Saved transcript

Learn to Learn in 4hrs 54mins - Full Course

Channel: Justin Sung

I've been a learning coach for the past

14 years. I've spent thousands of hours

understanding and synthesizing the

research on how to be a better and

faster learner. In this 4-hour guide,

I've put together some of my most

important videos on learning. It's

designed for you to watch from start to

finish in order, and I've divided it

into four chapters. Chapter one,

retrieval, chapter two, encoding,

chapter three, mind mapping, and chapter

four skill acquisition. The first two

chapters cover two of the most

foundational learning skills that you

need to master. Doing these well means

that you're able to remember more of

what you learn, understand complex

concepts more deeply, and recall and

apply what you've learned in whatever

way you need to, whether that's for

exams or [music] for work. The third

chapter covers how you can then leverage

these core skills to do more effective

note takingaking and how you can do

note-taking to make your learning even

faster and easier. The final chapter

then extends on these skills to not only

just learning new knowledge but also for

learning new skills. Especially for

those of you who are professionals

trying to learn uh new complex skills

for work, that final chapter will be

especially [music] valuable for you. So

I recommend that you take notes as you

go. Make sure to apply what you learn

and we'll get started with chapter one,

retrieval.

It's surprisingly easy to become good at

studying as long as you build the three

learning pillars. I've noticed that once

students are able to master all three

learning pillars, they're able to study

much more to a much higher quality in a

shorter amount of time, which ultimately

means getting better results. Now, the

issue is that most people don't know

about these pillars or they focus on the

wrong ones, which means even though it

can be easy to get good at studying,

most people will keep struggling their

whole lives. So, in this video, I'm

going to teach you what the three

pillars are and what you need to do to

master them to become a top learner. But

let's make something very clear. Getting

better at learning is not the same thing

as making learning faster and easier.

Effective learning takes effort. It

often feels uncomfortable. High quality

learning involves thinking really hard.

Most people think that you can get

better at learning without doing the

hard thinking. And so they actually

avoid that effort, [music] which means

that they avoid getting better. So

instead, most people think about how

they can just cover content faster. But

covering content fast doesn't mean

anything unless you can retain what

you've learned and then use it the way

you need to. Even if you can retain and

remember and spit out a 100 facts, it

doesn't matter if what you needed it for

was to solve problems. So getting better

at learning is about knowing what type

of thinking is effective and getting

better at doing that and then over time

you do get faster at doing that and it

becomes more comfortable. But the way

you get more comfortable is like how

long distance running gets more

comfortable for a marathon runner. It's

not that it's become objectively easy,

it's that you get used to the

difficulty. Getting better at learning

is also not the same thing as finding

the best app or finding the best

technique. It's perfectly possible to

have the best app and use the best

techniques and still do terribly with

your learning if you're not thinking in

the right way. Getting better at

learning means that you understand the

right way to think so that you don't

even need the best app or the best

technique. You can do well even without

it because you know how to use your

brain and think in the right way. So

with that out of the way, here are the

three pillars and how you need to think

about getting better at learning.

Learning is ultimately about getting

information and then putting it inside

our memory. And the process of putting

information inside our memory is

something that we call encoding. And

then when we use that information from

our memory, we call this process

retrieval. Retrieval helps us find gaps

in our memory. And it also strengthens

and consolidates our long-term memory.

Which means when you practice retrieving

your knowledge, your knowledge gets

stronger. On the other hand, encoding is

what determines how many gaps you have

in the first place. If your encoding is

not very good, it means that your memory

is very poor. It's very superficial, and

so you have lots of gaps to find in your

retrieval. And sometimes it's

overwhelming to try to fill all of those

gaps. This is the typical situation of

the Anki grind or the flashc card grind

where almost all of the learning is just

done through retrieval and testing

yourself through flash cards and the

encoding is not being done at a high

quality which means that you're

constantly forgetting almost everything

and overwhelming yourself with the need

to endlessly relearn the things that

you're forgetting. And so these are the

first two pillars to be a great learner.

You have to have good enough encoding so

your memory isn't full of holes. And you

have to have good enough retrieval so

that you're finding those gaps and

you're deepening your knowledge. The

third pillar is because learning doesn't

happen in isolation. It doesn't matter

if you have the best encoding and best

retrieval technique. If for example you

procrastinate so much that you never sit

down to study or you're so easily

distracted that you can't focus for more

than 20 minutes. These are things that I

call enablers. Enabler skills are not

your direct learning skills. They're the

skills that allow you to show up and do

the work you need to do consistently.

And so when we think about great,

really, really effective learners, then

one of their biggest characteristics is

that they have phenomenal encoding

skills. Their encoding ability is so

strong and their retention is so good

that they barely forget anything. They

don't have many gaps to find. They're

able to achieve a really deep level of

understanding and mastery in a very

short period of time. People with

phenomenal encoding skills, they often

don't need to spend a lot of time

studying. They don't need to spend a lot

of time relearning things. And so, you

can argue that encoding is actually the

most important skill for you to develop

to become a good learner, not just

learning how to do more flashcards or

writing pretty notes. But it is actually

the last thing that you should learn how

to get good at. And so here is how you

get good at each of these three pillars

and the order that you should get good

at them in. The first one you should try

to develop is actually your enablers.

And you can divide enabler skills into

two different types. The first type is

self-management. This includes things

like your ability to stop

procrastinating, your time management,

how you prioritize your tasks, and how

you can manage your focus and

concentration. The other category is

growth skills. And this is one that most

people don't think about. Growth skills

are actually the skills that allow you

to improve with time because not

everyone gets better and develops skills

at the same pace. And so if you want to

get better at I mean basically anything,

but especially something as complex as

learning, you need to have really good

growth skills. Otherwise, you're going

to give up before you get good. And the

two biggest growth skills are

experimentation and critical reflection.

If you imagine one person who learns a

new learning technique and then they

never use it, they're afraid of trying

it. They're afraid of making a mistake.

And then when they do use it, they don't

know how to think about how well it

went. Versus someone who learns a new

technique is able to use it immediately

and then once they use it and have that

experience, they're able to reflect on

it, see what went well, see what went

wrong, what they could improve, and then

create the next experiment immediately.

You can imagine which person is going to

improve more quickly. And I see this

very clearly in the students in my

program where some students are learning

skills literally 20 times faster than

other students. And 99 out of 100 times

when we look at the students that are

improving very slowly and feeling

frustrated and demotivated at the

experience of learning to learn, it's

because they are holding back on

experimentation or they're not doing

critical reflection often. And so this

is why we need to work on the enablers

first because either self-management or

growth skills are going to be rate

limiters for you. Which means it doesn't

matter how good your encoding is. It

doesn't matter how good your retrieval

is. It doesn't matter what apps you use,

how you write your notes. None of that

matters if your self-management and your

growth skills aren't good enough. And so

the easy part to this is that if you

know that you have an issue with your

procrastination or with your time

management or with your experimentation

and your growth skills, then you know

that you can work on that and you should

just work on that first and you will see

great results in a short period of time.

But most people starting this learning

skills journey will ignore this stuff.

They'll say, "This isn't important for

me. I just need to learn something else.

I need just a new technique that's going

to fix my problem." And then they're

going to struggle. And they're going to

find learning to learn very, very hard.

and they're probably going to give up

before they get good. So, if you want

learning to learn to be easier, focus on

your enablers first. And you don't need

to become like a machine, a a paragon of

focus. You just have to be good enough.

And once you are good enough with your

enablers, you're ready to move on to the

second. The second part is retrieval.

So, if we go back to this diagram here,

you remember that retrieval is whenever

we use information from our memory.

We've already encoded it. It's in our

memory and now we're calling upon that

and testing ourselves. So for example,

when we do a quiz or answer some

practice questions that's retrieval and

there are many many ways of doing

retrieval depending on how you need to

use your knowledge. If you need detailed

factory recall, we've got techniques

like doing flashcards or if you need to

apply multiple concepts together, you

can solve complex problems. You can use

and apply a knowledge to build something

like develop an app, teaching someone,

answering questions, making your own

questions, answering questions and then

making your own answer sheet, quizzing

your friends, brain dumps, mindm brain

dumps, writing practice essays, using AI

to generate your own practice test. And

it's not that one strategy is better

than the other. Each has their own

purposes. It's about figuring out how

you need to use your knowledge and then

aligning it with the retrieval

strategies you use. And when you have a

retrieval strategy that is consistent

and regular and it's aligned to your

knowledge needs, it enhances your

retention. It enhances your fluency and

recall speed and helps you to find gaps

in your knowledge in advance so that you

can fill them. And so hopefully you can

see why you need to start working on

your enablers before you work on your

retrieval skills because it's very hard

to have consistent regular highquality

retrieval sessions if you struggle with

your time management. if you can't

prioritize your tasks. But by locking in

really good retrieval, you've created a

safety net to your learning. Even if you

didn't understand it the first time,

even if it was a complex topic, even if

you're feeling nervous about the exam,

your retrieval strategy is there to

catch any gaps and help you prepare and

become confident before the exams. And

speaking of safety nets, what happens if

you're watching a video like this and

you're finding it helpful and you're

finding this advice useful and you want

to make sure you apply it in your life,

but you're worried that once you click

off of this video, you're going to

forget about it. Nothing's going to

change. What if there was a way that

every single week you could get a

reminder about what you need to focus on

delivered straight to your inbox,

written by me for free in the form of a

newsletter. Well, what a great idea. I

already thought of that. I have a free

newsletter which I send out every single

week which has tips like this. It's a

distillation of the study techniques

that I wish I knew 14 years ago when I

first started this covering what I think

are some of the most important

principles to help you become a more

confident learner. The emails take a few

minutes to read but can potentially save

you hours a week through efficiency. So

if you're interested again it's

completely free. There's a link to sign

up to the newsletter in the description.

Now the third pillar it's no mystery is

going to be encoding. I said encoding is

arguably the most important change that

you can make to become a better learner.

This is the hallmark of a genius. So why

is it the last thing for you to work on?

Well, it's because encoding the third

pillar takes a long time. Becoming good

at encoding is not about learning how to

do some mind maps. Even though that is a

great technique that can help you be

better at encoding. It's not about

reading a certain way. It's not about

writing your notes a certain way. It is

about how you think. Encoding is

basically a word to encapsulate all of

your current habits of how you interpret

and process new information. These are

habits that you've built up over years,

decades even. Some of those habits are

working for you and some of those habits

are outdated or hindering you. And so it

takes time to gain awareness of your

current learning habits and it takes

time to unlearn those habits. sometimes

a very long time. And it takes time to

replace those with new habits and learn

techniques like mind mapping and certain

reading techniques that help you think

in new ways and build those new neural

pathways. For some really experienced

already top achieving learners, this

process might only take a few weeks. For

students who have never experienced high

quality encoding before, developing

these habits can take several years.

Even with guidance and feedback like in

an intensive program like mine, it can

take months. And unless you have just

months of free time that you can be

struggling and not getting better at

learning, encoding is not the thing that

is going to make a difference for you in

the short term. The reason we work on

our enablers and our retrieval skills

first is because once we have these

locked down, it gives us the runway, the

time, the safety to slowly start working

on our encoding skills. And yes, once

you do improve your encoding skills, it

is legitimately life-changing. The

amount and the efficiency that I can

learn at now compared to when I was 17

years old is shockingly better. But if I

had just tried to work on only my

encoding skills that entire time, I

probably just would have failed medical

school in the meantime. By the way, in

terms of the specific process of what

encoding actually looks like, I go

through that in more detail in some

other videos. But here's the thing is

that even though if you follow these

steps and you learn it in this order

where you start with your enablers and

then your retrieval and then you slowly

work on your encoding skills, this is

the easy way to get better at learning.

Once you have all of these things, you

have a great very solid memory and then

you have a great ability to find your

gaps. You will walk into every exam for

the rest of your life feeling confident.

You will be focused and effective and in

control of your learning process not

just for uni but also in professional

life.

Okay. So that was a highlevel overview

of the three pillars of learning.

Self-management and enablers, retrieval

and encoding. Now, we will talk about

encoding more in chapter 2, but before

that, we need to look more deeply at our

retrieval skills. And the first step is

to realize that active recall and space

retrieval or space repetition does not

work. At least not in the way that most

people think it does in the way that

most people use it. It is just not a

long-term winning strategy. And until

you realize that, [music] you're not

really going to be able to improve and

become more efficient as a learner. So,

in this next video, we'll start by

addressing that problem. So, this video

is going to be a little bit

controversial. Not because I want it to

be controversial, but it just is. If

you're really into active recall and

space repetition, and if those are the

techniques that you think work the best,

then you're probably

wrong. Let me explain why. For those of

you that don't know, I'm Dr. [music]

Justin Sun. I'm a medical doctor, but

I'm also more importantly a learning

coach. It's what I do full-time. I work

with students uh teaching them

evidence-based studying and time

management skills.

Before I tell you why active recall and

space repetition doesn't really work, uh

let me tell you a really quick story

about how I came to discover this.

Okay, so rewind like 10 years ago and

I'm trying to enter into medical school.

I'm still in high school right now and

I'm doing relatively okay. I'm getting a

high grade band. I'm getting some

scholarships. I'm doing reasonably well.

You know, people used to look at me as a

smart kid. I go into university. During

this year, I just studied and studied

and studied like non-stop. That's all I

did. And in this first year of uni, this

is where I really started getting into

active recall and space repetition. It

was all the hype. Well, still is all the

hype. And I had thousands of flashc

cards and I would study literally

every day all day. When I say all day, I

was only getting like 2 or 3 hours of

sleep every night. Um it was very very

bad. And I did that every single day

every single weekend uh for about 9 to

10 consecutive months. It was pretty

brutal. Um I was incredibly sleepd

deprived obviously. I was hallucinating.

Even I remember one time where I had

been awake for like I think I was awake

for like 77 hours and I was probably

studying like 70 of those hours. I would

study when I was eating. I would study

while I was brushing my teeth. I would

study in the shower. My entire day was

just filled with studying. Uh obviously

I was a little bit obsessed and I did

end up getting very very good grades. Um

and I ended up getting into medical

school. So what happened when I entered

into medical school? Well, the thing is

the thing is that when you enter into

medical school, right? So before getting

in, I was studying about this much.

Okay, that year I essentially memorized

this whole textbook and probably a

little bit more for the other subjects

as well. But when I got into medical

school, I realized that there was a lot

more that I needed to learn. And in

fact, the content was about double. I

needed to study about double. So, for

those of you that are pretty good at

maths, you'll know that um you can't

study more than like if if you're

studying 20 hours a day, you can't study

40 hours a day, no matter how lingling

you are. And that was obviously a

problem because I just entered into

medical school and I didn't want to

fail. So, I had to figure out a better

way to study. So, that's when I started

looking into effective study techniques.

And what really got me was that I was

spending a lot of time doing my flash

cards and space repetition and active

recall, all of that sort of stuff. and

it wasn't really getting the type of

results that I wanted. There were guys

in my class who I like never saw

studying and [snorts] they would

consistently outperform me in the in my

test and exams and it was pretty

frustrating. So I looked into the

research and I started experimenting

with different ways that I could study

and I did this like a a crazy person

like my life depended on it because my

livelihood did. I didn't want to spend

my whole life just sitting in a library

wasting away and everything I learned I

taught to other students. By the time

I'd finished my third year of uni, I'd

already gotten a a teaching certificate.

So, I'd learned a lot more about the

theory behind learning and how that

works. And that allowed me to learn even

more deeply. Okay, fast forward a few

years. I'd actually built an entire

business around uh teaching students.

And one of the things I learned while I

was teaching other students was that

there are some techniques that will work

as long as you're already pretty good at

studying. If you're not someone that is

like very uh good at what's called deep

processing, um you know, essentially

someone that can just pick up a new

concept and learn it really really

quickly to begin with, then a lot of the

techniques don't actually work or it's

not [music] enough. And so for for me as

essentially a learning professional,

teaching others and getting paid to help

them learn to learn, [music]

I had to figure out a way to help

students to do well even if they weren't

already, you know, like a genius. And

this is kind of where the story begins

because it's been 10 years and I've

learned a lot. So, hear me out on this.

So, the first thing that I want to say

is that I know that what I'm going to

say today goes in the face of maybe

everything that you've heard from your

friends or your teachers or your parents

or other people on YouTube. I know and I

get it. When I teach you uh what I've

learned, it's going to make sense to you

as well. Okay? But there is a lot to

cover. There's a lot of stuff I'm going

to go through that you've probably never

heard before. So, uh, before we

understand why active recall and space

repetition doesn't work as well as

people hype it up to, we first need to

understand a little bit about how

learning actually works in the first

place. Because without knowing that,

we're not going to understand where it

works and then where it fails. And

that's going to be really important for

you to look at your own studying system

and actually start tweaking it. If you

don't know why it works in the first

place, every time you have an issue,

you're not going to know how to problem

solve it. And I think that's very

important to know. So the first thing I

want to point out is that studying is

not the same thing as learning and this

may be something that is really obvious

to you uh but I found that a lot of

students have not ever thought about

this is the fact that studying is

actually this process that we are doing

physically

right it could be the writing of notes

when we're um you know in class or

revising material it could be us

watching a video about something right

now you might be studying this video as

you're listening. This is the stuff we

do out in the physical world. Uh and the

purpose of doing this is so that we can

get learning occurring. So the purpose

of studying is to produce learning and

learning is actually the cognitive

process that occurs and this is

essentially when information is

connected into our brain and we can say

that we have learned successfully if

that knowledge is retained and

preferably we are actually able to use

it and apply this knowledge. So learning

and studying are two separate things. So

if you were to take a textbook and then

you were to smash your face into the

textbook, you would not say that that is

either studying or learning. But if you

were to smash your face into the

textbook enough times, you will at the

very least have learned the name of the

title of the textbook as it comes into

your face repeatedly.

That's not the best wording that I could

have used for that. As it impacts your

face repeatedly. And so in this example,

we have actually learned something. So,

if your friend were to say, "Hey, how

are you going to study for that test?"

And you say, "Oh, you know, just the

usual, slamming the textbook into my

face." Then that would be your studying

technique, I guess. Now, that's an

extreme [music] example. Well, what

about if you were to open up the

textbook and then you were to touch the

pages? What if you were to flick the

pages? What if you were to look at the

pages while you were flicking them? What

if you were to read the words on the

pages? What if you were to read slowly?

What if you were to then read it and

then write something? Do you see how

changing different things about the

activity changes the amount of learning

that it engages? So it shows that the

learning process is something that is

activated by the studying process and

not all studying processes activate

[music]

the same amount of learning. So that

means that you can potentially spend 10

hours studying using one technique and

then get only 1 hour of learning if your

technique [music] is only let's say 10%

efficient. Now in reality it's really

hard to put these exact percentage

numbers on it because it's just really

hard to measure but you get the gist.

Some techniques are really efficient.

you can get a lot of learning in your

[music] brain done using them. Some

techniques are less efficient and

broadly speaking we call the techniques

that are more effective at learning

active learning techniques. And there is

a huge range of active learning

techniques [music] that we can use while

we're studying. So what is it that is

actually happening in our brain when we

say that this learning thing is

encoding? Okay, so let me give you a

very quick dive into how our memory

actually works. There's this one model

for our memory that is called the

multi-store model of memory.

And this can get pretty complicated, but

long story short, it says that there are

different places in our memory where the

information goes. Number one, when we

take in information, it comes in a

sensory information. So this is the type

of stuff that we might be seeing with

our eyes or listening with our ears.

Right? Now you are receiving sensory

information and this goes into a part of

our brain which is called the sensory

memory. So that's relatively

straightforward. Now information from

your sensory memory is forgotten very

very quickly because if you imagine

holding on to every piece of information

that you are bombarded with on a daily

basis and remembering all of that your

brain would just explode. Imagine

remembering every single sensation that

is on your skin, every license plate you

see as you're walking. That would be

incredibly overwhelming. But more

importantly, it's very energy

inefficient. If we don't need that

information, it's not going to keep it.

In fact, it's a life ordeath situation

from your body's point of view. Your

brain consumes already at rest around

20% of your resting energy caloric

intake per day. So what that means is

that if it's unnecessarily being super

active, holding on to irrelevant

information, you will literally die.

So the point is that your brain is

really really efficient at forgetting

anything that is not relevant and not

necessary. What happens after this is

that if you intend to keep this

information, if you want to remember it

for longer, then it shunts this

information into something that is

called the working memory. Now, this is

also sometimes called the short-term

memory, but I like calling it the

working memory because it also talks

about one of its other functions, which

is that when you have information that's

in your long-term memory and you want to

use it again, it has to go through the

work working memory first. So, here's

how this works. Some of this information

that initially came in through sensory

pathways goes into our working memory

and then from our working memory goes

into our longterm

memory here. And this is a process that

we call encoding.

Now when we want to use this

information, we have to retrieve it from

our long-term memory. And this is a

process that's called retrieval. So that

means that every time you are answering

a test question or an exam paper or

someone asks you a question about

anything, what we're trying to do is

we're trying to collect it from our

long-term memory, call it forth into our

working memory, and that's where we can

actually answer or manipulate the

information or do something with it. So

I like thinking about the working memory

almost like a hotel lobby. You can stay

there for a short period of time, but

you're going to get kicked out if you

don't have a room in the hotel. But to

get in and out of this building, you

need to pass through the lobby no matter

what. So the working memory is where

you're going to be spending a lot of

your time when you're manipulating the

information, but it's not a good place

to hold on to it because the working

memory will also forget information

relatively quickly in the span of sort

of seconds to minutes. Now, your

long-term memory is a little bit

different. Your long-term memory will

forget things as well, but it will

forget things much more slowly. it will

forget things in the span of hours to

even months and it depends on how

strongly it was encoded in this process

here and that is very very complicated.

I'm not going to be able to get into it

and we also don't fully know exactly all

the things that that involves but we do

know a few things due to extensive

research in this field and one of those

things is that encoding and retrieval

are both very very important. You can't

just encode because then your brain

doesn't know how to retrieve it properly

to actually answer the questions. But

also, you can't retrieve what you don't

encode. You can't pour from an empty

bucket. If you don't fill it in the

first place, or if your bucket has

holes, then when you need to pour stuff

out of it, nothing's going to come out.

So, they're two sides of the same coin.

And students often don't think much

about the encoding process. And that's

because of another thing that we know

about encoding which is the fact that

encoding uses a lot of what we call

cognitive load. [music] And cognitive

load is in short the brain power

necessary to do the encoding process.

Encoding does not happen without

sufficient cognitive [music]

load. Now cognitive load is also

something that is actually pretty

complicated and a lot of places teach it

wrong. I've even [music] advised at

schools where their own school

curriculum taught cognitive load

incorrectly. But again, the long story

short here is that your brain [music]

has a certain amount of load that it can

kind of tolerate. And this is something

that can actually be trained. So if you

aren't able to tolerate a lot of this

brain power and a lot of this load, then

you [music] can actually train that,

which I will talk about in other videos.

But essentially what happens is that

when the load increases your learning

actually increases as well up to a

certain point. So what happens is if

this red line is talking about the

amount of cognitive load that you've got

on your brain and then this green line

is talking about the amount of learning

that's occurring aka the amount of

encoding that is incurring. Then what we

see is that the amount of learning is

really low at low levels of cognitive

load and it goes up as the load goes up

to a certain extent. Once it reaches

that threshold, it actually starts to

plateau and go down. So if we've got too

much load, then we're overwhelmed and

we're not learning effectively. But if

we don't have enough, we're actually

just fundamentally not encoding it at

all. and all of the techniques that

result in very low cognitive load and

therefore very low encoding and

therefore very low learning and

therefore making you forget the same

thing that you studied 20 times very

very quickly. These are all called

passive learning. And the thing is that

this is something that happens in your

brain. You can use the same technique

such as reading a book but if you're

thinking about it differently you could

get a lot of learning out of it or you

might be completely passive. So you it's

hard to tell based on just looking at

someone studying or seeing what

technique they're using how much

cognitive load is actually going on

inside their brain. And research is

strongly supportive that the

relationship between cognitive load and

encoding and how good your memory and

retention is is very strongly associated

with the amount of load. So the more

load the better to a certain point. So

what does this cognitive load actually

feel like when you're studying?

Cognitive load feels confusing. It feels

like you're already trying to figure

this out. You might have a little bit of

cognitive load right now thinking, "What

is he talking about? Where is this

going? How does that fit in? How do I

apply that to my life? How does that how

is that similar or different to what

else I know?" These questions, this

confusion, this is cognitive load. And

this is a sign that your brain [music]

is engaging high efficiency learning

pathways. Which means that if you're

studying and [music] this isn't

happening in your brain, you're not

getting that cognitive load. And another

thing that we know is that when this is

happening in your brain, it's directly

opposed to feeling [music]

bored or or drowsy. So if you've ever

been studying and you just find it so

boring and tedious and you're getting

sleepy and every time you start

studying, you fall asleep. That's what

used to happen to me all the time. In

fact, I probably got more sleep while I

just took naps while I was studying than

I did in my bed. Well, if that's

happening, then that is a sign that your

studying technique is actually [music]

not very efficient because it means that

you're not using the right types of

pathways in your brain because if you

were, you actually wouldn't feel that.

And there is studies that's [music] done

on the electrical activity of the brain

that shows the different waves. And so

right here, this is one of the main

reasons why techniques about encoding

and this stuff is not [music] really

talked about and you may have never

heard of this before is because of the

fact that learning correct encoding is

difficult. It's not just difficult in

that there are a lot of steps and

there's [music] a very specific pathway

to allow you to do correct encoding. In

my [music] course where I work with

students intimately, it takes months to

build up someone's encoding [music] to a

very very significant degree. But it is

in essence forcing yourself to become

smarter. When your encoding goes up, you

are faster at studying. You can just

[music] understand concepts faster. You

can just hold on to the information for

longer. You don't need to revise it all

the time.

>> [music]

>> your confidence goes up and you just

start enjoying the studying process a

lot more. But that takes a lot of effort

and you have to be very willing and

[music] ready to accept the discomfort

that comes with this encoding process.

And in fact, this whole idea that it's

difficult and it's uncomfortable, this

is actually called desirable difficulty.

And not many students are willing to go

through that discomfort in order to

learn the skills. Much like how if you

were to go to the gym, you're only

getting an effective workout if your

muscles are feeling pretty tired. Same

thing here is that your brain is only

really being used effectively [music] if

it has that level of discomfort and

cognitive load. So on the flip side,

that actually means that retrieval

techniques are easier to learn. And this

is where active recall and space

repetition come in. They're very easy

techniques to learn. Pretty much anyone

can pick it up. It doesn't have any real

learning curve. You can hear about it

and then 10 15 minutes later pretty much

just do it straight away. And there is

going to be a benefit. So we're getting

there. We're going to understand now why

it doesn't really work beyond a certain

point. Because the reason active recall

and space repetition works in the first

place is by adjusting and working on

this forgetting curve. Now the

forgetting curve is a very popular

wellknown concept and it basically says

that the first time that you learn

something if this is time on the x-axis

here and this is the amount of knowledge

that you have in your head stored able

to be recalled on the y-axis. The first

time you learn something, you will

actually forget this information

relatively quickly. Now, if you were to

then revise this information again,

let's say a few hours later, then you

would then forget it a little bit more

slowly. And so, every time you repeat

this information, you're going to forget

it slower and slower and slower until

this curve starts plateauing. So you can

see that the slope of this here is you

know pretty steep whereas over here it's

not so steep which indicates that we are

forgetting information a lot slower over

here than over here where we're

forgetting a lot of information very

quickly. Now research will say that

after one week of learning a fact with

your without doing any other type of

retrieval in between you can actually

forget around 60% of this information 50

to 60% of it. So that effectively means

that half of all the studying that you

did completely just went to waste after

just one week. And to be honest, a lot

of students are not revising stuff at

the end of every week to begin with

either. So it's actually in reality

going to be a lot more of an issue than

this because you essentially just study

everything throughout the year and then

before your exams it's like you're just

studying it from fresh. You've forgotten

everything and I'm sure some of you can

relate to that. So what active recall

and space repetition is doing is it's

actually moving you along this

forgetting curve. So instead of being on

this line where the rate of decay and

that is the technical word for this the

rate of decay is uh very very quick

we're getting to this slope here. So we

are moving and progressing along each

slope so that our rate of knowledge

decay is a lot slower which is obviously

a good thing and this is why it works.

This is why space repetition will work

for you if you're not doing it at all.

If you're already not doing any type of

retrieval, if you're not doing any type

of repetition and revision, then it will

help you. It will work. But the thing is

it has diminishing returns. In fact,

very rapidly diminishing returns. So,

for those of you that aren't familiar,

the idea of diminishing returns is that

something can be really good at the

beginning, but then it's not so good

later on. So, let's say, for example,

you need to organize your room because

it's a mess and you can't find anything

anywhere and every time you're trying to

find a sock, it takes you 30 minutes.

Then, it might take you an hour to clean

up and organize your room a little bit.

And after an hour, sure, it's not

completely organized and it's not the

best it could possibly be, but now you

can find your sock in just 30 seconds or

less. So, there's been a huge

improvement. But now, if you were to go

and try to organize it even more if you

were to try to get [music] it perfect,

maybe right now it's 80% 90% there. But

to go that extra 10%, maybe now what

you're going to have to do is organize

all your books in alphabetical order and

then organize all your socks by

different colors and fabrics. And that

might take you another 3 or 4 hours. And

at the end of the day, it might only

help you find your sock faster by like

five more seconds. So that's what

diminishing returns would be. In that

first hour of organizing, we get huge

and rapid gains, but then it's slower

and the gains that we're getting for the

amount of effort that we're putting in

is just not quite there. So, the reason

that active recall and space repetition

are so evidence-based is that the

research strongly shows that students

that don't use active recall and space

repetition do worse than the students

that do use it. And that is completely

true. You're going from a situation that

is bad to better. But from better,

there's a very big difference between

better and really good or best. So, if

you're a student that's not aiming to go

from failing to just passing or doing

relatively well, but you're actually a

student that's already doing relatively

good, but you want to be excellent, then

you're going to find that using active

recall and space repetition, if you're

not using it already, will help you, but

it's going to be very difficult to get

to those very top marks. And so again,

when you look at the research, there

isn't really strong evidence to say that

for people that are already achieving

pretty well, that doing more active

recall and space repetition helps them.

In fact, some research says it's the

opposite. It actually makes it worse.

And that's because of the fact that

active recall and space repetition is

inherently very repetitive. In fact,

that's kind of the whole reason it works

is that it's repetitive and you're

always fighting the forgetting curve.

Your brain is constantly trying to

forget this information and you are

forcibly putting it back in there saying

don't forget it. Don't forget it. Don't

forget it. But you have to do that for

everything that you're learning. And

that will stack up when you look at all

the different subjects that you're

taking, all the different facts and all

the different concepts. You're going to

have to repeat the same thing three,

four, five times to keep it in your

brain. Which means that you have to do

three, four, five times the amount of

studying and revision to keep it in your

brain. If you imagine that the first

time you learn something, you could

encode it 100% highest quality and you

just don't forget it for like six

months, then you would probably find

that it's really easy to study for your

exams because you don't ever need to

revise the information. Now, that isn't

possible, but we can get a lot closer to

that than most students realize. In

fact, more than even most teachers will

realize. And so this experience of just

repeating information and maybe doing

your flash cards over and over again and

constantly trying to use space

repetition and study things but then

still not getting the results that you

want. This is probably a very familiar

experience to people and actually a lot

of the students that are using space

repetition active recall based systems

will find that it's not actually working

as well as it seems like it should be

working. It's not giving them the

results that they've kind of been

promised that they expected to get. It

can be extremely monotonous and

incredibly tedious, very very time

consuming and in fact actually pretty

demoralizing if you're not getting the

results. So in fact what some of the

research will show is that if you were

to look at all the different people that

are using a technique that involves

space repetition or active recall like

active recall based space repetition

algorithm Anki flash cards, you actually

find that the majority of the people

that use that technique don't do well.

So what that means is that it's actually

a really common technique that a lot of

people are using and only some people

are going to do well and those people

that will do well using that te

technique probably already have a pretty

good inherent ability to encode. Now, if

you're not one of those people that

already came into things with a high

level of encoding, then you're going to

find that active recall and space

repetition might actually make your life

harder because [music] you're having to

spend so much of your time just

repeating and relearning the same

[music] stuff that you forgot. And

that's not necessary. Like I said

before, you can actually train this

[music] process. You can train your

brain to become smarter. You can train

your brain [music] to encode information

more efficiently the first time you

learn it. And this is because of

something called neuroplasticity,

[music]

which essentially says that your brain

is the ability to remode and adapt and

become better and learn new things.

[music] So if you're not someone that is

previously really like books smart and

academic and you're not someone that's

usually really good at picking up

concepts really quickly, you can [music]

actually train that. And you can not

just train it a little bit, but you can

completely [music] just like absolutely

massively shift to the point where some

of my students in the past have actually

had interviews with their teachers

because the teachers didn't understand

how they were suddenly doing so well.

Just think about that for a second. I do

this day in day out for thousands of

students all across the world. [music]

So, it's very, very consistent. I

haven't really ever encountered a single

student that couldn't be trained to do

this. Literally ever over the last

almost 10 years of me teaching this.

Okay, but the purpose of this video is

not to pitch my course. So, if you're

interested and you want to just have

like that proof that hey, this actually

works. It's not just like some random

theory that this dude on YouTube is

talking out of like just random thin

air. This is stuff that's like real life

cemented and actual practice. I've got

real students, real data that shows this

stuff. In fact, I'm gearing up to

publish it in journals. Uh then you can

learn more about that. But anyway, to

summarize what we have said right now is

that your brain tends to forget stuff

very efficiently if it's not encoded

into your long-term memory. Encoding

takes cognitive load. That's confusing.

That's uncomfortable. But if you learn

the techniques to navigate that, then

what happens is that your forgetting

curve uh actually just starts becoming a

lot flatter to begin with, which means

that you just don't need to revise it so

often. You can cancel out some of those

revisions. And that means that because

you're just fundamentally forgetting

stuff a lot slower, you just don't need

to revise as much. And it's just a huge

time savea. So at this point, you may be

thinking two things. number one. Well,

Justin, then how do you do all of this

amazing encoding magical super silver

bullet technique? Well, I will have

other videos talking about that because

this video is already getting pretty

long and it's necessary to explain why

the whole active recall space repetition

like cult is not as hyped up as it

really is in real life. But because

again, the encoding techniques are not

easy. It's not something I can just

smash out through like a one minute Tik

Tok. There's really a lot of explanation

that goes into it. So, I will be having

a lot of other videos talking about

encoding techniques and going through

demonstrations and examples and

workroughs and all of that sort of stuff

to just prove to you that it does

actually work. It's not just, you know,

me making stuff up. But the other thing

that you may be thinking or doubting is

well Justin if this is as good as you

say it is and this is like the third eye

of studying waking up

then why have I not heard of this

before? Why does everyone else on

YouTube say that active recall and space

repetition are god level tech I've

actually I literally saw a study guru

say active recall and space repetition

was a godlevel technique. I almost

vomited in my mouth. Why is everyone

else saying that? There's a few reasons

and there's actually even some studies

done around why people believe studying

related myths. And one of those things

is because of something called the

Dunning Kruger effect. And it looks a

little bit like this. This is the

Dunning Krueger graph. And what you can

see here is that there is knowledge on

the X-axis and confidence on the Yaxis.

So when you don't know anything, your

confidence is really low. Well, zero cuz

you know you know nothing. But when you

learn a little bit about something

compared to nothing, that's a lot more.

So your confidence grows much much

higher. You become much more confident

in this thing. And then when you learn

more and more and more, you realize

actually, man, there's more to this than

I thought. [music] Uh and then as you

just commit your life towards learning

this 10, 20 years later, you truly

become an expert and your confidence

grows again because you legitimately

[music] know a lot. So there's only two

points in which the confidence is really

high and that [music] is after you've

spent decades learning about this or

you've only learned a little bit and you

just don't know what you don't know. And

this is the case just objectively like

it's just the fact I I don't want this

to be insulting leg really don't like I

don't want this video to have as much

backlash as I suspect it will have but a

lot of the study YouTubers out there

don't know a lot about how learning

actually works or what goes on in the

brain. It's a lot of it is just they

have watched other YouTube videos and

they have tried a few things and they I

don't know got into medical school or

law school or something and they sort of

said hey it works let me make a YouTube

video about it and so learning is

actually really really complicated cuz I

did all of that. I did well and then I

used techniques and then I got good

grades and I got into medical school and

I graduated. I became a doctor. I even

did this whole business thing on the

side while I was doing that. all that

that stuff. And I realized the more I

learned, the less I knew. Really, I had

overestimated how much I knew 10 years

ago. Learning is legitimately, really,

really complicated to the point where

just one of those concepts that I've

talked about today, I've actually done

whole like 5hour workshops on just one

of those concepts. And that it's it's

still just barely scratching the surface

for a lot of students. active recall and

space repetition of some of the first

techniques that they learn about

studying. Before that, it's like turn

your phone off. Don't listen to your

favorite song while you're studying.

Don't study inside your bed covers, you

know, stuff like that. Just simple tips

and tricks of just straight up don't do

that. That's a terrible idea type of

advice. And active recon space

repetition are often some of the first

actual techniques that someone will

learn. And it's a good first technique

to learn because it's easy to use and it

does again produce benefit if you're not

doing it already. But again,

statistically speaking, there's more

people that use that technique and don't

do well than people that use that

technique and do well. And this leads me

to the second reason why you don't hear

about it so much, which is success bias.

Now, the story behind success bias says

that there were these planes in World

War II or something that came back after

their raids and they found that the

wings had the most amount of bullet

holes in them. So, the military said,

"Okay, well, we should put less armor

around the cockpit area because

obviously that place is not getting shot

as much." [music] And then a military

statistician said, "No, that would be a

terrible idea. The only reason that our

planes that we're seeing have more

bullet holes on the wings is because all

the planes that got shot in the middle

never returned. They all died.

So, when's the last time you saw a

YouTube video from someone talking about

how they failed? And that's the thing is

that when you don't do well, you're not

super keen on telling the world about

it. you're a lot less likely to make a

big YouTube video or grow a channel

about failing to use a technique. So,

you don't hear a lot of the stories of

people using these techniques and not

doing well. I, on the other hand, as

someone that is actually employed as a

coach to help students that tried to use

techniques and didn't work, I get to see

how many times people are following this

advice and it's not producing those

results. The number of times that

students will use techniques like active

recall and space repetition and not do

well is overwhelmingly

more common than the students that will

use it and then do well. And even for

the students that do well, they usually

come back one or two years later when

they're later in uni or the content is

more difficult or there's just more to

know and they're saying it's no longer

sustainable because they're just

spending way too much time uh or there's

just too much content and they're just

not able to keep on top of it. They're

falling behind and they're not able to

finish all of their flash cards or

however else they're using it. So

because we're only seeing the success

stories, we are led to believe that it's

more useful and more effective than it

actually is. Which leads me to the third

bias, which is something called

availability bias. [music] And what this

says is that we will judge how legit

something is based on how commonly we

encounter it. So if we encounter a bunch

of different people say, "Hey, vaccines

are dangerous," we will believe that

vaccines are dangerous. The same can be

said of climate change. The same can be

said about flatearthers and the same can

be said about active recall and space

repetition because so many videos and so

many people are talking about it because

of the fact that it's easy because of

the fact it's popular because of the

fact of success bias. Uh because of the

fact that this encoding related stuff is

just not as easy to explain in a very

short YouTube video as you can see from

this unnecessarily long YouTube video.

Probably you were led to believe that

it's more legit and it's not your fault.

It's just the way that our brain is

wired. It's just the biological tendency

of the human brain is that when

something is more available, we think it

is more legitimate. And this has been

studied across all different fields,

including, you know, politics and

science belief and all of this stuff. If

we see it more, we think it's more

legit. And it creates this spiral. We

get people that are learning this from

these common and popular videos. They

think it's legit. They try it. The ones

that are successful feel really

confident. They make a YouTube video

about it. and that becomes even more

common. So it produces this sort of

spiral of really confident people

learning something from common knowledge

then just kind of making it more and

more and more and more common and now it

just seems like that's kind of the only

way to do things. But that's actually

very demoralizing because if that truly

is the best study technique there is and

you have tried it and you're not getting

the result that you want, then does that

mean you're not able to achieve your

academic goals? Does that mean you're

too dumb? Does it mean that you're just

not going to be able to do it? But

that's not the case. That's not the

case. So again, I'm not saying that

active recall and space repetition are

bad. It's a good part of your studying

system. But if that is the only thing

that you're relying on and you're not

actually building good encoding

techniques, then you're essentially just

trying to refill a bucket with a hole in

it. Obviously, the best step is to patch

that hole to begin with. Now, most

students really underestimate their

potential. If you're already good at

encoding, the chances are that you can

actually improve that even more, usually

significantly. Some of the students that

are coming into my course are already

getting, let's say, 90% or in a test or

an exam or more. They're increasing

their study efficiency by two to three

times. they're studying only 50 30% or

50% of how much they used to study

beforehand and getting the same grades.

I've got students that are going from

getting like failing their papers C's

and D's to getting the top marks in

their entire cohort. And yes, it's not

easy. No, it's not just hey, plug in

this technique and you can just solve

all your problems. It evaporates and you

know, you become, you know, like a Yoda

of studying. It's not like that. they

are working hard and they're developing

these skills just like you'd have to

work hard and develop the skills to play

a musical instrument or to play a sport

really well. Same thing is that when you

really train yourself to use certain

studying techniques, you can actually

kind of unlock your brain's potential,

which is a super cliche thing to say and

it makes me cringe a little bit to say

it, but it's kind of true. So, I would

say for those of you that are feeling

super confident about your study skills

right now because you feel like you

already know all the techniques and you

know how to use them, approach things

with an open mind. Um, you never know,

maybe if you were to study this field

for another 20 years, you might realize

that there's more to it than you

realize. It's possible. It's just it's

possible. I'm not saying that's the

case. You could be a absolute just

genius, but it's possible, right? It's

just it's possible. like it's worth

having an open mind about, right? That's

all I'm saying. Or if you're someone

that is in the situation where you've

tried a lot of study techniques and it

hasn't worked for you and you're feeling

demoral demor demotiv no de demoralized

[music] and you're feeling like it's

hopeless and you don't know whether you

can do it or you don't think a career is

right for you because you think you're

too dumb or it's it's not within your

capacity and other study techniques.

you've tried it and tried it and tried

it and none of it has worked before,

then this video is really for you. And

I'm here to say that you can do it. You

can train yourself to be better. And you

will have to work hard, but you're

probably willing to work hard if you

know it's going to get you the results.

So for you, I'd say actually have some

hope. It may be that you've just tried

really hard at the wrong thing. If you

want to learn more about this, then

consider subscribing. Anyway,

okay. So, now we understand the problems

with active recall and space repetition

when they're used in the wrong way. But

it doesn't mean that those strategies

are completely useless. In fact, flash

cards are actually one of the best

strategies to use when [music] all

you're trying to do is learn volumes of

very specific lower order simple

information. And if the way you need to

use that information is for just

discrete fact recall. And unfortunately,

if you are a student and you're studying

for exams, often you do have some things

that you need to rotele learn. But the

effectiveness of flashcards for rote

learning also largely depends on the way

that you use the flash cards. So in this

next section, I'm going to give you a

master class on how you can use Anki,

which is probably the most popular

flashcard app out there, in the most

effective way possible to level up your

retrieval skills.

Did you know that there is a more

advanced way of using flashcard apps

like [music] Anki? I'm willing to bet

you didn't because it took me years of

using flashcards and reading through

research to figure [music] this out. In

this video, I'm going to tell you what

flash cards are great for and what they

are terrible for, even though a lot of

people still use them this way. And at

the end of this video, I'm going to tell

you my strategy for how you can make

flash cards less overwhelming, more

memorable, and you can triple their

effectiveness. I've taught this strategy

very successfully to hundreds of

students over the years and whether

you're using Anki or any other flashcard

app, there are things that you can do to

make them dramatically more effective.

If you're new to this channel, welcome.

I'm Dr. Justin Sun. I'm a learning coach

and researcher and the head of learning

at I can study. I'm also a former

medical doctor. For the last decade,

I've taught tens of thousands of

students around the world to learn more

efficiently. Now, a couple years ago,

one of the videos that really blew up on

my channel was the problems with space

repetition and active recall. And if

your system of learning does depend on

space repetition, then there are some

serious problems with it that I do talk

about in all of my other videos. [music]

But it doesn't mean that flash cards do

not have its place. In fact, I've

probably used flash cards more than most

people. After all, across my medical

degree, my honors degree, my master's

degree, my learning teaching

certification, I've spent over eight

years learning at uni to eventually

become top ranked. Flash cards,

including apps like Anki, can be a very

effective and useful tool in your

toolkit. But like any tool, we have to

know how to use it properly. [music]

For example, you might have the best

screwdriver in the world, but you can't

build an entire house with nothing else

but a screwdriver. at least not without

seriously abusing your screwdriver,

taking 10 years longer than it needed to

and probably injuring yourself in the

process. So, let's take a quick look at

what flash cards are good at and what

they are bad at, and then I'll tell you

the strategy for how you can increase

the good and reduce the bad. So, most

flash cards work like this. You have a

prompt, [music] which could be a

question or a fill in the blanks or an

image occlusion, which is basically just

fill in the blanks with an image. You

then answer it from memory and mark it

as correct or incorrect. Some apps even

let you rate how easy it was to get that

answer right and that affects the

spacing algorithm. And then depending on

how long that algorithm calculated for

you, you're then prompted to answer that

question again. And this could be even

just a few minutes later up to weeks.

Flashcards are useful for three main

reasons. Firstly, it triggers active

retrieval of knowledge which has

wellproven benefits on your memory and

retention. Now, the research is

surprisingly complicated here, much more

complicated than a lot of people make it

out to be. So, we're not going to go

into exactly why and how it helps you,

but in summary, actively retrieving your

knowledge is a very important part of

any learning system, and you should

definitely do it. No learning system is

complete without having retrieval

practice. The problems can arise when

you rely on the retrieval too much, but

we'll get to that later. Secondly, it

makes it very easy to space your

repetitions out and it allows you to

repeat stuff not at a topic or subject

level, but at a fact or at a concept

level depending on your ability to

recall that fact or concept. Repetition

to some extent is always going to be

necessary for learning. So, flashcard

apps make this a lot easier. Honestly,

the person that invented the digital

lateness system is a genius. Trying to

manage this with a manual calendar and a

schedule and tracking every single thing

that you got right or wrong would be a

nightmare and extremely timeconsuming.

And timeconuming isn't always a bad

thing but in this case that time is not

invested in learning. It's just admin

time. And lastly it helps with something

called microlearning. Microlearning is

when you have these study sessions that

are very concentrated and short bursts

of time like only a few minutes long.

And for some very complicated reasons

that we haven't fully figured out yet,

microllearning tends to be quite

effective. Having these concentrated

shorter bursts of studying tends to have

a disproportionately high benefit for

your memory and your retention. Now,

that isn't to say that having longer

study sessions is not useful. What it

means is that having the shorter ones

that are only like 3 to 7 minutes long

are also useful. [music] So, flash cards

are great for this. You can use

flashcards when you're waiting for the

bus, when you're on the toilet, when

you're waiting to order a coffee. You

could stack up to maybe 20 or 30 minutes

a day of microlearning without actually

scheduling any extra time. You're just

using these pockets of time that you

might not have been able to utilize

before. And so, when you look at these

three main benefits, you can see it's

genuinely very useful. Add on top of the

fact that it's also pretty

straightforward and easy to use, and it

doesn't take a long time to learn to use

them correctly, flashcards are very,

[music] very popular. So, what are

flashcards not good at? Well, even

though flash cards trigger active

retrieval of knowledge, the way you

retrieve the knowledge makes a big

difference. Flash card apps are

generally designed to test you on a

one:1 ratio. What that means is that you

get one prompt or question that tests

you on one concept or fact. And this is

good for direct fact recall and

memorization, but it's not as helpful

for the higher order learning needs

where you actually need to draw on

multiple concepts and facts and how they

influence and relate to each other. And

I talk about this concept a lot in my

other videos, like all the time. Now,

you could make flashc cards like a

challenging exam question that tests you

on these interrelated concepts, but it

tends to get a little bit messy. It's a

lot longer to create those questions. It

takes longer to answer them, and it's

tricky to understand whether you should

mark a question right or wrong. For

example, if your flash card is testing

you now on six or seven different

concepts and facts and you get five of

those correct and you miss one of them,

do you answer that card as correct or

incorrect? [music]

If you've ever tried this yourself, you

know that it gets pretty messy once you

start testing on more than two or three

facts and concepts per card. So problem

number one is that it only really helps

for the lower order style direct fact

recall and memorization type of learning

which is usually not enough to get you

the best marks or especially if you're

at uni and beyond even a pass which is

also part of problem number two. Flash

cards get overwhelming very quickly. If

you try to use flashcards to learn

absolutely everything, then you get to a

point where you have to do hundreds of

flashcards every single day. And this is

very timeconuming and also not very

effective. As I often talk about in my

videos, human memory excels when

knowledge is connected into a network.

When information is less connected in a

network, your brain holds onto that

information much less strongly, which

means you forget it more easily. It's

really common for students to rely so

heavily on apps like Anki that they

don't actually use any other learning

methods which might be much better at

building higher order knowledge networks

since all knowledge must exist in a

network for it to be retained and used.

And because flashc cards are pretty bad

at building knowledge networks, we end

up with a mountain of information we

have to learn through pure rope

memorization and repetition. Even if we

didn't need to in the first place, it

actually creates unnecessary work for

us. And it's a very brute force way of

trying to study a topic. And I can tell

you experts in their field that know

more about that field than anyone else,

they're not sitting at home doing flash

cards on the hundreds of new journal

articles that are released every week.

They probably aren't using flash cards

at all. In fact, and again, it goes back

to that analogy of the screwdriver. Yes,

a screwdriver can be really good at what

it does, and you can love using your

screwdriver for tightening a screw. If

you've never used a screwdriver before,

you're going to feel that it's amazing

compared to trying to tighten a screw

with your fingernail. But it doesn't

mean that it magically solves every

possible need that you have when you're

building a house. Flash cards are great

at what it's good at, but when you try

to use it in ways that it's not good at,

it's not efficient and it's actually

going to do more harm than good. And

then once you do get overwhelmed by the

volume of flash cards, it's actually

very hard to escape because now you're

[music] investing so much of your time

into doing your flash cards that you

can't use other methods without falling

behind. And in some cases, being able to

get a flash card correct might actually

even be harmful. So this is problem

number three, which is that flash cards

are very repetitive, which is the whole

point of it. But there's another part to

this. Because we repeat the same flash

card again and again, we may end up

memorizing the flash card rather than

the actual knowledge. And you've

probably already experienced this

before. For example, if you've got a

flash card that asks the question, what

is the function of the mitochondria? And

the answer is mitochondria is a

powerhouse of the cell. Then if you do

this flash card enough times, you might

actually just read what is the function

of and then you already know that the

rest of this flash card says

mitochondria. Then if you do this enough

times, you might recognize the flash

card just by reading what is the fun.

And at that point, you already know that

the rest of it is going to say function

of a mitochondria. And you're able to

recall the answer straight away without

even having to read the whole question,

which might seem like a really good

thing cuz your recall is faster, but

it's not. The problem here is that we're

no longer testing our ability to recall

the knowledge anymore. All we're testing

is our ability to associate that

particular flashc card with that

particular answer. So when we get into

an exam or any other type of assessment

and we're asked on that knowledge but in

a way that's different to how our flash

card put it, we may actually struggle to

recall that knowledge because it's not

testing our recall of the knowledge in

itself anymore. When we get these types

of questions wrong, we could often look

at it and say, "Well, I just made a

silly mistake because I already knew

that." But actually, there's a very big

and important difference between knowing

something and being able to retrieve and

use it in a realistic setting. So, as a

rule of thumb, if I see a student using

flashcards for almost all of their

learning and they end up with hundreds

or even thousands of them, I know that

they're probably doing more harm than

good. Like much more harm than good. So,

therefore, to make flash cards more

effective, we need to make them better

at doing the higher order of learning

stuff and make them less overwhelming

and also stop ourselves from getting

into that pattern where we're just

memorizing the flash card rather than

the knowledge. And surprisingly,

potentially one of the most useful

things that you can actually do is to

like this video. And the second most

important thing is to follow this

strategy that I'm about to teach you.

Now, this strategy is very rare. I

almost never really see anyone using

flashcards like this, even though it is

extremely extremely effective. About 6

years ago, I coached a young athlete.

They were world-class Olympic level

athlete, and they had a 30hour per week

training schedule. And I was coaching

them not on the athletics. I was

coaching them to handle studying for uni

and handle all of their learning stuff

while they were also doing this crazy

training. This person had really no time

to sit down and study for long periods

of time. The only time they had was a

6-hour block on a Saturday where [music]

they could get through as much studying

as possible. And as a result of that

experience, I learned a lot about

microlearning and how to really make

microlearning, including flashcards,

work for you. And since then, I've

taught these principles and techniques

that I'm about to teach you to thousands

of students. So, here's how you want to

set your learning up. You want to split

your dedicated long study sessions into

three parts. Now, when I say a long

study session, I think anything more

than three or 4 hours, I'd say is a long

study session, but it's kind of

relative. Like if you're studying 3 to

four hours every single day and then

your long session is like a 7-hour block

on a weekend, then you could call that

your long study session. The first part

is targeted review. The second part is

consolidation and preparation. And the

third part is preview. In the second

part, which is consolidation and

preparation, we're going to be covering

all the material that we've learned

since our previous long study session.

So that could have been maybe a few days

ago or even a whole week ago. During

this time, you're going to review your

material. You're going to write your

notes. This is kind of like the main

what we'd normally think of as your

normal study time. And if possible, I'd

recommend that you use an efficient

method for encoding that is nonlinear

and multi-order. And if you don't know

how to do that, then I'd really

recommend checking out my video on how I

studied for my masters where I literally

show you exactly how I did it. Now, of

course, as I always talk about, the

quality of your encoding makes a big

difference to how much you forget and

the quality of your knowledge. It's not

something that you can just pick up and

learn in 30 seconds. [music] I'm going

to teach you the principles. I teach you

the techniques in my other videos all

the time. You have to actually practice

it. So, if you're sitting there watching

this thinking that you can get good at

this and know how to do it just by

watching videos, that's not going to

happen. Okay? Like, it's a skill. It's

not just a theory. You have to actually

put in the practice. Anyway, while

you're going through the material and

you're encoding it, you're actually

filtering out the information. So, the

stuff that you feel like you can encode,

you're going to encode it with whatever

method that you're using. And the stuff

that you feel like you're going to

forget even by using that method or it

just doesn't fit, that's the stuff that

goes into your flash cards. It's already

different because a lot of people will

just dump absolutely everything onto

their flash cards. And again, that's

kind of [music] as soon as you do that,

you're fighting a losing battle. At

first, the flash cards you make are

going to be simple, just direct recall

of facts and concepts, just kind of the

normal way that you'd use flash cards.

And if you again have an effective

method of encoding, then you should have

already less flash cards than before

because you'll have less things to just

straight up memorize. But here is where

things get interesting. Throughout the

week, in these little pockets of time,

you're going to continue to do your

flash cards and you should reasonably be

able to get through around about 100 to

150 flash cards per week just through

these random little pockets of time. And

if you've got more than that, then that

probably indicates that your method of

encoding is actually holding you back

instead. So that's the trigger for you

to go check out my videos on encoding.

As you go throughout the week and you're

completing the flash cards, you need to

mark the ones that you got correct three

times in a row. We want to come back to

these later. Most apps have some kind of

like star or flag or some kind of way to

kind of just note that flash card. We're

going to want to be able to find all of

the ones that we got correct three times

in a row. Likewise, if you get a flash

card incorrect three times in a row, we

also want to flag that one, too. Flag it

something different so you can tell the

two apart. Now, in your next long study

session, which is a few days or a week

later, we're going to have a list of

flash cards that we got correct three

times in a row and a list of flashards

that we got incorrect three times in a

row. And at the beginning of this long

study session, we're going to do our

targeted review. Start with the flash

cards you got wrong three times in a

row. the chances are these flash cards

are going to continue to be a problem

for you. And so it's not worth it to

just leave it inside your flash card

deck and continue to just repeat them

again and again. Sometimes getting it

right, sometimes getting it wrong. It's

just going to clog up your system. It's

worthwhile to just spend a little bit

more time to really consolidate the

knowledge in those cards so that you

reduce the chances of you forgetting

them. For each of these cards, spend 5

to 10 minutes per card to go a little

bit deeper and to try to connect that

fact or concept with your prior existing

knowledge or other parts of the topic or

create analogies. We're going to try to

build more of a network around this. It

doesn't matter if you can't get through

all of your incorrect list. If you

dedicate a part of your study sessions

every time to doing this, you're just

going to help reduce that flash card

burden over time. Now, if you do this

and then you still get those flash cards

wrong, then you just do the same process

again, but this time you go even deeper

and you build even more connections and

and create even more of a network around

it. This often does mean that you have

to go a little bit out of scope of the

topic, but honestly, it's fine. The time

it takes to go out of scope, but hold on

to that piece of information is just

going to be worth it. You might also

find when you do this that you look at

this card and you think, you know what,

I don't even really need to know this.

which would be great because then you

can just remove it from your system and

you don't have to worry about it again.

The more things you can get rid of, the

better it is. For the cards you got

correct three times in a

>> [music]

>> row, we're going to go through those and

merge and upgrade them. We already

remember the basic facts, so let's

challenge ourselves with a higher level.

Take a look at all the facts and

concepts that you got in that correct

list of cards and start thinking how

some of these cards might be related to

each other or influence each other. When

you see that some of these things might

be connected, we're going to combine

them to create a higher order question

instead. For example, if you got two

flash cards correct and one of them

said, "How does protein synthesis work?"

And the other one said, "How are

hormones received by cell receptors?"

Then you could fuse the two of them

together to create a question that's

like, "Uh, how do hormones influence

protein synthesis?" So, this new card is

actually testing on the same basic facts

as the original, but now we're also

testing on the relationships and

influences that they have on each other.

So, there are multiple benefits of doing

this. Number one, it just reduces the

number of flash cards you've got to deal

with. Number two, it forces you to think

about relationships and builds networks.

And number three, it builds on your

existing knowledge. And what I mean by

that is that when you have this kind of

mega flash card that's a combination of

multiple other ones, you already know

that you've got mastery over the

foundational information. So when you

test yourself on that, it's unlikely

that you're going to get like 80% of it

right every single time and then just

20% of it consistently wrong. And

because the flash cards are constantly

merging and changing as your mastery

grows, you're not going to get into that

point where you're just so repetitive on

it that you're just memorizing only the

flash card. And then as you go, your

flash cards should continue to just

converge and get upgraded. Now, it does

take a little bit of time to set all of

this up and use this process, but first

of all, it pays itself off in efficiency

gains across really just like one or two

weeks. But also, it's probably faster to

answer each of these questions cuz it's

constantly building on what you already

know. And creating these challenging

questions is much easier when you've got

that filtered list to work with and you

know, you can just see exactly how they

could come together. It's easier than

just trying to do it from scratch. So,

these two steps, which is the reviewing

your incorrect ones and going deeper and

then reviewing your correct ones to fuse

and take them higher, this is part one,

targeted review. And then in part two,

we're going to go through our new

material, which is where we're, you

know, encoding even more. And then

obviously, we're creating even more

flashcards to work with for the week to

come. And then part three is the

preview. Preview is when you're priming

yourself in the material that you

haven't really covered yet is one of the

most important parts of studying. If you

had to choose between only doing review

versus only doing the preview, I would

always say go for preview because it's

the thing that's going to stop you from

forgetting so much in the first place.

It makes everything easier from that

point onwards. You can always catch up

on review if you start falling behind,

but if you don't do the preview, then

you're just constantly going to be

falling behind cuz you're just going to

forget so much. Preview is ultimately

what stops you from getting overwhelmed.

So, by following the strategy, you will

find that your flash cards become more

challenging, but in a good way. They're

a lot more engaging and enjoyable. It

helps you to prepare for your exams a

lot more comprehensively. It makes

flashcards less overwhelming and overall

improves your retention.

So that brings us to the end of chapter

one which is about retrieval. In the

next section we are now starting with

encoding.

Okay. So um encoding and uh increasing

that long-term memory, not being over

reliant on space repetition and active

recall. Here's how you do it. For those

that are new, my name is Dr. Justin. I'm

a medical doctor, a learning coach, and

I help students learn to learn. If you

haven't watched my video on the problem

to do with active recall and space

repetition and this thing called

encoding versus retrieval and the idea

of cognitive load and all of that sort

of stuff, you definitely want to check

that out first. Otherwise, this video

isn't going to make as [music] much

sense for those of you that have seen

it. Okay, let's dive into some of the

basics. Hey, it's um future me and

someone said that I should do a quick

introduction about the points I'm going

to cover and I forgot to do that. So in

this video I'm going to talk about uh

the basic principle behind how you can

do encoding and then I'm going to talk

about the second point which is to

increase your encoding toler tolerance

and cognitive load tolerance cuz those

are two like fundamental fundamental. It

doesn't get more fundamental than that.

They're like the step zero of do

effective encoding. What you'll find is

that I don't talk about specific like

techniques like step one, step two, step

three, do this like write your notes

like this. So, you're probably going to

have questions like, "How do I write my

notes?" or "What do I do for this

subject?" or "What I do for this

subject." And the reason that I didn't

cover that is because there's like

literally hundreds of different

variations of this. And so, it's better

for me to just teach you the principle.

If it abides by the principles that I

talk about in this video, it it's

probably going to be okayish. If it

doesn't abide by these principles, then

it's definitely not okay. But again,

I've got other videos that I'll post up

about, you know, more specific

techniques and examples. And this is

really just that first step introduction

into the basics of encoding which I hope

to just build on in future videos.

Anyway, back to the actual thing. Before

we really start, uh it is important to

realize that encoding techniques are not

easy by nature. Like literally by

definition, right? Encoding involves

cognitive load and cognitive load

naturally feels uncomfortable, naturally

feels confusing. So, if you are using an

encoding technique, especially a new one

that you haven't tried before and you're

finding that it's hard to wrap your head

around and you're just like generally a

little lost, that's actually completely

normal. In fact, if you didn't feel

that, it probably means you're doing it

wrong. So, a lot of students will use an

encoding technique for the first time.

[music] Uh they'll give it a go and they

feel this and then they back off. They

will give up. They'll say, "Hey, it's

not working for me. Uh I'm not getting

those results." The results do not come

immediately. It's kind of like training

your muscles. It's kind of like learning

to play an instrument. It takes time to

develop the skill. For some people,

that's only a few days. For some people,

it's only a few hours, but for most

people, that that that's around a month

to two months, and that that can be a

little bit daunting, but I do promise

that the the result pays off. So, how do

we do this whole encoding thing? There

are a lot of different techniques that

you can use to encode, but every single

encoding technique has to sort of follow

a few basic principles. and I'm going to

drive them down to just two. Okay. So

the first step is understanding about

different orders of learning. There are

low orders of learning and then there

are high orders of learning. Deep

processing, higher encoding. This

happens a lot more when we're at the

higher order of learning. So encoding is

really only happening when you have

clear organizational structure in your

brain. What that means is that you not

only know what the information is, but

you know how it fits in. There is a way

of navigating this information in your

brain that makes intuitive and logical

sense. There usually isn't a lot that

relies on you having memorized things

like memorize different groups of

anything, it's usually pretty logical.

And so someone that has done a high

level of encoding, when they explain

something, it sounds very simple. And

you can often get that feeling of like,

wow, I never thought of it that simply

before. and they can do the classic kind

of explaining it to a 5-year-old or

explaining it to a 10-year-old and that

is a sign generally of someone having a

higher order of learning. So, how do we

know what higher order learning is?

There are two different frameworks that

we can use to understand this. The first

one is called Bloom's taxonomy and as

you can see the lower order learning is

really the stuff at the bottom levels,

the remembering [music] and the

understanding. A lot of people will say

that just memorizing something is not

real learning. understanding is when

you're getting real learning. That's not

true because understanding something is

still very isolated. When we're doing

good encoding, we never want information

to be isolated. Every single thing that

you consume, every information that

comes into your sensory memory that you

shunt into your working memory, again,

if this is foreign to you, check out

that other video that I mentioned

before. All of that stuff in our working

memory, that's going to be forgotten in

seconds. We've got seconds. So, in the

in the seconds that that information is

in our working memory, that's our

opportunity to encode it into our

long-term memory. If we miss that

window, we're wasting time. So, we can't

just consume information first and then

settle on it and then consolidate it and

then try to encode it afterwards. By

then, it's already late. We've already

put it into kind of like a a

memorization box. we're already sort of

looking at it in terms of stuff to role

learn through repetition. And what I

found is that students that are

generally pretty heavy with the rope

learning or the memorization, if they

don't follow this right order, then they

are so pulled into their previous habit

of just rope learning that it's it's

very very very difficult to break out of

and certainly will waste a lot of time.

So step number one as soon as possible

we want to just jump to higher order

learning and that is something like

applying but more so things like

analyzing and evaluating the ideas. So

here's how we work up the ladder and I

want you to think about where you spend

most of your time thinking. Again we

want to be at those higher levels not

just in general but as early as

possible. Okay that's that's the key. So

the lower level is about remembering.

This is just like recalling facts and

individual details. The next level is

about understanding. If you understand

it, you can explain it. The next level

above this is applying. So this means

solving problems but the problems are

usually pretty uh concept specific like

isolated problems testing on just

individual concepts. And then we have

analyzing. So analyzing is the first

point at which we're starting to take

ideas and bring them together and

comparing them against each other. So,

it's not just about having one idea and

then just understanding that idea

really, really well and focusing on

understanding that idea. And you'll hear

me talk about this in a lot of other

videos as well. It's it's about taking

that idea and then looking at it in

relation to another idea and comparing

and contrasting between them, but not

just one or two, but multiple different

ideas and seeing the relationships

between them. And then the next step,

evaluating. This is about not just

comparing and contrasting the ideas but

it's about figuring out how we can judge

them, how we can prioritize them. So we

might know that we have three concepts

that are related to each other. Concept

A, concept B, concept C. And we know

that there is a relationship here.

Evaluating would be saying, okay, which

of these relationships is actually the

most important? Is it this one here or

is it is it this relationship that's the

most important or is it kind of like

okay A that leads to B and then A and B

together combined lead to C. Is that the

nature of the relationship? So when

you're analyzing you may have an

understanding that there is a

relationship. You may get an idea that

they are connected that they are related

to each other that they exert some kind

of influence. But when you're evaluating

it means that you understand it much

more deeply. you're very explicit.

You're very clear about what the nature

of that relationship is and how

important it is in the in the big

picture in the grand scheme of things.

So, I want you to start trying to find

the similarities essentially doing that

level five thinking of uh evaluating or

analyzing the information with this next

part. So, another taxonomy that we can

use apart from blooms is solo taxonomy.

And I personally like this one a little

bit more. So if you think about this

one, this part where we're actually

saying that the ideas don't exist in

isolation anymore, but we're actually

trying to see the connections between

them. We we're getting this in this kind

of relational type of learning. But then

when we actually start implementing the

bigger picture, we have an understanding

of its significance with the bigger

picture. That's now activating higher

order learning. So in order to do

correct encoding, we always need to try

to relate the information to each other

and to the bigger picture. So we're

always trying to relate the information

to each other and to the bigger picture.

Now for some people this is actually an

automatic process that they will do. Uh

students that are already pretty good at

encoding, they will naturally do this.

But I found that a lot of the time this

process goes sort of subconscious and

they will sort of flick in and out of

this method of thinking. What I'm saying

is that it's actually possible, very

possible. Like I this is legitimately

kind of one of the core principles of a

lot of the techniques that I teach is

the idea that you don't actually need to

really spend much time at all on the

lower levels of thinking. You don't

really need to try to memorize or try to

understand something. Now you're

thinking, Justin, how am I going to

evaluate and analyze and get an

understanding of the big picture of

something without even knowing what it

is? Like how without understanding

something, how will I be able to do

that? And the answer is that you can't.

You can't do that. [music] And that's

the point. Your brain will automatically

will automatically [music] fill in the

lower order levels of thinking. So the

idea here is that you set your goal,

your focus, your objective [music]

is to do the higher order thinking as

early as possible. By doing that, your

brain will automatically do the

memorizing and the understanding and the

application of it on the way there

without you even trying [music] to do

that. And the benefit of this is that

because you have the big picture in

mind, the information naturally becomes

more organized. Because if you were to

do it step by step, if you were to take

each individual piece of information,

sensory memory into your working memory,

you say, "Okay, I'm going to memorize

this. Okay, now I'm going to try to

understand it more deeply. Okay, now I'm

going to try to apply this and then I'm

going to try to see how it fits in the

big picture." If you were to do that,

then each piece of information is being

consumed individually and it's isolated.

And at that point, remember, we've got

seconds to encode it from our working

memory to our long-term memory. At that

moment we have decided that we are going

to look at it in isolation first. And

already our organizational structure is

starting off on the wrong foot. So now

we have to spend time to unlearn the way

that we had organized it and then find

another way to organize it afterwards.

So it's kind of like if you have a

really messy room, it's like putting all

of your stuff in there first and then

going into your messy room and saying,

"Okay, let's clean it up." It actually

makes more sense to take each individual

item, look at all the other items you

need to put into your room, think,

"Okay, I can see that I've got a lot of

stationery. I probably need to find a

way to organize that stationary in my

room." So, if you're thinking about this

to begin with, when you pick up your

pencil, then you know where it's going

to go. So, it's organized to begin with.

It takes a little bit longer to process

through the information the first time

round, but it's it's it's much

incomparably faster and it saves you a

lot of time because that information is

encoded straight away. And you'll find

that retention can be 80 90. I mean,

I've got some of the um students on my

course that are saying that their

retention is like 90% plus after 2 3

weeks of not even having looked at it

again. And that's far above the uh what

the research says is is the just

generally accepted norm of around 40 to

60% sort of 50% area. So that's the

first thing. Okay, that's the first

thing. So let me just really quickly

summarize that is that in order to do

good coding you have to you have to try

to organize the ideas in relation to the

big picture and you do this by comparing

the ideas against each other and against

the big picture and then creating an

actual organizational system so that

each piece of information knows where to

fit. So every technique that you use

should try to leverage off that. That

means you're not just reading something

and then just writing notes on it. You

shouldn't be doing that. If you read

something and just write notes on it

straight away, then you're not letting

your brain figure out how to organize it

first. You should never really be

committing anything, you know, into your

notes or anything like that until you've

figured out a way to organize it in

relation to other concepts and in

relation to the bigger picture. Right?

So, we're always looking for those

relationships. We're always looking to

build big picture relevance. Now, it

sounds simple and for some of you, it

truly will be simple. And for those of

you, you're probably already a pretty

good academic achiever yourself. This

part of the message is really for those

students that are listening that will

struggle with this and and this is the

statistical majority, vast majority of

students, even some high achieving

students, especially at in the high

school level, they're high achieving

because they're relying on repetition.

Uh but this is a completely different

method of thinking. So you could be a

very high achiever, but you may actually

still be not that good at encoding. Uh,

and then what you'll find is that as the

information gets harder and harder, th

this repetition based learning becomes

less and less sustainable like I like I

talked about in my last video. So for

those of you that are struggling with

this method of thinking, just remember

what I said before is that it is a skill

you do need to, you know, practice it.

And that confusion of thinking how does

this fit? How does it come together?

Where does it connect? Can I organize it

this way or maybe I can organize it this

way instead? All of that is good. That

that's learning that's good cognitive

load being used and that's actually

directly contributing to improving your

memory. So that's the first thing. The

second thing is a much uh smaller point

and this is just something that's going

to help you do that first thing which is

you need to start training your

cognitive load tolerance. You need to

start becoming more and more familiar

with the idea of keeping information in

your brain. When you when you're writing

notes, you will get the sensation that

as soon as you've written notes about

it, there is a sort of burden that's

been lifted from your mind. You can kind

of breathe a little bit easier. You can

probably relate to this feeling. That's

not necessarily a good thing. And this

again is pretty nuanced because it it

can be good sometimes and it might not

be. And again, I've got videos on that

coming up as well. But as a rule of

thumb, if you're someone that generally

writes notes in a very linear format,

uh, and by linear, what I mean is that

your notes kind of just look like this.

You might have some bullet points in

there as well, uh, but they're pretty

pretty linear. You might be typing them,

uh, you might be using an app like

notion or something. The idea is that

all of these ways of writing notes are

linear and they're usually quite wordy.

So, this method of writing notes is not

very effective for a number of different

reasons. And if you're doing it that way

already, you probably have a habit of

reducing your cognitive load and

offloading it into your notes. And

that's that's not a good thing because

it means that yes, you've got a record

of it, but you're not actually encoding

it. So that again is going to create

future work for yourself and repetition.

It's going to end up wasting a lot of

time. What you want to do is you want to

get into the habit of slowly increasing

your cognitive load capacity. So if

you're finding it really really

difficult, if you tending to write a lot

of notes, just practice um reading

something or listening to something and

instead of writing notes straight away,

get into the habit of just holding on to

that information a little bit more,

taking in a little bit more information

and asking yourself the questions, how

does that relate to what I just learned?

And then how does that relate to the big

picture? Ask yourself these questions.

And as you do this more and more, you

will start to be able to hold on to more

and more information at a time up until

a certain point where you'll be able to

really read for 15, 20, 30 minutes

without writing any notes. And at the

end of it, you can put down a very

highly organized, beautifully processed

set of notes. And people will look at

you and think, man, how did you actually

do that? And that takes time and it

takes practice. But slowly graduate

gradually just trying to expand your

tolerance for cognitive load is very

very important skill. Most of the more

advanced encoding techniques require you

to be able to have require you to

tolerate a certain level of cognitive

load uh to be able to do it at at all.

If you don't have a certain level of

tolerance, a lot of these techniques are

just completely impossible. So this is

something that you're going to need to

develop as like a very fundamental skill

for any in reasonably if even

intermediate encoding techniques. From

this we will be able to build on this.

We'll be in able to incorporate things

like chunking. We'll be able to use

nonlinear note-taking like mind maps.

We'll be able to bring them together

into something that I call chunk mapping

which is a very specific variation of

mind mapping that facilitates this uh

chunking process. uh optimally. We'll be

able to start layering in uh a lot of

other techniques like more interle

microlearning. We'll see how flash cards

can fit into this system. We'll see how

we can do our space repetition in a

healthy and productive way. We'll learn

how to add on memorization techniques

that um supplement this just like wrote

learning techniques to fill in any other

gaps. We can look at revision

techniques. All of these things we can

start layering on. But we can't do any

of that unless we patch the hole in the

bucket, right? We can't we can't do

anything else until that hole in the

bucket is already at least reasonably

patched. And that means we need to start

getting a system where our encoding is

relatively high and we're not forgetting

things quite as quickly the first time

we learn it. And this is a process that

again it will take you some time, but I

also promise that it will contribute uh

and and help you and and benefit you.

For those of you that struggle with the

idea of like comparing and thinking

about the big picture, if you find that

you've got way too many relationships,

way too many connections, and it's just

overwhelming, then what I'd suggest is

that you take it down a notch first.

Think about applying the information

first. So we know that applying the

information is not quite as good as that

highle evaluation where we're comparing

and contrasting and prioritizing

different ideas, but it's still a lot

better than just the memorization and

understanding. So if you think about

taking information in and just thinking,

how can I apply this? How can I apply

this? And you focus on that, that will

increase your tolerance a little bit.

When you're good at that, then you can

bring it up to the next level. All of

the stuff that I've just talked about

that I've only briefly mentioned, I have

plans to make videos on all of that. And

I've got a lot of examples that I can um

work through, stuff that my students

have sent me um where where there are

very common mistakes and issues that I

found that I think you'll find very

helpful. I've got all this footage. I

just need to sit down and edit them

because again, YouTube is not my

full-time thing. The the teaching

students how to learn, that's my

full-time thing. This is just something

that I do when I have the time and space

to be able to do it.

So that was a good first intro [music]

to encoding. But now we are going to go

into encoding more deeply in more

specific contexts. One of the most

common uh forms of encoding that people

often tell me that they struggle with is

as they are reading new information and

it leads to a lot of frustration because

you just end up forgetting everything

that you've read. So to address this in

the next section, I'm going to introduce

to you a framework called Pacer, which

is a really simple framework that you

can apply to improve your encoding when

you read, which means you will just

remember more of what you read. In this

video, I'll teach you a system for

remembering everything you read, study,

or learn. I've been using the system for

the last seven years starting from

learning disease pathophysiology in

medical school through to reading

research articles and learning science

or uh reading books on productivity or

business. And the reason the system

works so consistently and so well is

because it breaks down that process of

reading into two distinct stages. The

first stage is the consumption period

and the second stage is [music] the

digestion period.

Most people think that by focusing on

the first stage and consuming more

information, they'll be able to

therefore remember and apply more

[music] information. So they focus on

trying to read faster or watching

lectures at triple speed or binge

listening to audio books or watching

hours of YouTube tutorials. But that is

not how learning works. And once we

understand how learning does work,

you'll see why my system is so

effective. You see, when it comes to

remembering and applying information,

it's much less about what comes in to

your brain and it's much more about how

much stays in your brain. And that is

what the second stage, the digestion

period, is all about. And it's the part

that is often neglected. So, I'll teach

you a system for mastering both of these

stages, which in turn increases your raw

retention as well as your ability to

actually use the knowledge in the

[music] way that you need to. But first,

we need to ask ourselves, is it even

possible to remember everything you

read? And the short answer is no. But

here's the secret. Trying to remember

everything we read should not be the

goal in the first place. And we know

this because of a man who actually could

remember everything. This man's name is

Kim Peak. And his story is so crazy that

Hollywood made an entire movie about

him. Kim Peak was a mega genius and his

memory was ridiculous. He was able to

memorize a book with such perfect recall

that after reading a book one time he

would be able to write it out word for

word with every comma and full stop back

to front. He memorized so many maps and

atlases that he could give you driving

directions between any two cities in the

world and the path that he gave you was

mentally calculated to be the shortest

distance. Now the reason Compique had

such supernatural abilities is because

of a very rare medical condition he had

called FG syndrome. He was born with

macroephily which means he had a larger

brain and he had no corpus colosum which

is basically the bundle of neurons that

connect both hemispheres of the brain

together. And scientists believe that

because he didn't have the normal

pattern of neurons, his brain adapted

and developed new connections to

compensate, which I guess gave him like

superhuman memory. Now, I want you to

imagine that both you and Kim Peak were

about to sit the same exam. Who do you

think would do better? And the answer is

that it actually depends on the exam.

You see, despite his superhuman memory,

Kim Peak struggled with reasoning and

problem solving, which means that if the

exam was at the junior levels of

schooling, which often tests on the

lower levels of learning, which involve

a lot of memorization and recall, then

Kim Peak would definitely win. But if

the exam was at a higher level like

university or post-graduate where the

reasoning and problem solving the higher

orders of learning are examined as a

higher priority then you may actually

have the edge. Now for most of you

listening probably using the knowledge

you've consumed to reason and problem

solve is kind of the whole point of why

you're trying to read and remember in

the first place. which basically means

that it is not enough to remember

everything which is good because for

most people that's not possible anyway

but it is possible to remember

everything you need to remember in such

a way that we can use that knowledge in

the way we need to and that is what the

system that I'll teach you helps you to

achieve so to start using the system we

have to understand that not all

information is equal. In fact, I break

down the information that I read into

five different categories using the

acronym Pacer.

And it's important to be able to

identify which category the information

you're reading to belongs to because for

[music] each category, there are

specific targeted processes that then

help you to deal with and manage that

information more effectively. And when

we use the wrong process for the

specific category of information, it

makes remembering and understanding what

you read much harder, much more time

consuming, and much less effective, and

that you're more likely to forget what

you read. It also increases the chance

of you entering the passive mode of

reading, which is where you get to the

bottom of a page and you can't even

remember what you just read. So the

system goes like this. In the first part

where we are consuming information, we

want to identify which category what we

are consuming belongs to using [music]

the pacer acronym. Then during stage

two, we digest what we have read using

the targeted process for that category

which takes the information and stores

it in our long-term memory through the

process called encoding. So let's go

through pacer together so that you can

accurately identify the category of

information you're trying to remember.

The P in pacer stands for procedural.

And procedural information is any

information that tells you how something

should be executed. For example, this is

a book that I used during medical school

that taught me about how to do a

clinical examination like listen to a

heartbeat or take someone's blood

pressure. And a lot of the information

in this book is about the correct

technique [music] to perform the

examination. And some subjects and

domains have a lot of procedural

information. Some great examples of this

would be coding and languages. And the

targeted process for working with and

mastering this type of procedural

information is practice.

The key is that you want to apply

procedural information in real life as

early as possible. A lot of people will

spend time to read it and memorize it

and write lots of notes about it and

then a week or two later they'll try to

practice it, but by then it's too late.

We've already forgotten a lot of it. And

a lot of that time is just wasted.

[music] Instead, as soon as you take

that procedural information into your

brain, try to apply it and practice it

as early as you can. Now, straight away,

we run into a problem with using this

[music] approach. What if we're reading

something and we don't have time to

practice it right now? The answer is you

either move on to something else or you

stop consuming anything and you wait

until you have time to practice it. But

you do not waste your time trying to

just memorize it on the spot. Because

here is the crucial part about learning

that everyone overlooks. The two stages

of consuming and digesting must always

be [music] balanced.

Everything you consume must be digested

[music]

in order for you to retain and use it.

Only when stage one is followed by stage

two does learning actually occur. If

we're reading something and we don't

have time to use the right process, like

practice, then most people will say,

"Oh, well, I don't have time right now.

I'm just going to get through as much of

it as I can." And they spend more time

reading and reading and essentially just

consuming more and more. But this is the

learning equivalent of overeing. They

haven't had a chance to digest it. So,

they're just going to end up vomiting it

all up again through the mental [music]

vomiting process we call forgetting.

Which is why for most people the amount

that they forget [music]

after reading is extremely high with

some studies suggesting that up to 90%

of what is [music] consumed is forgotten

despite hours of consuming. And if we're

forgetting 90% of what we read, rather

[music] than consuming more and taking

time away from the digesting, it

actually makes more sense to spend less

time consuming and more time on the

digesting and processing. This increases

your retention, which therefore

increases the amount of working

knowledge you're able to build. That's

why earlier I said what goes into your

brain is less important than what stays

in your brain. And this principle of

balancing stage one consuming with stage

two digesting is important not just for

procedural information but for every

other category of pacer. Unfortunately

stage two digesting is almost completely

neglected [music]

for the second category of information

the a of pacer which stands for

analogous.

Analogous information is actually one of

the easiest types of information [music]

to work with and remember and apply

because analogous information is [music]

the information that is related to

something you already have prior

knowledge about. And even if we don't

have direct prior knowledge about it, it

may remind us indirectly of something

that we do have knowledge about. For

example, let's say that we are an avid

swimmer and we're learning about the

physiology of a muscle contraction.

[music]

When we look at that muscle contraction

cycle, we might think, hey, [music] that

reminds me a lot about the swimming

technique I use. And by connecting the

new information about muscle contraction

physiology with what we already know,

our swimming technique, we have created

[music] an analogy. And so that is

analogous information and analogies can

form with [music] any prior knowledge

including knowledge within a topic

itself. In most fields of study there

are concepts or patterns of concepts and

relationships that tend to repeat and

recur throughout that field. You might

have learned about how to solve a

particular type of problem last semester

and now this semester this new problem

solving approach that you're learning

for the first time reminds you a lot of

that old problem solving process and

relating those two approaches is also an

analogy. So when we're engaging in stage

one, the consumption period of reading,

[music] we want to actively be thinking

about whether what we are reading is

related to something that we already

have knowledge about. And once we

identify it as potentially analogous

information, the targeted process we

want to use here is critique. [music]

This is the part I said everyone misses

once we create an analogy. Critiquing it

means [music] we examine critically how

good that analogy actually is. For

example, with the analogy of muscle

contraction and swimming technique,

critiquing that analogy means [music]

asking ourselves in what way

specifically are these two things

similar or related to each other? In

what ways are [music] they different? In

what situation does this analogy not

make sense anymore? And if there are a

lot of differences or a lot of

conditions and situations where the

analogy breaks apart, then is there a

better analogy or can we extend or

modify that analogy to make it more

comprehensive and more accurate? This

critiquing process massively drives up

our retention and depth of understanding

of this new information. And the reason

this works is because instead of new

information just [music] being new

information that your brain doesn't know

what to do with, we're actually

extending it from what we already know.

We're taking our existing network and

connecting [music] it to the new

information straight away. Which is the

reason why creating analogies has been

shown in studies repeatedly to be so

powerful for our retention and

understanding. Now, at this point, you

might be looking at the system and

thinking, "This seems a little forced.

It doesn't feel natural." And you're

right. In fact, [music]

it's crucial that you understand that

this is not natural. And that's why it

works. If you have no time pressure and

it doesn't matter how well you learn

something, then you can learn and read

[music] however you want. But

unfortunately what research has shown is

that there are clear biological

limitations of the human brain to how

much it can [music] consume and store

into our memory in one go. And in the

modern day when there is so much we have

to learn, it is very very easy to exceed

that biological limit and then get

overwhelmed. Learning is extremely

complicated. [music] So to be able to

learn a lot in a short amount of time,

reach a high level of knowledge, a lot

of processes need to go right. And this

is why most people will plateau on their

learning ability and after a point not

really improve for the rest of their

lives. For me, figuring out what

processes to care about and therefore

what to improve on and then how to even

execute on those correctly took me at

least seven or eight years of almost

constant experimentation and reading of

research and coaching people to see what

works for them. And honestly, I got

lucky because 10, [music] 15 years ago,

a lot of the research didn't even exist.

Which is why to make it easier for you,

I've started a free weekly newsletter. I

take everything that I've learned that

helps you become a more efficient

learner. The things that [music] have

the highest chance of giving you success

in a short amount of time and I package

them in a [music] way that you can take

and implement into your own learning in

less than 105 minutes. If you want to

sign up for the newsletter, it's

completely free. I'll leave a link in

the description for you. Now, getting

back to Pacer, you might notice that the

way that I've written the A in Pacer is

is like this. It's this kind of strange

shape there. And the reason is because

[music]

a the analogous information can exist

within as a subset of procedural

information. For example, you could

create an analogy on [music] a set of

instructions to make it simpler and

easier for you to understand and then

later you go and practice [music] it.

But analogous information also exists as

a subset within the next category of

information which is the C of pacer and

this stands for conceptual.

If procedural information is the how to

do something then conceptual information

is the what. [music] And for most

science subjects the majority of what

you need to learn is conceptual.

Conceptual information includes facts

and explanations, theories and

principles, relationships between

concepts, and ways that that concept can

be applied. And in most cases, we need

both the procedural and the conceptual

knowledge to solve a problem and apply

our knowledge properly. For example,

although this book goes through how to

listen to someone's heart, I still need

to have the conceptual knowledge about

what I'm listening to to be able to

analyze that and make a conclusion on

the diagnosis. So, when we identify that

a piece of text we're reading is

conceptual type information, the process

we want to use straight away is mapping.

Nonlinear

networkbased notetaking [music]

such as mind mapping is an efficient way

of increasing your attention and [music]

mastery of conceptual knowledge because

conceptual knowledge inherently exists

in a network. Although a textbook or a

lecture might be delivered word after

word in a linear format, if we look at

the mind and knowledge of the person

that wrote that textbook, it doesn't

exist in a linear sentence by sentence

structure. Their knowledge and expertise

exists in a highly connected network of

information. There is no innate sequence

of information. An expert can start at

any point and navigate to any other

point. This is what allows an expert to

do complex problem solving because they

can look at a problem, understand what

concepts are related, and see how those

concepts connect together to solve the

problem. Whereas a beginner who's only

learned it at a surface level just sees

individual separated concepts and they

don't understand how they [music] link

together. As a learner, our job is not

to remember the sequence word for word.

Our job is to try to recreate that

network of knowledge that the expert

[music] had. And mapping is such a great

technique because it forces us to not

only think about each fact and concept,

but also how they connect to each other

to form a bigger picture. So when you

are reading and consuming, take some

time to get out a piece of paper or a

tablet and make a map of the things that

you're learning. And as you read more,

you add more to your map. You move

things around. You reorganize things. As

you read more, you also digest more and

your map grows. Remember, analogous

information can also exist within

conceptual information. And so you might

find opportunities within conceptual

information to create some analogies and

you might want to add those into your

map as well. Even if the analogy doesn't

make its way into the map, it could give

you an idea in terms of how you want to

structure your ideas on your map. Now,

here's that same problem again. Let's

say you're reading, but you don't have

time to draw a map or maybe you don't

have anything to map on while you're

reading. Then again, we need to slow

down and consume less so that [music]

consumption and digestion can stay

balanced. And if you don't, you'll just

end up overwhelmed again and wasting

time because not only are you going to

forget a lot of what you are consuming,

but now you've given the future version

of you more work to do by having to go

and figure out what you've forgotten and

then reconsume it again. Anyway, now the

good news is that the digesting of

procedural analogous and conceptual

information is easily the most

timeconuming. The E and the R of Pacer

are much faster and easier to deal with.

I'll talk about E and R together because

they're both very similar to each other.

But pay close attention because the two

are actually so similar to each other

that most people never distinguish

between the two and that can lead

directly to hours of wasted time per

[music] week. The E and Pacer stands for

evidence.

Evidence type information is the

information that helps make conceptual

information more concrete. They're often

very detailed, sometimes very technical

pieces of information, but they're

useful because we can use these facts or

statistics or cases as examples to prove

a conceptual point. For example, we

could understand conceptually how World

War I started. But we also need to know

the evidence information of date certain

specific events occurred between which

specific people at which specific

location to make that concept more

concrete. And the key process for

evidence type information is to store

and rehearse.

Store means that you just collect that

information and note it down somewhere.

You could add it to your conceptual map

or you could add it to a second brain

system using something like notion or

Rome or obsidian or you could put it

onto flashcards. You could even just

write them down on a document somewhere

with all the other things that you are

storing. This should happen as soon as

you identify it. So as you are consuming

the information and you identify that

this piece of information is an evidence

type, we go ahead and straight away

store it.

>> [music]

>> The rehearsing part of it comes a little

later. We put aside time to do the

rehearsal. And rehearsing the

information is the key to improving our

retention of evidence type information.

Rehearsing means that we think about how

we will need to use this piece of

information. How are we going to apply

it? What type of conceptual information

is this an example of? We then challenge

ourselves by using and applying that

information in the way that we will need

to use it. This means solving problems

or writing detailed answers to questions

or creating explanations, teaching it to

other people or maybe writing essays

that use that piece of evidence as a

supporting example for a wider concept.

And so while we store the information

while we consume it, the rehearsing

happens later, maybe at the end of the

day or at the end of the week. But do

not waste time while you are consuming

trying to just memorize and read and

reread and writing copious notes on that

piece of information. Otherwise, you are

not going to have enough time for the PA

and C the first three types of

information which is what forms the

foundation of knowledge that the

evidence type needs to build off of in

the first place. Now, evidence type

information is very similar to the final

type which is the R of Pacer and this

stands for reference type information.

Reference information is the easiest to

deal with. [music] It is all of the

nittygritty very specific detailed bits

of information that don't really change

your conceptual understanding. They're

not particularly that important. They're

not analogous and they're not

procedural. But for whatever reason, we

might need to know this later. This

might be something like the exact value

of a mathematical constant or a specific

gene involved in a particular mutation

or the name of a very specific molecule

of a disease or maybe a list of

attributes used to define a variable for

coding. And the process we use to deal

with this type of information is the

same as for evidence almost. It's store

and rehearse. the same things.

The storing part exactly the same. You

[music] chuck it in a second brain on

your flash cards, wherever makes sense

for you. But if you need to be able to

record this information from memory and

you can't like refer back to your notes

when you need to use it, then you

probably want to use something like

flashcards because the rehearse part is

a little different. Because reference

type information is by definition not

very conceptually important anyway. It's

quite hard to use this for problem

solving or as part of like an extended

discussion or answer. The way we are

probably going to use this information

is just direct fact recall. Which is why

something like flashcards using a space

repetition active recall strategy like

an app like Anki is going to be the best

way to handle reference type

information. So as you're reading and

you're thinking, hey, this might be a

reference type information, you dump it

into your flashcards and you put aside

like 30 minutes every day or whatever to

just go through your flash cards to do

your rehearsal. But please again

absolutely

do not waste time while you're reading

trying to just read and reread and write

notes and just memorize this information

at the time. You need to use that time

for the first three which forms the bulk

of your knowledge. As I said earlier,

there are a lot of things that need to

go [music] right to be able to learn a

lot of information in a short period of

time. And wasting time on trying to

memorize reference information while

you're reading it instead of spending

that time on the first three types is

one of the worst offenders. And as soon

as you get into that mind frame of

reading something and then rereading it

again, trying to get it into your head,

you can say goodbye to your learning

efficiency. So now you know the five

types of information for you to try to

identify as you consume in stage one

[music] and the appropriate targeted

process that will help you to digest

that information in stage two. And the

key to being able to retain a lot and

have a good high level of knowledge for

what you have consumed is to keep that

stage one and stage two [music]

balanced. And I will see you in the next

one.

So by now we've gone through quite a lot

of strategies on encoding uh and you

should definitely apply them but as you

apply them one of the things you'll

realize uh and this is a common barrier

for people is that encoding effectively

is actually really tiring. It can be

mentally quite exhausting and this is

actually a good thing. Effective

learning takes effort. It does take up

mental energy. But for a lot of

learners, always feeling tired when

they're learning is quite demotivating.

And you're not going to be able to get

much work done or maintain your

productivity if you don't know how to

basically force your brain through that

feeling [music] and still make

meaningful learning progress even on the

days when you feel exhausted [music] and

tired. So, in this next section, we're

going to go through how you can overcome

this. There is a method of learning that

I've been using for years to force my

brain to study even when I don't feel

like it, especially on days where I am

feeling tired and burnt out. It's called

the ladder method. I use this method to

study learning science while working as

a doctor full-time while running a

business. I also use this for my

full-time masters again while I was

working full-time and I managed to

graduate at the top of my cohort. It's

probably one of the most useful

techniques that I use on a daily basis

anyone can use, including you. And I'll

show you how it works on something like

this beefy textbook. But first, we have

to understand why we don't feel like

learning in the first place. And once

you understand that, the latter method

will make a lot of sense. Now, there's a

reason that we don't feel overwhelmed at

the thought of tying our shoelaces or

walking 20 steps, but we might get

overwhelmed at the thought of climbing

an entire mountain. Even though walking

a few steps and tying your shoes are the

first steps of climbing a mountain.

What's happening is that our brain is

making a judgment on how hard something

is going to be and how much effort and

energy it's going to require. Our brain

uses a lot of energy. It's the most

energyconsuming organ in our body,

consuming 20% of our resting energy. So,

it is incredibly efficient at avoiding

unnecessary energy intake. Now, when it

comes to studying, one of the most

energy consuming things that your brain

has to do and therefore doesn't want to

do is to organize information. It's a

crucial part of forming memory and

developing understanding. So, here's how

that works. Imagine these marbles

represent new information. Each marble

is a fact or concept that you need to

learn. And these cups represent how your

brain is trying to organize it. Whenever

you learn something new, your brain has

to look at it, understand it, analyze

it, and make a decision about which cup

it belongs in. It looks at how similar

it is to what is already inside these

cups. And it groups this information

based on similarities. And all of this

thinking takes energy and we feel that

as mental effort. Our brain is working.

And once it figures out where it belongs

and then it organizes it, then the

mental effort goes down cuz it's stored

away. And this process repeats with the

next piece of information. It looks at,

makes a decision, and then decides where

we want to store it. And then we repeat

this process until our learning is

complete.

So then what part of this makes our

brain feel overwhelmed so that we don't

feel like studying? Well, imagine if I

didn't have any cups at all. Now instead

of picking up a piece of information,

looking at it, and asking ourselves,

which cup does it go in, we have to ask

ourselves, how many cups do I need?

Which cup should I get? What are the

alternative options? What else do I need

to put into this hypothetical cup? And

then what am I meant to do if uh a few

more pieces of information later I

realize that that was wrong? After all,

I don't know what other options there

are because I've only got this one piece

of information to work with. And trying

to figure out all of that takes much

more effort and energy which creates the

I don't want to study feeling. So there

are three main ways that your brain uses

lots of energy while learning. First is

to just understand what it is consuming,

reading, listening to. The second is to

compare it with what you already know.

And then the third is to decide where

it's going to put that information.

Where does it belong based on [music]

how similar it is or how related it is

to the things that you just compared it

to? And trying to do all three of these

things at once while you're learning

creates overwhelm and is going to be

very daunting. So what do we do instead?

So let's say that I want to study this

chapter in this textbook. Immediately I

look through this and I feel like man

there's a lot to cover. Uh I feel like

it's going to require a lot of work. I'm

getting overwhelmed and now I don't want

to study. This is where the ladder

method comes in. Based on the ladder

method we are going to be breaking up

this topic, this chapter based on

different rungs of effort. And each rung

on the ladder is low effort. So let me

show you this. Here's what I'm doing

during this. I'm going through the

textbook and I'm looking for the things

that are low effort. I'm saying what are

the things that feel easy for me to

understand that I can easily compare

with the things that I already know and

that I can easily think about and how

the topic might be organized. I'm also

using some nonlinear note takingaking to

track [music] my thoughts which I talk

about in some other videos. I'm also

highlighting the parts that I actually

focused on just for you to be able to

see at the end of this. I wouldn't

normally highlight anything when I'm

doing this. Just a nonlinear notes is

fine. You'll be able to see that, but

I'm just trying to show you what I am

focusing on and what I am either skimm

reading or just completely skipping

because I think it would take too much

effort to try to understand or compare

or to organize. By the way, don't worry.

This is an old ass textbook uh with

highlighting all over the place already.

uh I'm not ruining a new book. Okay. So,

as you can see, I have skipped

basically, you know, like most things.

If you look at the parts that are

highlighted, most of it has been

skipped. You know, it's pretty bare.

However, I have managed to with just the

parts that I focused on build a pretty

decent scaffold for me to work off of.

And so this topic has become a little

bit easier for me now than it would have

been 10 15 minutes ago. So if I'm really

tired, I can call that a day. I can end

on that rung of the ladder and I can

pick up the second rung another day. Or

if I want to, I can just do the second

rung now. And on the second rung, I'm

going to do exactly the same thing. I'm

going to look for the things that feel

easier and feel lower effort. I'm going

to build on my scaffold and build up on

my knowledge. But the difference is that

it's going to take a little bit longer.

Each successive rung on the ladder takes

a little bit longer because now more

things make sense to us than they did

before. And we're probably ready to go

into a little bit more detail. Having

said that, it is still low effort

because now I've established some of

those major cups I need to fill. So,

let's now do the second run.

All righty. And that was about 35

minutes that I spent on that. So, you

can see the second rung took a little

longer. I was able to get through more

detail. What was surprising in a way is

that the second rung when I went through

it, there wasn't a lot more stuff that I

felt like I was going through, but it

was more like I was just going through

the same ideas but deeper and really

figuring it out. And you can see that a

lot of the time was spent on just

organizing the information. So you can

see of the ways that our brain can use

energy. Before I was using a lot of that

energy on just trying to understand

things and put things together in a very

general rough way. again just figuring

out maybe how many cups I need roughly.

And in the second rung, I'm now refining

that. [snorts] I'm spending more of that

energy not on just understanding but now

really on just making sure those

decisions and those comparisons are

correct. So same amount of effort just

used in a different way depending on the

run. Now the third time I go through it

should be enough to cover off this

topic. I'd be going through a little bit

more of those details either adding them

to my map or adding them to flashcards

depending on the type of information.

most topics I find you generally can get

through all of it in just three rungs of

the ladder. And so here's the secret as

to why this technique works so well.

It's because each rung takes the same

effort as the last rung and [music] I'm

splitting all the work that I'd need to

do for this topic into each rung. It

makes every study session easy cuz we're

just not letting ourselves spend time on

things that are hard. But also, it gets

easier the more you do it. Even though

with each rung we're covering more

content and more detail, it's easier to

make sense of it because our cups and

our structure and our foundations are so

strong. The more you learn, the easier

it gets. You can also apply the same

approach for projects or assignments as

well, where you start with the easy

highlevel planning first and you

progressively get more and more detailed

with each rung of the ladder. Now, this

is just one type of way that you can use

the ladder method and there are so many

other applications of this principle

that I teach in my full guided program.

But for someone who has never tried

studying like this, it is a complete

gamecher. By the way, if you are

interested in my program, you can check

out the link in the description. There's

this technique and dozens of other

techniques that you can learn. Once you

start using this ladder method a couple

of times, your brain will realize, hey,

studying isn't that bad. and it'll make

you less likely to put things off and

less likely to procrastinate.

Now, once you've improved your ability

to encode uh and [music] encode even

when you are tired, you're now ready to

learn a few more slightly more advanced

encoding strategies. And to round off

chapter 2, here are 12 more advanced

encoding strategies that you should

learn and apply.

I've been a learning coach for the past

13 years and I found that proper

encoding is one of the most important

abilities for any student or

professional to master. If you have a

strong encoding ability, you are able to

remember more of what you learn and to a

deeper [music] level. But if you're weak

at encoding, you could be wasting

hundreds of hours every year. [music] In

fact, I've coached over 30,000 learners

and I found that strong encoding skills

are so important and rare that it is a

hallmark of what we call genius. So that

person you remember from your class who

never studied and remembered everything

that is strong encoding and you [music]

can learn it by following these 12

rules. Rule number one, stop fighting

your brain. Encoding is the word that we

use anytime that your brain forms

memories with new information. And your

brain is actually really good at doing

this if we stay out of the way. Anytime

there's new information that comes in

and we want to learn it, our brain

starts the process of encoding and what

it wants to do to put it into our

long-term memory is see where it fits.

It's like putting a book on a library

shelf. There is a organizational

structure. There is a logic to it. And

when our brain is able to see where this

new information fits and how it's

relevant and how to organize it into our

memory, that's when we feel like it

makes sense. That's when we feel like,

okay, I understand it and I feel like

I'm going to hold on to this. When it

doesn't fit anywhere, that's when it

feels like I don't know what to do with

this. I'm not sure how this is relevant.

And you can feel that you are about to

forget it. And your brain is not going

to hold on to that piece of information

because there's no need to. And it's

very important that it doesn't just use

up energy on just holding on to every

scrap of random piece of information

that it gets hit with. And so your brain

is trying to organize and make sense and

place information somewhere that it

belongs, where it connects, where it's

relevant, where it influences other

things. And then for the things that

don't fit anywhere, it says this is not

worth keeping and then it's going to

throw it away. Good. Good brain. And so

now if you take that information that

was just thrown away and forgotten and

then you tell your brain, "No, you need

to remember this. Put it back in." And

it still doesn't fit anywhere. And so

your brain forgets it again. And then

you pick it up again and you say, "No,

you need to remember this." That process

is extremely inefficient. You are having

a shouting match with your brain. And

this is basically the spectrum of the

quality of encoding. On one end you have

techniques, methods of learning,

notetaking, listening, reading that help

the brain to see how it connects to

create structure and to organize it. And

on the other end, you've got techniques

where you are not helping to connect it.

You're not seeing the big picture. There

is nowhere for it to fit. you're just

repeatedly smashing it into your brain.

And that's a process we call wrote

memorization. Being a good encoder is

about realizing that that is not going

to help with our memory compared to

finding a way to make it more relevant

in the first place. And you have to make

that switch because the second rule is

to prevent learning debt. Learning debt

is what happens when you keep fighting

your brain. So let's say that this is us

and we're going to learn a new piece of

information which is this square. It

goes into our brain and initially we

feel like we don't know how it's

relevant. If we keep fighting our brain,

it's going to stay irrelevant which

means our brain is going to continually

forget it. It's going to put it in the

dump.

And so what do we need to do later?

Well, later we now need to spend time to

look at what's in the dump. We need to

then spend time to learn it again. We

need to spend time to think about it and

realize, oh, it's still irrelevant. And

we need to spend time to repeat it and

tell our brain, no, you need to hold on

to this. And so, what's your brain going

to do? Well, it's still irrelevant. So,

it's just going to forget it again. And

then this entire process has to repeat

again and again and again. And this is

all wasted time. By not taking the time

here to turn this irrelevant information

into something that we think is

relevant, we have created all of this

debt for ourselves. Learning that we

just put off until later and now the

future version of us has to pay that

off. And if you have a habit of creating

learning debt where your ability to

learn depends on how much repetition you

can do later, it's very difficult to

ever improve your encoding because every

time there is the opportunity to

practice the skill and make the

irrelevant relevant, we just say, "Nope,

I'll just deal with that later." And so,

what's one way that you can break this

habit? What's one way that you can make

it easier to turn the irrelevant into

the relevant? Well, this is rule number

three. Don't overeat information. I

often talk about learning as a two-phase

process. Consuming and digesting.

Consuming is what gives you the

information. Digesting is what makes

that information something that sticks

in your memory that you can use. That's

basically what encoding is. Digesting

and encoding in this example are the

same thing. And so this is what I mean

by overeing information. And it's very

easy to do this. Everyone falls into

this trap at some point. If you are

sitting there in a lecture and you're

listening for an hour, dense information

coming in, and then afterwards you go

and read through a textbook for another

hour. Again, lots of information coming

in. And at that point, you decide, okay,

I'm going to get all this information

that I've collected, and I'm now going

to start trying to see how it fits

together, making it feel more relevant,

connecting the dots. You are already

overeing. That is going to be much more

difficult and more timeconuming and

overall less efficient than just

digesting

constantly but frequently throughout

that entire process. So, as you're

listening, listen, listen, listen. take

some information and then try to piece

it together even in a very simple way. A

little summary, a little synthesis, a

tiny mini mind map and then you go back

to listening and collecting information.

Getting into the habit of constantly

trying to digest what you're consuming

and making sense of it as you go creates

this snowball effect of learning. As you

learn more, more things start to make

sense to you. you start seeing patterns

and trends. And so the new information

that comes in becomes easier to connect

because you've got a better foundation.

You've got more anchor points to connect

to. And so as you get more and more

information, learning becomes easier and

easier. On the other hand, if you just

consume for a really long time and then

try to digest all of that at once,

instead of having two or three concepts

that you're trying to put together,

you're now working with 25. and it can

feel really overwhelming and cognitively

taxing to work through all those

possible interactions and relationships

and make it work. This is also one of

the reasons why I always recommend if

you can to pre-study before entering

into something like a lecture or a

workshop. It gives you the opportunity

to just consume a little bit some of the

most important things and to digest that

in your own time so that when you come

to the live event which might be a

little bit faster pace, harder to keep

up with, you have that foundation to

work off. That snowball has already been

built. If pre-study is not already part

of your learning system, I highly

recommend it. And if you're not sure

about your current learning system and

you're not sure how to improve your

learning system, I also have a free

learning system diagnostic quiz that you

can take. Everyone has some learning

system whether you know it or not. But

that learning system may not be the

best. This quiz helps you to map out

your learning system across five

important domains of learning among

which encoding and pre-study are part of

it. And at the end, it even actually

gives you a score for your encoding

skills. So, if you're interested in that

quiz, it's completely free and I'll

leave a link in the description below.

Now, the next four rules are actually

tactics. There are four types of

thinking that you can do that will force

you into more effective encoding. So, if

you took that quiz before and let's say

your encoding score was like 10%, then

just doing these four tactics could

increase that to maybe 50 or 60%. So,

starting with rule number four, simplify

everything. Here's the trick.

Stop trying to remember or understand

what you read or hear. And I know that

sounds really counterintuitive if you're

new to this because it feels like, well,

that's kind of the whole point of

learning is to remember and understand

it.

Being able to remember and understand

something is a side effect of doing the

right type of thinking. Just trying to

remember something and trying to

understand it is actually not the most

effective way to achieve that.

Confusing, I know. On the other hand, if

you try to simplify it, if that's your

number one goal for any new piece of

information that you hear is you're just

trying to simplify it, then your brain

will automatically go through the right

motions and processes that allow you to

understand it and remember it better

than if you were just trying to remember

and understand to begin with. Even if

you incorrectly simplify something, the

work that went into trying to simplify

it will make your memory of it stronger

when you get the correct version. And

this is especially useful for really

dense technical complicated information.

Like I remember going through medical

school reading these definitions like

anaphilaxis is a life-threatening severe

systemic hyper sensitivity reaction

involving IG mediator. Like it's like

okay so basically your immune system

hits the panic button. You know, being

able to frame something that initially

is complicated in a way that it's just

simpler and more intuitive to understand

allows you to work with that concept

more easily. And this is really

important because the next rule, rule

number five is to compare everything.

Before I talked about how good encoding

means making the irrelevant relevant.

Well, this is the first part of how your

brain creates relevance. Your brain

fundamentally operates in networks,

which means that information is only

meaningful because of its relationship

to other pieces of information. You

might say, "My house is really important

to me." Why? Because of the implication

it has on shelter and stability and

security and warmth and all these other

things. So forcing ourselves to compare

new information with another piece of

new information or to compare it with

something that we already know. This is

basically opening up our brain in the

networks within it to this new one to

see where it can fit. We're actively

looking to give it meaning by finding

similarities and differences. And once

you've done that, once you've been able

to simplify something and then see the

similarities and differences of this

piece of information compared to this

other piece of information, then we're

ready for the next step, which is rule

number six, connect everything. Once we

go through this process of trying to

simplify and trying to compare all these

different concepts with each other, then

we can actually see how they connect

with each other. We start seeing the

influences and the impacts and the

implications. We start building the

network. We are creating memory. And I

deliberately use the word everything

when I say simplify everything, compare

everything, connect everything because

you have to do this consistently. It's

not simplify when you feel like it. It's

not compare things when it feels

obvious. It's every single time. A

strong encoder is someone who has a

habit of every piece of information that

comes into their brain. They are

examining it. They are trying to

simplify, compare, and connect it. And

sometimes they're not successful. They

don't know how to make it simpler. They

don't see what it's similar to at all.

They don't see how it could connect with

anything else. And this is what makes

good encoders also have really good

questions. The question is not just,

hey, what does this mean? It is, hey,

this seems kind of similar to this

thing, but also very different from it,

and I feel like it might connect with

this other thing, but I'm not sure. It's

much more targeted. And at a certain

point, if you are encoding the right way

and you're doing following these steps,

you will feel that at a certain point,

there are a lot of connections and

similarities that are overlapping. And

that's actually a good thing because

that means you're ready for the next

step and it's the fourth tactic. Rule

number seven,

group everything. Before you group

things, this is what your organization,

your mind map, how your thoughts are

currently organized. Something like

this. It's this kind of complicated

network of all these different things

that are connected together. And yes,

there's connection, but it's also so

overwhelming that there's no way we're

going to be able to remember this.

Grouping is about taking this and then

simplifying it. Again, making it easier

for us to hold on to and package into

our memory. And the way we do this is by

looking for these patterns of shared

similarities. So, for example, we might

see that these three items here are

actually connected to each other. So

maybe they actually share a single

similarity and that could be the name of

the group that they form underneath. So

instead of representing it like this, if

we look at all the different shared

similarities, we can actually simplify

the exact same network down to something

that looks a little bit more like this.

And so this is actually preserving all

those same connections. But look at how

much more organized this looks and how

much easier it is to remember. And so

again, this is that digesting. It's

about not necessarily taking in any new

information. It's about looking at the

information you've already got and then

looking for these patterns and these

trends and doing that deep thinking. And

that thinking is you doing the encoding.

The very process of looking for ways to

organize it, of creating groups,

realizing that those groups don't make

sense and therefore thinking of a

different group. That is the encoding

process. And so that the time spent

doing that leads to better memory, leads

to a deeper understanding, saves you

hundreds of hours every single year that

you spend studying just through how much

it improves your attention and

efficiency. And the awesome thing is

that a genius is able to do these steps.

They are looking for comparisons.

They're making connections. They're

grouping and they're simplifying. And

they're doing it automatically.

Sometimes they're not even aware that

they're actively doing it. But by

teaching you these techniques, you can

do the same thing. You don't have to be

born with it. Even if you're not built

different, you can build differently.

And I'm really making this uh a point

and I'm emphasizing this because of the

next rule, which is rule number eight.

Get used to thinking hard. By this

point, I think you've realized that this

is a lot more mental effort. Digesting

it takes effort. It takes concentration

to be able to do this. It is a lot

easier just to read through, speed read

some textbook, listen to a lecture on

three times speed, and just smash your

face infinitely into flashcards. But

there is a reason most people are not

very efficient at learning. Because

getting to the point where you're

efficient at learning means doing this

stuff, doing the hard work, and getting

used to thinking at that level. And one

day it will become a habit. And so

thinking at that level will be just as

easy as however you're thinking now if

you're not at that level. But if cutting

down on wasted time while learning,

improving your attention, getting a

deeper understanding, being able to

solve more complex problems, if these

are things that you've struggled with,

you're not at the level that you want to

be quite yet, you have to go through

this process. There's no way that you

will reach that result without going

through this path of getting used to

thinking like this. Now, on to rule

number nine,

which is to do everything again.

Learning is endless,

which means that encoding

never ends. Just because you created a

nice mind map, created a nice network

for what you have learned right now

doesn't mean that that's where it ends.

And you may have done a lot of hard

thinking. You're sweating bullets.

Unfortunately,

we have to keep going. As you learn

more, as you get even more detail, as

your knowledge deepens, as you realize

there might be gaps or mistakes in the

way that you encoded the information,

you have to then re-evaluate what you've

constructed and then restructure it.

There have been many times where I've

created a mind map of something and I

feel like it makes a lot of sense. I

test myself and I realize I got it

wrong. And even at a micro level, you

know, I was talking about how you need

to be consuming and then digesting

frequently. So you take a little bit in

and then you digest it and then you take

another little bit in and then you

digest it. That process of digesting.

What that really means is take in a

little bit of information, couple of

concepts, simplify them, compare them,

connect them, group them together, and

then take in the next bit. With that

next bit, you now simplify that, compare

it, connect it, and then group it. And

what will happen is that as you are

continuing to collect and consume more

information, you realize that the way

you grouped and connected it before

isn't enough. You have to re-evaluate

your groups to encompass the new

information. And so mentally you are

constantly

I I mean literally if you're an

effective learner who can encode

efficiently, you are constantly in a

cycle of simplifying, connecting,

comparing, grouping, taking new

information in and then doing it all

over again. And this is why rule number

eight is really important. You have to

get used to thinking hard. But the good

news is that even though it might sound

really overwhelming to just constantly

be doing this, it's actually easier than

you might think. The hard part is just

setting up those initial habits. Once

you have your habits of simplifying and

comparing and connecting and grouping

things together, it's straightforward to

just keep thinking in that way. And at

that point you will feel that the

control you have and how strong you can

make your memory and how deeply you can

understand something is a rare skill

that most people you encounter will not

have. Now this next rule is actually uh

another tactic that helps you to do all

of those previous ones using a single

technique which is to use better

analogies. Creating an analogy is

actually like a magical technique.

Anytime you want to create an analogy,

you have to simplify the information,

compare it, connect it, and group them,

you have to to create an analogy. Now,

you can't just rely on only using

analogies for the rest of your life. But

having that as one tool to achieve this

as part of your learning toolkit is

incredibly valuable. Now, why do I say

to make better analogies? Well, it's

because a better analogy makes your

learning even more effective. It takes a

powerful technique and really

supercharges it. So, what is a better

analogy? A better analogy is one that is

more comprehensive in that it involves

more of the key details and concepts of

what you're trying to learn while being

simple and also accurate. And it's

balancing these three parts of an

analogy that can be challenging.

Whenever you create an analogy, it's

often very simple to make a simple

analogy for only two or three concepts

and how they relate to each other. But

once you start adding additional

concepts and more factors and more

conditions, then our analogy grows.

Suddenly it's not just learning is like

eating and then digesting. It's like,

but then there's also depends on how

spicy the food is and then what you ate

before and whether you know you're

already full and how far you are from

the toilet. And so now the analogy just

becomes itself like a whole thing to try

to memorize. And so that's why we need

to make it simple. But then if you make

it too simple, you actually start losing

accuracy. And so, as you probably have

guessed by now, when you're trying to

make a really comprehensive, while

simple, while accurate analogy, the

thought process and the effort that goes

on mentally to see whether it makes

sense and to make it meet those

conditions, that is also helping with

your encoding. Now, the next rule is

something that makes everything that

we've talked about easier to do. It is

your best friend when it comes to

learning, which is note-taking.

Rule number 11 is to use notetaking

as an offload. If you're carrying like

five plates of food and you're about to

drop them, you give a couple of those

plates to your friend. You let them

carry it so that you can focus on what

you can hold. When it comes to learning,

note takingaking is that friend. While

the human brain is extremely powerful,

it also has very well-defined limits and

it is not good at holding on to multiple

pieces of information at the same time.

So, if you're trying to balance like 12

different concepts and see how all of

these concepts can be simplified and

compared and connected with each other,

there are probably very very few people

in the world that could manage that for

new complex information just mentally.

So, the way that we use our note-taking

needs to be in the realm of hold on to

this thought for me. Here are a few

concepts. Maybe they relate together.

I'm just going to jot that down so I

don't have to hold on to that. Could it

be like this? Could it be connected like

this? Where does this fit? Jot that

down. Get to the habit of thinking on

paper. And there are two huge advantages

to how this helps with your encoding.

Number one, it actually makes it

cognitively easier because you can

literally see the thoughts on paper and

you can actually, you know, visualize

it. You can move things around. You're

not spending so much time just trying to

remember and juggle the information

mentally. The second thing is that your

notes start becoming a reflection of

your mind. After all, it is a mind map.

And this is really useful because you

can then look at your notes to find gaps

in your knowledge or areas where your

memory is going to be weaker by just

evaluating the types of connections. If

you see this straggly piece of

information way out there that's not

connected to anything, you know that

you're likely to forget that and that

you're not going to be able to solve

complex problems with that information.

That becomes a weak point. You don't

even need to test yourself. You can look

at your notes to find areas of weakness

in your knowledge.

I think that's pretty cool. And learning

to do that is crucial because of the

next rule, which is rule number 12.

Challenge your hypothesis

constantly. You will never know you are

wrong until you know you are wrong.

Every piece of knowledge we're crafting,

every network we're forming is just a

hypothesis. This is just how we think

that knowledge is structured right now.

I've been studying about learning

science for a pretty long time now, like

13 years, and everything I know about

learning is still I think of it as a

hypothesis. I'm willing to challenge any

part of how I think learning works when

new information comes in. This is what

allows me to be flexible and adapt my

structures very freely. And it is this

mindset, the willingness to constantly

challenge your hypothesis and to

constantly challenge how you have

understood something that allows your

expertise to keep growing quickly. When

we don't challenge our hypothesis, it

makes our knowledge very rigid. Mistakes

and gaps in our knowledge stay hidden.

Especially when you're just starting a

new topic, everything's a hypothesis.

There's almost no chance you're going to

get right the first time. But if we

group it a certain way and connect it a

certain way and we say, "Okay, well, now

that I've connected it and now that I've

grouped it, I'm just going to keep it

like that and we continue to learn

things that suggest that maybe this

group is not the best, unless we stay

open to the fact that this was just a

hypothesis, we're not going to change

it. This becomes rigid. So the mistakes

and the misunderstandings that we formed

early on stay there. They become the

foundation where all the additional

knowledge is built on top of. So those

are the 12 rules to dramatically boost

your encoding abilities. And if you're

listening to it and you're thinking it

doesn't sound simple, it doesn't sound

sexy and quick to just apply it.

That's what learning is. If you're

looking for a shortcut to learning, I'm

sorry to say that it doesn't exist. But

there is a path which is up to you to

take. Thanks for watching and I'll see

you in the next one.

So that brings us to the end of chapter

two on encoding and we'll now move on to

chapter three which is about mind

mapping. Mind mapping is technically

just a strategy that's used to help with

encoding. It's just a note-taking

strategy. Uh however, it's its own

chapter because it's a complex skill and

there's a lot of things to do uh

correctly to get the full benefit from

it. And it's also going to build on the

encoding strategies and principles that

we've already talked about uh in the

previous sections. But in this chapter,

we're going into more detail with some

more step-by-step instructions. We're

going to start with this kind of general

but comprehensive guide on how to do the

perfect mind map. I've taught people to

mind map for over 10 years. I've made

hundreds of mind maps myself and

reviewed thousands [music] more as a

coach. It's a skill that's allowed me

and my students to not only get top

results, but to do so efficiently and

without spending every waking hour

studying. So, in this video, I'll show

you my six-step framework for mind

mapping, which I call grind. And each

step of this framework helps you unlock

a different learning [music] outcome.

Following these six steps correctly will

help you create the perfect mind map,

which allows you to have a deep and

nuanced understanding of a topic much

more quickly than what it would normally

take you, as well as a stronger memory

on what you've learned and the ability

to apply what you've learned in deeper,

more nuanced ways. But first, we need to

clear up a common misunderstanding and

talk about what a perfect mind map even

is. is. And once we understand what a

perfect mind map actually means,

creating one becomes much easier. You

see, the perfect mind map is less about

the mind map and more about the process

you use to create it. Let's say you took

one of the mind maps that I created and

got first in class and then you imported

that into your own notes. Would you do

just as well with just that? Probably

not. And that's because you can't just

copy paste knowledge from one person's

brain into another. Well, at least not

yet. Learning is not something that

happens automatically or even naturally

in some cases. Learning is a series of

processes that we have to deliberately

engage in. Great learners are ones that

have a lot of great processes and bad

learners are ones that are either not

engaging in enough processes or they're

wasting time with the wrong processes.

And when we engage in the right

effective processes, the side effects of

that are better understanding, better

memory, and a better ability to apply

what we've learned. When we use the

wrong processes, that's when we can

spend hours and hours reading and

writing notes and not really having any

benefit on our memory or our

understanding or our ability to use

knowledge. So, what most people don't

appreciate is that the point of mind

mapping isn't to have a mind map. The

mind map itself is not the knowledge.

Mind mapping is a skill that helps us

engage in the right thinking processes

to build the knowledge. And that concept

is distilled in my six-step grind

checklist. When we create a mind map

following grind, we effectively force

our brain to engage in high efficiency

in coding, which is basically the

technical term for our brain turning

information into memory. So let's start

with the first step of grind which is

also one of the most fundamental

processes that you should ever do in

learning. There's almost no situation

where you should not be doing this. And

step one of grind the G is grouping.

Grouping is simply arranging related

ideas together. So, for example, if I

have these [music] pens, then grouping

just means that I'm categorizing them

somehow and [music] putting the

categories together. The hard part,

which takes thinking and therefore

promotes learning, is figuring out what

kind of grouping I want. For example, I

could group these pens based on color,

or I could group them based on how much

ink is left in them. Or I could even

group them based on sentimental value.

Uh, this one I got as a as a gift, and

this one I just found off the floor. So,

you see, the way that we think about how

these items are similar or related to

each other affects the groups we arrive

at. The point is that there are always

multiple ways that we can group

information and the right way for you

and your memory is not always the first

or most obvious one even if that's the

way that it's taught to you. So if we

have a look here are some mind maps that

do not have much grouping going on. And

now we have a look at some mind maps

that do have grouping. When we create

groups to organize information, it has a

twofold benefit. The first one is that

the process of grouping and figuring out

how I want to arrange the information

promotes a stronger memory and depth of

understanding. But in addition, the fact

that we have organized the information

in these categories makes it easier for

our brain to then retain and access that

information again in the future. In

other words, we not only benefit from

having these groups in our memory, but

the process of making the groups

themselves is also beneficial. In the

learning science research, you'll often

hear the benefits of grouping referred

to by terms like chunking or scaffolding

or creating mental models or information

schemas. And as more and more research

comes out, we're increasingly finding

that grouping is critical for promoting

a strong memory. Now, these days with

AI, there are actually some ways that we

can kind of cheat this step and get the

AI to group things for you. And there

are definitely some ways that you can

use AI to help you, but there are some

ways that it can harm you instead. I'll

show you the right way to use AI later

uh right after I go through the other

steps of grind. Now, step two of grind

is something that we already started

doing back in step one while we're

grouping, but here we take it to the

next level. The R in grind, step two,

stands for relational. We want [music]

to make our mind maps relational.

Relational means we're thinking about

how ideas are related to each other

[music] and we're expressing that on our

mind map. And there are broadly three

levels of relationships that we can form

while mind mapping. In level one, we

[music] have too few relationships. And

here's an example of that. Now at level

two we are having too many

relationships. It's getting overwhelming

[music] and that's what it looks like

here. And then in level three we have a

good amount of very organized

relationships. And it's the fact that

you can actually have too many

relationships that makes this second

step tricky. Here's why. A relationship

can [music] be any way that two facts or

concepts relate to each other. This

could be a influence that they have on

each other. It could be a cause and

effect relationship. It could be a

chronological relationship like step one

or step two or any other conceptual

link. Which means there are really a lot

of different ways that two things or

three things or an entire topic can be

related to each other. So it's not

enough just to know that two things are

related. We have [music] to understand

the nature of that relationship. When we

put down just every relationship we can

find, that's when it ends up looking

like that level two where there's too

much going on. We have to consciously

decide which relationships are important

enough for us to put down on the mind

map. And that's a decision that we need

to make. Now, the reason that the grind

checklist is so effective is because

each step of grind influences the other

steps. So, for example, depending on the

types of relationships we want to

emphasize, it also affects the groups we

will form. So, if we take this example

of uh a medical disease, this is the

method of grouping and the types of

relationships that are a little bit more

obvious. This is usually how it will be

taught in a textbook. But here is that

exact same topic and the same

information [music] arranged differently

by looking at different types of

relationships which leads to different

types of groups and you can see that the

two look very different to each other

and that reflects it being organized in

a different way in our mind. Now there's

no right or wrong answer. It's the

process of trying to figure out which is

best for me that promotes that stronger

memory and depth of understanding.

You'll also see later on how the other

steps influence your grouping and

relationships as well. Now, the third

step of the grind checklist is something

that should naturally occur if we did

step one, the grouping, and step two,

the relationships properly. But if we do

happen to miss step three, then we'll

find that we know each individual

concept pretty well, but we struggle to

apply that information, especially in

more complex problem solving, having

deeper discussions, or just trying to

use that knowledge in a way that's

different to how it was just directly

taught to you. So, if you've ever felt

that way about what you've learned, then

step three is the one you need to look

out for. And step three, the I in grind

stands for making our mind maps

interconnected.

Once we have formed the groups and

relationships in step one and step two,

we need to make sure that the groups

themselves are related and connected to

each other to create an overall

structure aka a big picture

understanding of the topic. And here's

an example of a mind map that has done

step one and step two correctly. So

there are groups and there are lots of

relationships but it's not very well

interconnected. You can see that there

are these really dense [music]

uh bodies of relationships but the

overall connection between each group is

relatively weak and loose. When we zoom

out it's a little hard to see how that

entire topic comes together. This is a

pattern I call islands and it's actually

one of the over 90 patterns in my

training program that I teach people to

avoid. This usually happens when we get

tunnel vision on what we're learning and

we're not really thinking about how what

we're learning right now relates to that

overall big picture frequently enough.

And when that happens and we end up with

these islands of quite concentrated but

sort of isolated uh groups then it

compartmentalizes

our understanding of the topic and it

restricts our ability to use that

information more freely and fluidly

which is exactly the type of way we need

to be able to think about the

information to do complex problem

solving or to have deeper more nuanced

applications. So, here's an example

where there is a similar density of

information, but it's being organized

with a much better overall structure and

aka the interconnectedness is a lot

better. And you can see it actually just

looks cleaner and more organized as

well. And by making sure that our mind

maps are grouped, relational, and

interconnected, we're able to form

what's known in the research as a

knowledge schema, which is basically the

way that our brain organizes information

to form knowledge and memory. Now, just

for your reference, getting to this

point with your mind mapping skill is

not something that you can usually pull

off in just one or two attempts, at

least not correctly. Most people try

mind mapping, they're not really able to

hit these first three steps correctly.

They don't find mind mapping is very

useful for them and then they stop. And

yes, if you're not doing it correctly,

it's not going to be effective. On my

training program, I normally teach these

types of processes over 3 to four weeks

and then an additional three or four

weeks to refine and consolidate them.

And the reason is because each step of

grind has several cognitive processes

that we need to get correct to be able

to do it properly. And those processes

are not always obvious. Trying to do all

of them correctly all at once is pretty

much impossible. But when we spend a

week on just nailing one part of the

process and then the next week on the

next part of the process, then it means

that every week we can consistently

improve, unlocking better and better

results along the way. By the way, these

processes do get quite complicated. So,

if you want me to dive into any of them

in more detail, let me know in the

comments. Alternatively, if you want to

learn each step of making the perfect

mind map straight away in complete

detail with stepbystep instructions and

feedback on your work, then you might be

interested in my program at I can study.

I'll leave a link in the description if

you want to learn more about it and see

if it's right for you. Now, by this

point, if we've got our grouping,

relational, and interconnected parts of

the mind map done, we should be seeing

some real improvements to our memory and

our ability to understand concepts

deeply, comprehensively, and accurately.

Uh, and our ability to apply that

information. And in my experience, this

is almost certain. So, [music] if you've

done the GRNI steps and you're not

seeing these improvements, it probably

means that one of those processes was

not quite done correctly. However, even

though it's effective, a lot of people

find that doing this can take a lot of

time, especially during uh lectures or

seminars where someone is talking to you

and you need to process that information

and write notes on the go. It can seem

impossible, which is where step four,

the N of grind comes in, which is to

make our mind maps nonverbal.

Non-verbal simply means that we should

try to express our ideas without

necessarily using so many words. There's

a lot of research around how writing

lots of notes can actually reduce the

quality of your learning because it

probably means you're not processing the

information as much before you write it

down. You might have also noticed that

in the previous myap examples I showed

you, most of them were not that wordy.

And this is the first level of achieving

nonverbal, which is just to reduce

unnecessary words. Reducing unnecessary

words forces you to synthesize and

summarize what you're learning. Doing

this also helps you to engage in what's

called the generation effect of

learning, which is one of the most

important processes to build new

knowledge effectively. One excellent way

of reducing your wordiness is just to

use your lines, arrows, [music] and

spatial arrangement to represent ideas.

For example, instead of writing the

sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps

over the lazy dog, she sells seashells

by the seashore," we can instead draw

something like this.

And the bonus benefit of doing this is

that it gives us an opportunity to look

at the information and ask ourselves,

how can I group this? What are the

relationships that I can find those step

one and step two processes? For example,

why is the fox jumping over the lazy

dog? Why is the dog lazy? Why is she

selling seashells? Is there a

relationship between the selling of

seashells and the lazy dog? Is she

raising money to build a fence to

protect the dog from the fox because a

dog is not lazy, it's actually elderly

and disabled. This kind of thinking and

uh questioning is one of the most

important things that we can actually

do. It's part of a process that's called

active learning, which is crucial for

promoting a strong memory and a deeper

level of understanding. We can also take

nonverbal to the next level by adding

some simple, sometimes abstract images.

You can see I did a very basic example

on this here with the shells, some

symbols here for she and and and the

money. Uh, but here's another example

where I spent a little bit more time to

flesh it out. And doing this is

something that I call adding a memory

landmark. By drawing these memorable,

somewhat abstract images in our mind

maps, it makes it easier for us to

review the information and come back to

it in the future. It creates a unique

element in our notes that makes it more

memorable and also makes the process a

little bit more fun. Does take a bit of

time though, so I probably wouldn't be

doing that during a lecture or seminar.

Now, to get to this point where we've

got G, R, I, and N down, I would expect

that this takes at least a couple of

months of practice. But remember, before

you have mastered this, you're still

going to be getting benefits from just

applying this probably straight away.

And once you have mastered it, your mind

maps are going to be so beneficial for

your learning that people around you are

going to look at your notes and have no

idea how you are doing so well. and they

will certainly have no idea about how

deep the process was that you used to

create your notes. But it is the next

two steps of grind [music] that take our

mind mapping skill to the highest level.

Starting with step five, the D of grind.

We have to make our mind maps

directional.

A perfect mind map not only has groups,

has relationships, is interconnected, is

nonverbal, it also has directionality,

or in other words, flow. And no, I don't

mean a mystical chakra flow. Uh, I mean

that we're using arrows to show how the

ideas on our mind map interact with each

other. Using mind maps purposefully to

add direction and flow in our mind map

achieves two main things. First of all,

it forces us to examine the nature of

the relationships and the groups that

we've formed. Like for example, if I've

got these concepts here, sure, these

might all be related to each other, but

are they related to each other in a way

that looks like

this? Or maybe it's more accurate to say

that the relationships are more like

this. They're the same relationships,

but it paints a completely different

picture. And number two, it actually

helps make our mind maps clearer and

more organized, which also helps with

our retention. Have a look at this mind

map that doesn't have great

directionality.

And now have a look at this one that

does. You can see that this one with

more directionality gives the mind map

more of a purposeful structure. It adds

meaning and context to the mind map,

which ultimately makes it more

memorable. Now, finally, we're ready for

the sixth and final step of grind, which

is arguably the step that most people

skip, but is also the step that probably

increases our knowledge, our memory, our

depth of understanding to the highest

level. A grind map without the final

sixth step, the E, is not a perfect mind

map. And the E, step six, stands for

making our mind maps emphasized.

Emphasizing your mind maps is all about

making decisions and judgments about

what you're learning. Aka that critical

level five of Bloom's taxonomy, that

higher order thinking. To achieve step

six and make our mind maps emphasize, we

need to deliberately make a decision on

which relationships and groups and

combination of relationships and groups

are the most important for this topic

and we need to visually represent that

on our mind map. This creates something

that I often call the backbone of the

mind map. Here's an example without

clear emphasizing.

And now here are a couple that have good

emphasizing. Now, those of you that are

on my program have probably heard me or

the other coaches uh talking about the

backbone constantly, and there is good

reason for that. It's because a mind map

with a clear backbone means that the

most important relationships and groups

have been clearly emphasized. [music]

Which means we have made clear and

deliberate judgments about which parts

of the mind map and the topic are most

important. Now remember [music] how I

said that each step of the grind map

actually influences each other? Well,

here's another example of that. When we

[music] examine which relationships and

groups are the most important, often we

find that the relationships and groups

we expressed are not actually the best.

Maybe there's an alternative grouping or

relationship structure that we think

would actually make even more sense. And

if that happens, that's a disaster

because now we have to go through and do

step one, two, and three all over again.

And that takes time. is what you might

think, but actually this is a good

thing. By forcing ourselves to think

about what we're learning more

critically and make more explicit

judgments about the importance of

different things, [music]

it helps us to refine and consolidate

our knowledge, helping us arrive at uh

knowledge that is more accurate and

deeper and is also stickier in our

memory. this back and forth process

where we're redoing parts of the mind

map and adjusting the structure and

regrouping and testing different

relationships and going back and forth

between different resources. This is

actually a natural part of learning

which in the research is often called

the recursive nature of deep learning

and you can't skip this step or at least

you shouldn't if you want a higher level

of knowledge mastery. The ability to

explain what is and is not important and

justify that is a hallmark sign of

expertise. Likewise, not being able to

clearly articulate what is or is not

important, but instead just knowing a

whole bunch of individual facts that are

generally connected to each other is a

sign of a beginner in that topic. Now

earlier in the video I said that there

is a right and wrong way of using AI to

help you make a mind map. And if we

remember that mind mapping is a process,

a skill that helps us engage in the

right thinking process to promote good

learning. It becomes much more obvious

as to what will help us and what will

harm us. For example, I could plug a

bunch of keywords into Chat GPT and get

it to generate some groups for me.

And just like that, it's done. Would

that be harmful or helpful for our

learning? Well, if we remember the fact

that the process of looking for

similarities and differences and

therefore deciding on which groups we

want to form in itself is a process that

helps us with learning. Then getting AI

to just do that for us would be harmful.

[music] It saves us time, but it defeats

the purpose of grouping it in the first

place. Okay, but what about instead if I

think of some groups myself, but then I

use chat GPT to verify whether those

groups make sense or not. After all,

those are the types of things that it

could be hard to verify using a Google

search or trolling through your

textbook.

And now that bit of feedback actually

seems pretty helpful. So was this going

to be helpful or harmful for our

learning? Well, in this case, it would

be helpful because we've already done

the hard part of thinking about the

groups and comparing and arriving at

some kind of hypothesis. And verifying

whether that hypothesis is legitimate or

not through Google searches and reading

through pages and pages of textbooks and

lecture slides is not really that

different from getting the answer in a

single report. So as a rule of thumb,

using AI in our learning is generally

harmful for learning if it number one

makes it cognitively easier for us to

organize the information and number two

if it bypasses the need for us to

compare or make active independent

judgments about what we're learning. On

the other hand, AI is generally helpful

if it saves time for us in just

collecting information or in just

summarizing large bodies for us to then

process and compare and make judgments

on. Or number three, it saves time

compared to doing a Google search of

essentially the same thing. Now, if you

follow these guidelines, you will be

well on your way to creating the perfect

mind map.

You've now completed your intro to mind

mapping. I'm shortly going to share some

more advanced strategies and tips for

mind mapping. But before we do that, I

need to address the most common mistakes

people make when they start

experimenting with mind mapping. If you

make these mistakes, mind mapping can

become a huge waste of time. Most people

who say that mind mapping doesn't work

for them, they're running into these

mistakes. So, let's start by avoiding

those. Mind maps are seriously powerful

and I learned pretty much everything

using them, but a lot of people struggle

getting started with mind mapping. So,

if you've ever tried mind mapping and

you found that it was overwhelming or

you're just staring at a blank page, not

sure what to put down or you're even

insecure about trying it, then [music]

I'm going to tell you exactly why you

feel that way and what you can do about

it. Now, I travel around the world

delivering workshops on how to learn

more effectively. And mind mapping is a

common technique that I'll teach. And

the way that I teach it now is actually

very different to how I taught it 10

years ago. 10 years ago, I would just

say, "Here's how to mind map. Go and do

it." And then 5 minutes later, I'd look

around and everyone has a blank page in

front of them, confused, and they don't

know where to start. And at first, it

confused me because I'm literally giving

stepbystep instructions on how to do the

technique. Like, why can't you just do

it? But then over the years I realized

that there are two very common and

powerful mental barriers that people

form over their academic lives that

seriously hold them back. And it's not

just for mind mapping. These mental

barriers which are basically habits that

we form will hold you back for pretty

much any effective learning technique

that you can ever learn. So what are

these mental barriers? The first thing

is that you have to trust your brain.

What does that mean? Okay, imagine

you're sitting there in a lecture. Most

people, if they're awake, will just be

listening, sitting there, and writing or

typing down their notes constantly. Just

listening and writing it down straight

away like a human photocopier. And if

that's you, then you're really going to

struggle to learn more efficiently. And

I'll explain why in a sec. But first,

here's a question for you. If you write

notes constantly while you are consuming

new information, why do you do that? Why

don't you just listen to it first, piece

it all together, think about it,

synthesize it, and then output it in a

nicely formatted, organized set of

notes. The answer is that number one,

you probably don't know how. And that

seems really overwhelming. And number

two, you don't trust your brain to be

able to do that in the first place.

After all, you've never been able to do

that before. And you might think that

your memory is like a civ. So, there's

no reason to believe that your brain

could hold on to all of that

information, put it all together nicely,

and then write a set of notes right at

the end. But this is a self-fulfilling

prophecy, and it's not a good prophecy.

The prophecy says, "You are going to

struggle to learn forever." Because I

want you to think about how learning

actually works. Let's say I'm learning

from this book. If I just look at this

book, how much do you think I'm going to

learn? Not a lot. Now, what if I open

the book and look at some pages? Am I

learning now? Yeah, probably not yet.

But what if I now read the words that

are on the page? Am I learning now?

Yeah, a little bit more than before.

Okay. What if I now read the words,

think about them, ask myself some

questions, and then go back to try to

answer those questions, flicking back

and forth within the book to answer

that, and then write down my notes that

summarize my thoughts. Obviously, that

last one will probably result in the

most amount of learning. And the key

difference between those examples I just

gave you is how much your brain is

involved in that process. So when we

think about us reading something, that

information coming into our brain, then

us writing some notes about it, learning

is the part that happens in the middle,

in the gap between where information

goes in and then comes out again. In

fact, research tells us that writing

notes immediately after listening or

reading to something like at the same

time makes us worse at learning. And

that's because this space in between

information coming in and going out gets

so so small that there's no opportunity

for your brain to do any thinking in the

first place. So if you want information

to come into your brain and stay in your

brain, then you have to actually let

your brain in on the action. You need to

give it the time and the opportunity to

sink and pull it apart and ask questions

and connect it all together again.

Because your job as a learner isn't just

to take information and document it for

later. Your job as a learner is to take

in information so that your brain can

process it. And honestly, if all you're

doing is reading something or listening

to something, writing some notes, and

then later going to reread and then

rewrite those notes, you are not letting

your brain in on that process at any

point. Unfortunately, if you like most

people spent 10 years just writing notes

endlessly as your main form of studying

and then someone like me tells you to

stop doing that and try mind mapping

instead, that's going to feel

uncomfortable. It's different. It's new.

It's unknown. It can make you feel

anxious and insecure. What if it doesn't

work? What if you start with the wrong

fact or concept? What if you forget and

you write down the wrong thing? Or what

if you put down the wrong relationship

or connection? What if the world

explodes? You know, all sorts of

terrible things can start happening if

you mind map. And if that's you, and

especially if you've been following my

content for a while and you want to give

mind mapping a go, but you just feel

like you don't know how to start, then I

want you to understand two things.

[music] Number one, anything new is

uncomfortable. You either live with the

discomfort of learning something new or

you live with a discomfort of never

learning and growing. And number two,

it's actually not hard at all if you

take it one step at a time. So here's a

couple of strategies that have worked

really well for my students in the past

to help them unlock their first proper

effective mind map. First thing I call

delayed notetaking. [music] The concept

to this is simple because learning

happens inside the brain. And if we're

just writing notes immediately as soon

as that information comes in, we're

effectively bypassing the brain. With

delayed note takingaking, we're just

going to increase this space. We're

going to increase that gap and give our

brain more of an opportunity to jump in

on the process. How do we do that? By

literally just waiting and taking in

more information before we write [music]

our notes. For example, let's say you

normally write notes constantly and

straight away. [music] Then you would be

writing notes on a word forword basis.

As soon as someone says a word, you

write that word down and it would look

something like this. So here the

lecturer would just be talking to you or

you're watching a video or you're just

reading a textbook and you [music] are

just constantly writing writing the

notes. Basically no gap between the

information coming in and the

information going out. Zero brain

actually involved. Now here's what it

would look like with a sentence level of

delay. We're first listening or we might

be reading something. Uh and then after

a sentence, then we're writing it down

very quickly and then we're going to be

listening again. We're thinking about it

and then we're writing it down again and

again. We're listening or reading and

then we're writing it down again. So you

see there's more time spent in my brain

and less time spent just on the

keyboard. We're creating a pause between

the information coming in and the

information going out. And therefore,

we're introducing an opportunity for

real learning to take place. Now, the

secret to making this actually helpful

for you is that you have to activate

this cognitive switch. And this is

important because this cognitive switch

is actually crucial to do any form of

effective learning, especially mind

mapping. In fact, I guarantee you talk

to any top learner and they are already

doing this cognitive switch without them

even realizing it. Here's how this

cognitive switch works. When we add a

[music] small delay, like just two or

three sentences, then our brain is in

this juggle mode. We're basically just

trying to hold on to and juggle mentally

all this new information that's come in

and desperately try not to forget it

until we can write it back down. That's

juggle mode. And that kind of thinking

is not helpful for learning. It's not

going to help you build a good memory.

And it's certainly not going to help you

apply what you've learned. But once that

delay in our note-taking starts widening

even further, a really interesting thing

starts happening in our brain. This

graph represents how long we delay our

note-taking for. And then here on the

left, that's zero. That's basically as

soon as I hear it, I'm writing it down

again. And then here on the right, let's

say this is, you know, a 10-minute

delay, which means that after I hear

something new for the first time, I'm

actually holding on to that for 10

minutes and continually consuming

[music] 10 minutes worth of information

before I'm writing it down. and have a

look at what happens to our mental

effort and memory on the yaxis. So at

first our effort involved in doing this

is basically zero. It's you know it's

easy to do and our memory on this is

almost zero as well. This is extremely

easy but also extremely useless. Now

once we start delaying our note

takingaking for a little longer like a

few sentences what we'll find is that

the amount of mental effort goes up a

lot. We're in juggle mode. We're trying

to hold on to all of this new

information before we can write it down

again. [music] But remember, I said

juggle mode is not an efficient way for

your brain to encode new information. So

even though the effort goes up rather

rapidly, our memory doesn't really go up

by much at all. Now, here's where it

gets interesting. Because after we

introduce a delay of more than let's say

1 or 2 [music] minutes, we're taking in

so much new information that it's pretty

much impossible for our brain to hold on

to everything without forgetting it. Our

effort is already going to be at its

limit and we're going to be forgetting

most of what we consume during that time

anyway. So this situation which feels

quite overwhelming is exactly where we

want to put ourselves because this is

what puts us into that cognitive switch

from juggle mode into organizing mode.

And learning to think in this organizing

mode is crucial to do any kind of

effective learning. In organizing mode,

we're not trying to hold on to every new

piece of information and and juggle it

in our in our brain so we're not going

to forget it because it's impossible.

[music] It's too much. In organizing

mode, instead we're focused on trying to

group it, to simplify it, to summarize

it so that there are less individual

things to hold on to. We're transforming

it into something that feels easier to

remember and makes more sense. And

research as well as my own observations

from coaching thousands of people have

shown that this process of organizing

these separate facts and concepts into

groups is critical for forming stronger

memory and deepening [music] our ability

to apply that knowledge. It's kind of

like folding and putting your clothes

away instead of just trying to hold on

to all of your laundry at once. You know

where to find your socks because they

are logically in your sock drawer

together. In the same way, your brain

knows how to access certain information

because it's been actively organized in

a way that makes sense. So, if we look

at this graph again, once we flick into

this organizing mode, then our mental

effort actually starts going down and

we'll stay at this more reasonable

level. It's not going to drop to zero

because you still have to spend effort

on trying to find ways to group it and

organize it together, but it's a lot

easier than just holding on to and

trying to remember everything. But more

importantly, our memory and our depth of

understanding shoots up massively. Now,

an efficient learner can usually delay

their note-taking by around five minutes

or more, depending on how dense and

complicated the information is. However,

diligence is key. [music]

It could literally take you years to

delay your note-taking by up to 3 to 5

minutes, which is really the level that

you want it to be if you want a chance

at mastering mind mapping. And in fact,

[music] it's going to take so long that

you're probably going to give up before

you actually crack it. Which means if

you want to improve your memory and

retain more and solve more complex

problems and improve your performance

and assessment without studying all day,

then you have to work on your learning

skills. consistently

every week. And even if you found me on

YouTube today, I worked on this every

day for years, which is why to try to

make this as easy as possible for you so

that you don't have to spend every day

for years. I make videos like this, but

I also have a free newsletter. It's

called the Learning Drops Newsletter.

It's a completely free newsletter that

you can sign up to and I'll email you

every single week practical things that

you can do to get better and faster at

learning every single week. The emails

only take 3 to 6 minutes to read, but

they aim to save you hours per week in

study time while improving your academic

performance and without spending years

to figure it out like I did. I'll leave

a link in the description if you want to

join. Now, if you give delayed

note-taking a go, you're going to run

into another problem, which is that you

don't have enough time to [music] write

your notes. Because if you're just

listening and sitting there like

listening or reading something for 5 or

10 minutes and then you are writing your

notes, then you need to write those

notes very very quickly. Otherwise,

you're going to miss the next 5 minutes

worth of stuff. Or if you're reading and

it's a self-study session, this study

session is going to take you hours. But

if this happens to you, then [music]

that's probably because of another bad

habit that you have. And this is the

second major mental barrier, which is

the belief that writing more notes is

better. Cuz for a lot of people, there's

a sense of security with writing lots of

detailed, comprehensive notes. Research

actually shows that having longer,

wordier notes tends to reduce your

academic performance. And the reason is

because of what I mentioned before. If

you have lots of notes, it probably

means you did more constant writing,

which means that you actually thought

about what to write less. So, on top of

delaying your note-taking, I also want

you to actively [music]

drop your word count. By writing less,

not only does it save time, but also

forces you to think about another way

that you can represent that same

information, which in turn forces us to

think about the information more deeply.

And honestly, rather than delaying the

note-taking, it's this dropping the word

count part that I found most people find

more challenging. And it's probably

because writing lots of notes keeps you

in the illusion of learning. The

illusion of learning is when we are

doing things that make us feel like

we're making progress when we're

actually not. For example, I know a lot

of people that buy a lot of like books

or audio books and it just goes from

like the delivery person to their shelf.

Like they never even read it. That is

the illusion of learning. You're doing

something, usually something very easy

that feels like it's productive when it

actually [music] isn't making a

difference to the thing you're trying to

improve. Writing notes is the same

thing. Anyone can write a lot of notes.

And when you get to the end of a long

study session and you've got 30 pages of

beautiful, comprehensive notes, you look

at that and think, "Wow, that's so

beautiful. Pat yourself on the back.

I've been so productive." Except that's

a lie. And we all know it because a week

later we're probably going to forget

half of it and we're not even going to

read the other half again anyway. But

once we force ourselves to drop the word

count, it strips away the illusion of

learning. It's forcing us to engage with

the process of learning directly. If we

struggle with that learning process, it

becomes painfully obvious because we can

literally see it in our notes. So to

make it a little easier for you to

escape this illusion of learning more

successfully, let me show you [music] a

stepbystep progression of what it would

look like as you progressively drop your

word count. We start with your original

notes that might look something like

this. So we're going to take the first

step now of shortening it, which is just

reducing down some of those unnecessary

sentences, turning some of them into

bullet points, just just taking out

unnecessary obvious filler words.

All righty. And this is the simplified

word drop version. Straight away just

comparing it back and forth. There's

literally no useful information that was

stripped away between the two versions

here. So that's the first step of

dropping the word count. So now what

we're going to do is take [music] the

next step where we're not necessarily

taking away more words, but we're now

seeing how we can start using spatial

arrangement, some lines, some basic

arrows and connections to just express

some of these obvious relationships and

ideas without having to physically write

it out.

And you can see at this point it's even

simpler. And again, there's no useful

information that was stripped away. In

fact, I'd say that this final one is

actually a little better at showing the

relationships uh and showing the overall

picture of how I should understand it.

You can see at a glance, it's actually

easier to see as well. At this point,

you can see it's actually almost

starting to naturally form a kind of

mindm. So even though with each of these

iterations there's less and less on the

page, there's more and more learning

that is happening in the brain. Less on

the page, more in the membrane. This is

how you're meant to create a mind map.

This kind of natural progression here.

Most people when they think about doing

a mind map, they start with this big

central theme on a page and all these

things branch out of it. But that's not

the point. The a mind map is just a

representation of the relationships and

the connections that you discovered and

synthesized based on thinking about how

the information is related and can be

grouped together. And by getting [music]

to this point alongside some delayed

notetaking, that's going to help you

unlock a better memory, which means that

you're going to forget less of what you

studied and better knowledge

application, which means that you can

use what you've learned to solve more

problems and do better in your exams.

So, how long does it take to go from

this here all the way through to this

final version? If you are a total

beginner who has only done linear

note-taking before and you're feeling

really really insecure and uncomfortable

about this, it's going to take you

probably one or two weeks if you are

diligent with practicing it. And from

this point [music] to get to a fully

supercharged memory boosting mind map

will take another 2 to 6 weeks with

guidance or 2 to 6 months if you're

doing it alone. Again, it depends on how

deep your old habits are and how

diligently you practice.

Okay, so with those mistakes out of the

way, we are now ready to move on to some

more specific strategies and cognitive

processes to help you build a

bulletproof mind mapping system. We've

covered a lot so far and you're still

here with me. So, well done. At this

point, I want to tell you about two

different things. First thing, if you're

finding this valuable so far and you're

seeing that there's new insights and

you're seeing how it's kind of all fit

together, understand that this is not a

process that happens overnight. It's

more of a marathon. You can do it. You

can transform it and it is worthwhile to

spend the effort to do it. [music]

It is a really special feeling to have

the confidence to look at any challenge

to do with learning new knowledge or

learning new skills and just know that

you will be able to tackle that and

overcome it and do it probably better

and faster than everyone else. It is a

life-changing skill and it has been for

me both when I was a student going

through medical school uh doing my

masters working as a professional. So

the first message really is just to keep

it up. You can do it. The second message

is to say that if you want to make this

process a little bit faster, a little

bit smoother, a little bit more guided,

if you've liked so far that I've kind of

structured and put together a few of

these videos and you like the fact that

you can sort of start from one place and

then just progress through step by step,

then you may also be interested in

joining my full paid program. If you're

not interested in joining and you just

want to watch the videos for free on

YouTube, I will keep uploading videos

for free on YouTube. And I plan to do

this for a long time. But for those of

you who are serious about learning to

learn and you want to do this faster

with closer support and you like this

stepbystep structure where you can just

[music] learn everything that you need

to to be a better learner, then I think

you may also be interested in learning a

little bit about my full guided program.

This is a 4hour video and it's still not

comprehensive. There's a lot of other

aspects about learning and

self-management that is just not covered

um in this master class at all. So, if

you are interested in learning a little

bit more, I'll leave a link to it in the

description below. You can also sign up

at icenstudy.com. If you're not

interested, that's all good. There's no

pressure. But for those of you who are,

you can check it out. Now, if you want

to make the process of mind mapping

easier, one thing you need to be able to

do very accurately is assess your

current level of mind mapping. You

should be able to look at your mind map

and understand what level you are, what

the issues you have are, and therefore

what you need to do to improve on it.

And this process is a little bit tricky,

especially if you're just starting out

on learning the skill. So, this next

video helps you to self diagnose that

and tells you exactly what you need to

work on to improve your mind mapping.

Mind mapping can be broken down into

three different levels of skill. When

mind mapping is done at a skill level of

level three, it's legitimately one of

the most powerful learning techniques

that you can master. It improves your

memory. It increases your processing

speed. It makes it easier to think about

more content more deeply. But when mind

mapping is done at level one, it can be

a complete waste of time. For me, being

able to do a level three mind map every

time is a big part of what gave me the

confidence to run a business full-time

while going through medical school and

then later uh my full-time masters for

which I ranked first in my year. Now,

the first step in actually being able to

level up your mind mapping is to be able

to look at a mind map and identify what

level it's at. Once we can figure out

the difference between the different

levels of mind map, we can then focus on

the processes that help us bridge each

of these levels. So, I'll show you some

examples of each level of my maps. See

if you can spot the difference. So,

these ones are level one.

And then these ones here are level two.

These are some level three.

Now, you might think that the main

difference is that a level three mind

map just looks simpler or more

comprehensive, but it is so much more

than that. And the difference between a

level one and a level three is probably

the difference that separates a top 30%

learner from a top 1% learner. But

before we get into that, let's take a

deep dive into level one. So, here's the

example of the level one my map again.

Now the level one mind map has two

important characteristics. The first

thing is that it has nonlinearity of

ideas. So if you have a look at this you

can see that it's not just going left to

right down the page. Uh all of these

things it's trying to represent the

ideas spatially around the page. And

second thing is that there are

connections between the ideas. [music]

Uh you can see that they're trying to

express these connections with these

lines and arrows. Now, the difference is

actually a lot more obvious when we go

back a level to what's even before level

one, which is level zero note

takingaking. And level zero note

takingaking looks a little bit more like

this. [music]

And these are actually my old notes from

like over 10 years ago. And I can tell

you that the thousands of hours I spent

on writing notes like these [music] were

ultimately a waste of time. So at level

zero, there are five characteristics

that you should definitely avoid.

Firstly, it's very linear. Uh secondly,

[music] it's usually very wordy. And

thirdly, it's pretty superficial. Uh it

doesn't go into the content very deeply.

It doesn't really look at how ideas are

related to each other because frankly

trying to write that all down through

level zero linear note-taking would be

completely overwhelming. There's often a

lot of highlighting and sometimes

there's a lot of annotating. And at the

end of the day, it is uselessly time

consuming in that it takes a lot of

time, but it's not really helping with

our retention or our depth of

understanding. So level one really

represents this first point where

someone's trying to break this old

linear mold, but the important thing is

not to just recognize the

characteristics of each level. It's to

know what the process is that takes you

from level zero to level one. And there

are three key processes

that someone is engaging in to go from

level zero to level one. The first

process is that they're looking at how

they can use arrows and lines to

represent information instead of just

writing it out as full sentences. So no

full sentences.

The second thing is that we're trying to

cut down on how wordy it is. we're often

doing a little bit more summarizing.

And the third part is getting a little

bit more comfortable with just

representing information spatially and

without using words.

When we follow these processes, we go

from level zero to level one. Now, at

level one, we're not really getting a

strong benefit from mind mapping. The

real power of mind mapping comes from

level two and level three. And in fact,

level one often looks pretty messy.

However,

level one is not bad. Mind mapping is a

skill and like any other skill, there

are levels to that skill and you can't

just skip a level. Level one is

necessary because it allows us to break

out from level zero to then [music] work

towards level two. It's kind of like

training wheels on a bicycle. And a lot

of people will say, "Oh, I gave mind

mapping a go. It didn't really work for

me." But they actually only reached

level one. And you're right. If you only

reach level one, it's not really going

to work for you. So, let's have a look

at level two where you should see some

benefit. Here's an example of the level

two mind maps again. And once we're at

this level two skill, we should be

feeling a lot more comfortable with

expressing information nonlinearly. And

at level two, there are three

characteristics to look out for. First

of all, we have groups of information

and these [music] groups are related to

each other and as a result there is a

clearer flow or structure to the

information. You can see these groups

being represented uh here in the brown

uh as well as the flow of information

with the arrows being a little bit

cleaner. And if your mind map has these

characteristics, it's probably at level

two. And by the way, let me know what

level you are in the comments so that I

can help cater my future videos to you.

So, now that we know what a level two

mind map looks like, let's think about

what the processes are that take us from

level one to level two. There are again

three main processes that we want to

focus on here. The first one is that

we're thinking a little bit more about

how ideas are similar or different to

each other.

And by thinking about how similar things

are to each other, this allows us to put

them into groups. We're arranging them

by those similarities. Number two, we're

now thinking about how the information

actually flows and influences each

other.

We've created these groups. We've looked

at how things might be related and

similar to each other. And we're

thinking, how do these ideas connect

together in a coherent structure? Which

leads to number three. We're actually

[music] thinking about intentionally

creating more of a structure

as opposed to, for example, just drawing

a bunch of lines and arrows connecting

things all over the place. And overall,

the the difference between level one and

level two. The major difference is that

we're spending a lot more time thinking

[music] about how we want to arrange the

information and organize it as opposed

to just getting used to organizing it

nonlinearly. And by thinking about how

to organize the information in level two

and later also in level three, we're

forcing our brain to engage in that

higher order thinking, which is one of

the most important cognitive processes

that [music] you can do to understand,

remember, and apply what you learned

properly. In fact, the OECD has even

come out with a statement saying that

higher order thinking skills is one of

the most crucial [snorts]

things that a modern-day learner needs

to know to be successful. So, what that

means is that if you are mind mapping

[music] and you're not noticing

improvements in your understanding or

your memory or your ability to apply the

information, it probably means that

you're not engaging at that higher order

of thinking. And that would be common

because most people tend to avoid higher

order thinking since it takes more

mental effort and it can feel

uncomfortable which basically means most

people are avoiding the type of thinking

that helps build stronger memory and

deeper understanding in the first place.

This is famously called the

misinterpreted effort hypothesis which

I've talked about in lots of my other

videos. And this is important because

there's essentially no point in using

mind mapping as a technique if we're not

engaging in the right type of thinking.

And [music] it's actually really easy to

demonstrate the difference between level

zero, level one, and level two. [music]

So I'll show you using this article on

metacognition, which is just taking from

Wikipedia. It could be from a textbook

or from lecture slides. Uh it doesn't

really matter. This is just a

demonstration. So at level zero, let me

show you what my note takingaking would

look like. like I'll type it out for you

so that you don't have to struggle

reading through my handwriting. So, as

I'm writing these notes, all I'm doing

is I'm reading a sentence, I'm

summarizing it a little, I'm

transcribing it down. Honestly, [music]

I may as well have just used Chat GBT or

something to do this because it takes no

mental effort and my brain [music] is

almost asleep. Uh, no real learning is

happening in the [music] brain. Now,

there actually is a way to still do

linear notes while still getting [music]

level three results. Uh, and I'll show

you that one later. Okay, so I'll just

end that demonstration there because I'm

losing brain cells. Let me do the same

passage at level one.

And so here, as I'm writing, I'm

mentally doing the same thing. I'm

basically just reading a sentence. I'm

summarizing it a little uh maybe a

little bit more concisely and then I'm

just writing it down. And I'm basically

just looking to see if it's connected

[music] to anything else really

obviously. And I'm putting some lines

and arrows down. Uh as we are

progressing, you can see it's [music]

starting to get a little messy and

honestly like it's already kind of

overwhelming in terms of just there's

[music] a lot of lines and arrows going

everywhere. Um, and this is usually when

a lot of students will say it's not

working since it might actually feel

worse than just linear notes which are

at least easier to read. But anyway,

that was level one. Same content, same

stuff, but done through level one mind

mapping. And you can see some

similarities with the examples that I

showed you before. So now let's do level

two. Exactly the same content again.

Now, here there's a big difference in

thinking compared to before because

instead of just going sentence by

sentence and putting it down, I'm

actually uh reading more. I'm actually

thinking about it back and forth. I'm

actively deciding how I want to

structure this information in a way that

makes sense. And I'm also actively

trying to group related ideas together.

You [music] can see it's looking tidier.

It's there's more groups. It's a little

bit easier to follow. And it's actually

a lot more engaging. In fact, it's

actually even a little bit fun and I can

feel that the information uh sticks in

my head a lot more easily while [music]

at level zero and then level one, I

barely remember what I wrote down. Uh

also, it's a little hard to see from the

video, but the time I spent just

thinking about what to write before even

writing anything down in the first place

is a lot longer. So, at level zero and

level one, I'm I'm basically writing

something every 5 or 10 seconds. I'm

pretty much writing non-stop. And at

level two, I'm thinking about things for

like, you know, 20 or 30 seconds or even

more before even writing it down because

I'm just trying to think about how I

want to arrange it. That's actually um

one really good way to see if you're

thinking about things enough [music] to

learn effectively. It shouldn't really

be possible to think at level two depth

and also write constantly. So that is

level two. And now going from level zero

to level two is probably enough to give

you a decent little grade bump of like

10 to 15%. But level three is where you

start seeing some serious improvements.

Here's an example of my maps at level

three again. And there are three

characteristics that you need to know uh

at level three. The first thing is that

the structure and flow is much clearer.

you can clearly see uh where the

information is going throughout this

map. Number two, there's more emphasis

to some groups and [music] arrows over

others. For example, you can see that

these arrows are a little bit thicker

compared to, for example, these arrows

that visually indicates the importance

of information and relationships. And

this last one is harder to notice, but

the groups themselves are more intuitive

and easier to remember. So if we kind of

zoom in a little bit here, we can see

that the actual name of the groups that

have been used are not always the same

[music] terminology that is taught for

the topic. They've actually releabeled

the group so it makes more sense for

them at an intuitive level. It's

actually easier to understand the

difference between level two and three

by talking about the processes that we

need to engage in to go from level two

to level three. Now, by the time we're

at a level three skill, we're used to

writing nonlinear notes. We're used to

thinking about how things are similar.

We're used to grouping things together.

We're used to creating structures and

flows. What we're focusing on with the

process at level three is the quality.

So, we're improving the quality of the

connections and relationships that we're

forming. We're also increasing the

quality. And when I say quality, I'm

talking about how intuitive [music] the

groups that we're forming are. Yeah,

sure. We can connect this group to this

group. We can connect these ideas to

these other ideas. We can group these

things together. [music]

Sure. But which way of grouping is

actually the best [music] for us? Which

makes the most sense? Which is the most

intuitive? Which feels like it's going

to be stickier in our memory? Which

means number three, we have to spend

time to identify alternatives and then

make an actual judgment on which one is

the best. For example, here's that

little map that I made before at level

two. And then here is the exact same map

with essentially the exact same

information, [music] but just grouped

and structured differently. So, at level

three, I'm actually thinking about these

alternative ways of structuring the

information and arranging them in a way

that makes more sense to me. At level

three, our mind maps are becoming

cleaner, more intuitive, more

deliberate. The lines and the arrows and

everything that I'm putting on there is

more intentional. Now, for most people,

the difference between level two and

level three uh may not seem like much.

After all, we're still just grouping and

organizing information. But the

difference between level two and level

three in terms of how much it affects

your performance and results and memory

and depth of understanding is probably

more than the difference between going

from level zero all the way through to

level two. Being able to create a level

three mind map consistently is very

uncommon and probably translates to a

roughly top 10% level of performance. In

fact, the type of thinking that you have

to do for a level three mind map is so

crucial that virtually any top 1 or 2%

learner is going to be thinking in this

way even if they're not using mind maps

as the technique mentally. They're

engaging in those same higher order

thinking processes and patterns. which

is why earlier I said that it is

actually possible to do level zero uh

linear note takingaking but still get

level three types of results and let me

show you how just going back to my

article on metacognition here I'm going

to do the like pseudo level three

note-taking with linear notes uh here so

as I do this just notice how I'm

spending a lot of time reading and um

and when I'm writing I'm not actually

just reading things and writing things

down. I'm actually thinking about it and

synthesizing it and I'm doing all of

that higher order thinking [music] and

grouping and thinking about how things

are related to each other. I'm doing

that all mentally as I read and then I'm

writing down like my entire synthesis

and structure. So, it's almost like a

mini essay where I'm trying to explain

all the relationships and nuances of the

content that I've read. And this is

basically how you're able to get some

people that are using what seems like a

pretty mediocre method of note-taking,

but they're getting great results

because mentally what's going on is at a

high level. But there are two specific

reasons that you should not do this.

First of all, it's honestly just much

harder than doing the level three mindm

because I'm having to do all the

thinking in my head and all the

processing. [music] I can't track my

thoughts and uh all the relationships

that I'm thinking of on the mind map.

So, it's much much harder for me to

actually create the connections and

organize my thoughts. Being able to just

literally write it down and brainstorm

the ideas as I go uh is probably two or

even three times faster and easier than

trying to do it all mentally and then

just forcing it back down into a linear

set of notes again. This is actually

also the reason why you should use mind

maps to plan uh literature reviews and

essays. It's also probably two or three

times more timeconuming

overall. Not just when I'm writing the

notes, but later when I go to review the

notes, I'm forcing myself to have to

read through this entire thing all over

again to extract the the meaning from

it. Whereas if I had just the mind map,

I can just glance at it to review the

structure in like seconds or minutes.

And even though the mind map looks

simpler, it's actually the same types of

relationships and thoughts that as were

in the essay. The essay is not a more

comprehensive set of notes at all. In

fact, the essay probably doesn't even

cover all of the relationships that I'd

be able to express in the mind map. The

level three mind map is [music]

incomparably

simpler, faster, and more organized.

This [music] synthesized essay writing

thing that I just did, you can use that

as a revision technique later instead.

Now, if you found this video and you

want even more to help you master the

art and science of learning, then I've

got a free weekly newsletter that I've

created where I've [music] taken my

decade of coaching and distilled what

really works into bite-sized emails.

[music] Each email contains a key

concept to help you improve your memory,

your depth of understanding, your

ability to apply your knowledge, as well

as a practical takeaway or a challenge.

It's completely free and the concepts

that I talked about in this video are

also included in one of those

newsletters as well as other concepts

that I have never made any videos about.

If you're interested, I'll leave a link

for you to join that in the description.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll

see you in the [music] next one.

And that is the end of chapter 3 on

mindapping. And I want to reinforce that

just knowing about the skill of mind

mapping is not enough. The only way

you're going to improve is through

targeted repetitions, getting feedback,

and iterating. Your ability to mind map

will get better over time as you

continue to practice, as with any skill.

And so, on that note, let's move on to

chapter four, which is about skill

acquisition. If you want to be a

well-rounded learner, yes, you need to

be able to learn new knowledge very

quickly, but it's arguably even more

important that you can learn new skills

quickly. And so we're going to kick off

chapter 4 talking about skill

acquisition with how you can master any

complex skill more easily. There are

four stages of learning any complex

skill that you need to know. And there

are four corresponding actions that you

have to take to be able to learn that

skill effectively. When we do the right

actions for the right stage, we're able

to progress through that stage very

quickly. This is what fasttracks our

ability to learn skills. Unfortunately,

most people are doing actions at stage

three when they're only at stage two.

And when there's this misalignment, it

creates wasted time, frustration,

stress, and ultimately you will not be

able to master pretty much any complex

skill. This is where the rail framework

comes in to make sure that we are

aligned and mastering new skills as

effectively as possible. By using this

framework, my ability to coach students

on how to study and learn more

effectively [music] has become about

five or six times faster than before.

What used to take me 2 years to train

now only takes me 2 or 3 months. And

I've personally used this framework to

learn pretty much every new skill I've

picked up over the last 10 years. from

studying to public speaking, dancing,

archery, photography, even using

nunchucks. In fact, actually, let me

show you. I don't break anything. Uh, as

I do this, let's give it a go.

Literally just hit my light.

Nothing destroyed. Uh, and yes, FYI,

that is a skill that serves absolutely

no purpose in my life. But the best part

is that this framework is actually

really, really easy to use. By the end

of this video, you'll learn how to use

rail to learn any new complex skill. But

first, we actually have to understand

the scientific principle behind why some

skills [music] are even harder to learn

than other skills in the first place.

So, when I was 15, I watched this video

on how to tie shoelaces

really quickly

and I practiced this skill for like 5

minutes and I learned how to do it. But

learning to tie a shoelace is very

different from learning to play an

instrument or learning to code or most

other complex skills. And one of the

things that makes a complex skill

complex is this thing called the latent

learning period. Latent learning was

first described in the 1930s by this

American psychologist called Edward

Tolman. And it basically talks about

when there is no immediate reinforcement

[music] while you are learning the

skill. For example, if I'm learning

something simple like tying my

shoelaces, then there's no real latent

learning period. I'm getting immediate

feedback on whether the shoes were tied

up well or not. But as soon as we enter

into any even moderately complex skill,

the latent learning period stretches out

much longer. For example, if you learn

to play chess, you might spend lots of

time, weeks even, just learning the

rules and how to move which piece and

figuring out the strategy. But until you

really play a game and get some real

experience, you're not going to know

where your mistakes are and how to

actually improve. And so there's a long

time between the learning and then the

getting [music] feedback on the

learning. That's the latent learning

period. And for skills like learning how

to study, you might not get feedback on

how good your new study technique is for

weeks or months until you actually get

an exam result. And during that time,

you might have done hundreds of other

things that all affect the outcome. It's

pretty much impossible to know what was

the reason you got the result that you

did and therefore what you need to

change to improve. And every skill,

especially complex skills, [music] take

trial and error and experimentation to

improve. But we waste a lot of time

triing things and making errors over and

over again sort of aimlessly. But if we

can answer just one question, it can

massively increase our ability to learn

any complex [music]

skill. And that question is, am I moving

in the right direction? Because even if

we don't know the fastest, most direct

line to learn a skill, if we have

guidelines that tell us whenever we're

potentially deviating off track, then we

know that our experiments and our

efforts are going to eventually get us

towards the goal rather than just

wandering around aimlessly for years.

And we can answer this question of am I

moving in the right direction with the

rail framework. [music] Here's how it

works. In the first stage of learning

any complex skill, we're pretty

clueless. We have no idea where to

start. We don't know how to think about

it. We don't even know what questions to

ask because we don't know enough to even

ask questions. And this is a huge

problem because it means we don't know

where to put our effort and attention.

[music] Because I'm learning coach, I'm

going to use learning to learn as an

example. Most people have no idea really

where to start increasing their learning

efficiency. And they come in with a

bunch of misconceptions about learning

like just thinking that more hours

studying is the key to success. And even

in my training program and I can study

where people are actually trying to

upgrade their studying techniques.

[music] It is not uncommon for me to see

someone skip a technique because they

don't think it's important or relevant

for them when actually it might be

literally the most important thing that

they could possibly be working on. We

don't know what we don't know and trying

to improve anything without knowing

where to direct our effort is the

biggest time waste of all. But this is

the first stage of learning a new skill.

It is the R of rail and it stands for

relevance

because improving at this [music] stage

means understanding what is relevant for

you and what is worth caring about. So

how do you know you're at the relevant

stage? [music] Number one, you'll feel

generally lost and confused about where

to begin. You either can't think of many

things to work on or experiment with, or

there seem to be so many things to work

on and experiment with that it's

overwhelming, aka, we don't know what to

care about yet. You'll know you're

[music] making progress through this

relevant stage when you start realizing

more variables to think and care about.

And things that seemed irrelevant before

now become relevant for learning to

learn. These variables might be things

like understanding what creates active

[music] learning or being able to assess

your cognitive load or learning about

different orders of learning or

understanding how encoding affects

retrieval. So, as you progress through

the relevant stage, you're not actually

getting any better at the skill. Like,

you can't do it properly yet, and you're

certainly not getting any results for

it, but you are still progressing, and

that's the [music] key. So, how do we

actually make this progress? Well, the

actions that help you progress through

the relevance stage are number one,

exploration, and two, challenging.

Exploration means that we're spending

time to understand the skill. Talk to

people that are already good at it. What

do they say you should be thinking about

and caring about? Get a diverse range of

opinions. Spend some time to learn more

about the theory. What are the other

variables that you should be thinking

about? Challenging [music] means that

we're being open-minded and challenging

our own beliefs or assumptions. Like I

mentioned with learning to learn, a lot

of people think that a certain technique

is what they need to get better. But in

reality, what's really holding them back

might be another variable that they

haven't considered or don't think is

very important, like the way that

they're practicing or how they're

managing their time. And the only way

that [music] we can really find out what

matters is to be open-minded to the idea

that what we think is important right

now might not be correct. Now, learning

to learn is one of the most important

skills that you can master because it

makes learning everything else in your

life much easier. However, it is

probably one of the most challenging

skills to learn because it is an

incredibly long latent learning period.

And seeing people trying to learn to

learn and struggling and stressing

because they don't know where to start

is not only really sad, but it's very

frustrating for me because it is so much

easier when you know what to care about.

So, to help you with this, I've created

a free learning system health check

[music] quiz for you. It's a free quiz

that you can take that will evaluate

your learning system and score you out

of a 100. But more importantly, you'll

get a personalized report that will give

you which components you're doing well

on and then which parts that are holding

you back from being a learning master.

Now, for learning to learn, this quiz

should probably get you almost to the

end of stage one of rail [music] and it

only takes like 10 minutes. FYI, it took

me like 2 years to get to the end of

stage one uh because I had no one

[music] to teach me and I was literally

spending like thousands of hours reading

research papers and thinking about the

way that I learn. For some people, they

never reach the end of stage one for

their entire lives. But you can now skip

all that. I've got the link to the quiz

in the description below. So anyway,

we're now at the end of stage one,

relevance. We know what to care about.

We know what the variables are. What

now? Well, this is the part in skill

acquisition research, which is called

the plateau period. It's often the part

where most people give up. In the second

stage of learning a skill, we are trying

to perform the skill, but we are

consistently failing. Sometimes we know

why we failed and sometimes we don't. We

continuously make mistakes and we don't

seem to be making any clear progress.

This is why it's called the plateau

period. It's frustrating and

demotivating and so this is [music] when

a lot of people will give up but not if

you know the rail framework because the

second stage is the awareness stage

as in we're becoming more aware of our

mistakes. And a key sign that you're in

this stage is that you are trying

[music] and making mistakes. hopefully

lots of mistakes. Think of it like a

checklist. Let's say to learn a skill

correctly, you need to make a hundred

mistakes in order to finally be able to

do it correctly for the first time. In

that case, progress is about making as

many of those mistakes as quickly as

possible. So, making mistakes doesn't

feel good, [music] but it is helpful and

necessary. Once you know how to overcome

the mistakes, doing it correctly happens

by default. A lot of people who go

through my program hold off on

practicing new techniques because

they're afraid of making mistakes and

getting it wrong. They can spend days or

even weeks just thinking about it and

asking questions to try to avoid every

possible mistake they can think of. And

then by the time it comes to give it a

go, the head is so full of things to try

to avoid that they become overwhelmed

and paralyzed. [music] On the other

hand, people who recognize the value of

learning from mistakes can give things a

go and pick up a new skill within days.

[music] So, as you progress through the

awareness stage, again, you're still not

doing it correctly yet, and you're still

not seeing good results, but you are

progressing by becoming more aware of

the mistakes you tend to make. So, how

can you progress through the awareness

stage more quickly? Well, the two

actions here are experimentation and

reflection. [music] Experimentation is

about trying to perform the skill

correctly and probably making mistakes.

Reflection is about thinking what those

mistakes were and why you made them. We

can then try a new experiment based on

that reflection to try to overcome that

mistake. If it was a repeated mistake

that you already knew about, you think,

well, what am I missing? What's the

variable that I haven't considered? And

if you don't even know what your mistake

was in the first place, you need to get

feedback from someone who does know. And

everyone needs feedback. Even the

highest performing athletes in the world

have coaches to give them feedback. Like

I said, we don't know what we don't

know. Awareness is about knowing more

things so that we can overcome them. And

it's hard to gain awareness when you're

going through it alone. So, as you move

through this second stage of awareness,

we are making less and less mistakes.

And at a certain point, there are no

more mistakes we're making. This is the

sign that we're nearing the end of stage

two. Now, you might think at this point,

we're done. We've learned the skill.

We're not making any mistakes. Time to

move on with my life. But unfortunately,

not. We're now only entering into stage

three of four. And stage three is

another point at which many people tend

to give up. Now, before we get into

stage three, it's important to know why

rail even works. And it's because it's

derived from another widely studied

model called the four stages of

competence. In this original model, the

stages are called unconscious

incompetence, conscious incompetence,

conscious competence, and unconscious

competence. And I love this model, and I

even teach it in my program. But the

reason I'm teaching you rail is because

the four stages of competence is very

dense, and there are a lot of nuances.

It's also a little abstract, and it

doesn't actually tell you what you need

to do to progress through the stages.

The reason I developed rail is so that

you'd have something that's a little

more practical, especially for stage

three. And that's because stage three

can be even more demotivating than stage

two if you don't have rail. So at stage

three, we've finally overcome our

mistakes. We've learned how to do the

skill correctly. However, it takes a lot

of effort. We're not very consistent and

it's pretty slow. And that's because

it's a brand new skill. because it's

brand new. It's slower and takes more

effort than our previous habits and how

we used to do things. And in the early

part of stage three, our consistency is

so bad that out of 10 attempts, we might

only get it correct two or three times,

which is why stage three is called

iteration.

And you know you're in stage three when

you've been able to perform the

technique correctly at least one or two

times and you're not discovering any new

mistakes, but you're struggling to

overcome all of them every time. You

know, you're progressing through stage

three when with each cycle or iteration,

you feel that your consistency is

improving and you're able to do the

technique correctly a higher percentage

of the time. you're starting to feel

that it's becoming easier to do it and

it requires less effort and you're

getting faster as well and it must be in

that order. If you try to go faster when

you don't have the consistency and

accuracy yet, you're just going to be

increasing your error rate. This is a

common reason for demotivation and why

people might give up at this stage. So

to progress through this stage more

quickly, we want to take these two

actions which is varied [music] practice

and adjust. So varied practice isn't

just performing the skill again and

again. It's actually about performing

the skill in different levels of

challenge, different context, and in

different conditions. If you're learning

a new study technique, you want to apply

it to lots of different subjects with

different volumes of workload through

different mediums and different

difficulties. Adjust means you're

observing how your consistency changes

in each of these different contexts and

levels of difficulty. Adjusting involves

fine-tuning your technique so that you

can maintain your consistency even when

the situation isn't optimal. For

example, how do you adjust your

technique for different subjects or for

when you're tired or when you don't have

as much time to study? Again, I'm using

study techniques as an example here, but

you can use this for literally any other

skill. And after enough iterations,

you'll notice that you're able to

perform the skill with a high level of

consistency, with a low level of effort,

and you're able to do it very fast. This

means you've entered the final stage of

rail and it's when your new skill has

become a new habit. It's just as easy as

any other habit. And in fact, it

actually takes effort to do it

differently. At this stage, the actions

to take are not so much about improving

the technique, but about refining it to

make it better if it needs to be and

regularly using it because if you don't

use it enough, you will lose it. This is

a phenomenon called skill decay. And it

can happen for any skill that's

neglected. And it causes us to slip down

into the earlier stages of rail. And

because stage 4 is about keeping your

skills for life, it is called the lifong

stage. So you can now use rail to figure

out what stage you're in. see whether

the actions you've been taking to learn

a new complex skill have been aligned

for the stage you're at and start taking

the right action to progress you to the

next stage more quickly. And if you're

wanting to get a head start on the rail

framework for one of the most complex

and important skills that you can ever

learn, aka learning to learn, then make

sure to check out that free learning

system health check quiz linked in the

description below. As usual, thank you

for watching and I'll see you in the

next one.

Now, as you make your way through these

four different stages of learning, it's

important that you are wary of and avoid

one super common mistake that lots of

people make when they're learning any

new skill. It's a really harmful

sabotaging mistake, which I'm going to

explain in this next video. I've been

obsessed with figuring out the fastest

[music] and easiest possible way to

learn new skills for the last decade.

And after years of teaching people and

reading the research on this, I've

stumbled across a mistake that [music]

guarantees an almost 100% failure rate

on learning any skill. And sadly, this

is a mistake that most people make every

single day. I call this mistake theory

overload. And I think it is one of the

most important things to [music] know

about when you're trying to learn any

new skill. But first, we have to

understand a key, often overlooked

ingredient [music] to learning any new

skill that allows us to even learn

skills in the first place. And this

ingredient is experiential cycling. So,

if I practice shooting this bow every

day for a month, [music] I should get

better,

right?

Maybe, [music]

but maybe not. Once I let go of this

arrow, I cannot control where it goes

midair. At least as far as I know. Where

this arrow lands depends on everything

that I did in the setup beforehand. And

by the way, like any skill, learning to

learn is the same. Our exam results, our

memory, our depth of understanding,

these things depend on the processes we

used before when we were studying. Now,

imagine I shot this arrow and it landed

here. Not very good. But to do better

next time, I have to know what to change

to get it into the center. I cannot keep

just firing arrows off randomly

expecting to get better. I might get a

bullseye once in a while, but it's not

going to be consistent. And once the

target moves further away, it's not

going to work anymore. Same thing in

learning. If we get a bad exam result,

we need to know what to change. Just

because we get a better exam result in a

different exam, it doesn't mean we

actually solved the problem. So this is

essentially the experiential cycle. We

have an experience. We observe the

result. We think about what we need to

change and then we do an experiment to

see if it made it any better. Without

this cycle, we cannot learn any new

skill. This is pretty straightforward

and obvious. But here's the part that

traps people. Whether it's learning

about learning skills or learning to

shoot an arrow or learning any other

skill, the fastest way to learn any

skill [music]

is to learn more slowly. This is the

theory overload trap. Now, most of you

know that I've got a program that

teaches people to learn more

efficiently. And one of the things that

I can do on the program that I can't do

on YouTube is I get to observe how the

students behave and I can track their

progress much more closely. So take a

look at these two students and see if

you can guess which one ended up being

more academically successful. First one

to look at is this one here, Suresh, who

was on the program for 5 weeks and got

through 31%

of the program. And the second student

that I want you to look at is [music]

Enzo, who was on the program for 54

weeks and got through [music] 20% of the

program. Who do you think improved the

fastest? So despite covering less of the

course, it was actually Enzo who ended

up with better academic results. He went

from a baseline of 62%

to the latest exam result of 92%.

Compared to Sesh, and this is the

surprising part, Sesh actually went from

80% to 71%.

Sesh actually got worse after working on

it for 5 weeks. Why did Sesh get worse?

I'll give you a clue. It's not just

because Enzo had so much more time to

work on things. Well, the answer is

theory overload. Okay, now imagine this

bowl is your brain.

Very smooth. Just kidding. Now, your

brain has a limited amount of cognitive

resources that it can spend. It's like

how much memory or RAM your computer

has. So let's say that these wooden

blocks represent your cognitive

resources. Now whenever we learn a new

skill, we're introduced to new things

that we need to think about. So each

thing takes resources to keep it in mind

and think about it. Hold my arrow more

tightly, stabilize my core, keep my

shoulders uh relaxed, breathe more

slowly, aim a little bit lower. You can

see that my bowl, my capacity is

becoming filled up. And on top of that,

there's a certain amount of resources it

takes to just perform the activity. Now,

once a new skill eventually becomes a

habit, the amount of resources it takes

goes down. But when you're learning a

new skill, it's not going to be a habit.

It's going to be unfamiliar and

difficult and awkward. And all of those

things [music] take additional resources

to overcome. So more and more needs to

be invested [music] into just doing the

actual skill. And as you can see now, we

are

overflowing. We've overloaded our

brain's ability to think about things

because we have given it too many things

to think about. In the research, our

brain trying to think about lots of

different things at the same time is

called multiple element interactivity.

And it's a common reason why we enter

into what's called cognitive overload.

But here is the thing about learning a

cognitive skill like learning to learn

for example unlike learning a physical

skill like archery. For a physical skill

we burn energy using our body using our

muscles. For a cognitive skill we burn

effort with our brain. Which means that

the amount of cognitive resources it

takes to just perform the skill the act

of learning is innately very high to

begin with. It takes a lot of mental

resources to understand new information

and process it and organize it and think

about where it belongs and create new

memory. And all of this effort helps to

translate the learning into memory

[music]

and understanding. If we didn't feel

this effort, we wouldn't have any memory

and that would be called passive

learning. But with effective more active

learning, it takes a lot of resources to

begin with, which means adding just a

few more things [music] can put us into

overload very quickly. So in that case,

what is the best way to learn a new

skill, especially a cognitive skill?

Well, at the end of the day, all of that

means that when we're learning a new

skill, we should only ever be trying to

experiment with one or two things at

[music]

the same time. So Sesh, who covered like

30% of the program in a month, would

have learned over a dozen new

techniques. And each technique has two

or three things to think about. So that

means that Sesh would have been trying

to juggle 20 or 30 things at any given

time. He was completely overloaded and

therefore his brain was not able to

actually learn the [music] skills. And

this is exactly why some students, if

they don't realize this trap, can

[music] spend months or even years

trying to learn a new skill [music] and

feeling like it is impossible to get it

right because no matter how much time

they put into it, they do not seem to be

improving. It is incredibly frustrating.

So, here's the secret to learning any

skill the [music] right way. Always

balance your new theory with practice.

If you practice without any theory, it's

aimless. If you practice with too much

theory, you're getting overloaded. So,

the trick is to [music] balance new

theory coming in with your existing

skills becoming habits. Like I mentioned

before, when skills become habits, your

brain figures out a more efficient way

to do it. that doesn't require so many

cognitive resources anymore. [music] It

finds a shortcut. And so the amount of

cognitive resources it takes to [music]

perform the skill goes down as more of

this new skill just starts to become an

old habit. [music] And eventually what

took a lot of concentration to do now

takes virtually no thinking at all. and

you can still do it just as accurately

and just as consistently. We have freed

up more cognitive resources to take in

some new theory

and turn those into habits. For some

skills and techniques, it can take weeks

if not months to develop them into

habits. Whereas for some it can just

take a few hours. And by balancing the

theory with practice, we can achieve

optimum skill growth where [music] we

are practicing and every time we

practice, we're improving with focus and

direction, but we're not getting

overloaded. So, here's what this looks

like in practice. Let's say we've only

got 5 hours a week to practice. [music]

Now, that is not probably enough to form

new habits very quickly. And so we're

going to need to reduce the amount of

new theory we take in. And because we've

got a low amount of practice and

therefore a low amount of theory, the

two of them are aligned and we can

achieve our optimum skill growth. Now

let's say we now have a little bit more

free time and we want to dedicate a

little bit more time to learning this

skill. So we have now 20 hours a [music]

week that we can dedicate to practice.

So the amount that we can practice has

now gone up, which means we can also go

up in the amount of theory we can take

[music] in.

But it's proportional to the amount of

extra practice we're getting. So as a

rule of thumb, I usually say for every

hour of theory, we should have at least

5 hours of practice. So for example, if

we have 5 hours of practice, we would

only be able to take in 1 hour of theory

in this first example. Whereas in the

second example, we've got 20 hours of

practice. Therefore, we can have up to 4

hours of theory. Now, unfortunately,

that's just a rule of thumb. And in

reality, it's a little bit more

complicated because 5 hours of

practicing a very complicated skill is

not the same as 5 hours of practicing a

very simple skill like a new way to tie

your shoelaces, in which [music] case 5

hours of practice is probably overkill.

And so, what's more important and

accurate than just the number of hours

of practice is actually monitoring how

quickly we're able to form new habits.

When new habits form, we have the mental

space to take in more theory. [music]

So, if we're very slow at forming new

habits, then we're going to be slower at

taking in new theory. And the way you

can know that new habits are forming is

when you can feel that things are

becoming easier and faster without

compromising your accuracy and your

consistency. And most of the time,

you're able to get faster without trying

to get faster. The speed comes with the

efficiency that your brain develops at

just getting better at doing it. Now,

this is where I have to give props to

Enzo because Enzo realized that he was

developing new habits more slowly than

we would have anticipated. [music] And

so, he took a year to cover 20% of the

program. So instead of 5 hours of

practice for every hour of theory, he

was doing more like 15 20 hours of

practice for every hour of theory. So

even though on the surface it looked

like he was going very slowly, his skill

growth was being maintained at an

optimal rate because he was never

letting himself get overloaded. And by

the way, if you're interested in the

program yourself, there's a link in the

description that you can check out. Now,

while theory overload has an almost 100%

failure rate, [music] the reverse is

also true. Almost 100% of the time, I

see someone balancing their theory

intake rate with their [music] practice

and habit forming rate. They are able to

learn their desired skill very smoothly

and very quickly. which is why I said

that I think this is one of the most

important things to understand if you

want to learn any [music] skill.

So those are some of the core principles

on how you can learn any new skill more

quickly. Next I want to talk about how

you can apply these skills and these

strategies for your work as a

professional. So if you're a

professional trying to learn complex new

skills for your work, this next video is

going to be especially valuable for you.

I've been a learning coach for the past

13 years. I've coached hundreds of

professionals, entrepreneurs, and CEOs

to learn effectively even under immense

time pressures and responsibilities.

This is going to be no BS advice on how

to learn as a professional. Number one,

start from zero. Let's say we have two

different types of professionals. The

first is a great diligent student

throughout university and the other is a

university dropout. Of the two, which

would you think is easier to coach to

become a super efficient learner? In my

experience, most of the time the second

person who struggled, was a terrible

student is actually easier to coach.

This is because they actually have less

built-in habits of learning. A lot of

professionals struggle with learning,

especially with high workloads, because

when they start learning, they use the

same techniques and habits that they

were used to while going through

university. not realizing that those

methods are not serving them anymore.

And a lot of the time it didn't serve

them back then either. They just got

away with it. And it's not to say that

book smarts is not important, but it's

about understanding that your learning

system probably is a combination of good

habits that are working and you should

keep doing them and then bad habits that

are holding you back which you are

probably not even aware of. And the hard

part about becoming an efficient learner

is not actually just learning new

methods and techniques. That is easy.

The hard part is discovering and then

unlearning your existing bad habits that

have set in over years. So start from

zero means just wipe the slate clean.

Forget about the way you used to learn.

If it's still working for you now, it

will come back into your system. But

don't build your learning system from

okay, here's what I used to do in

university. Let's start from that. Just

start from what is my learning goal?

What's my current situation? And then

just build from a blank slate. Number

two, learn in sprints. When you go

through uni, everything is laid out for

you. There's a curriculum to follow and

all you have to do is just learn what's

given to you and then hit the

assessment, which they usually tell you

how they're going to market. None of

that applies in a professional learning

context. However, having that structure

makes it much easier to learn. So one of

the things that I recommend any

professional to do is to actually set

very clear explicit learning goals

almost like lecture objectives for

yourself. What do I need to know? How

well do I need to know it? And in what

time frame do I need to achieve this

expertise by? Once you've set your

learning goals, learn aggressively. This

is the sprint part. Consume as much as

you can about this topic until you feel

like you're starting to lose track of

it. It's a little overwhelming. And that

may actually only take like a few hours

of learning about it and then apply what

you've learned immediately. So the

sprint is setting a learning goal,

consuming about this aggressively, and

then applying it usually for a more

extended period of time. Once you've

applied it enough that this new

knowledge feels like your own and you're

pretty comfortable with it, then you can

move into your next sprint where you set

your next learning goal and then again

consume aggressively. There's been

situations where I've spent maybe two

weeks to read a few books on something

and then I'll spend six months just

applying what I've learned because I

don't feel comfortable enough to consume

more information without having

consolidated and lived through the

learning that I've already accumulated.

Remember that the value of learning as a

professional is your ability to execute

and apply that knowledge. It doesn't

matter how much you've consumed and how

much you know. If you can't actually use

that and if you don't have the wisdom to

use that in the right way, it's

ultimately meaningless. Number three,

lead don't follow. I go around the world

doing workshops for various different

industries. And when I work with new

graduates, one of the most common things

that I see is that the new graduates

that really excel, whose managers see a

lot of potential in them, that they're

being picked to be the rising stars,

they do something different to the

typical graduate. And it's very rare.

What they do is they put themselves in

the mindset of becoming the expert. And

this is actually really important when

it comes to learning because the way

your brain will store and organize new

information that you learn is heavily

influenced by the context and the

purpose with which you're learning it.

So if you're learning just trying to hit

your current requirements and your

current level, then yes, you will be

able to reach that current level, but

90% of the value of that learning is

going to end there. But you can bet that

that same piece of information, if you

were to ask an expert about it, they

would know even deeper and more nuance.

It may not be new information that you

haven't learned, but it's a way of

seeing that information that the

beginner normally can't see. And so if

you're setting your sights on trying to

develop that higher level of expertise,

being the expert, not just following

along everyone else, but becoming the

leader within your level, then not only

will you hit your current requirements,

but because you are thinking like an

expert, the way that that knowledge is

consolidated into your brain is going to

be closer to that of an expert. So it's

actually going to carry you to the next

level and beyond. And trust me, when you

are tackling a new topic or a new client

or a new project and you have learned

about it and the way you contribute and

the questions you ask and the way you

think about it is way beyond your

current level, people will notice.

Number four, write less. You are not a

human photocopier and words on paper

don't mean anything. Back when you're a

student, some of you may have taken a

lot of pride in writing lots of really

nice, pretty comprehensive notes. But

what you will probably quickly realize

in a professional learning environment

is that writing a lot of notes takes a

lot of time and doesn't really provide

much benefit. Learning is not about

writing notes. Writing notes is a tool

to help you think so that you can do the

learning. The learning happens in the

brain. And if you're learning in the

right way, you're constantly comparing

and contrasting the new things that

you've learned with other new things

you've learned or with existing

knowledge you have. You're constantly

trying to make analogies. You're

constantly trying to simplify what

you're learning. That is a constant

active process that should be going on

in your brain. And it's hard to keep

track of all of these thoughts if you

just do it mentally. That's why you use

notetaking. It is a cognitive offload

mechanism. And so when you look at your

notes, it should be like a visual

representation of your thought process.

And any adjustment you make to your note

takingaking method that gets you closer

to this onetoone match with your thought

process and how your brain is trying to

organize that information, the more

effective your learning is going to be.

And therefore, naturally, you'll feel

that you need to write less notes. And

this logic also directly applies for the

next tip which is don't memorize.

Learning through memorization is a

losing game. You don't there's no way to

win this. The more you try to memorize

and learn through repetition, the less

efficient your learning is going to be

overall. There is going to be some

information that you do need to

memorize. You can't avoid it. Especially

if you are in a lot of scientific

disciplines or really technically uh

heavy disciplines. So when I was a

doctor, yes, there was lots of things

that I had to memorize. But what you

need to understand is that memorization

is a method of learning when all other

methods of learning are not applicable.

It is the process of your brain

receiving information that it doesn't

connect with, doesn't see the relevance

of, doesn't know why it's important,

doesn't know why it needs to keep it,

and therefore tries to remove it and

prune it from your memory because that's

what it's meant to do. and then you

taking it and then ramming it back into

your brain to say, "No, I need you to

hold on to this." And with enough

repetition, it does actually work. You

can deepen this neural groove so that

that information just stays there

stickier. But this requires repetition

and is very timeconuming if you're

trying to do this at scale. In the first

instance of learning new information,

your primary objective should be how can

I learn this in such a way that I don't

need to memorize it. How do I make it

simpler, inherently more intuitive, more

relevant? How can I find a way to apply

it and consolidate it straight away? And

the biggest barrier I see when coaching

people is that they are so used to

learning through memorization that

they're not even aware that they're

trying to memorize it. Whenever you hear

something or you're reading something

and you go into this loop of thinking,

I'm going to forget this. So, let me

repeat that again and again to try to

consolidate it into my memory. That

behavior, that thought process is you

trying to memorize. So start building a

a radar, an awareness of when you enter

into that habit and then use that as an

opportunity to say, okay, instead of

just repeating it again and again, maybe

I just pause for a moment and just think

about how I can connect it to something

or simplify it so that it's easier to

remember. Now, one thing I need to

mention is that even though I'm

packaging this information as a bunch of

tips, learning to learn is a messy

process. Some people watch my videos and

they assume that because they watched

it, they will magically get better at

learning. But if you are serious about

getting better, you cannot avoid putting

in the time and effort to try things,

make mistakes, and learn from them.

Personally, it took me over 7 years of

constant trial and error and reading

thousands of research articles. And

those years of experience are what have

allowed me to make YouTube videos like

this today. But if you're a busy

professional trying to become

hyperefficient at learning, you probably

don't have a spare seven years. This is

why I created the I can study program on

YouTube. I try my best to give you

content and valuable information, but

there is a lot to go through and if you

want to improve quickly, you need to be

focused on what to do next rather than

what video should I watch next. On the I

can study program, I'm able to distill

my years of experience into the ideal

order and structure. I can give you

tasks and check your understanding and

give you feedback. I can go into

examples and walkthroughs for your

specific goals. So, while I will keep

posting videos for free on YouTube, if

you are interested in a faster, more

guided, less confusing path to

improvement, you may be interested in

checking out my program at

iconstudy.com. If you'd like to explore

it, I'll leave a link to it in the

description below. And we'll move on to

the next tip, which is actually one of

the first lessons in the program as

well, which is to prep everything. Think

about your brain's ability to learn like

a physical muscle. If I give you like a

potato to carry, that's not going to be

very difficult. But if I'm constantly

throwing potatoes at you and now you've

got like you've got this sack of

potatoes and you're constantly trying to

catch more and hold this huge heavy sack

of potatoes, you're going to get very

tired. And the exact same thing happens

with our learning except instead of

muscular fatigue, we're going to enter

into cognitive fatigue or cognitive

overload. And so the trick to learning

efficiently is to balance our cognitive

resources. That's basically how much

mental energy and strength that we have.

And so if you imagine that you are in

some workshop or a seminar and you're

listening to someone give you this large

volume of very dense information that

you have never been exposed to before.

Your brain is trying to process that,

understand it, organize it in your brain

while simultaneously receiving the next

piece of information. And it's trying to

juggle so many things at the same time.

And if that's the situation you're in,

it's pretty much impossible to make your

learning more efficient except using

some very cognitively advanced

techniques. So when I say prep

everything, what I mean is to take that

big block of learning and to start

chipping away and working at it in

advance. And you can spend just five to

10 minutes just generally familiarizing

yourself with what the main ideas are

going to be about what you're learning,

what some of the more complicated ideas

might be, and just generally how it's

all connected and why you need to know

this, why it is important for you. and

how it's going to be relevant for you.

And it doesn't take very long to get a

general familiarity and a sense of

purpose with what you're about to learn.

And that means that when you learn that

information, your brain isn't trying to

process and understand it and then

desperately try to figure out where it

fits all at the same time. It has an

idea about where this information will

fit. And so, it's easier and faster to

store it away. Spending just 10 minutes

to prep yourself on what you're about to

learn can save you literally 10 times

that amount of time and effort in the

future. Having said that, one of the

most common ways that you can ruin the

benefit of that preparation is to

overconume information. Which brings me

to the next tip. Don't overeat. Learning

is essentially this constant battle of

consuming and digesting. You're

consuming new information and your brain

is digesting it. Figuring out how to

organize and store this into your

memory. The figuring out and storing

part of this process takes a lot of

effort and there's a limit to how fast

you can do this. This is the bottleneck.

It's very easy to consume a lot of very

dense information very quickly just like

how I actually realized in the last few

years that I tend to stress binge eat

and I didn't even know what overeing

actually meant. Uh and I'm working on

that now. You may also not know what it

actually means to over consume and

overeat new information. So, here is the

mental check that I use every time I'm

learning something new that makes sure I

never overeat. There are two questions I

am constantly asking myself while I'm

learning new information. The first is,

does this make sense to me? Not just do

I understand it, but do I actually feel

like it makes sense? It makes sense

because that pattern of connections is

something that your brain feels

comfortable and familiar with. The

second question is, do I feel like I'm

about to forget this? This question is

bringing our attention to a very similar

and important cognitive phenomenon. When

we have too many things that don't make

sense, where our brain doesn't know how

to organize it and file it away, then

it's going to prune that information out

of our memory. And so that feeling of I

feel like I'm going to forget this means

that your brain has not found a

worthwhile and meaningful way of

organizing this information. And if

there's lots of information you've

consumed in a in a short period of time,

your brain will probably struggle to get

meaning out of it because it's

overloaded. It's holding a very big sack

of potatoes. And so in that situation

where you feel like either it doesn't

make sense or you're about to forget it

or both, the most important thing you

can do is to stop eating. Put the potato

chip down. You don't have to, Justin.

Just because you opened up a bag of

chips doesn't mean you have to finish

it. You need to give your brain the

space to just process what it's already

consumed. This is where note-taking in a

way that reflects your thinking process

can really help. You write down what

you're thinking. You track your thoughts

and you use that note-taking to help you

to organize, group and simplify this

information. Now, how long it takes, how

long you need to pause for for this to

be consolidated,

this can be minutes, seconds, or even

hours or days depending on your skill

level and the amount of practice you

have as well as the complexity of the

information and how much knowledge you

already have about the subject. But I

can guarantee that if you keep overeing

and it doesn't make sense and you feel

like you're going to forget it, then you

the only thing you'll be able to do when

you overeat is vomit it back up. You

won't be able to use that information

probably for the reasons you're trying

to learn it in the first place. And like

I said, one of the things that really

helps you with this is tip number eight,

map everything. The human brain is

vastly more efficient at processing

visual information than written

information. Some studies suggest 20 to

40,000 times faster. This is why you can

look at a painting of something and

understand what you're seeing in half a

second when it might take you half an

hour to read a detailed description of

everything that you saw. Well, if you

want to get more efficient with

learning, you have to develop the habit

of visually representing what you are

thinking about in your notes. Like I've

mentioned, the brain works in

connections. It forms networks of

knowledge that are all connected to and

influence each other. And when

information doesn't fit into this

network somewhere, it is eventually lost

and forgotten. It is your ability to put

something into a network and connect

that meaningfully that determines your

attention and your depth of expertise

aka how you can apply that information.

As a professional, most of the things

you are learning, you're expected to do

something with. Everything you learn is

connected to something and it is your

job as a learner to figure out what

those connections are. and mapping

nonlinear notetaking. Actually

physically representing connections and

flows and influences on paper as you

learn is an incredibly powerful

technique that can help your brain to

think of and see these connections. And

if you've tried mapping and note-taking

before and you haven't found it very

effective, then I can guarantee

it's not because the map is not

effective. It's because the way you are

thinking as you make the map is not

effective. And so one key tip to make

this more effective is to judge

everything. The value of each new piece

of information you learn is not always

equal. Some things are more important

than other things. Some things are

important in one context and less

important than another context. And the

reason something is important is usually

because of the influence or impact it

has on another piece of information.

This is the network. A great learner

doesn't just organize information based

on how someone tells them to organize

it. They actively think about why this

piece of information is important. They

judge and critique the information. And

sometimes this is how you gain a

perspective on knowledge that is

uncommon amongst your peers. Where your

peers can say, "Oh yeah, this thing is

made up of A, B, and C." But you can

talk about it as, "Yeah, this thing is

made up of A, B, and C, but really the

most important thing is B because of the

influence it has on A and C." And you

can immediately tell that the second

person has thought about it more and

understands the topic to a deeper level.

In fact, even if you don't make a map or

create a network or do any of the other

things, simply just asking yourself on a

scale of 1 to 10, how important do I

think this piece of information I've

just consumed is? Just asking yourself

that question can have immediate impacts

on your attention and your depth of

understanding. And one of the best parts

about judging everything and getting

into that habit is that allows you to do

the next tip, which is to ask better

questions. There's no such thing as a

stupid question. Sure. But there are

definitely some questions that are

better than others for learning. And the

best questions that help you to hold on

to information, make sense of

information and use that information

like an expert would that helps you to

be a leader and not a follower is when

you are asking questions that help you

to map and judge the information. Let's

say you learn two new facts and you're

trying to decide which of these two

facts are more important and in what

situations and how do they connect to

each other? How can I map it? You can

see that trying to do that, trying to

achieve that outcome of judging it and

mapping it forces you to think about

this information more deeply and in

relation to another. You might have

understood each thing individually.

I understand what this concept means. I

understand what this concept means. But

when you start comparing, well, which

one is more important? How does it

influence each other? It's a whole new

realm of thinking. And naturally, if

it's a new topic, you may have

questions. You will have hypothesis.

I think this is more important in this

situation because I feel like it impacts

this and this and you know whereas I

feel like this one is more important in

a different situation because I feel

like it connects with this thing and

this thing but not this thing. You can

see these are hypotheses and to clarify

those we ask questions and depending on

your your situation you know where you

ask that question might depend maybe you

leave it on a separate notepad and you

go over it later in your in your own

time in the evening. Maybe you do a

Google search. Maybe you ask a

supervisor or a manager or a senior. And

not only does asking and then answering

these questions help with your learning

and help you reach that expert level, if

you are in a situation where questions

are welcomed and encouraged, then your

supervisor or your manager or even your

client is going to be impressed at how

deeply you're trying to think about this

topic and the types of questions that

you're asking. If I'm working with

someone and I know it's complicated and

it's new to them and they don't have any

questions for me,

almost always that's a red flag. It

means that they're not even thinking

about it at the level that they need to

to have these questions pop up into

their heads. And if I know there's a

certain standard that they need to hit

and they're also not even thinking at

that standard,

then there's almost no chance they're

going to hit it. On the flip side, if

someone is asking me questions, that

shows that they're thinking at this

level. Then nine out of 10 times, I know

that the outcome, the quality of the

work that they produce is going to be

excellent. By the way, if you're liking

this and you want me to go even deeper

and explore some of the nuances and

variations of these techniques that took

me over a decade to figure out, then I

want to mention that I also have a free

weekly newsletter where I cover that.

You can find a link to that in the

description below. Now, on to the next

tip. Number 11, tactically hit the

books. When you go from high school to

university, there's a big shift in that

you take a lot more independence and

responsibility. You decide how to study,

when to study, or whether to study at

all. When you go from uni to the

workforce, there's another transition in

that you now decide what to study in the

first place. And so when you think about

studying and having dedicated study

sessions, think about studying as your

fourth optimal solution to a knowledge

problem. So if you need to know

something for work or for an exam, the

first option like the most ideal

solution to that problem, the knowledge

gap that you have is that you just know

it and you can just remember it. there

was a gap, you thought about a little

bit more and it's like, oh yeah, now you

filled it. The second option is that you

just quickly look it up. A quick Google

search, looking through notes, looking

at a reference piece of information and

the knowledge is there. The third option

is that you can't find the information

quickly, so you have to do a deeper

search. It takes you a little bit longer

to find the answer. You're crawling

through reading like dozens of different

uh Google results. You're reading

through articles trying to figure this

out. And the fourth option is when you

have to do that deeper finding. It's

timeconuming. You have to troll through

things. However, it's not enough just to

have found an answer. It's when you not

only have to have an answer, but you

also need to know how to think about the

answer and how to think about the

problem and all the other things that

are related to it. You actually have to

have expertise on the topic. And in

order to achieve that, you need to do

studying. And the reason this tip is

called tactically hit the books is

because a very common thing that I see

is that people will have this general

knowledge gap within their discipline.

And so they'll find like a book or a

course that fills it and then they'll

just go through it. And it is a very

passive and inefficient and undirected

way of trying to fill that knowledge

gap. Some of the information isn't even

relevant to what you need and then you

have to sift through what is and isn't

relevant. It's often very timeconuming

and feels very boring and tedious like

you know going back to school and then

because it's not a targeted way of

filling your knowledge gap. It's not

providing you value for your daily work

straight away. You have to spend 3 weeks

finishing this course before you then

turn around and think okay did this help

solve my problem? But if instead you

think about the process of studying as

almost like this fourth option like this

really slow Google search then it means

you are much more deliberate about what

you are trying to learn and why you're

trying to learn it. What information do

you need to solve your knowledge gap and

how do you need to think about it for

this to be valuable? And if you start

here in a more targeted way then it's

easier to make this knowledge relevant.

It's easier to make it make sense. It's

more memorable naturally. It provides

you value straight away. And even if you

do go on and then study all the other

little details that may be less

relevant, it's easier to learn and

integrate that stuff later because

you're building on this solid foundation

of relevant material that makes sense to

you. And one thing that you should do to

try to make the knowledge that you gain

from hitting the books more relevant

more quickly is to delete the latent

learning period. If you studying in uni,

you might spend six weeks studying

something and then have an exam and then

in that exam you see how well you did.

Well, this is actually a very risky

studying strategy because it means that

if you've got gaps in your knowledge and

you weren't hitting the level, you don't

figure that out until the exam. So a

good student should be testing

themselves very regularly. So it's their

exam result is not a surprise to them.

Well, this is even more true if you're

learning as a professional. Forget 6

weeks. If you spend 6 days learning

about something, preparing some

solution, some strategy, solving a

certain problem at work, but the way

that you've approached it and what

you've learned has not been accurate,

hasn't been correct, then you've just

wasted that entire week and that time

and probably someone else's time and

money. And so that period from when you

start learning something through to the

point at which you start getting

feedback on the validity of what you

have learned, that's called the latent

learning period. And as a professional,

we want to bring that as close to zero

as possible. For a new and especially

complicated topic, it can be very

difficult to know what even is the

correct or right way of thinking about

it. And so we want to test the validity

of how we're thinking and structuring

this information very frequently. Go

from learning about it, making sense of

it, connecting it together, and then

proposing, okay, this is how I think I

should apply it. And try to do that

immediately. And then have that approach

or strategy checked by someone early and

frequently. If there are major errors in

the way that you're thinking about

something or learning something, you

want those to be signposted to you as

early as possible so you don't have to

then restructure your entire schema of

learning. But in reality, when I do

these workshops and I talk to these

professionals that I'm coaching, they'll

spend weeks learning about something and

only weeks or months later when they

actually apply it in a real world

setting at work do they realize that the

way they learned it isn't actually

helpful for their needs. And by having

this weeks or months long latent

learning period, we've just wasted all

of that time. And speaking of wasting

time, one of the most important things

that you can do to save time when

learning is to actually learn more

slowly. Because tip number 13, slow is

fast. This general manager of this

company that I worked with once told me

that good planning costs a lot, but not

planning costs much more. And I find

that this is really true for learning.

When we don't have a lot of time and

there's so much to learn, it's really

easy to want to learn faster and just

cover more content and overeat and just

just do whatever we can to get on top of

this knowledge gap. So you end up

reading a lot of books and attending

courses and and and workshops and you

know listening to a bunch of different

podcasts and audio books and all you

have is just more things that you're

forgetting. And the trap is that it

becomes so easy to get caught up in just

going through more material quickly

that we deprioritize

actually spending the time to think and

process and organize what we've

consumed. the idea of learning in

sprints and consuming and then just not

consuming anything else, just applying

and consolidating and checking and and

living through that. This is a very

confronting suggestion to a lot of

people who would say, well, if I do

that, I'm not going to be able to cover

my knowledge requirements because I'm

not getting through enough content

quickly. And my answer is that if the

problem is with the knowledge you have

in your brain, then flicking more pages

with your hands doesn't change that. And

sometimes what we need to think more is

to give ourselves the space by flicking

pages a little less. I would say that I

am a very efficient, fast learner.

You would hope so cuz it's my literal

job. But when you watch me study,

it's not I'm not blazing fast. My pen

isn't catching fire, you know? I'm not

breaking through my keyboard every study

session because I'm just like studying

so fast. Most of the time when I'm

learning something, I'm doing a lot of

just looking, thinking, pondering, maybe

a Google search. Mentally, there's a lot

going on and it's very quick. What I'm

focused on is fixing the biggest

bottleneck, which is my ability to

process and organize the information.

I'm acknowledging that it doesn't matter

how fast I consume. The consuming

information part is never the

bottleneck. I can always do that faster

or slower. The thing that affects my

speed of learning is how much time and

effort I devote into the thinking and

processing part. And sometimes that can

make it feel like you're learning very

slowly if you are used to measuring your

speed of learning by how quickly you're

covering content. But if you are

learning correctly, thinking in the

right ways, it should take more effort

and it should take a little longer. And

that's what saves you time in the

future. Going slow and doing it properly

is what makes your learning fast. And

the final tip I have for you is to bring

everything to the table. One of my

employees is also one of my former

students. They joined my program. They

learned the skills. They did very well

academically. We hired him and there was

this big difference between his ability

to perform academically which was very

high versus his ability to perform at

work. And what we eventually realized

was that these skills of thinking

critically and connecting everything and

judging everything and mapping

everything, he wasn't holding himself to

that standard consistently with his

work. He was only doing that when it

came to studying something. But the key

to being an exceptional professional, to

being a thought leader, to being someone

who's able to just learn and just adapt

and tackle projects with confidence, is

that your brain needs to get used to

thinking at this higher standard. It has

to get used to it so that it can become

a habit so that it can become easier and

faster. You don't want to need to like

take a quadruple shot of espresso every

single time you sit down to do some work

because your brain is just like having

to think so hard to think at this level.

With enough practice, it just becomes a

habit. It becomes as easy to think in

this way as whatever way you're

currently thinking of. Now, it takes

time and it takes effort to get to that

point, but that's where your goal should

be. And if on a Monday you're thinking

at a lower level and then on a Tuesday

you're thinking at a higher level and on

a Wednesday you are back low, this tug

of war is going to make it harder for

you to just consistently build this

habit. So show up every day holding

yourself to this standard. Every meeting

you're a part of, every conversation,

every problem you're solving, do your

best to think and maintain this standard

for yourself. become the person who's

valuable to involve in the conversation

purely because the way they think about

it is valuable. And when you bring

everything you can to the table

consistently, not only does it help you

to train your brain with these new

habits, but you become someone who is

more dependable, who is capable of more,

is given more responsibilities and given

more opportunities. So that's the advice

and I can tell you that in the hundreds

of professionals that I've done face tof

face workshops for all around the world

that the number of people that follow

even half of this advice is [music]

extremely rare. And if you do follow all

of this advice, your ability to learn,

your growth trajectory, your career

trajectory will tangibly improve. So I

hope you found this useful. If there are

certain situations that you want me to

cover or questions you want me to

answer, leave a comment down below. So,

if you're interested in joining my

program to get a fast track on

developing these skills, there's also a

link to that in the description below.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll

see you in the next one.