(Better thumbnails soon, promise)

They demand to be able to call themselves English while knowing that to be English is based on blood; ethnicity; lobbying to destroy that truth so they may ‘fit in’, all the while they possess their own ethnicity, which the…

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I first found the poem pictured above when I was much more of a recent convert to nationalism and carried myself with the expected zeal of such. Back then I didn’t take too much notice of the poem. It just sounded cool. I was, and perhaps still am at my core, a performative literary enjoyer.

While I find it di…

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This is a republished article from early 2025.

On a quest to remove my brain from the deep fat fryer of the modern world, I’ve been trying to figure out what I couldn’t during my time in school: the art of becoming an autodidact.

Multiple failures by “the adults in the room” meant that a very obvious diagnosis of ADHD went unrecognised. I dropped out aged 15, then went for a second attempt, and dropped out again at 17. Now at the age of 22, I finally received a diagnosis. Ironically, I didn’t ask for the diagnosis myself, rather I went to test out antidepressants and the doctor said “yeah, we can do that, but I want you to fill out these tests”. One test was for autism, the other for ADHD, scored below the borderline for autism and above the borderline for ADHD. Two years later (God bless the NHS) I was assessed by a professional and formally diagnosed. I’ve been trialing Elvanse/Vyvanse since the beginning of May 2025 and it’s going well so far.

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In order to “learn how to learn”, I had to understand the basics. This is what I was hoping reading this book would achieve for me. I had to know how to study, how to develop my memory, and how to identify my comprehension of a subject. This book was a pretty good place to start.

Without further-a-do, here’s the summary of The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition by Peter Hollins:

**The Beginning**

First you must choose a specific skill that you want to learn, such as the piano.

Once you know what skill you would like to learn, break that skill down into subskills.

Subskills are mini-skills that contribute to the learning of the main skill.

For example, the subskills of learning the piano would be music theory, reading notes, tempo, etc.

**Efficient Study**

The most efficient way of learning is the 80/20 rule.

To master a skill or subskill (100% completion), prioritise the hardest 20% and the remaining 80% will become very easy to accomplish.

The focus of study should be on active recall (remembering) rather than cramming. Short durations of study with intense concentration will help you learn quicker than long durations of mediocre and decreasing concentration.

What you do during the study session also matters. Learning three subskills (eg the music theory, reading notes, tempo) during a study session lasting one hour will be better for the brain than spending a whole hour on one subject (eg trying to play an entire piece in one go).

A study session that goes “ABC” is better than “AAA”. Moving on to different subskills while retaining concentration gives the brain time away from the previous subskill so that it can form synapses and build memory, and also helps it develop context for the different subskills and link them together for an all round better understanding of the main subject. Studying multiple comparable subjects in one session is called “interleafing”.

Returning to the discussion of study duration, you should have multiple (two or three) sessions of short duration, between twenty and thirty minutes, rather than one session of one to two hours. This gives you a chance to learn in the morning and review your ability to actively recall in the evening.

Example:

Study for thirty minutes at 8am

Study the same thing at 8pm, without looking at your notes, and try to remember what you learned at 8pm.

Another important aspect of studying is problem-based learning.

By giving yourself a problem to solve using the skill you are wanting to learn, it provides a clear and identifiable path towards the solution.

In order to solve Problem Y, you must learn and develop Skill X.

You want to learn to play your favourite song on the piano. This is the problem.

To identify the solution, you begin learning subskills (music theory, notes, tempo etc from earlier).

Through study and practice, you develop these skills to the point you can confidently play your favourite song.

In order to progress your skill even further, you choose a more complex problem. Repeat.

**Comprehension**

Being able to comprehend the subject that you’re learning is very important. It’s not good enough to just read and take notes. You need to be able to develop active recall and contextualise what you have learnt, or else you haven’t actually learned anything, you’ve just remembered something that you can’t do anything with.

You can know the name of a chord and what it looks like on a sheet, but if you can’t recognise it on the piano and play its tune, that knowledge is useless. That is the difference between remembering and understanding. Being able to understand, and not just remember, is comprehension.

The way to understand your level of comprehension is through a process called elaborative interrogation, essentially self evaluation. This requires you to keep your ego in check and to enforce brutal honesty of your own understanding.

In order to comprehend a skill and continue developing your proficiency, you need to be able to recognise your blind spots and failure points. You will never master a skill if you skip over your blind spots and continue on. There’s no point spending an entire study session playing a whole piece just to be able to say you were practicing. There is no point playing a whole piece if there are only certain parts of that piece that you are bad at playing. Those bad parts are the blind spots, and you need to be able to comprehend those blind spots in order to overcome them and get better.

There are two non-exhaustive methods of comprehension:

The Feynman Technique

1. Decide on a skill you are wanting to learn.

2. Write down a full explanation of the skill in plain English.

3. If there is a part that you can’t explain plainly, or at all, note it down.

4. The parts you failed to explain are your blind spots. Prioritise studying those.

5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you can write a plain but in depth explanation of the subject.

6. Write an analogy relating to the subject. This shows you can not only understand but also contextualise the subject, being able to relate it to something else for full comprehension.

Feynman’s explanation for this technique related it to the curiosity of children. You may think an explanation of a subject is simple until you are pushed further than expected.

A child might ask you “Why does rain come from clouds?”

You could answer “Because clouds hold onto evaporated water.”

The child will ask “Why?” to every answer and it will reach a point where you don’t have an answer. This is your blind spot. Everybody thinks that the reason why rain falls from clouds is common sense until pushed for below surface level answers, then they don’t know. They could evaluate their full comprehension of cloud systems by using the Feynman Technique.

Once you have come to an understanding of your present comprehension of a subject, you then need to know how to move forward and how to measure your progress. Thankfully, the second method of comprehension shows you how.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a system that allows you to categorize your comprehension and skill level. It includes six levels of comprehension, with the first level being a complete beginner and the sixth level being a master of the trade. Moving up the rungs of Bloom’s Taxonomy takes time, patience, and genuine practice, so do not try and rush them.

1. Remember

The first level is the ability to remember what you have learnt. This is the very beginning of comprehension. If you asked for the colour of the sky, and you answer blue, then you have successfully remembered and you have climbed to the first rung of the six levels.

2. Understand

Remember that there is a major difference between remembering something and understanding something. You can move up to the second rung when you can not only answer that the sky is blue, but also why the sky is blue - due to the atmosphere interacting with the scattering sunlight - providing context to your answer.

3. Apply

You must be able to apply this knowledge elsewhere in order to move up to the third rung. For example, being able to tell someone that the sky being blue due to the reflection of the ocean is actually just a myth, and the real reason is due to the way sunlight interacts with the atmosphere above us.

4. Analyse

So you know the sky is blue due to the atmosphere interacting with sunlight, but why does that cause the sky to become blue? Diving deeper and analysing the answer to understand it more helps develop further comprehension. Yes, the sky is blue due to sunlight, but further analysis will teach you that sunlight is made up of all colours of the spectrum, so why only blue? Because when the sunlight enters the atmosphere, air molecules within the atmosphere cause the blue wavelengths of the colour spectrum to scatter more than the other colours, letting us see the blue more intensely than any other colour.

5. Evaluate

Is there any gaps in knowledge by this point? Is there anything else about this topic that you could learn? Refer back to the Feynman Technique.

6. Create

The final level of comprehension is the ability to create something with the skill or subject that you have learnt. You now have an in depth understanding of how the sunlight interacts with our atmosphere, you know how different molecules interact with the colour spectrum and its different wavelengths, and you can fully contextualise the concept. How can you take this skill and create something entirely new with it?

The example in the Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition book dealt with somebody who had completed the first five levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy on the subject of the American Revolution. The person had fully mastered its history and had a grasp on the where, what, when, why, how. In order to complete the sixth level and in order to create something new from their knowledge, they could take the history of the revolution and its context…. What went wrong, what didn’t, how geography influenced the revolution, etc and apply all of that knowledge to a modern day country still living in oppression - how could the lessons of the American Revolution apply to that modern country? Could you teach the lessons to the people of that country and allow them to execute a successful revolution themselves?

**Confusion / Frustration**

Learning a skill takes hard work and effort. If it feels easy, then you aren’t doing it right. You will always hit a wall and the ease will wear off. This is where most people quit.

Develop “confusion endurance” by pushing through the confusion and frustration of learning. When you’re confused / frustrated, but still going, this is where the learning actually happens. This is what makes sure that you get better and better every time.

**Environment**

You need to set up both social and physical environments that incentivise you to stay consistent with your studies. These both have major impact on your ability to be successful.

Social Environment:

1. Do not let negative people bring you down. There will be people in your life, whether that’s family, friends, co-workers, bullies, etc that see you developing yourself and they will have a negative attitude towards it. Ignore their negativity, reject it entirely.

2. You are the average of the five people you are most often surrounded by. Make sure that your network aligns with your goals. Exchange the negative people in your life for positive people that believe in you and want you to succeed. Even better, surround yourself with people who have similar goals, or have already achieved those goals.

3. Find a mentor who can guide you towards achieving your goals. Don’t look for somebody with “natural talent”, they will not be able to help you. You do not have natural talent like they do. That means they have not had to get to where they are the same way you will. Instead, find somebody who had to struggle to succeed, like you will have to. That way your mentor will be somebody who has fallen into the same traps as you and will teach you the best way out of those traps and how to avoid future traps.

Physical Environment

1. Design a space conducive to studying. Efficient and purposeful study will always be less desirable than any of the fun things you are surrounded by, and you will tempted much greater by those non-productive things. The easiest way to remove temptation is to remove the object causing it.

2. Remove all temptations from your reach and field of view. Out of sight and out of mind. This will dramatically reduce the likelihood of your concentration drifting from productivity to non-productivity.

3. Keep everything you need to study organised in one area, easy to reach, visible at all times. This will make it much easier to stay on task and not let you get distracted.

**Curiosity**

Motivation wanes and doesn’t last forever. It is curiosity that allows you to continue your studies when the motivation isn’t there to keep going. Curiosity keeps you turning the page even when you’re sighing from boredom. There are different types of curiosity and it’s important to recognise which type of curiosity your system runs on.

1. Joyous Exploration

Very simple to understand. This is the curiosity that most people think of when they hear the word. It’s the curiosity you experience when first starting to learn something, when it’s all new and fresh and exciting and dopamine floods your brain.

2. Deprivation Sensitivity

This form of curiosity branches off from a desire to resolve knowledge gaps and reduce the discomfort of not knowing something. I’d argue that reading The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition was a form of deprivation sensitivity for me.

3. Social Curiosity

This is the type of curiosity you experience when you overhear people talking about something and it piques your interest, making you want to learn more about the topic so you can contribute to the conversation.

4. Stress Tolerance

When you do something to embrace the anxiety that comes with exploring the unknown. Being thrown into the deep end of the pool; sink or swim.

5. Thrill Seeking

Very simply put, this is the “adrenaline junkie” curiosity. Taking risks to gain experience.

**Set Reasonable Expectations / Skill Stacking**

It’s important when starting to learn about a subject that you set reasonable expectations for progression.

You are not going to be in the top 1% of whatever you are learning.

At best you will reach the top 10-15% and that is good enough.

It takes around twenty hours of learning to fully comprehend the basics of a subject.

After one hundred hours you are most likely to be in the top 80% and after one thousand hours you are likely to be in the top 25%.

Even once you reach the top 10-15%, there will likely still be hundreds of thousands of people with equal or superior knowledge regarding the subject, so how do you stand out?

You stand out by building up three or more skills that synergise together to produce value.

For example, being in the top 1% of writers means that no matter what you publish, people will buy your book.

Being in the top 10-15% of authors means that some people might read your book but it won’t be a career anytime soon.

So how do you build on this and make a living out of writing even when other people around your skill level can’t?

You stack your ability to write with other skills that’ll help you.

For example, an author needs an audience to read their book, so if you develop social media skills in order to market your book and build an audience, the money starts to come in and it begins to be a career.

If you stack your ability to write AND your social media marketing skills with another skill in business management, then not only are you able to write the book and grow a profitable audience, but you’re also able to deal with the administration of your company, know how to file your taxes and do basic accountancy, and how to network and find literary agents who can connect you with journalists, publishers, etc to further promote your writing.

**TL;DR**

Short but intense study sessions twice a day with mixed but interleafed subjects. Use problem-based learning to identify an issue and base your learning on developing a solution to overcome the problem. Exercise confusion endurance to stay consistent with learning. Elaborative interrogation to self assess your blind spots, using Feynman Technique & Bloom’s Taxonomy to gauge level of comprehension. Create positive social and physical working spaces. Set reasonable expectations for progress and stack skills to go further, faster.

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Roughly 45 minutes from first draft to the final poem.

First draft was roughly half the finished length. Initial idea was to write up a poem which personifies the months of the year as some kind of deity (not far from reality, now that I think about it), with a non-descript petitioner seeking to make it through November’s 30 days as October ends and the harsh bite of the darker months start to nip on those that must live through them.

They seek refuge in the autumnal mildness of November, pleading that the month provides them with gentle and merciful conditions, acting as their final moments of preparation before November releases them into December’s unyielding and cruel Winter.

I feel lost. The very fabric of who I am feels withered and tattered; flags of somewhere or something forgotten litter the crawlspace of my mind, my heart, my aching eyes. I do not know what dreams were sown into the symbols donned by those flags. There is nobody else around to remind me what it all means or who suspended them in the hazy air of my internal abyss.

Was I always this slow to think? Think, think— when did I last feel sharp or witty? Quick to answer? Was the air always this hazy? What’s causing— what’s that smell? It’s pungent, and consuming, and violent, and revealing, it’s coming from infront of me, and—it’s fire.

I walk without hesitation towards the source, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. With every small lunge toward the flames, my nostrils are assaulted with the tasting notes of speckled embers. Hazy air transforms, with a few more steps forward, into bellowing and intoxicating smoke. Heat holds my hand with a firm grip, inviting me to meet with its master. I cannot reason with myself, not with the smoke plumes flooding my headspace. I fail to find good argument against meeting with the siren in front of me, calling for me with its light and warmth and encompassing fervour.

I release the vocal seal from my lips and separate my lips in anticipation to address the rising flame. I must speak properly, with purpose and intent. I feel like I’m engaging in first contact of an alien species. Maybe I am. There’ll be a lot to say

if that’s the case. Better prepare accordingly.

My lungs pull and tighten as I perform a rapid and deep inhale—a mistake was made here. I understood instinctively that I had performed a fatal error. In my excitement, my awe of the flame, my eagerness to speak—it was as if the smoke that had been conquering the space around me had, for a brief yet tragic moment, become peripheral to me. I blundered the logic of my own headspace. Smoke wasn’t just swallowing everything around me. It was waiting by my lips. The siren song had caught me in its awe, and the smoke pushed into my throat to claim me for its master, and worst of all I pulled it further and deeper down into my lungs, I aided my own undoing! Only Icarus had flown closer to the flame than I had!

Not long after, I naturally started to sputter, and wheeze, and plead with my hands for a different death. Not like this! Bring me back to that world I knew before, with the cold! The hopelessness! I had for the first time felt hope in the warmth of that fire—hope killed me. My knees begin to dip, then collapse into a kneel. It’s even darker now. I can hardly see anything at all. I can’t see a way out of this.

The warmth transforms into a blistering, scolding heat under the blanket of smoke. I can’t even see the fire anymore, that lying fire, that kindling of hope wrapped in deceit, and—Ow! My fingers are peeling—I can’t see my fingers, I can’t, I can’t! I can’t take this anymore!

All that remained was the blinding darkness and the tortuous heat. Perhaps this was Hell. Surrender to your punishment. Embrace what you, and only you, allowed to come to happen. Surrender.

In that moment, I yielded my fate to whatever faith may take pity on me. Death took me. The pain withdrew from my flesh like an army retreating in defeat—I knew then at least, even pain is defeated in death. That was my first peaceful thought. My second thought was “How am I still thinking if I am dead?”

By the time I finished asking the question, colours started swirling where it was once dark. A little bit like when you push your thumbs into your eyeballs out of boredom and you see a colourful light show start to dance around. I couldn’t make anything out, not yet. Just colours pushing against each other, reds and blues and yellows and whites, underpinned by a current of black pushing past everything else, escaping from the symphony of colours—bellowing out of my eyelids, as if the vents of my eyes had finally opened—the vibrancy of the colours began to take form as the smoke cleared from the depths of wherever I had been in my body—detail commanded structure, and the familiarity of my bedroom delivered clarity to a poor set of eyes, and a mind, that had seen far too much.

As I caught my bearings, the frostiness that dominated the world around me had made itself known to my fingertips before whistling down my arms and legs. I was, once more, taken by the cold that I had known for my whole life. That unrelenting hopelessness lifted itself into view. It is important to understand that hopelessness has no shape of its own. It adopts the shape of those who yield to it, like a spider weaving a web around your body.

I’m talking awfully sharp to you right now. Introspective. Contemplative. The haziness that clouded my mind seems to have finally disappeared. There is something that remains. Something new. Something I failed to tame during my time in the depths.

I could feel in real time hopelessness beginning to weave the web around me. Happy to take me back to where I belong; to feel like a helpless fly waiting to be eaten. Yet something primordial had already consumed me and I had survived through faith alone, faith that in my surrender to death that a deity may take pity on me, and set me free.

The web spins around my wrists like handcuffs. Hopelessness is indifferent to the cold. They are harmless to one another. They coexist in their cruelty.

Yet now, something is different. Finally, again, I breathe in deeply, and gently exhale, watching foolishly at the centre of my nose — the warmth of my breath disrupts the frost for just a moment. A kind of heat that wasn’t present within me before now. I breathe in. I exhale. I watch. It happens again.

My thoughts return to those first few moments when I was first thrown into… the dungeon, or whatever it was, inside myself. I remember the flags littered across the grounds. My wonderings about who may have held them above ground, and what they hoped to achieve. My focus then returned to the muggy air pushing back an icey force that, for the first time, had been made moveable.

I think my apathy was put on trial when I was down there. The cure for apathy is intensity. What greater intensity is there than the smoke, the flame, the scolding heat and quivering muscles, the flaked skin—perhaps I did die in some way down there—yet when I pleaded for the divine to hold me, I only heard the crackling of fire in response. It was fire itself that placed me on trial for my apathy against the world, it was fire that burnt away any uncaring I had, it was fire that vented and cleared away the ashes of who I once was, it was—yes! It was fire that kindled a light, and a blistering heat, inside me—both of which can never be extinguished, can never battle the frost and fear defeat. The coldness of this world has become mine to conquer.

And as for hopelessness, despair, despondency, whatever label you use for that ugly creature — I will say only this: find me a spider’s web that survives against even the smallest flame, and I shall submit to you again. Until then, I will carry my flame, and I will hold onto my ridiculous hope, and I will conquer what was once invincible.