Discover An Effective Way to Learn Anything Faster Starting Today: Do, Fail, Learn from Your Failure and March Ahead in Success

 
Discover An Effective Way to Learn Anything Faster Starting Today: Do, Fail, Learn from Your Failure and March Ahead in Success

 

There are different ways to learn a skill or to learn to do a task effectively. One of the ways I am going to discuss in this blog is the DFLS way. I have found this way more effective than many other ways people use to learn. Why? The one reason that I find this type of learning more effective than others is that this kind of learning is active learning.

 

Active learning is a concept, it’s an approach to picking up a skill where the individual’s whole being is actively involved. Here you don’t just listen as you do in a classroom setting. You are actually doing it. You are getting your hands dirty. You may succeed or you may fail. In the process, if you pay attention, you will learn a valuable lesson.

 

Mind you, here I am talking about taking actions in small-small things like learning to swim or learning to write answers, learning to be better skilled at a task. In no way I am suggesting taking high risks that include large monetary investments or other risky propositions.

 

Accomplishing minor success develops confidence in the self and can lead you to achieve success at a big level because then it becomes a habit – for you achieving success becomes a practice.

THE DFLS WAY TO LEARN A SKILL QUICKLY & EFFECTIVELY

STEP 1: D

D for Do: ‘D’ stands for ‘do’ or ‘doing’. It’s getting into action. Let’s take a real-life scenario wherein you have to learn to swim. Will you join an institution that teaches you from textbooks how to swim? Or would you join a swimming club where from day one you are put into the swimming pool and then taught how to swim?

 

Of course, you will choose the latter and join a swimming club! I mean who joins a school or college to learn something like swimming or driving a car?

 

There’s a difference between studying and learning. While the study is done by listening to lectures, reading books; learning comes from doing things.

 

If we take the above example of swimming, and say, you have decided to learn swimming by joining a college where they are going to teach you swimming using a textbook. Even if you score cent percent marks in your exam, I am sure you will never learn to swim in the real swimming pool.

 

I am not totally negating reading. Reading is important, it may give you the theory. But if you don’t take action you may never know how well can you do what you know.

 

Let’s assume you are a student. You are preparing for your exams and have studied the syllabus. You think you know the answer but unless and until you sit and write the answer on a piece of paper you will never know if you can actually present your answer in a way that will fetch you top marks.

 

That’s the power of action or doing. When you get down to do something your mind, body, and soul gets involved in it.

 

In certain case scenarios even before starting you may feel that you are entering into the belly of a sleeping giant that will gobble you up. Like this feeling, you have just before the presentation you have to give. You dread walking to the front of your classroom and facing your classmates staring at you. But my dear friends, in uncertainty, lies the adventures of life.

 

Remember, your right action will set you free from your false fear.

 

STEP 2: F

F for Fail: ‘F’ here represents Failure. Most of us are afraid of failure. A few of us are so very frightened to face failure that we refrain from taking action. We just stop.

 

Let us look at failure from a different point of view. But first, let’s understand what success does to us. To start with, success doesn’t teach us much. In fact, it blinds us to the extent that we start thinking ourselves of someone with a Midas touch. Instead of studying our success we start basking in the light of our achievement and start believing that we can never fail in whatever we decide to do.

 

On the other hand, failure is like a true friend. It doesn’t promise us the world; it doesn’t fill us with false ego. It simply shows us this is where we went wrong. It captures our attention and if we, instead of neglecting it, running away from it, blaming others for it, dare to sit and listen to it, we can become the masters of our game. Failure is a tough teacher, but its lessons are for a lifetime.

 

The lessons of failure are any day better than the most expensive textbooks you can buy or the most expensive courses you can take.

 

Failure allows us to seek the truth behind our lack of success and tells us to act on it so that we can overcome it and achieve our desired success.

 

STEP 3: L

L for Learn: ‘L’ stands for Learn. This is one of the most interesting aspects of life that help us become better.

 

Learning is quite different from studying but most of us tend to think of it as the same. In a simple sense, studying is done when we read a book or some articles to gain information. Like, when a student attends school or college, she is prescribed many textbooks that she has to study by repeated reading and comprehending the contents. The students look at the topics carefully to understand more about it. Even though studying is a part of learning, it is not entirely learning.

 

Learning happens when you practice what you know. Once you know how to use what you have studied you have internalized your subject and can use it to your benefit when the need arises.

 

Facing failure can be a path to better learning. When we fail, we fail because some of the actions that we took or didn’t take were not in alignment with the goals that we desired.

 

I, you, most of us by default are afraid to fail. So, when we fail, it makes us feel less valuable and we want to forget about it as soon as possible like a bad dream. We hop on to something new, a new venture, take up a new opportunity, or start all over again.  This all happens but without becoming wiser from our last failure. We believe deep inside that this time, situations will be different and in our favour. But are they different? Not necessarily.

 

Failing is painful, agreed. But not learning from failure is nurturing that pain for a lifetime. Failure shows us practically how things churn out when we take an action.

 

To learn from our failure, we can follow the following two steps:

STEP 1. Ask - What happened? Here we describe what we failed at, what went wrong. Whether it was teaming up with the wrong people, investing too much money without anticipating the returns. Don’t hide anything. It pays huge dividends to be truthful to oneself.

 

STEP 2. Ask - How do I overcome these mistakes in the future? This is where we start to seek answers. There can be many ways to do this. We can seek out books on overcoming our failures and study them, taking good notes and relating them to our failures. We can join a professional course to study the right way to do things that we failed at. We can take up a job at a company and learn how they do the same job successfully that we failed at or we can apprentice under someone.

 

Whatever ways we employ we have to make sure we prepare ourselves for the future by learning from our failures.

 

STEP 4: S

Succeed: Finally, ‘S’ leads us to ‘Succeed’. It is said that nothing succeeds like success. If we are alert and anticipate things; if we base our actions balanced between heart and mind, not totally depending on our high emotions, we can experience such kind of success.

 

‘Know Thyself’ – Socrates said. What he meant was not just knowing your name, date of birth, your hobbies. Not just knowing yourself at a shallow level. But to know yourself deep inside - What is your philosophy of life, what are your habits that define your actions, what is your attitude towards your surroundings, how do you look at things? In short, what are your strengths and weaknesses that drive you or stop you from taking action?

 

Chanakya, regarded as one of the greatest thinkers, strategists and philosophers, said regarding success – Swashaktim gyatwa karyamarbhet.

One should evaluate one’s capacity before starting a job or work.

 

Achieving success is a process of consecutive actions that we plan and undertake over a period of time. Oftentimes we may not know for how long we need to keep up with our actions till we see success.

 

In Conclusion

Knowing things by studying can lead to a false sense of confidence about our capability to carry on certain tasks. Knowing can prepare us for the next step to success – just the next step. It will not directly make us attain success.

 

It is said that if you have to run fast, you should run slow. What it translates to is that if you want to achieve success fast, you not only need to plan but also you need to watch each and every action, each and every step you take towards the goals that you desire to achieve. One false move, one wrong decision can stop your progress for days and weeks slowing you down or maybe even bring you to a standstill.

 

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