Drown your way to swimming

Don’t start at the bottom, start at the top. Find the very best person in the field and follow what they say. If you don’t understand their words because they’re over your head, listen to them more - google their terminologies - until you do understand the world they live in. Compare your work to the best on earth, not to your peers.

Refuse to learn without doing.

Don’t read a blog on how to code without hand-coding/copying every example. If you listen to a lecture, take specific notes - this will lock in information. Research shows that taking more selective notes causes you to process the information and retain it better.

Start a blog

Disseminate the valuable information you’re learning to others. The simple act of teaching will cause you to process the knowledge to a level of simplicity that greatly increases your understanding. Plus, any human interaction surrounding the knowledge - comments, arguments, corrections, will cause it to lock-in deeper into your memory.

Practice shorter, but more frequently

A guitar student who practices 10 minutes every day will do far better than one who plays 2 hours once a week. The latter will simply keep re-learning much of the same thing each week, forgetting it by the next week. Your brain remembers the first and last things the most, so make sure to recap each “learning session” with the most important things you want to remember.

By Will Stern on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-learning-strategies-do-people-who-are-quick-learners-follow)