Learn Anything Faster With Claude
Most people read. You’ll retain. Here’s the 6-step system I use - plus a copy-paste prompt kit inside.
You read an article. You watch a tutorial. You highlight half the page.
Three days later - gone.
Not because you’re not smart.
Because the way most people consume information is broken.
It’s passive. It’s slow. And it was designed for a world before AI.
By the end of this issue, you’ll get my Claude Learning Accelerator Kit - 5 copy-paste prompts that turn anything you read into something you actually retain and use. Free. No opt-in.
Let me show you exactly how I fixed this - and why it took me embarrassingly long to figure out.
My honest story
Two months ago, I was trying to learn how to run paid ads.
I’d never done it before.
I had a course, a YouTube playlist, and a folder full of bookmarks I’d never opened.
I sat down for 3 hours. Read everything. Took notes. Felt productive.
A week later, I couldn’t explain the difference between a campaign objective and an ad set without Googling it.
That’s when I stopped reading about things and started learning with Claude.
I rebuilt my entire learning system from scratch.
What you’re about to get is that system.
I used this exact system to go from zero knowledge of Claude to setting it up live - in one afternoon.
That’s roughly 6 hours of tutorial videos compressed into 90 minutes of focused work.
What you’ll become
After 1 week: You stop re-reading things three times. First pass sticks.
After 1 month: You’re picking up new tools and skills in hours, not days. The people around you notice.
After 1 year: You’re the person who always knows what’s coming - because you absorb knowledge faster than anyone in the room. That has a career value that compounds.
The old way vs. the way that actually works
The old way: Read → Highlight → Forget → Re-read → Still forget → Give up or fake it
The new way: Feed → Extract → Quiz → Connect → Compress → Verify
Six steps.
Each one has a specific Claude prompt.
Let’s go.
If this is useful, share it with one person who’s been meaning to learn something new but keeps putting it off. Takes 10 seconds.
Step 1: Feed Claude the source material
Before anything else, get your source material into Claude.
Paste an article. Drop a transcript. Upload a PDF. Give it a URL. Whatever you’re trying to learn - Claude needs to read it first.
Quick setup:
Open Claude at claude.ai
Paste your content directly into the chat - or use a URL if it’s a public page
Don’t ask it anything yet. Just say: “Read this. I’ll ask you questions in a moment.”
This one pause matters.
You’re telling Claude this is a study session, not a quick-answer session.
It changes how it responds to everything after.
This one line does all the work.
Without the setup message, Claude treats each question in isolation.
With it, the session is treated as a continuous learning conversation.
Step 2: Ask Claude to teach it back like a tutor
This is the Feynman method - but instant.
Richard Feynman believed you only understand something if you can explain it simply.
Now you don’t have to do the explaining yourself.
Claude does. Your job is to read it and flag what doesn’t land.
Quick setup:
After feeding the material, send this exact prompt (copy it exactly):
You are my personal tutor. I just shared a piece of content with you.
Teach me the 5 most important concepts from it — as if I'm smart but new to this topic.
For each concept:
- Give it a name
- Explain it in 2 sentences max
- Give me one real-world example I'd actually encounter
After you've taught me all 5, ask me: "Which one do you want to go deeper on?"Read each concept out loud - this sounds weird, but it forces your brain to actually process it
Pick the fuzziest one. Go deeper on that one first.
The ‘ask me which one’ instruction at the end is what most people skip.
It turns a monologue into a dialogue.
That’s where the real retention happens.
Step 3: Run an active recall quiz
Reading feels like learning.
It isn’t. Retrieval is learning.
Every study on memory says the same thing: if you want something to stick, you have to pull it out of your brain - not push it back in.
A quiz forces retrieval. Claude builds the quiz for you in 10 seconds.
Quick setup:
After Step 2, send this:
Now quiz me on what I just learned.
Give me 5 questions - mix of multiple choice and short answer.
Don't make them easy. Make them test whether I actually understood — not whether I memorised words.
After I answer each one, tell me if I'm right, what I missed, and why it matters.Answer each question without scrolling back up - the struggle is the point
When Claude corrects you, read the explanation twice
I’m going to be honest - this step feels uncomfortable.
That’s good.
Discomfort in learning means the material is moving from short-term to long-term memory.
Push through it.
Step 4: Build an analogy map
New knowledge needs a hook. Without one, it floats.
The hook is something you already know.
Claude can find one for you in 5 seconds - and once it does, the concept never leaves you.
Quick setup:
Tell Claude what you already know well - a hobby, a job skill, a subject you’re confident in
Send this prompt:
I already understand [marketing funnels / cooking / football tactics / project management — use whatever fits you].
Take the 3 hardest concepts from what I just learned and connect each one to something from my existing knowledge.
Be specific. I want to be able to say "ohh — it's like when..." and have it click.Once you have the analogy, write it down in your own words.
That 30 seconds of writing encodes it faster than reading it five more times would.
Pause here. Read this before moving on.
I know the instinct is to race through and grab all 6 steps as fast as possible.
Resist that.
Steps 1 through 4 already give you more retention than 90% of the content people consume in a month.
If you stop here and actually do these four things the next time you’re trying to learn something, you’ll feel the difference today.
The last two steps are the ones that turn you from a learner into a practitioner.
Take a breath first.
Step 5: Compress it into a cheat sheet you’ll actually use
Long notes don’t get read. One-page cheat sheets do.
After you’ve learned the material, make Claude distill it for you into something you can scan in 60 seconds - something you’d actually open the next time you need it.
Quick setup:
Send this prompt:
This looks long. It isn’t work - it’s copy-paste. Claude writes this for you in 10 seconds. Your only job is to paste it into Gemini.
You are a visual prompt engineer for Gemini image generation.
I just learned about Google Ads in this session. Write me a Gemini image generation prompt for a flat educational cheat sheet infographic based on what we covered.
The prompt you write must produce this exact output when pasted into Gemini:
CANVAS SPECS:
- 1080x1350px portrait
- Flat design only — no illustrations, no icons, no 3D, no photography
- Background: off-white #FAF9F7
CONTENT TO INCLUDE (hardcode all text exactly as written below — no placeholders):
Header (dark bar #0A0A0F, full width):
- Title: "5 Google Ads Concepts That Save You Money"
- Subtitle: "What beginners get wrong — and how to fix it"
- Tag bar: Search · Display · Bidding · Metrics · Mistakes
5 Content Rows (alternating white and #F2F2F2 backgrounds):
Row 01 — Campaign Types
- Search captures existing demand. Performance Max lets Google's AI do the work.
- BEST FOR: Founders running their first ad campaign
Row 02 — Keyword Match Types
- Exact Match = full control. Broad Match = Google decides. Never use Broad without negative keywords.
- BEST FOR: Anyone tired of paying for clicks that never convert
Row 03 — Bidding Strategies
- Target CPA tells Google your max cost per lead. Manual CPC gives you full control.
- BEST FOR: Advertisers with at least 30 conversions already tracked
Row 04 — Key Metrics
- Quality Score (1–10): higher score = cheaper clicks. ROAS of 4x = $4 back per $1 spent.
- BEST FOR: Anyone trying to read their dashboard without guessing
Row 05 — Beginner Mistakes
- Never send traffic to your homepage. Always use a dedicated landing page.
- BEST FOR: Anyone who ran ads and wondered where the money went
Callout Box (blue left border, background #EFF6FF):
PRO TIP: Set a $10/day budget. Run 7 days. Look at data before touching anything.
COMMON MISTAKE: Auto-applying Google's recommendations without reviewing them. Turn it off day one.
Footer (bottom strip, two sides):
Left: "To get more free AI cheatsheets, join: humzakhalid.substack.com"
Right: "Hamza Khalid"
TYPOGRAPHY RULES TO INCLUDE IN THE PROMPT:
- Headlines and section labels: Clash Display 700
- All body text and bullets: Darker Grotesque
- Section numbers: white text on #2979FF rounded pill shapes
- Accent color: #2979FF
- Body text: #1A1A1A
- Muted text: #666666
STYLE RULES TO INCLUDE IN THE PROMPT:
- Flat design only
- No icons, no logos, no illustrations, no decorative elements
- No shadows, no gradients
- Every word above must appear exactly as written
- Typography is the only visual element
Output only the Gemini prompt — clean, copy-paste ready, nothing else before or after it.Copy the output into Notion, Obsidian, or Apple Notes, or simply download it
Title it with the date so you can find it later
This is the artifact from every learning session.
Over 3 months, you build a personal knowledge library in your own words - indexed by topic, ready when you need it.
Step 6: Run the blind spot check
What you don’t know will hurt you.
This is the step most people skip - and the reason they still sound shaky when someone asks them a question about what they “learned.”
Claude will find the gaps you didn’t know you had.
Quick setup:
Send this final prompt:
Based on our full conversation today, tell me:
1. What did I seem to misunderstand or only partially grasp?
2. What important things from the original material did we NOT cover?
3. What would an expert on this topic say I still need to learn?
Be direct. I'd rather know the gaps now than discover them at the wrong moment.Don’t get defensive when Claude points out gaps - this is the most valuable output of the whole session
Add the gaps to your next learning session as starting questions
The phrase ‘be direct, I’d rather know the gaps now’ is the unlock.
Without it, Claude softens the feedback.
With it, you get the honest version.
This newsletter grows from your shares. If you got value from this, forward it to one person who consumes a lot of content but retains very little.
Real-world use cases
Learning a new software tool before paying for a course: Paste the tool’s documentation or a “getting started” article. Run Steps 1–3. You’ll know in 20 minutes whether the tool is worth your time and money - before spending either.
Absorbing a dense research paper or report: Paste the abstract, intro, and conclusion. Ask Claude to teach you the 5 findings that matter. Then quiz yourself on only those. Skip the middle 40 pages unless Step 6 tells you that you need them.
Prepping for a job interview or client call in under 2 hours: Feed Claude the company’s About page, a recent article they published, and the job description. Run the full 6-step system. You’ll walk in knowing more about their world than most candidates who spent a week preparing.
Getting up to speed on an industry you know nothing about: Find one good overview article. Run Steps 1, 2, and 4. The analogy map in Step 4 is especially powerful here - it connects an unfamiliar industry to your existing mental models in minutes.
These are the use cases that matter.
Nail these before you try to optimize anything else.
Before you close this, there are two things left. One is free. One could be the most valuable thing in this issue.
In 60 seconds
→ Feed Claude your source material and set the session context
→ Ask Claude to teach you the 5 key concepts as a tutor
→ Run the active recall quiz - answer without looking back
→ Build an analogy map from what you already know
→ Compress everything into a scannable cheat sheet
→ Run the blind spot check - find what you still don’t know
Save this. Screenshot it. Come back to it.
A word before your gift
Paid members of AI In Public aren’t just readers.
They’re the ones who come back and say, “I used that prompt and here’s what happened.”
That’s the gap. Between reading and doing.
Paid membership is where we close it - with deeper walkthroughs, prompt teardowns, and a community of practitioners who share what’s actually working.
NOTE
The first 100 people who go paid will also become our Founding Members - locked in at $100 for life, instead of the $300. We’re not there yet.
If you’ve been thinking about it, this is the issue to do it. You’re already doing the work.
