Three steps to get up to speed on any subject quickly

Three steps to get up to speed on any subject quicklyThree steps to get up to speed on any subject quicklyDont boil the ocean, Terry said as he slapped a tall stack of papers on my desk. Just tell us what we need to know.I was staring at a serious problem. To help our firm win a multimillion-dollar consulting contract, I had five days to tell my new boss everything there was to know about airline bankruptcies. Problem was, I didnt know the first thing about airline bankruptcies.I barely knew the first thing about anything. It was my first month of my first job out of college, and I had no idea how I - a 23-year-old with zero existing insights on the industry - was going to tell a senior lebensgefhrte anything that wasnt going to get me fired.Feel free to use the Internet, Terry said as he shut the door to my office. I didnt know whether to laugh or cry.No one warns us that adulthood is full of such sweat-inducing dilemmas, where the stakes are your reputation, your career, and (rig htly or wrongly) even your sense of self-worth. When youre in over your head, how do you quickly figure out whats important? Is there a way to go from incompetent to in control - really, really nicht weit davon entfernt sein?As Ive since discovered, there is. Heres how it works.1. Google once, then start sketchingTed Greenwald knows all about deadlines. As a news editor at the Wall Street Journal with almost 35 years of experience in journalism, Greenwalds job depends on delivering stories on time and on point.Greenwald recalls having to get up to speed for a story on network security, a particularly gnarly topic for an outsider. I really could not make sense of the article, Greenwald tells me. To make things worse, Greenwald confesses he is a very slow reader who doesnt have time to consume huge piles of research or take multiple passes through material. To survive in the newsroom, he developed two routines.First, Greenwald says he always Googles once. Whenever he starts working o n a new story, instead of reading anything, I do some searches. I just open up a bunch of tabs that look promising I might very quickly have 20 tabs open. This doesnt strike you as all that revolutionary you probably do the same thing when youre trying to understand something unfamiliar to you. But you probably also find yourself falling down an infinite digital rabbit hole, right? The key, according to Greenwald, is to build a quick overview of what other people have said - and then stop Googling.To prevent getting sucked into a time-wasting vortex of endless searching, Greenwald says its important to move on after the initial search. Youve got to do it in one sitting. Whatever I get there, thats it - Im done at that point, he says. Its a limited view, but it skims the cream.And the best cream, according to Greenwald, is something you wouldnt expect a business journalist to search for pictures. Particularly when the information hed like to understand involves data, Greenwald sugg ests looking for images, which convey dense information better than text or raw numbers. I just imagine what graph I would like to see and type in some words that describe that in Google Images. You may not get the graph you want, but youll get something thats related to it.But sometimes, Greenwald admits, image searches come up empty. Even then, he still has to put the pieces of the story together on his own. And thats when he goes to the drawing board - literally.If Im trying to understand a process, often I will sketch it out as a diagram. It helps me understand the gaps in my knowledge. Just by using a pen and paper, Greenwald can get to the root of the problem, which is how his story on network security came together. I probably went through 20 pieces of paper, Greenwald says, but in the end he finally grasped the complex topic and was ready to write.2. Get inside the right peoples heads (not just the experts)Jules Maltz gives away hundreds of millions of dollars for a living. The 36-year-old partner at Institutional Venture Partners has helped make bets on some of the hottest tech companies of the past decade, including Twitter, Snapchat, Slack, and Dropbox.But writing big checks isnt as easy as it sounds. If he takes too long, a hot startup will find other investors. If he rushes in, he risks getting caught in a bad deal. I see all sorts of companies in different industries, Maltz tells me. If I dont make the right call quickly, I risk missing out on the next big deal.When the pressure is on, how does he decide which companies to back and which to let go? Maltzs secret isnt just talking to smart people. Its talking to the right smart people.When Maltz led his firms investment in Oportun, a financial services company primarily serving Hispanic communities, he had to figure out what mattered most in retail banking - not his professional forte. I picked up the phone, Maltz says. We talk to 10 to 20 people before we make any investment.Thats more than jus t a venture capitalist doing his due diligence - its a way of efficiently circumventing a lot of bad (or just superficial) information and getting straight to the heart of the matter. Maltz believes theres never a shortage of Googleable experts and industry analysts willing to share their knowledge. Once you find a few, Maltz recommends letting people ramble a bit before asking the most important question of all The best thing you can ask is, What questions should I be asking?When Maltz posed that question about Oportun, he learned that, above all else, success in retail banking hinged largely on customer enthusiasm. And, as smart as the industry analysts might be, there was no way they could tell him how much Oportuns customers loved the bank it was time for Maltz to get outside his office and inside customers heads.I had to learn about a customer who wasnt me, the red-headed, Jewish, native Oregonian told me. Maltz stalked retail locations to find customers willing to talk about their experience. Call it old-school market research if you like, but it was also the most efficient and reliable way for Maltz to brush up. Only by collecting insights straight from customers mouths could he understand if the bank was a company people would stick with over the long term.Guided by questions from industry experts, the insights Maltz collected helped him make the case for a $47 million investment. However, without the firsthand information Maltz heard from Oportuns customers, the deal would never have happened.As Maltz sees it, a servicenummer to experts is one shortcut to getting up to speed. But there are key insights experts cant reveal. The most valuable insights often come from people who are are closest to a product, policy, or service but outside your sphere.Many people only look at a problem from their point of view - thats a terrible way to do things, Maltz says. Knowledge often comes not only from asking the right questions, but meeting with the right peopl e.3. Teach to knowIf anyone knows how to digest new information quickly, its author Shane Parrish. His blog has over 80,000 subscribers hungry for his weekly insights on a wide range of topics, from business tips to creativity advice.When I used to learn new subjects, I would explain them with complicated vocabulary and jargon, Parrish wrote in a post. The problem with this approach is that I was fooling myself. I didnt know that I didnt understand.Sometimes insider terminology can make a project appear more intimidating than it is. Unfamiliar words, acronyms, and shorthand can seem like gibberish to someone just getting started. But not knowing jargon can be an advantage.The famed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (whom Parrish has written about) believed in two kinds of knowledge the shallow kind, which only reveals the names of things, and real knowledge, which comes from truly understanding how they work.Your more experienced colleagues might be able to spout familia r terms, but that doesnt mean they know what theyre talking about. As Feynman once wrote, If you ask a child what makes a toy dog move . . . the answer is that you wound up the spring. But spring is just the word used to describe whats visible outside the toy. What happens inside is the object of real knowledge. Take apart the toy see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things.In my case, the ratchets and gears were the mechanisms of airline finances and bankruptcies, and to take them apart and put them back together again, I did what Parrish recommendsWrite out everything you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to someone else. Not your smart friend but rather a toddler. This may sound silly, but this part is incredibly important and has worked wonders for me learning new things.If you try this and find your explanation de pends on a convoluted vocabulary, you likely dont understand the subject well enough and its time to go back and simplify.Today, Im an author, speaker, and consultant, and I use these techniques to brush up on practically any topic while Im under the gun. At my first professional job, with a multimillion-dollar deal at stake, I couldnt fake it - I had to get up to speed. I started by getting a lay of the land on whats already known. Next, I synthesized what Id learned with a few rough sketches and then got on the phone with industry experts who could help me spot the gaps. Finally, I broke down the problem and practiced explaining what Id learned in simple language that anyone could follow.I hustled, but five days proved plenty of time, even for a 23-year-old starting from zero.Nir Eyal is the author ofHooked How to Build Habit-Forming Products. For more insights on using psychology to change customer behavior, join Nirs free newsletter and receive a free workbookhere.This column f irst appeared at Nir and Far.