Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition Summarised

This is a republished article from early 2025.

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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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