13 Years of No BS Study Advice in 58 Minutes

Summary

In this insightful 58-minute video, learning coach Justin Sung distills 13 years of experience into practical study advice. He emphasizes that studying doesn't equal learning; it's the effectiveness of study techniques that matters most. Avoiding superficial "study hacks" and instead understanding personalized learning processes, Justin highlights the importance of building a comprehensive learning system rather than relying on shortcuts. He underlines the benefits of active recall, spaced repetition, and testing oneself at various knowledge levels. Justin advocates for learning logs to track progress and notes that understanding and adjusting one's study approach is crucial for true learning.

Highlights

• Studying doesn't necessarily lead to learning; understanding the difference is key. 📚
• Avoid the trap of "study hacks"; real improvement comes from genuine learning strategies. 🚫
• Focus on personalizing your study methods rather than imitating others blindly. 👓
• Testing frequently helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses better. 🕵️‍♂️
• Root memorization should be a last resort; aim for deeper understanding. 📘

Key Takeaways

• Studying isn't the same as learning; it's about quality, not quantity. 🧠
• Stop looking for quick study hacks; focus on building effective learning systems. 🚫
• Effective learning requires understanding personal learning processes. 👩‍🎓
• Test yourself regularly at different knowledge levels to find gaps. ✅
• Active recall and spaced repetition are powerful study techniques when done right. 🔄

Overview

Justin Sung, a seasoned learning coach, shares over a decade of study insights aimed at transforming mere studying into effective learning. He stresses the difference between the act of studying and the actual learning outcome, which is crucial for academic success. His journey from a desperate medical school applicant to a thriving educator provides authentic evidence of his methods.

The video debunks common misconceptions like the efficacy of 'study hacks' and the tendency to mimic successful students without understanding the underlying reasons for their success. Justin introduces viewers to effective study methods that focus on holistic understanding, personalization, and the proper use of tools like active recall and spaced repetition.

Implementing these strategies creates a robust learning system that is more efficient and effective. Justin's advocacy for keeping a learning log ensures ongoing improvement and motivation. By fostering a deeper cognitive connection with study material, students can optimize their learning potential and academic performance.

13 Years of No BS Study Advice in 58 Minutes Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years I run a learning program called I can study where I've worked with tens of thousands of Learners around the world to help them Reach their dream results and I'm going to compress 13 years of studying and learning advice into this one video number one studying does not equal learning you can spend a lot of time studying and get very little learning out of it studying is just the
• 00:30 - 01:00 thing that you do it's the way you write your notes it's the way you read your book the way you test yourself they're the physical activities we study so that it can produce learning learning is the outcome it's the thing that happens in our brain that connects the dots together that turns information into Knowledge Learning has only occurred if the information is something that you can remember and you understand it deeply and then you can apply it in the way that you need to apply it so if you
• 01:00 - 01:30 spent four 5 6 7 8 9 10 hours studying but you don't have good retention depth of understanding and the ability to apply that knowledge after spending that time you didn't learn you only studied and it's this understanding that I wish I had 13 years ago when I was desperately trying to enter into medical school and I was studying 20 hours a day sacrificing sleep sacrificing friends sacrificing Hobbies relationships with everyone around me um taking a massive
• 01:30 - 02:00 hit to my mental health because I was so sleep deprived just studying so much that I wish I realize that different methods of studying set on a spectrum of Effectiveness some methods produce almost no real learning like rereading and just like highlighting things this produces like no real learning the amount of time you need to spend on that activity and how in a way lucky you have to be for that to just accidentally
• 02:00 - 02:30 create learning is astronomical on the other hand there are other techniques that produce much more learning and the idea is that we want to get rid of the stuff that doesn't work and replace it with techniques that produce a high amount of learning and thinking about studying not as just like the thing that you do and then if you have problems it's like oh I've got problems with my studying very abstractly and thinking about it instead as okay I'm doing stuff but how much learning
• 02:30 - 03:00 uh each of the methods I'm using producing this shifts the focus it makes you much more targeted in being able to improve the way you learn number two stop looking for study hacks real ones don't exist if you go on Tik Tok or Instagram and you search like # study study and studygram study talk you will find hundreds of videos of people saying use this technique and you're going to get 100% on your next test
• 03:00 - 03:30 like guaranteed and it promises you a lot in like a 30second one minute video and these videos get like millions of views because there are millions of people looking for this shortcut to learning here's the truth if you've really been struggling to get better at learning then the solution is not going to come from a 30second study hack if it was that easy to solve you would have already solved it and most of the time
• 03:30 - 04:00 yes sometimes there are little things that can be adjusted and like tiny little tweaks that you can make to the way that you study to make it more effective but most of the time the big problems that people have with studying that holds them back from success are rooted in years and years of habits that have just stacked together and you can't unlearn and retrain that overnight and so when you focus on study hacks not only is it just not going to work and
• 04:00 - 04:30 you're going to waste your time but the part that really bugs me is when I sit down with a student and they've been using so many study hacks for so long and they haven't found good results with them they start believing that they're just not going to be smart enough I remember I had this one student who uh like a really bright bubbly girl um trying to enter into medical school at the time she came into my office we had a consultation together and I mapped out her whole learning process and I looked at her and I said okay well based on
• 04:30 - 05:00 what you're doing it seems like you've got these habits that are leading to you doing this kind of studying and thinking in this way which means that you're probably going to struggle with these sorts of things and I kind of created a road map for her uh in terms of how she needs to improve and I was explaining this stuff and then I looked up at her and then I can see that she's she just starts crying and I thought I'd done something wrong I was like damn was not prepared for this I asked her what's going on and she said I just thought I was Dumb and so she had been using study
• 05:00 - 05:30 hacks and tips for so long that she believed in herself that since all these hacks that are promising her great results are not working therefore the only logical conclusion left must be she's just too dumb and I think that's a very sad conclusion to make just because you didn't realize the answer doesn't lie in a shortcut so then the natural question might be what of my meant to
• 05:30 - 06:00 look at instead so you might look at what successful students are already doing to try to copy them which leads me to number three stop copying successful students and I know this sounds very counterintuitive if you see someone that's successful and you want to be successful naturally you think if I just do what they're doing I'm going to be just as successful here's the thing learning is a very personalized thing it's a very very personalized process
• 06:00 - 06:30 and what works for one person isn't necessarily going to work for another person and this is especially true in learning to learn because of something called Deep processing deep processing is your ability like and a lot of this is determined genetically and early childhood experiences and you can train it and this is what I do you know what we do at I can study we train it uh but it does take time but de processing is your brain's ability to connect information together and extract
• 06:30 - 07:00 meaningful learning out of the information that you're consuming when you look at someone you say man they're just like a genius you they just read it and just they just get it everything clicks for them what their brain is doing to make it click for them that is the processing and it and again it's something that can be trained and the reason this is important for copying successful students is because most successful students are not successful because of the techniques they use it's not because of how they're
• 07:00 - 07:30 studying it's because they have a level of deep processing that is in a way natural like they're they were luckier in a way um and they could get away with using mediocre techniques and still make it work for them a great analogy is thinking about how a Car Works you've got an engine and if you have a really powerful engine and you just floor it like you don't have to be a great driver you're going to go really fast and sure maybe if you're competing against other
• 07:30 - 08:00 people with like awesome cars then you need to have that skill but just in the general population most people are not driving supercars and so if you just just even slightly just push down on the PED you're going to go fast so if someone else is in a different car that's not as fast with a smaller engine looking at the person driving and trying to copy their technique Shifting the same way pushing down on the accelerator the same everything like the technique everything is exactly the same they're not going to go as fast and this is a
• 08:00 - 08:30 very easy thing is that when you look at what successful students are doing and I'm not talking about like study influencers who honestly a lot of the time when they talk about the stuff that they're doing they're not doing that stuff they're just making up stuff that they're saying they're doing to create some content for it but it's like when you look at what they actually do in their daily life they're not doing half that stuff if you look at what successful students are actually doing and you just do exactly the same thing and millions of people do the same exact thing those millions of people are not
• 08:30 - 09:00 all getting that top result and a lot of that comes down to the Deep proccessing ability so what you should be doing instead of just copying successful students is figuring out how you can be successful yourself and like I said it's personalized and it doesn't mean that if you don't have good deep processing that you're never going to be successful my deep processing is not actually like naturally amazing I remember 13 14 15 years ago especially when I was going
• 09:00 - 09:30 through high school I would look at these people in my class that don't seem to need to study like at all and somehow they're doing so much better than I was and I was actively trying to do better than them and studying more than them and that continued when I was trying to get through medical school it continued into medical school where there were these people that were just like anomalies and now a lot of people look at me and think of me as an anomaly like when I did my master of education I got the the
• 09:30 - 10:00 highest grade in the entire year and I studied like for six weeks like even less than that and people would look at that and say okay it must be because like I'm built different but it's not I I really actively try to build myself and my deep processing ability to get there and if that's you then you really do need to like it's if your deep personing is not at a certain level it is very difficult to be a good learner and so training that becomes a very high
• 10:00 - 10:30 priority and that is not something that already successful students a lot of them are not doing that number four stop thinking techniques start thinking systems I'll tell you a story there's a student that I uh was working with a couple years ago and they were really really struggling with their studying for a long time and and this is not just like working with me for a short amount of time like they were working with me for uh like an entire
• 10:30 - 11:00 year so I talked to them and asked them what was going on and I kind of mapped everything out and what I realized is that he had this belief that there is this best technique and that the perfect technique is the end goal once you understand and can use this perfect technique you don't need the other techniques anymore it's just you can use that and your problems are all solved that is not realistic
• 11:00 - 11:30 there is no such thing as the perfect technique you have to start thinking about techniques like tools you cannot build an entire house with a screwdriver it doesn't matter how good your screwdriver is you just can't do it or if you do it like your hands are bleeding and it took you like 30 years the idea is that you have to have a tool box of different tools that you know how to use and each tool has its own purpose and its own limitations and exact same thing is true for learning
• 11:30 - 12:00 skills each technique or method or strategy has a specific purpose that it's really good for and then it has limitations and just because something has limitations doesn't mean you should do what the student was doing and abandon it and say oh I must not be good enough I'm not going to learn that use it for what it's good for and then supplement that with other techniques that fill in those gaps there's another side to the Spectrum here which is that some students also never think about the limitations in the first place and so
• 12:00 - 12:30 they'll have a technique and they'll believe this technique is like Flawless and so they will then use and abuse it to do everything and the best example of this is flash cards a lot of people look at flash card space uh space repetition and active recall and that is like their whole method of studying like they just have flash cards and if they if it's not enough it's not working then they think hm what's the problem ah here's the answer more flash cards and that's a situation
• 12:30 - 13:00 where you're abusing it flash cards are a great technique for a specific purpose but if you use it for something it's not good for you're not going to get good results you're wasting time you're burning efficiency now as we have established if you want to become a better and more productive learner you need to upgrade your entire Learning System and when I say this a lot of students will come up to me and say well Justin I don't even have a learning system however that is not true most
• 13:00 - 13:30 students have a learning system it's just not refined and so it's like most students have a toolbox of sorts to begin with it's just that it may not be full of like premium top-of-the-line tools that they need to excel at the top level now a high leverage activity that you should do is to have your toolbox assessed by an expert this helps you to figure out which of your tools is the weakest but more importantly where you
• 13:30 - 14:00 should invest your time in first to get the biggest improvements in your results now this is something that I do all the time and if I could see you in person then I could give you a consultation map out your learning toolbox tell you where you need to work on and just do that for you on the spot but I only have so much time and it would also be kind of weird for me to just rock up to your house unannounced just like offer you a learning toolbox evaluation but to still help you I've actually created a free
• 14:00 - 14:30 learning toolbox assessment for you it's a quiz that evaluates your entire learning system and then even gives you a score out of 100 more importantly it also gives you a personalized report at the end which tells you exactly which parts of your learning system are holding you back and therefore what you should work on it's absolutely free and I'll leave a link in the description for you below now let's move on back to our next study lesson number five avoid the illusion of learning what is the illusion of
• 14:30 - 15:00 learning the illusion of learning is when you do something that makes you feel like you learning but you're not and this is basically the learning equivalent of productive procrastination so one of the things we're probably all guilty of is you know when there's something that you need to do like a big task and you procrastinate but you procrastinate doing things that feel productive like organizing your room or like cleaning up your desk or something like that or you know just planning like
• 15:00 - 15:30 creating a schedule and it's not the most important thing for you to do really what you need to do is just get on and do the task but we procrastinate with these other things that feel like we're making progress and we do that because it feels it's easy and it makes us feel better about the fact that we're making progress and so that's basically what the illusion of learning is it's when you're doing something and it makes you feel good because it's like I guess this is helping me was learning but when
• 15:30 - 16:00 you actually go to measure it it's probably not helping and there's two really common examples I see in students that I work with the first one is in just writing and rewriting notes the amount of times that I've spoken to someone mapped out their learning and then they have a 1H hour lecture followed by two three hours of writing notes but then at the end of those 2 three hours they haven't learned anything I say well if you were s a test right now
• 16:00 - 16:30 how well do you think You' do they say well terribly because like I haven't learned it yet I've just written my notes why did you spend 3 hours writing notes and doing stuff if it's not helping you with learning and a lot of the time the answer is that it's just what they're used to doing it's comfortable it's an existing habit and they don't know what else to do they don't know how to really create effective learning so they hide in the comfort of the the illusion just saying
• 16:30 - 17:00 I'm sure if I just do this it will help with my learning somehow even though you know when you really look at it that it's not helping with your memory and your retention and your depth of understanding your ability to apply it and so if you're trapped in the illusion of learning the answer is not just like feel terrible and and panic and stay in the illusion of learning it's to accept that you're doing something that's frankly kind of useless and learn about the Alternatives the there are other
• 17:00 - 17:30 things that you can do and not knowing what to do is not a good excuse and I don't mean to call you out and I don't mean to upset you with saying that but I think if you really want to give yourself the best chance of success sometimes you do have to look at things as like this is the cold hard truth now one of the things that you can do to break out of the illusion of learning and do something that's a little bit more effective is number six yourself earlier and more often I
• 17:30 - 18:00 remember for most of my life especially High School I would study and study for an exam and then by the time I'm entering into the exam I really don't know how well I'm going to do like usually I would know that I'm going to pass and I'm probably not going to do like too badly but I have to wait for the result to find out and that sounds completely natural but actually there isn't a good reason not to know how well you're going to do in
• 18:00 - 18:30 an exam before you walk in and if you don't that probably means you're not testing yourself early enough and often enough how I used to study and this is how a lot of people study is that you just spend time like studying and reading and writing notes and then like a week or two before the exam I'm doing practice tests or or sometimes it's like the night before the exam I'm just doing like practice papers and I'm finding these gaps and I'm getting used to applying my knowledge and I'm going into the exam and here's the thing is that let's say you test yourself and then you
• 18:30 - 19:00 you find all these gaps you don't really have time to fill any of them anymore and in fact I've even worked with students that deliberately avoid testing themselves with harder questions because they know they won't be able to answer it it's like you're still going to have to answer it in the exam anyway the point is you have to find these gaps by testing yourself as early as possible possible and one of the changes that I
• 19:00 - 19:30 made that really helped with my exam results and my exam confidence is just testing myself at the end of every week at the end of every month so on the Saturday I would test myself on everything I learned from Monday to Friday and then on at the on the Saturday of every month I would test myself on everything I learned during that month which meant that number one I was Finding gaps early but the number of gaps I was Finding was not that large cuz I was only having like a few days worth of learning to to review so it
• 19:30 - 20:00 didn't take that long to fill those gaps and then by the end of the month I had already filled a lot of those gaps and so by the time I would enter into an exam I would generally know where I'm at like if I didn't have enough time to study or I knew that I didn't really quite understand a certain thing I knew I'm probably going to lose a couple marks on that so I could guess how my exam result was going to be fairly accurately but if you're going into an exam either not knowing or feeling confident and the result is ve like very different from what you expected then
• 20:00 - 20:30 you're either not testing yourself early enough and often enough or you're testing yourself in the wrong way and so what is the right way to test yourself number seven test at each level of knowledge I talk about this concept of um levels of knowledge very often in a lot of my other videos like blooms revised taxonomy I'm not going to go into it in a lot of depth right now but basically knowledge can be divided into different levels at the low levels it's just memorization regurg ation just being able to explain something it's
• 20:30 - 21:00 very very isolated at the higher levels you can use Concepts together you can see how they connect and influence each each other so it means that when you get a tricky question you can look at that question and you can dissect it you can pull apart which concepts are relevant how you need to connect them together to arrive at an answer and so one of the mistakes that I used to make is I was predominantly testing myself at a low level and a lot of my studying was at a low level in anyway um even though I
• 21:00 - 21:30 knew I was going to be tested at a higher level so I knew that there were going to be questions that asked me to discuss a web of Concepts together where I need to use knowledge in a very interconnected way in a more complex more nuanced kind of application but I would only test myself like with flashcards uh you know answering individual like single questions and I never tested like whether I can actually do that higher level of thinking and lo and behold I S an exam which questions
• 21:30 - 22:00 do I struggle with the most the complicated ones so just think to yourself how am I going to be tested on this how do I need to use my knowledge and make sure that you are testing yourself in that same way so you can find the gaps that are relevant to you number eight test yourself in different ways so let's say you're learning to play tennis then there's a theory of understanding how to play understanding the rules knowing technically how you're me to do a serve and and do your
• 22:00 - 22:30 forehand and backhand but then there's the ability to actually do it and it's understanding the tiny tiny little nuances where you know I guess theoretically you could learn that through a textbook but realistically it it just be overwhelming it's like how You' position your foot exactly you know how you arch your back when you do a serve where you're looking these tiny tiny little things that allow you to execute on what you what you know and so the first one which is the theory
• 22:30 - 23:00 is the what that's called declarative knowledge and the second one which is being able to do it the how that's called procedural knowledge and in a lot of subjects you need both great example is maths or physics where there is a declarative knowledge set of the concepts and understanding what things are and being able to Define things and being able to look at a question and say okay I can understand what relevant
• 23:00 - 23:30 Concepts there are and how I can chain them together that's the declarative knowledge but then you have to actually be able to solve the problem like use the formula and do the right equations and know how to use the equations correctly and that's the procedural part same thing in software engineering or coding where you can understand how to use the code uh technically what the language is and how to use you know different parts of it and then there's the ability to actually write good bug free code the problem arises when you
• 23:30 - 24:00 only focus on one of them a great example again is math where mass is often really heavily focus on the procedural knowledge so people spend most of their time just like solving problems and just doing equations so when they get a question that requires them to think about it a bit more conceptually maybe it's a little bit more abstract they don't really know how to approach it because they have never thought about the concepts behind it and so that will be a failure of not really learning and then testing yourself in
• 24:00 - 24:30 the declarative type of knowledge and you don't always need both types like sub some subjects like biology for example are often very just like declarative concept focused but you do need to test yourself again in the way that you know you're going to be tested to see whether you have gaps in your declarative or procedural knowledge part and so once you test yourself often and in different levels and with a balance of declarative and procedural like actually doing stuff as well well then you'll find gaps now the question is
• 24:30 - 25:00 what do you do with the mistakes you make number nine assume you'll make every mistake again I think one of the most common and detrimental myths about learning is something I call silly mistake syndrome is the belief that the reason you got it wrong is a silly mistake but here's the thing it's probably not the truth is most people do not lose enough marks
• 25:00 - 25:30 from silly mistakes for it to really matter I remember distinctly back when I was in my final year of high school sitting in the library doing these practice test questions and what I would do is I would write the answer and then I would check the answer sheet straight away and then which by the way that's not a good technique uh and I'd check the answer sheet straight away and then I'd read the answer and sometimes I'd get it wrong but it's not
• 25:30 - 26:00 because I was completely wrong it's because there's just like this one point that I missed but I know the point I understand it I already studied it I just forgot to add that point in that particular answer and so I'd look at that and I'd say yeah that's just a silly mistake and so I do these practice questions and you know my test result when I did it would be like 95% and then I'd sit the actual exam and I'd get like 85% and I'd look at the answer sheet and be like man I just
• 26:00 - 26:30 missed those little points and I used to think that that was because of me making silly mistakes until I realized there are still people who are not making silly mistakes why am I the one that is suffering from the silly mistakes am I just a silly person and that's when I decided to just assume it's not a silly mistake just assume that every time I make a mistake
• 26:30 - 27:00 there's a legitimate reason for me to have made that mistake there's a real Gap in my knowledge and when I shifted that perspective what it helped me realize is that when I'm writing something and I missed a point and I look at the answer sheet and I'm like oh yeah that makes sense I already knew that it doesn't matter it doesn't matter that I knew and I can understand the answer sheet if I wasn't able to generate that answer it it means that there's a gap and I started seeing these tiny misalignments
• 27:00 - 27:30 with how I had studied the topic this point that I'd missed it's not a silly mistake to have missed it now that I really dive deeper I genuinely didn't really understand why it was so important to add into the answer in the first place and after studying a little bit more I realized okay actually not having that point doesn't make sense if I really understood the answer to this then I would included it because leaving it out is actually incomplete and
• 27:30 - 28:00 speaking as a coach uh there are very very few times when someone is making a silly mistake while having genuinely good levels of knowledge the people who make silly mistakes consistently these are almost always the same people who have gaps in their knowledge number 10 do spaced repetition an active recall properly if you spent
• 28:00 - 28:30 any amount of time watching studying and learning videos you will have heard of space repetition and active recall um if you haven't then I'll really quickly summarize it space repetition is when you take something that you've learned and then you repeat it you usually test yourself uh in some kind of spacing interval so it could be you learn something on one day and then a week later you test yourself and you test yourself again two weeks later and you test yourself you know a month later or something like that and it's effective because of something called the spacing effect which is basically that your
• 28:30 - 29:00 memory is enhanced when you repeat things after a certain weight period active recall is when you recall something from your memory actually it's any time you're retrieving Knowledge from your memory is technically active recall so a great example is if someone asks you a question and you answer that question from memory you're doing active recall and space repetition and active recoil often paired together because a lot of techniques use them together you do a space repetition session using
• 29:00 - 29:30 active recall so for example if you learn something on Monday and you test yourself with some practice questions and flash cards on Saturday then that's a spaced active recall session that you're doing and what most people focus on is just making sure that spacing is really good and uh you know hitting their active recall sessions on anything that's due when the app tells them hey you need to revise this again but the truth about learning is that the spacing
• 29:30 - 30:00 part is first of all easy to do and much less important than the active recall part and how you do your active recall makes a very big difference to how effective the technique is going to be at producing learning so there's actually two different types of active recall arguably some people say that there's three the first one is cued recall cued recall is when there is a q like like uh fill in the blanks or a
• 30:00 - 30:30 question prompt uh that that gets you to trigger that memory free recall is when you don't have that cue so something like just writing an essay more openly about a certain topic that might be something like free recall if it's a very open-ended question that will be like free recall and then there's actually a third type some people say which is recognition uh or recognition based recall which is you see something and you assess whether you can recognize it
• 30:30 - 31:00 on if whether it feels like it's a it's a new thing and the main benefit of active recall comes from the free recall not the cued recall and definitely not from recognition but most people don't realize that these three things are different let's say you have a flash card that asks you a specific question and then you answer that question and the answer to that question is like one or two words that's cute what that means is that when you answer
• 31:00 - 31:30 that question what you're training your ability to do is recalling that fact from that cue which means anytime you're asked about that information without that cue it becomes harder and sometimes you can actually tell this happens when you have a flash card that you've done so many times that without even finishing reading the question you already know the answer like the recall you have is within 2 or 3 seconds just
• 31:30 - 32:00 you read the first few words and you already remember that the rest of the question goes like this and therefore this is the answer to it if you're at that point you're no longer actually testing on your ability to recall that knowledge all you're doing is you're testing your ability to match these words to these words so one thing that you can do and this is a tip that I give to everyone who's using flash cards is to swap out your cues change your questions regularly especially the ones
• 32:00 - 32:30 that you're consistently getting right start changing the actual question you're asking you can still testing the same Concepts or the same facts but just change the way you're queuing yourself but the worst one is people that do just recognition where they'll have a flash card they'll try to remember it and then they can't but instead of just admitting that you failed to remember it and often this happens with people that have a ton of flash cards because they know that as soon as as they mark it wrong they're going to have to do that again in like
• 32:30 - 33:00 the next few hours what they do is they just click the answer they look at the answer and then they think oh yeah that's right it's like yeah we know it's right it's the answer so there's no point doing that like you you that's the ultimate illusion like you're tricking yourself into thinking that you know it you literally just proved that you didn't know it so if you go and fall into this trap where because you recognized it you think that means that you can actually recall it that's a
• 33:00 - 33:30 that's a huge red flag and here's the golden tip worry more about how you're doing your active recall then you're spacing when you do really good active recall you've got more of room for error with your spacing when your active recall method is really bad very very cued or even recognition based then your memory of that is so fragile you need to repeat that like every 1 or two days otherwise you're losing that memory we call it knowledge Decay your knowledge
• 33:30 - 34:00 Decay is very fast when you have an active recoil that induces more learning then your knowledge Decay is slower and your memory is stronger which means you don't actually have to space it so frequently you can get away with not looking at it for like one or two or three weeks so start doing more free recall yes it does take more time and effort and it's not as brain dead easy as just spamming 100 flash cards but also when it comes to learning you
• 34:00 - 34:30 don't really want brain dead number 11 root memorize but only as a last resort what is root memorization root memorization is learning through repetition it is boring it is monotonous it is very tedious if all you're doing with learning is rot memorization your life of learning is going to be painful and excruciating and probably not very effective effective and I for the longest time most of my
• 34:30 - 35:00 learning was just wrote memorization in fact I didn't even really know that there were other ways of learning for me it was just sometimes I can understand it and it will just click and I don't need to rote memorize it because I just I just get it but then sometimes I can't get it and then I have to rot memorize it and so that's not really a technique you know that's not a that's not a learning system and the reason rot memorization needs to be a last resort is not because it's not
• 35:00 - 35:30 effective R memorization is a tool like any other and you do need to R memorize things sometimes sometimes there really are things that are so irrelevant where the only reason that you would need to know this is because you're tested on it and that's not a great you know situation to be in but sometimes you have to wrote memorize but the problem is that it creates a very surface level very isolated kind of knowledge which means that you can only use that knowledge in that way like just
• 35:30 - 36:00 regurgitation of words so if you need to use that knowledge for anything more complicated like a higher level of knowledge then Ro memorization is not going to be a good tool to use and I can promise you you cannot root memorize your way to success but there is actually another problem with root memorization which is that it is by definition very time inefficient a lot of rote memorization is repetitive and just spamming flash cards
• 36:00 - 36:30 is a great reason for it by the way again like I'm I'm not on a personal like I'm not getting I'm not getting paid by like a big mind map to uh hate on flash cards every chance that I get it just so happens that it's a great example for a lot of mistakes that people make when you use flash cards a lot of people will create flash cards and feel great making flash cards and
• 36:30 - 37:00 not realize that for every flash card they make you have to pay that back three four fivefold in the future it's debt you're creating learning debt and this is another illusion of learning where you feel good making 100 flash cards but it didn't really contribute to your learning until you do it so if it takes you a minute to create a flash card for example you're going to need 5 minutes in the future to answer that so
• 37:00 - 37:30 I used to spend like like over an hour every day making flash cards then I need 5 hours later in the future to go through and answer them and do them to the point where I'm receiving the benefit of it like it's in my memory but I'm doing that like every day so if I'm doing that five days a week for example then that's five hours of flash cards I'm now giving myself 20 25 hours of work to do the next week and this is why
• 37:30 - 38:00 it's very easy to get into this cycle where you're spending hours and hours and hours every single day just doing flash cards and some of my students are doing like they're doing like five six hours of flash cards a day and if that sounds extreme to you you're right that is Extreme and if that's you that's a problem that's not scalable that's not sustainable and it's understanding that if every flash card you make is creating
• 38:00 - 38:30 debt for yourself and so you want to minimize that if you can get away with not having to use repetition you're saving time and even if it takes a little bit longer right now to learn it and learn it probably the first time you should do that rather than just giving that work and multiplying it and letting your future self deal with it and if you feel overwhelmed right now with your work volume it's probably probably because your past self did that to you
• 38:30 - 39:00 one of the St I worked with last year his name is Tony he's a chemical materials student from Taiwan and in Asia there's this huge culture of Road memorization it's like a whole thing and he was you know pretty skeptical about doing less rope memorization because he felt like there was no other way that he could learn it we cut down his rope memorization so if 100% is everything he had to learn he was learning like 90% of it through just rope memorization and so we managed to to cut that down just to 70% and that's only a 20% reduction in
• 39:00 - 39:30 the amount that you need to rot memorize Tony went from studying like 60 hours per week to 30 hours per week we were able to have the amount of time that he was studying by reducing the amount he was rot memorizing just by 20% and that's because of the volume scaling issue with with rope memorization is that a small reduction in how much you need to rope memorize has a big impact and the amount of time that you burden yourself with but let's say we do need
• 39:30 - 40:00 to use R memorization it's a last resort but we're at the resort right now then how should you do it number 12 use flash cards memory palaces and Link methods for Road memorization I'm not going to explain each of these different techniques you can look them up there's lots of great videos and tutorials about how to use these methods but they work they are very very effective for for their purpose just make sure to use them
• 40:00 - 40:30 for their purpose don't abuse them and remember it's the last result number 13 study with friends sometimes I remember in my third year of medical school I was really obsessed with figuring out how I could study with friends I think part of it might have just been I was like socially deprived from spending so much time either studying or learning to study and I I wanted to kind of spice things up in my life you can get a sense for what my
• 40:30 - 41:00 life was like based on the fact that that was spicy for me um and so I actually ended up doing a lot of experimenting but also learning about good ways of studying with friends and what I found is that studying with friends can be really effective but probably not in the way that most people do them so there are two main benefits that I found for studying with friends the first one is for accountability and focus especially if you get e IL distracted having friends to keep you
• 41:00 - 41:30 focused and keep you accountable can be useful unfortunately sometimes they're the cause of the distraction so in order for this to work you actually have to have everyone in that group needs to have the shared purpose and understanding of why you're studying together like there has to be like an agenda like okay we all think the same way we are here to hold each other accountable to be real with each other to keep each other focused and I would highly recommend implementing some kind of system or like structure use timers
• 41:30 - 42:00 uh use like have the you like a schedule laid out tell people that your responsibility for the session is to keep time or to make sure no one gets distracted like assign roles to people make it like a job take it seriously I mean if you're just studying with friends just to like have fun and spice up your life then you can do whatever uh but if it's to really actually make it effective and like promote optimal learning then create structure the second benefit of studying
• 42:00 - 42:30 with friends and this is something I almost never see in students like outside of in my program that I'm directly teaching this to is use your friends to find gaps for each other so one of the things that I used to do very often is just like quizzing each other and that's great but it's not usually sustainable it's not enough you can make that into a whole part of your learning system and this is an awesome technique like seriously so
• 42:30 - 43:00 underrated make practice tests for your friends as part of the way you do your space repetition active recour sessions I was telling you like test yourself at different levels uh different ways making a practice exam for someone else is a great way of revising as long as you're trying to make it from memory and that means that after you've made your exam you then need to check with your notes to make sure that the exam makes
• 43:00 - 43:30 sense and then you can create your own perfect model answer sheet for the questions that you made which is great learning but then by exchanging them with your friends you now get the questions and perspectives that they made and if you're trying to make truly challenging questions then this is like like a like a infinite practice paper glitch and the best part is that there's no real answer sheet with which sounds like a disadvantage but it is a massive
• 43:30 - 44:00 Advantage because when you know that there is no answer sheet you have to check that your answers make sense you have to be much more critical reviewing the notes reviewing your material to make sure that there's nothing missing and a lot of the time the answers that you write for your friend's exam will be different to the answer sheet that they made for their own exam and those points of difference actually become really good areas for discussion those usually indicate pretty deep and nuanced gaps in
• 44:00 - 44:30 knowledge and if you get a group of like three or four friends to do this then in the time it takes to make one exam and then make an answer sheet which you're spending that time studying anyway you now also get three extra exams it is very time efficient it is very effective for Learning and it is even fun and yes I I promise I do other things in my life other than study for fun next piece of advice study ahead to get ahead I'm going to
• 44:30 - 45:00 blow your mind with this one let's say you're falling behind or you're strugling to keep up first of all we got to accept the truth the reason you're falling behind is because whatever you are doing right now isn't enough for the pace it needs to be and to stop falling behind the easiest way is to get ahead and you don't actually need to catch up to get ahead and this is the mindblowing thing for a lot of
• 45:00 - 45:30 students imagine you're in a sinking ship you don't need to get all the water out of the ship first before you plug the hole in fact that's illogical you plug the hole first it's the same thing with learning if you're falling behind now there's this backlog of stuff that you need to study and catch up on you can keep chipping away at that debt of learning but just make sure your not accumulating more debt and the reason
• 45:30 - 46:00 that you're like kind of a little screwed if you don't do this is because remember if you're falling behind or struggling to keep up it means what you're doing now is not enough so you will definitely keep falling behind and if you've already got a debt and a backlog of stuff to chip away at that's going to get larger not smaller with time and so as soon as you realize you're falling behind you should at that point plug the leak and one of the best
• 46:00 - 46:30 and fastest ways to do that if you're short on time which you probably are CU you're falling behind is to scope every subject to 10x your learning efficiency I personally believe that no learning system can be called efficient if it doesn't involve scoping a subject before you learn it so what do I mean by scoping a subject it means going through what you're about to learn and getting a
• 46:30 - 47:00 big picture overview of what it's talking about what are the main ideas what are the main groups of ideas and how does it generally connect together it's not about memorizing everything you need to memorize and all the new pieces of terminology and mastering it before you learn it in class or in lectures it's just about getting enough of an idea about it that it feels a bit more familiar and in learning science this is called priming and priming is a studying
• 47:00 - 47:30 technique that has a very high correlation with learning when you prime knowledge it basically gives your brain context and relevance for what it's about to learn you're telling it why it's important and where it maybe fits before you're telling it what it is a great analogy is thinking about a library imagine you are the sole librarian of this huge library and people are turning books that they've read and you have to put these books
• 47:30 - 48:00 away in the appropriate place but you don't actually know how the library is organized you don't know where the shelves are for which authors for which genres all you're getting is a pile of books coming at you every few minutes and you desperately need to put those books in the right place imagine how hard that would be compared to if 15 minutes before your shift shift started you went into the library and you generally got a sense of where the
• 48:00 - 48:30 categories and what the shelving organization structure looks like now when someone gives you the book and you look at it you can think ah yeah This one belongs somewhere over there and you may not know exactly where on the Shelf it fits but you know where the Shelf is the same thing for your brain when you're learning something new your brain's trying to figure out what it is and understand it and it's also trying to decide why is this relevant enough for me to spend energy on remember Ing and keeping this knowledge your brain isn't helping you pass an exam your
• 48:30 - 49:00 brain is just trying to keep you alive and it is a very energy consuming organ which means that if you're giving it random irrelevant information that doesn't fit anywhere your brain is going to aggressively remove it because from your brain's perspective it's a matter of life and death and while there are many ways to prime your brain just scoping the subject and getting a layer of the land is a really high impact strategy that you you can use that is going to have a noticeable difference on
• 49:00 - 49:30 your memory and retention as well as how deeply and easily you can understand New Concepts next up use cognitive load to delete passive learning cognitive load is the fancy term for mental effort effective learning always involves mental effort passive learning is the type of learning that doesn't involve High mental effort and in fact it's not really even learning so rewriting notes
• 49:30 - 50:00 is fairly passive if you're just writing it again word for word rereading things is also fairly passive and different techniques on that spectrum of how much studying turns into learning have different levels of mental effort associated with them and generally the more effective ones have more mental effort so for example creating summary pages is more effective and then turning those summary pages into something that's nonlinear and relational takes a little bit more eff effort and then
• 50:00 - 50:30 teaching it to a 10-year-old and simplifying those relationships and groups that takes even more effort and this is simply just because the learning is what happens in your brain so your brain has to do thinking and processing to turn information into relevant knowledge it takes effort and the way we feel that that mental exertion that's what we call cognitive load and now not everything that has high cognitive load
• 50:30 - 51:00 makes it effective like for example if all you wanted to do was max out your cognitive load you can stand on like a stand on one foot while you're juggling and someone's slapping you in the face with a fish while you read a textbook your cognitive load is going to be through the roof but it's not going to make a difference to your learning and so not all high cognitive load is effective learning but all effective learning involves higher cognitive load but whenever your cognitive load is low you can know for sure that you're not
• 51:00 - 51:30 engaging in effective learning and so you want to be able to train yourself to be aware when you're studying what's the level of mental exertion cognitive load that I'm feeling and if it's high okay that's fine right if it's low there's a high high high likelihood that you're doing passive learning and those need to be massive red flags that you look at and optimize or just completely remove that out of your learning system and in fact you can even do a quick test have a
• 51:30 - 52:00 study session for like one or two days and then identify the techniques and the methods that you use where you feel that your brain is entering into that passive State it's feeling boring it's feeling tedious it's feeling monotonous you're kind of falling asleep and getting drowsy uh those are areas where your brain is basically falling asleep just try studying a topic without doing any of that stuff just literally remove it from your system and you know
• 52:00 - 52:30 what you will probably find that there is no real difference to how much you learn and you've saved that much time and some of you will do this and be like well man that's like 90% of all my studying feels like that you know surely my learning has gone down NOP it just means that 90% of the time you spent on studying was kind of a waste of time and I'm saying that from phys where that used to be me so much of my
• 52:30 - 53:00 learning was passive and it took me a very long time longer than hopefully it will take you with my videos uh to fix that and make it more active next up these two are pretty juicy create analogies an analogy if you don't know is just when you're comparing two different things to highlight how these things are similar to each other like for example if I say life is like a journey then that's an analogy because I'm highlighting the similarities between life and a journey and creating
• 53:00 - 53:30 analogies is actually a great example of a technique that requires higher cognitive load because to create a good analogy you have to look at two different concepts and compare them and look at how they're similar and that takes effort and and that comparison that process your brain undergoes to figure that out that produces high quality learning and actively forming analogies from what you're learning is a criminally underrated technique so make analogies and if you're already making
• 53:30 - 54:00 analogies then you can make them even better by critiquing those analogies so let's say I take an analogy like life is a journey critiquing that means really examining the analogy that I've created to see how accurate and comprehensive it is so I might say okay but life is also kind of not like a journey because life is more unpredictable you don't know where you're headed whereas with most Journeys
• 54:00 - 54:30 you kind of know where the end point is and you can kind of map out what the path is going to be so you might say Okay okay so actually in that case life is more like a spontaneous journey and you might say okay well but also life has more unpredictable elements and sometimes you find yourself somewhere that you never intended to be whereas with a journey you can usually figure out where you want to go and then and then go there without too much complication might say okay in that case life is like a spontaneous journey
• 54:30 - 55:00 through a foggy treacherous forest mountain okay you see what's going on is that the analogy is growing in order to be more comprehensive and accurate of whatever we're learning about in this case it happened to be life and when you apply your brain in that way to critique an analogy and enhance it it forces you to examine the information and the topic much more deeply and much more critically and that also induces a higher level of cognitive load which
• 55:00 - 55:30 also translates through to a higher level of learning and again you can actually just test this you can take two sets of Concepts or two topics that You' have just studied make a really simple analogy for one of them and don't critique it and then make another analogy for the other topic but then critique it and then spend a bit of time really making that analogy more polished give yourself a week and then see which topic you feel more confident on 99 out of 100 times the analogy you spent time on critiquing your memory and your depth
• 55:30 - 56:00 of understanding and the Nuance to how you understand each of those individual Parts is going to be deeper and finally keep a learning log if you are serious about learning to learn then you are going to be going through a journey uh through a it's not quite a treacherous Mountain Forest but it is a long process to really create a personalized learning system and there
• 56:00 - 56:30 are a lot of things about your habits and your processes and your techniques you're going to have to change and it is impossible to change too many things at once in fact it's actually biologically impossible your brain has this uh maybe protective mechanism that's wired into it that stops IT from changing too many things in a short period of time which means that you can only really focus on changing one or two things at a time and for learning where there are like hundreds of factors that influence your
• 56:30 - 57:00 ability to learn it's going to take you a while and at a certain point and everyone who is serious about improving their learning is going to face this you're going to become overwhelmed with the amount of things that you're trying to change and the experiments you're running and the mistakes that you're making the trial and error keep a learning log I so wish I kept a learning log 13 years ago when I first started my journey like that those three years of improvement I probably could have done that in like 9 months if I kept a
• 57:00 - 57:30 learning log that tracks what am I testing what do I think is going to make a difference what technique am I trying today how did that go what am I going to do tomorrow if I just kept iterating that with more Focus instead of just doing this thing and then this thing and then this thing and this thing and then coming back to the first thing then it would have been so much faster and so much easier for me to improve but I didn't because I was lazy basically and I couldn't be bothered keeping a learning I just didn't think it was going to be necessary until it was too late in fact it's so important that all
• 57:30 - 58:00 of the students that I train now through I can study like a learning log and reflective record is like one of the actual techniques that I teach now it just makes a huge difference and it helps enormously with motivation to see the progress that you're making that you can't necessarily see on the surface and so being able to look through your learning log and realize like man the stuff I used to think about and worry about and how I thought about learning like a month ago is completely different to how I understand it now that's really
• 58:00 - 58:30 motivating so please make your life easier keep a learning log so that's my advice and honestly I can do like a hundred more of these because 13 years is a long time to just be learning about learning and I've picked up a lot of these lessons along the way if you enjoyed this format please let me know if you want me to do more of this again let me know and if you want to learn a little bit more about some of the techniques you can start applying to work on the things that I've talked about then check out this video here to
• 58:30 - 59:00 help you on the next step of your Learning Journey