Tansel Ali is a three-time Australian Memory Champion. He shot to fame worldwide for memorizing two Yellow Pages phone books–more than 2,300 business names and 20,000 digits–in only twenty-four days.
Tansel was the celebrity memory coach for television personality and former CEO of Leo Burnett, Todd Sampson, in the award-winning TV documentary, Redesign My Brain. With Tansel’s memory coaching, Todd competed at the World Memory Championships in London, where he successfully memorized an entire deck of randomly shuffled playing cards.
In his new book, How to Learn Almost Anything in 48 Hours, Tansel reveals the secret to learning new skills fast–easy-to-learn memory strategies, including mind mapping, visualization techniques, and mnemonic devices.
These strategy can be applied to just about everything — even your college courses.
At the onset of the book, Tansel maps out the 7 simples starting steps to effective learning. Applied with the techniques from the book, you’ll crush any college course.
How To Learn Almost Anything In 48 Hours With These 7 Simple Steps
- Gather as many materials and resources on the topic as possible – spend up to three hours getting as much information as you can, even stuff that’s not covered in the course.
- Develop a memorization strategy — Tansel reviews several in the book. Find the one that works best for you and best for the material.
- Organize and prioritize — break down all the information into different levels of importance. Spend the most time on the important stuff. Seems like this would be common knowledge but think about the last class you bombed and how you spent a ton of time on stuff that barely got covered.
- Create accountability — This step is crucial. Find a person — friend, family, mentor — who’ll hold you accountable for not studying or working on the new skill. We usually let ourselves down but have a hard time letting other people down.
- Memorize…but not for long — Tansel points out in the book that short periods of memorization work are much more effective than long hours of trying to remember large chunks of info.
- Review with spaced repetition – Go over what you’ve learned. Ok now go over it again. Ok, now again.
- Practice and apply — let’s say the course you’re trying to crush is a language. You’ve done all of the above. Awesome. Now go try it. Go somewhere where only that language is spoken. Try and communicate. If it’s another topic, go talk to people well-versed in it and try and hold a conversation. How much did you learn? Were you lost at some point? Study that stuff.
The book is filled with practical exercises for honing memory and training your brain to learn well and learn fast.
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