How to learn anything faster

First thing's first: You'll need to get specific about the skill you'd like to learn. "Writing" by itself is a little vague. Do you want to learn to write poems? Blog posts? Essays? Books? Same with "rowing" -- do you want to row on a team, or by yourself? Each of these are a little different, and would require you to take different steps.

Once you've got a specific skill in mind, follow these steps to learn it quickly.

1) Break the skill into parts, and practice the most important parts first.

Deconstructing a skill into smaller pieces doesn't just make it seem more manageable; it also lets you distinguish the most important things you'll need to learn.

"Most of the things we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills that require all sorts of different things," said Kaufman in his TED talk. "The more you can break apart the skill, the more you're able to decide, 'What are the parts of the skill that will actuallyhelp me get to what I want?'"

Then, you can practice those things first. The result? You'll be able to improve your performance in less time.

For example, let's say you want to learn how to play the guitar. You can break that skill down into components like reading music, proper posture, proper finger placement, learning scales, learning chords, finger picking, and so on.

So which are the most important? You might argue that learning common chords and the finger placement for those chords are two of the most important skills, since knowing only a few chords means you'll be able to play a ton of songs.

If you're not sure what the most important parts of your skill are, then reserve that piece for the next step.

2) Learn from an actual expert.

No matter what skill you want to accomplish, there's likely someone out there who's already good at it. The fastest way to get good at something yourself is to find a person who's already getting the results you want, figure out how they got to where they are, and model your own journey after theirs.

"It doesn’t matter what your age, gender or background is -- modeling gives you the capacity to fast track your dreams and achieve more in a much shorter period of time,"wrote Tony Robbins, a motivational speaker and self-help author, in his book Power Talk.

Here's where you might sign up for lessons, ask to go to coffee with a friend or coworker who's already good at the skill you're looking for, watch a film that follows an expert's journey, and so on. There are a ton of different possibilities for how to learn from someone who has already gotten where you want to be -- and thanks to the internet, you have a world of resources available to you.

If you don't know anyone personally who's an expert at the skill you want to learn, then you'll have to do some research. Use your network. Spend some time searching online and you'll likely start seeing names come up over and over again, who you can then study up on. You can also literally search for experts online using "expert search engines" like ExpertiseFinder.com.

3) Learn from multiple sources.

Studies show that the more different ways you experience a piece of information, the more likely you are to retain it. Why? Because different media activate different parts of our brains -- and when several different parts of our brains are working at once, we can retain knowledge better and remember things more quickly.

So don't just read books and articles related to your skill. Try listening to podcasts, watching videos, using apps to practice, and even jotting down notes as you learn.

But learning things in theory is only a part of building a new skill. Which brings me to my next point ...

4) Spend one-third of your time researching, and two-thirds of your time practicing.

You can only learn so much about how to do a skill from researching it. You can spend all the time you want reading about how to shoot a soccer ball, but when you get out there on the pitch, don't expect to have a perfect shot on your first try. You know what they say: Practice makes perfect.

But if you're starting from scratch, you've obviously got to do some research first, otherwise you won't know where to begin. So what's the right ratio between practice and research?

Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code and The Little Book of Talent, suggests using what he calls the "rule of two-thirds." It means you should spend only one-third of your time studying up on something, and the other two-thirds of your time actually doing it.

"Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them," Coyle told TIME Magazine. "This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it's much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. ... If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it's better to spend 30% of your time reading it, and the other 70% of your time testing yourself on that knowledge."

Kaufman suggests learning enough in theory to be able to recognize mistakes and self-correct. Once you reach that point, you can move on to focusing most of your time practicing.

5) Pre-commit to practicing for at least 20 hours.

Remember that it doesn't take 10,000 to get good at something; it takes 10,000 hours to become a tip-top performer in a highly competitive field. To get good at something, Kaufman says it takes about 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice. So once you get into the practicing phase, make a commitment to practice for at least 20 hours before even thinking about quitting.

Now, 20 hours is a lot less than 10,000 hours, but it's still a big time commitment to carve out our busy lives. It's the equivalent of about 40 minutes per day for a month.

That time commitment is the part where people have the most trouble -- but it's also the key to success. It's not necessarily fun to practice the same skill over and over again, day after day. People tend to hit what Kaufman calls "the frustration barrier," which is when we feel like we aren't improving quickly despite committing a lot of time and effort. This is where we lose confidence -- and it's where we tend to quit.

That frustration is a barrier to progress. But if you pre-commit to spending at least 20 hours practicing the skill, you'll have a much better shot at sticking it out through those moments of frustration.

6) Get immediate feedback on your performance.

Once you get into the practicing phase, make sure you're seeking feedback on your performance and correcting mistakes before they become ingrained. 

According to Gladwell in his book Outliers, what really separated the Beatles from other bands at the time wasn't just practicing; it was that they got in front of live audiences as much as they could in order to get immediate feedback on their performance.

Feedback can come from a mentor, a coach, a friend -- from many different sources, depending on the skill you're learning. But the point of it is for you to learn where you're making mistakes that you don't know you're making, and learn correct or alternative strategies. The quicker you're able to get feedback and correct your form and mistakes, the quicker you'll improve.

7) Give yourself deadlines.

If you've done some reading on productivity, you may have heard of Parkinson's Law. Itgoes like this:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Remember that paper in college you had all semester to write, and yet you ended up writing the whole thing the weekend before it was due? Yeah, that was Parkinson's Law.

The trick to turning Parkinson's Law in your favor is to set deadlines for yourself. When you give yourself less time to get something done, it'll make you do it more efficiently. In other words, you need to kick your own butt a little bit.