Description

John Sonmez – 10 Steps to Learn Anything Quickly

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To Every Programmer Who’s Ever Scanned
Hacker News And /r/programming And Thought…

“How Will I Ever Keep Up?”

Get John Sonmez – 10 Steps To Learn Anything at the Course Farm

Here’s How To Turn “Information Overwhelm”
Into An Efficiency Edge That Can
Quickly Boost Your Income,
Earn You “MVP” Status With Your Team,
And Make You The In-Demand Developer
Companies Are Dying To Recruit

There’s this whip-smart developer I know of—I’ll call him “Mike.”

Mike is a learning machine. He zips through podcasts at 2X speed on his commute, devours online courses at his desk with lunch, and juggles 2-3 technical books between the Kindle app on his iPhone and the dead trees by his bed.

He does all this because he’s seen how fast things change in software development.

Since he cut his teeth as a programmer at 9 years old (Turbo C for MS-DOS), Mike’s seen entire languages and platforms come and go: VisualBasic, ActiveX, ColdFusion.

He converted from VB6 to .NET, then learned PHP and the LAMP stack. He invested heavily in Dojo (before jQuery killed it dead). He flirted with Silverlight and Flash until plugins became evil and HTML5 rode in to save the day.

Today he’s wrestling with massive frontend frameworks like AngularJS and Ember, weighing which JavaScript AMD loader to use and wondering whether Grunt or Gulp will eventually “win.”

Most nights you’ll find him plugging away on one of a half dozen side projects. Code at work, code at night, lifehack all the time.

Mike loves learning and he loves his job. But even with all the extra hours he’s putting in, he can’t escape the sense that he’s…

Slipping A Little Further Behind Every Day

Just about every day he hears about a new “it’ll change your life” tool. Or a coworker shoehorns yet another v 0.1 JavaScript library into the codebase…

His brain is already red-lining.

What happens when he gets that title bump—and suddenly the meetings wipe out his lunchtime learning session?

And will he be able to keep up his side projects when the new baby arrives?

And the guy who’s produced more online training for software developers than anyone else alive.

I’m not saying any of this to brag—I just want you to take seriously what I’m about to say next:

Today’s Software Devs Are Under More Pressure To “Stay Sharp”
Than Ever Before

A few years ago, web developers could pull down a decent salary armed with nothing but a text editor and a solid understanding of HTML, plus maybe a little CSS and JavaScript.

Those days are gone. Today’s employers want “full stack” developers—software storm troopers who can parachute in and:

And if you’re looking for things to get easier, I have some bad news…

This Breakneck Pace Is Accelerating,
And There’s No End In Sight

Technology enables technology. The faster our hardware gets, and the more efficient our runtimes and processing engines get, the more demands there are on you, the developer.

New languages and platforms to build multi-threaded apps. New standards and specifications. New frameworks that promise to hide all the hideous complexity—but turn out to be yet another leaky abstraction.

Most developers I know are responding to this by hoarding information.

They’re driving themselves to the brink of burnout to cram every scrap of knowledge possible into their brains.

They’ve been fed a lie—that their knowledge of the latest and greatest languages, tools and platforms is what determines their value.

I used to believe this lie too. For years I dedicated every moment I could spare to consuming books and pounding through video courses.

But as I gained experience, I realized that this was a game I could never win.

Because 5 years from now 50% (or more) of what you “know” will be obsolete.

And I came to see that it wasn’t my knowledge of C# or SQL that was the key to advancing in my career.

The Most Important Skill Any Software Developer Can Have Is…
Knowing How to LEARN

And I’m not talking about just squirreling away knowledge for “someday.”

Today’s successful developer is a master at diving deep into a new piece of tech, slicing it into bite-sized chunks and absorbing the critical 20% that lets him work productively while other developers are still scratching their heads and searching Stack Overflow.

I have this ability today—but I didn’t always.

A few years ago, learning any new technology felt like embarking on an endless trek to Mordor.

Here’s what I’d do:

This whole process was REALLY time consuming. I’d spend weeks or even months to get my arms around a new programming language.

And every time I thought I had a good handle on the topic, I’d stumble across some new rabbit trail that I hadn’t explored yet.

The goal posts were always moving. The longer and harder I studied, the more the topic seemed to expand in all directions.

I never got that satisfaction of “done”—and eventually I’d just get overwhelmed and move on to something that seemed more interesting or urgent.

Worst of all…

Get John Sonmez – 10 Steps To Learn Anything at the Course Farm

When I Tried To Apply What I’d “Learned”
I Couldn’t Remember Half Of It!

As frustrating as all this was, I just assumed it was part of the process.

That is until I made a discovery that changed the way I learn forever.

Several years ago, I took a side job creating online training course.

At first I was in heaven—I was getting paid teach what I knew about software development.

Pretty soon, though, I hit a little snag… I ran out of things to teach.

Google had just released Go, so I thought, “What the heck, I’ll do a course on that.”

After cruising through my courses on Java, Android, iOS and several other languages and platforms I knew well, this Go course felt like slamming into a brick wall.

Suddenly I realized how horribly inefficient and painful my way of learning really was. I was spending weeks and weeks to create a single course.

My old approach to learning wasn’t going to cut it. I had to adapt, and FAST.

So I Threw Out Everything I “Knew” About Learning

I stopped trying to brute-force the information into my brain until my eyes bled and my brain begged for mercy.

I took charge of my own learning, rather than letting book authors and other “experts” push their preconceived ideas on me.

I found a way to get down to the bare essentials that would give me a productive, working knowledge of the topic in the shortest time possible.

That Go course took four long weeks to create.

But with the discoveries I made about learning efficiently, I was soon producing courses in three weeks… Then two weeks…

Until I was cranking out a new course every 8-9 days.

I’d cut my study time down to barely a third of what it was. And what really surprised me was this:

The Faster I Learned, The More I Retained

This really caught me off guard.

My motto in life is that nothing is free—there’s always a tradeoff. So I expected that the tradeoff for rapid learning is a shallower understanding and less ability to apply what you’ve learned.

Turns out, it’s the opposite.

As I improved my learning efficiency, my ability to retain and apply the information went through the roof.

That’s because I wasn’t cluttering my brain with trivial details. Instead I zeroed in on the key concepts—then applied the knowledge as I learned, locking it into my long-term memory.

Not only was I learning 3X faster, now I didn’t need to constantly circle back and relearn the basics over and over.

I realized that…

Most People Approach Learning Like A Noob Writes SQL

What happens when you use 10 different queries to build up a dataset? It works, sure, but it is SLOOOOOOOW.

Any programmer with a rudimentary knowledge of SQL can throw in a handful of JOIN statements, and BOOM, that 60-second operation finishes in 3.

Learning is the same way.

There’s no advantage to spending 4 weeks to learn something you could master in 1.

All you’ve done is burn time and brain cycles.

I ran with this mind-bending insight and continued to refine my new way of learning while creating course after course.

Over the next 18 months, I tackled more than 30 topics, including Dart, Lua, HTML5 game development, MeteorJS and Redis.

I knew I was on to something when other developers kept commenting on how “sticky” my trainings were. Because I was embedding my learning approach into my courses, my students were retaining more too.

Without trying, I had stumbled on…

A Flexible Framework For Breaking Down Literally ANYTHING You Want To Master And Downloading The Information Right Into Your Brain With Maximum Efficiency

And I had to share what I’d learned with my fellow software developers.

So I set out to reverse-engineer and systematize what I’d been doing by instinct.

I spent weeks observing myself as I learned, looking for patterns I could extract.

And when I finally boiled it all down, I came up with a sequence of steps that anyone could follow.

I call them the…

10 Steps To Learn Anything Quickly

Discovering these techniques for yourself will change your entire outlook on software development—just like it did for me.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the flood of “must-know” new technologies, frameworks and tools that you’re bombarded with every day, you’ll adopt a Zen-like attitude toward the churn.

You’ll relax in the knowledge that you DON’T have to jump on every new trend (or risk getting left behind).

You’ll have the confidence that you can pick up a new technology and know it back to front in a few days or a couple of weeks.

Instead of feeling scattered and distracted, your learning time will have laser-like focus and structure.

And you’ll finally experience the satisfaction of actually FINISHING. You’ll know when you’ve learned enough and you’re ready to move on.

This 10-step system will show you:

Here’s How It Works

10 Steps To Learn Anything Quickly is NOT a “talking head” lecture on abstract concepts.

For this course, I wanted to show you the techniques in action. So I decided to let you “look over my shoulder” as I teach myself a brand new skill—how to create pixel art.

With each step, we’ll start with a brief overview of what’s involved, including your goal for the step and the specific actions you’ll take.

Then you’ll get to hear my thoughts as I perform the steps right in front of you on camera.

As I unpack the first 6 steps for you will:

Then in the last 4 steps, you’ll chew through your learning action plan in record time.

This part is fun, because you’ll tap into your own curiosity and child-like desire to explore. There’s even a MANDATORY play time—and a chance to show off everything you’ve learned.

And it all helps to anchor your new knowledge in your brain so you can pull it out months or years later and it’s ready there, exactly when you need it.

The entire course is presented in 12 HD-quality .mp4 videos. The videos are DRM-free, so you can download and convert them for viewing on the player of your choice. (Or even speed them up to 2X if that’s your thing.)

And true to the spirit of “learning quickly,” the techniques in this course won’t take you weeks of study to master.

In fact, you get the entire system in just 72 tightly edited minutes.

That means you can rip through the whole course over your next lunch break and then put the system to work for you immediately.

I put a lot of thought and effort into creating this course, and the videos really stand alone.

But I want to do everything in my power to see you master these 10 steps.

So I’ve put together a hefty collection of add-ons and bonuses to help you—and you get them at NO extra charge:

Bonus #1 – “Paint By Numbers” Workbook

I cover a lot of ground in this course—it’s a packed, fast-paced 72 minutes of instruction. To help you apply each step in a structured, easy to follow way, I created this 32-page workbook.

The workbook includes a concise summary of each step, as well as questions that make it “paint by numbers” easy to apply each step.

This workbook alone is almost as valuable as the video training, because it guides your thinking as you apply the concepts I cover in the course.

While I was “beta testing” this course, I sold the workbook separately. Almost everyone who bought the course also bought and used the workbook. They paid an additional $10 to purchase the workbook, but you get it here for free.

Value: $10

Bonus #2 – Word-for-Word Transcripts
(All 12 Videos)