I’ve gotten pretty good over the last twenty years at mastering a subject quickly.  I want to share some of my tips.

I used this skill as a VC to rapidly understand a new business sector.  One of the joys and terrors of working in early-stage tech companies is understanding new stuff that comes along:

1. What It Is: New technologies don’t come with a user manual.  It takes a lot of people experimenting in a lot of different directions to figure out even what a new discovery is.
2. What It Can Do: Once you figure out what it is, you need to know what it can be used for, which involves trying it out in a bunch of different business areas.  Usually a new technology comes with some assumptions about what it’s good for, but these are often wrong and need to be revisited.  Again, a lot of people do these experiments.
3. How It Fits In: Last is figuring out how the innovation will become the Next Big Thing in one of the sectors where it’s good for something.  By this time the innovation is usually known to the sector, but it is not (yet) well-known; in particular it is not known what the business of bringing it to market will have to be.

I’m fond of using the PC as an example of these three stages when I teach classes in innovation and entrepreneurship.  In the case of the PC:

1. Microprocessors arose out of calculator chips
2. It took a while to figure out that you could make a general-purpose Turing Machine out of a calculator chip because it took a while to figure out why you might want such a thing
3. The fledgling PC was “unlimited in its uses”, meaning no one had a use for it… Until Dan Bricklin wrote VisiCalc and the spreadsheet was born.
4. The PC went from “Nice to Have” to “Must Have”.

So, let’s say you come along in Phase 2 or 3 (which is often the case with an innovation) and you want to know, “what’s happening with PCs”?  Here are some steps I’ve found useful:

1. Find the right search terms to exhaustively trawl the ‘net about the subject.  The right search terms are ideally MECE (a McKinsey-ism: “Mutually Exclusive/Collectively Exhaustive”.  None of the terms describes any of the others, and together they describe all the entities.  What mathematicians would call a “basis,” a linearly-independent spanning set.  Finding these search terms involves a lot of experimentation.  Each experiment yields a broader set of relevant search results until you reach a point of diminishing returns, where additional search terms either don’t add new pages or add “false-positive” results.
2. Use the search terms to find 3 good reviews of the topic, preferably not by deep technologists but by journalists or other good generalists.  Nothing wrong with technology mavens but journalists are quicker to see connections between the technology and potential business uses.
3. Talk to one or more of these sources.  Presto, you’re an expert, or at least you can play one on TV.

Some giants have also worked this territory.

I want to particularly call out Tim Ferriss, whose Four Hour Chef book is subtitled “The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything [emphasis added], and Living the Good Life.”  Ferriss discusses some very similar approaches to characterizing the key elements in a subject area.  Read his book.

I’ve also read books by Josh Kaufman (“The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything”) and Joshua Waitzkin (“The Art of Learning”).  Waitzken’s book is much deeper and more inward-looking, but both are of interest.

Enjoy!