We learn from birth without conscious effort or awareness. As we get older we learn patterns, incentives, rules, punishments that interfere with self-directed learning. Young children show intense curiosity and learn quickly. After a few years of school those qualities usually get pushed down and replaced by the forms of “education,” which get mistaken for “learning” due to perverse incentives.

You can recover your innate curiosity and ability to learn. If you went through typical schooling you have to give yourself permission to learn on your own. I recommend John Holt’s books How Children Fail and How Children Learn, and Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.

Lots of things I learned quickly and easily because I found them fun - like coding.

But I always sucked at languages - I was in top class for everything in school and bottom class for german. As an adult i tried to learn spanish and failed miserably for ages. Tried all the usual suspects but despite wanting the end result I found the process so boring and frustrating that i gave up.

Then I discovered Michel Thomas. He made learning a language something to be figured out. Something with structure, and conscious thought, and fun, and fast - As well as being an amazing teacher he's an awesome dude (he was a frikkin' nazi hunter!).

The BBC made this doc about him where he goes into a school and teaches the 5 worst students GCSE french in only a few weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic

If you are struggling to learn a language, you need this dude.

Read more about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas

I was lucky enough to be homeschooled (semi-properly) and thus avoided some of the terrible learning habits of traditional education.

Curiosity was encouraged and the curriculum, specially during early education (i.e. before I had to pass SATs), was mostly driven by interest and what books where available in the local library.

As an adult, and after being affected by 8 years of undergrad and grad schooling, I've notice that I need to make intentional efforts in order to approach something I want to learn in a "non-academic" way, say, curiosity driven, exploratory and giving myself permission to take a different direction at any time.

In a professional context (software engineer) where "learning" is very goal oriented, i.e. interface with X vendor's API or use SQL to do something, I seldom worry about learning more than the bare minimum needed to complete the task because 1. the project has a deadline and 2. the motivation for the "learning" in that context is getting paid, and I've realized that trying to get paid AND finding joy in learning is near impossible for me.

First was where my dad told me his role models would get most of their knowledge from biographies.

In college I did really well up to a point. Worked longer and harder and that made things worse. The best students slept early and were relaxed. So I capped my study hours, took care of diet and sleep, and developed a system for note taking. Long story short, it's reading the conclusion of the paper/chapter first, keeping a glossary, and breaking it down to the skeleton facts.

Then freelancing. Time/skills converted directly to money. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition worked best for this. There's an order to learning, e.g. you shouldn't start to learn a language with projects. Grinding skills gets you trapped as advanced beginner. There are multiple plateaus to mastery, and they usually require a mentor and some task.

Then after subscribing for MasterClass. It's not the classes themselves, but rather seeing what the top 0.1% had in common. Everyone had passion, a way of dealing with self-doubt, beginner's mind, and often some gaping flaw in their skill set which was transcended by some other skills.

Beginner's mind became a fascination - how does an expert see the same thing differently every day? Doesn't the expertise interfere?

The answer was in Thinking Fast and Slow's two systems. There's an intuitive system/muscle memory (1) and an active conscious mind (2). You can't let system 1 override system 2 - anger, fear, habit should not affect your perception. It's not a clear cut mental/physical separation either. Most of your learning will be done with system 1, including mental tasks like chess, debugging, algorithms. System 2's job is just to interrupt when it's on the wrong thing. This aligns perfectly with Dreyfus's model too.

I'd say the best way to learn is to totally trust your learning instinct. Don't think. Don't judge yourself. Just use your consciousness to observe. If you observe hard enough (beginner's mind), you'll be too focused to think, which puts you into flow.

I learned to persevere while tackling a hard subject. I now know if I don't understand material at first I will given time. This got me beyond giving up in the early stages.