How long is a piece of string?

The usual answer to this question is: twice as long as half its length. And I guess asking a similar question "How long does it take to learn something?" could be equally uninformative.

But is it?

If you think about it, there are some things you struggle to learn and others that you learn effectively instantaneously.

Consider the following examples:

• You go to see a movie and a friend asks you what it was about. Even if you have seen the movie only once, the chances are that you will be able to give a coherent summary of the movie and the main events in the plot, almost without giving it a second thought.
• A friend tells you that a man and a woman you both know are having an affair. No effort to remember this, right?
• You go to a restaurant and decide to try a dish you have never tasted before. It tastes terrible. You don't need to have the experience more than once to know not to order that dish again.
• You are in a department store and are trying to find out the price of something. You see another customer go and use a price scanner mounted on a nearby wall. So you go and do the same thing. No need for multiple exposures to the experience to know what to do in future.

There is a tendency to think that learning is hard, but as these examples show sometimes it is remarkably easy.

What do these examples have in common that makes them ready sources of learning?

They are vivid, personal, advantageous (either in terms of gaining or avoiding something), they are interesting and (generally) simple.

Of course some of these things are in the eye of the beholder. You aren't likely to remember anything about an affair between two people you barely know. Conversely, a mathematician shown a new way to solve a particular kind of equation may find it easy to remember because of the huge amount of background knowledge that they bring to the party.

So when you are trying to learn something, see if you can find something in it that fits the pattern of "things that are easy to remember". And keep track of the things that you find easy or difficult to remember so that you can experiment with applying the properties of the things you find easy to learn to the things you find difficult to learn.

By acquiring and using this kind of self-knowledge, you can make your learning journey a lot easier and a lot more productive.