The most important thing is being honest with yourself about what you're actually interested in. No fancy techniques are going to help you go fast if you're for

The most important thing is being honest with yourself about what you're actually interested in. No fancy techniques are going to help you go fast if you're forcing yourself every step of the way. Obviously in school you have limited control over this, and heck, probably most of the time in work too. But I see lots of people trying to pick up skills they think they _should_ but which they're not really excited about. Passion and curiosity give you a leg up for free. But assuming that's the case: 1. Follow the history of a thing, from its simplest early incarnations, through warring schools of thought, up to cutting edge ideas. Understand the forces (and people!) guiding a thing and you'll have a good way to contextualise everything you learn. 2. Have a project and dive into it straight away. Don't just learn to play an existing song on the piano, write a new song. Don't write another todo app, write a brand new app. Don't learn to ask for a cup of coffee in French, learn to argue about anime etc etc. This exposes you to more tensions, pitfalls, opportunities for failure, and therefore more chances to learn. 3. Skim texts a bit, then play around a bit, and stay in this loop until you feel you have a very high level map of the territory. You're trying to understand firstly what exists at all in the subject you're interested in, but also learning how to relate specific things to specific places/themes/topics. This phase is very much learning how to google in your specific domain, and you're welcome to use fancy note-taking tools and techniques here if they suit you. 4. Pick the most interesting or most challenging part of your project, and go deep on that area. Find examples of experts solving that problem, understand where they're coming from, why their solutions might be different. Pick whichever camp you feel intuitively at home in (maybe you want to be a gung-ho attacking chess player, maybe a slow, positional one), lean towards that solution. Let passion guide you even if you eventually decide you took the wrong turn - don't try and learn OOP and FP at the same time, try out being an insufferable bore about each in turn. 5. Once you've had a few failures and disappointments and proven you aren't going to give up, establish long term feedback loops and use them honestly. What are you trying to paint that looks worst? What words do you keep forgetting? What neural network architecture do you always copy and paste without understanding? Keep practising new things and learning all the ways you still suck. I personally wouldn't over optimise for this early on though, I would wait until you have a lot of momentum built up. 6. Don't let self improvement take over your life. Stop and smell the roses.