Locate—engage with what you’ll learn#

This is the first move in any piece of learning: engage with the subject and pull together the raw material you’re going to work from. Think of it as acquiring — books, manuals, a lecturer’s notes, a half-hour video, a page in someone else’s head — and getting it ready for the next step, where you’ll actually try to understand it.

Sometimes this is easy. A course hands you the texts and you’re done in five minutes. Sometimes you’re learning something so specialised that almost nobody has written it down, and you have to forge your own trail. Most of the time you’re in the middle: a few prescribed texts, plus gaps you fill yourself.

Here’s the thing that’s changed since I first wrote this. Twenty years ago the hard part of Locate was finding enough good material. Today the hard part is the opposite — there’s a near-infinite supply, and the skill that matters is choosing well and stopping. Locate has quietly turned from a hunting problem into a filtering problem.

Engage first, organise second#

I want to stress the word engage, because it’s easy to treat this step as pure admin — collect the files, tick the box, move on. That’s a wasted opportunity.

The forethought you do here shapes everything downstream. Skilled learners don’t just grab whatever’s nearest; they size up the subject, decide what’s worth their attention, and set themselves up before diving in. In the research on how good learners work, this up-front phase — planning, judging the task, deciding what and how — is one of the things that most separates people who learn well from people who merely put in hours (Zimmerman, 2002). The few minutes you spend here choosing the right two books beats hours spent grinding through the wrong five.

So as you gather, keep a light hand on the wheel:

• Map before you collect. Skim the landscape first — a contents page, a syllabus, one good overview article — so you know the shape of the territory before you start pulling things into it.
• Aim at your actual goal. Material for “I need to pass this exam” looks different from material for “I want to genuinely understand this for years.” Decide which you’re doing, then collect to fit.
• Stop when you have enough. Gathering feels like progress, which is exactly why it’s such a good way to procrastinate. A tidy folder of unread PDFs has taught you nothing. Get a workable core and move on.

Judge the source, not just the search rank#

When good material was scarce, you mostly trusted what you could find. Now that anyone can publish anything — and AI can generate plausible-sounding text on demand — judging a source is part of the job, not an afterthought.

A few habits worth keeping:

• Prefer sources with their reasoning on show. A good source doesn’t just assert; it explains, cites, and lets you see where its claims come from. That’s what you want to learn from — and, conveniently, it’s what helps you spot a weak source from a strong one.
• Cross-check anything that matters. If a fact is load-bearing for you, see it in two independent places before you build on it. This is doubly true for anything an AI tells you: today’s tools are fluent, confident, and quite capable of inventing a citation that doesn’t exist. Treat AI output as a lead, not a verdict — then verify it.
• Go past the obvious references. The standard textbook is the start, not the finish. What else exists? A practitioner’s blog, a recorded lecture, a biography of someone who actually did the thing — these often stay with you longer because they carry stories and emotion, not just facts.

Where to look#

The classic sources still hold up, and most learning draws on a mix of them:

• Books, texts and manuals. Still the backbone for most subjects. Look past the prescribed list. I recommend you buy at least the core texts rather than borrow them — then you’ll have no hesitation about scribbling notes and marking them up, which is half of what makes a book yours.
• Instructors, lecturers and experts. Often the content lives in a knowledgeable person’s head. Whether it’s one-to-one or a lecture hall, the limiting factor is usually your note-taking, not their teaching — so have a system for capturing and organising what you hear.
• The web — and AI tools. The open web puts an extraordinary amount within reach, and AI assistants now let you ask for a tailored explanation on demand. Both are superb for sourcing — finding material, surfacing a clearer explanation, pointing you at what to read next. Just remember the line drawn in learning with AI : a tool that helps you find and understand is a gift; a tool that does the understanding for you leaves you with nothing. Use AI to gather and clarify, then do the learning yourself.
• Other learners and people in the field. Fellow students often have references and shortcuts you’ve never met. People who’ve already walked the path have more still. Trade your own findings back — it’s how the good stuff circulates.
• Video and other references. Recorded demonstrations are excellent for skills you need to see. And keep a decent reference to hand — a dictionary for unfamiliar terms, a solid encyclopaedia or reference site for the background a course skims over.

Look for the how, not just the why#

As you gather, notice what kind of content you’re collecting. A lot of books and courses — especially in self-help and business — spend their pages on why a skill matters and barely any on how to do it, let alone how to learn it. Picture three books on making eye contact during a talk. One tells you eye contact is important and builds rapport — the why it matters book. A better one tells you exactly what to do: get your eyes off your notes, hold one listener for two or three seconds, then move to another — the how to do it book. The best gives you drills to practise it — stand in the kitchen and make your points to the appliances, mark your notes with an arrow to remind you to look up — the how to learn it book.

All three have a place, but if everything you’ve found is the first kind, you don’t yet have what you need to build the skill. Memorising ten reasons good eye contact matters won’t improve yours. So as you search, keep asking which kind you’re holding, and keep looking until you’ve got the how and ideally the how to learn it.

Once you’ve engaged with the subject and gathered a workable set of material, you’re ready to move on. This section goes deeper on two things:

Content sources #

Where learning content comes from — books, instructors, the web, video, other learners, and more — and how to weigh each one.

Collecting content #

Practical capture: intelligent note-taking, highlighting and marking that earns its keep, and keeping what you gather organised enough to find again.

A last word, since gathering is so easy to overdo: a fat folder of unread material is not learning, it’s shopping. Collect enough to start, then go and engage with it.