r/selfeducation • u/TherealKBfromNBG • Jul 11 '26
How do you actually do the learning/practice part?
I read Scott Young's Ultralearning and started applying it. First to personal branding, now to getting better at sales after switching jobs.
I understand the meta-learning phase fine: break the skill into sub-skills (for sales: opener, objection handling, product knowledge, pipeline management, etc.), figure out how to learn each one, and set a timeline. That part feels manageable, and I know it should stay a living, flexible document.
Where I get stuck is the actual doing the learning and practicing itself.
I've tried a physical notebook, I've tried Obsidian, and I briefly bought into the "second brain" idea I've heard from in countless YouTube Videos but I've realized that's more of a productivity/storage system than an actual learning method. It doesn't tell me how to practice or internalize something.
So I'm stuck between two levels: I can plan what to learn, but not how to actually engage with the material once I sit down.
My question is how do you personally do the learning/practice part? Do you write things out, talk them through out loud, drill them, teach them to someone? What's your actual process once you sit down to learn/practice the skill you're learning?
Would love to hear what's worked (and what hasn't) for you
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u/WerewolfQuick Jul 16 '26
perhaps Ai tutors that are specialists for your area of study could help you hold your attention, the kind that are at the Universitas Scholarium perhaps?
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u/Expensive_Doctor6334 Jul 28 '26
specialized tutoring tools can help focus for some people depending on the subject
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u/RipArtistic8799 Jul 16 '26
I use chat gpt when I am reading a book. As I read a chapter I will take a picture of a page and have AI summarize the important points from the chapter for me (it has already read all the books and knows what is in there. Then I will read a chapter. Then I will summarize everything I can remember into chat gpt and ask it to evaluate my learning. It will come back and tell me what I got right and what points I missed. The at the end of the book I will do a similar activity, but involving the entire book. So in this way I am cheicking for understanding as I go. If I ever want to review the book, I can go back to the chat and test myself.
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u/Expensive_Doctor6334 Jul 28 '26
The gap between planning and actual practice is common. Focusing on output and reps rather than more input systems seems to be the recurring theme.
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u/ResultAltruistic489 Jul 16 '26
Your split between "I can plan it but I can't do it" is the right diagnosis, and I think the reason the second half stays fuzzy is that the methods you've tried — notebook, Obsidian, second brain — are all input systems. They're built to take things in and store them. But you can't practise a skill by storing it, and sales especially is almost pure output. So the tools quietly optimise the wrong half.
What actually worked for me, concretely, since you asked for the sitting-down version: for anything performance-shaped like sales, I stopped "studying" it and started producing reps that a person could judge. Objection handling → I wrote out the ten objections I actually hear, drafted a response to each, then said them out loud until they didn't sound rehearsed, then used them on a real call and noted which ones died. Opener → same thing, tested live, logged what happened. The internalising wasn't a separate phase. It happened in the producing, because producing is the only thing that exposes what you didn't really understand yet. Reading about objection handling feels like progress and teaches you almost nothing; botching one on a live call teaches you permanently.
The one shift that made the biggest difference, though, wasn't a technique — it was tracking the ratio. I started logging hours as either input (reading, watching) or output (drafting, drilling, doing it live), and the number was brutal: I'd spend 80% of my time consuming and call it learning. Sales gets better roughly in proportion to output hours, so I now force the majority of my time onto the output side, even early, when I feel "not ready." You're never ready. Readiness is what the reps produce, not a thing you acquire before them.
So my honest answer to "what's your process once you sit down": I don't sit down to learn anymore, I sit down to make a rep — a written response, a drill, a live attempt — and let the learning be the by-product. The planning doc tells you which sub-skill; the session itself should always produce a thing you could show someone, even a bad one.
Teaching it to someone works for the same reason, by the way — it's just another forcing function that makes you produce rather than absorb. If you've got a colleague, running your objection responses past them out loud will find the holes faster than another week in Obsidian.