker. The brain got stuck at the first point, but more points
keep coming. And of course, without complete information, you have
‘incomplete information’.

Incomplete information can easily be fixed by making the mistake
first hand.

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Reason 2: Your brain needs to make the mistake first hand
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No matter how good the explanation, you will not get it right the
first time. You must make the mistake. And this is because your
interpretation varies from the writer/speaker. You think you’ve
heard or read what you’ve heard/read. But the reality is different.

You’ve only interpreted what they’ve said, and more often than not,
the interpretation is not quite correct. You can only find out how
much off the mark you are by trying to implement or teach the
concept.

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So how do you avoid losing 90% of what you’ve learned?
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Well, do what I do. I learn something. I write it down in a
mindmap. I talk to my wife or clients about the concept. I write an
article about it. I do an audio. And so it goes. A simple concept
is never just learned. It needs to be discussed, talked, written,
felt etc. (I wrote this article, ten minutes after reading these
statistics online).

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The next time you pick up a book or watch a video, remember this.
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Listening or reading something is just listening or reading.
It’s not real learning.
Real learning comes from making mistakes.
And mistakes come from implementation.
And that’s how you retain 90% of everything you learn.

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Which is why most of the people you meet are always going around in
circles.
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They refuse to make mistakes. So they don’t learn.
They’d rather read a book instead. Or watch a video. Or listen to
an audio.

Their bucket is leaking 90% of the time.
But they don’t care.
The question is: Do you?

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I hope you find the article useful.
Travis Lepp works for Enunc8 – http://www.enunc8.com a company that provides reporting and analytics to Small to Medium Enterprises.

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