How to Learn Any Skill Fast
(Without Wasting Months)
Human beings are exceptionally good at learning — yet many of us have convinced ourselves we’re “bad at learning” new skills.
The truth is, it's not they are bad at learning, it's that they are running an poor skill acquisition strategy.
They start with a vague intention.
They study random things.
They collect ideas like Pokémon cards.
They don't practise enough…
and end up thinking "I'm a slow learner."
And then they tell themselves the most expensive lie of all:
“Maybe I’m just not that kind of person who can learn skills quickly.”
If any of that seems familiar to you, don't worry - it's not you. It's the strategy you are using.
Because mastering any skill is a process.
And the better you get at understanding that process — and fine-tuning it for yourself — the faster you’ll pick up new skills and adapt in the real world.
Over the years I’ve become obsessed with skill acquisition: not as a hobby, but as an operator’s advantage. The ability to walk into a new domain and build usable capability fast.
That’s why I teach OOPRPRI.
To help learners dramatically reduce the time it takes to get really good.
It starts with...
O — Objective
Set a clear objective for your learning. This is a non-negotiable.
If you’ve got endless time and resources, you can study everything.
If you don’t (and you don’t), prioritise.
Define what you want to be able to do in sensory terms — so your brain has something concrete to track and measure progress on.
For example:
- “Learn NLP” is too general.
- “Learn how to use NLP principles and language patterns to get my boss to say yes to a pay rise” is specific and useful.
Learning any skill has a cost.
Pursuing “learn NLP” could take a long time with no clear end-point. Learning how to get your boss to say yes to a pay rise could be achieved in a couple of hours.
I know which one I’d choose.
O - Orient
Get the lay of the land before you go deep.
With a clear objective, orient yourself to the domain.
Start with a high-level overview. Build the map before you obsess over the street names.
Example: if you want to become a stronger persuader so you can double your sales, walk into a bookshop, grab five best-selling sales or persuasion books, and skim them quickly.
Pay attention to what’s similar across all of them.
You’re exposing your brain to the terminology of the field and beginning to pattern the core ideas that show up again and again.
Every field has organising ideas — what I call traffic junctions — concepts that connect everything to everything else.
Find the junctions and the whole subject becomes easier to learn.
That’s true in NLP too. It can look like there are hundreds of patterns, but many patterns are organised by only a handful of underlying “moves”. Learn the moves and you can learn multiple techniques quickly — and generate your own ways of getting the job done.
And this doesn’t just apply to books. You can do the same thing with video: watch several people teach the same topic on YouTube. Different voices, same domain. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can pick things up from small amounts of data.
P - Principles & Processes
Extract what makes the domain work — and how it works in practice.
Once you’ve got the big picture and basic terminology, pattern for principles.
Some teachers make principles explicit. Others bury them inside techniques. Either way, keep digging until you find them.
Because if you internalise the principles, you radically shorten the time it takes to learn a new subject.
When you’re unsure what to do next, principles act as a compass. They guide your decisions when you don’t have a memorised script.
But principles alone aren’t enough.
You also need the processes — the specific tactics, techniques, and procedures that make the principle operational.
Principles explain why something works.
Processes show you exactly what to do.
In NLP, for example:
A principle might be:
State drives behaviour.
A process might be:
The step-by-step sequence for eliciting and intensifying a state before anchoring it.
In persuasion:
A principle might be:
People don't resist their own ideas.
A process might be:
Ask calibrated questions → reflect criteria → align proposal to those criteria → test for movement.
Principles give you judgement.
Processes give you execution power.
And here’s the leverage point:
If the outcome you’re pursuing is made up of multiple component skills, practise each process in the order you’ll actually use them — until the full sequence becomes automatic.
That’s how you move from “knowing about it” to being able to do it cleanly under pressure.
Next we want to also pay attention to...
R - Rules
Learn the rules-of-thumb that produce quick wins.
Every domain has rules-of-thumb, heuristics and guide rules that tell you what to do in specific contexts and what not to to do.
You don’t have to fully understand why a rule works in order to use it.
In NLP, for example, we suggest you start with the Desired State before you ask the client about the Present State.
There’s a reason for that. But as a beginner, if you follow the rule, you’ll usually get a better outcome than if you don’t.
Rules are shortcuts. Not right for every situation — but powerful when used appropriately.
Learn the rules, then learn when to break the rules.
Speaking of rules, it's mission critical you commit ample time to...
P - Practice
Practise is and practise some more.
Practice always has been and will be the mother of skill.
Ask any expert and they will tell you, you can never get too good at the fundamentals.
Even though OOPRPRI is presented sequentially, applying what you learn should happen throughout. If you want rapid skill acquisition, look for every opportunity to practise.
This is what builds your body of reference experiences — and later, the intuition you can call on automatically.
A good rule-of-thumb:
- If the outcome is made up of multiple skills, practise each component in the order you’ll use them, until you can do the whole thing automatically.
Example: anchoring.
Before you learn how to “set” an anchor, it’s essential you know how to elicit and intensify a strong emotional state first.
Otherwise you have very little to anchor.
R - Review
Close the learning loop so you find the path to quicker learning.
This is where “practice” becomes “progress”.
Most people practise and hope. Review is what upgrades your process.
After any attempt — a conversation, a meeting, a sales call, a coaching session — run this loop:
- What worked well (specifically)?
- What didn’t go as planned (specifically)?
- What am I going to keep doing and do more of? How and when?
- What’s a single change that would improve my next application?
Here’s why this matters. If you don't reguarly review what you are doing, you can't see 1) what aspects are key to your success and 2) what you are doing which is creating drag and slowing you down.
Finally, we come to...
I - Integration
Integration is where you take all the knowledge and embodied experience you gained and integrate it so you don't have to consciously remember 1,001 things.
While practice builds capability. Integration makes it available under pressure. It gives you the ability to make more useful determinations and choices under pressure.
A skill is integrated when:
- you can do it without thinking through steps
- it holds up when you’re tired, rushed, or under social pressure
- it works across contexts, not just in “practice mode”
- you can recover quickly when it goes wrong
A simple integration test:
Can you do it in three environments and still get a similar outcome?
- When conditions are ideal
- When the situation is fluid
- When the pressure is on and stakes are high
And one of the fastest integration drills is to...
Teach it.
If you can explain the principle, demonstrate the behaviour, and correct someone’s mistake in real time, you don’t just “know about it”.
You own it.
And you can level up to higher and higher levels of skill.
Now It's Your Turn:
So you now have a framework. you can use to learn just about any skill you want, far faster and with far less wasted effort.
To recap, the OOPRPRI Framework consists of:
- O — Objective: Define the exact capability you want in real-world terms.
- O — Orient: Build a map of the domain; find the “traffic junctions”.
- P — Principles & Processes: Extract the underlying principles and the step-by-step procedures that operationalise them.
- R — Rules: Learn the rules-of-thumb that reduce beginner mistakes and speed early competence.
- P — Practice: Drill component skills in sequence until fluent and automatic.
- R — Review: Run tight feedback loops to upgrade your next repetition.
- I — Integration: Stress-test across contexts until you can do the skill with confidence when it matters most.
When you use this framework, don't be surprised when people start saying you are “multi-talented” and so skilled in many different areas. You’ll know the truth: you’ve simply taken the time to learn how to learn — and you can do it well.
You’ve acquired a meta-skill that compounds. One that’s valuable in every domain. One that lasts a lifetime.
It's now time to put it into practice!
As you do, make sure you have fun.
To your success,
Tom
Hi!
I'm Tom.
Everyone has something they’d like to change in their life. I’m here to help you transform the behaviours that get in your way so you can have the life you really want.
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