The Basics
Avoid Common Mistakes
Passive Learning
The number one mistake students make when reviewing materials is interacting with the resource passively. Meaning that they read their book, watch a video, or review a tutorial - but they don’t really engage at a deeper level. They don’t take notes, they don’t think critically about the information they have interacted with, and they don’t try to actively apply what they are learning by practicing the concept.
This will all amount to a slow advancement in skill, especially when you are trying to rely on this form of information gathering as your primary form of learning. With this, you are likely to forget or overlook the more important bits of information that are crucial to the theories you are studying. We should be relying on our skills of note taking, studying, and the ability to restate what we learned in order to fully utilize a resource.
Stalling Progress
Another common mistake students make is halting their progress entirely by obsessing over a single, often arbitrary, skill. It is not unusual for a student to come to a point early on in their learning, such as an exercise on drawing circles, and becoming fixated on their ability to draw a perfect circle before they allow themselves to progress any further into their materials. This can cause people to focus on this skill day in and day out, getting frustrated with the exercise, and burning themselves out.
Although this may seem practical, as in many cases you should be proficient in one skill before moving onto a more complicated one, but with drawing, this is not the case. Often, improvements are more gradual and are more comparable to working out. When you work out, you don’t focus on building up one single muscle group at a time, you allow many muscle groups to develop over a longer period of time. You should approach learning how to draw in a similar manner.
Overachiever
While it is important to keep a steady pace and proceed through your learning materials without getting bogged down on just one skill, the other extreme can be just as devastating to your progress. Switching between subjects too quickly, and not spending enough time to thoroughly understand a concept, or doing too much at once can make it just as hard to progress your skills as not doing anything at all.
Students might approach one subject for a few days, or a week and jump into a completely different subject for a similar amount of time, and then yet another. When they get back to learning the first subject, they find themselves needing to retrace their steps and refresh their memories, before they can advance in a significant way. This leads to frustration for most students, and years or circling the block.