You Can Become A Genius In 12 Months. Here's How...

Summary

Justin Sung, a seasoned learning coach, shares a 12-month plan to transform into a 'genius'. In his video, he explores the difference between hard work and effective learning strategies. The journey begins with understanding and redefining one's learning goals, then assessing current skills, followed by making high-yield changes in learning habits. Midway, the focus shifts to cognitive growth, pushing comfort zones, and embracing new learning techniques. The final months are about enhancing speed and adaptability to varying conditions, ultimately creating sustainable learning habits that set you apart as a genius.

Highlights

• The first month is all about discovering what it means to be a genius and setting this as a goal. 🌟
• High retention, mastery, and time efficiency are keys to genius-level learning. 🔑
• Understanding your learning flow through metacognition is essential. It's about awareness and reflection. 🌐
• Prioritize habits that have a high impact. Start with quick wins to give room for bigger changes. 🏆
• Months 4-6 focus on pushing comfort zones with cognitive growth. Embrace fear and uncertainty! 🧗‍♀️

Key Takeaways

• Being a genius is about quality, not quantity. Learn effectively, not by just working hard! 💡
• Reflecting on your learning methods is crucial. Dive into the 'what', 'how', 'why' of your study habits! 🧐
• Achieving high retention, mastery, and efficiency requires tailored goals and adaptive learning techniques. 🎯
• Unpredictability in learning fosters growth. Step out of your comfort zone for maximal improvement! 🚀
• Adapting to new challenges means revisiting and refining your techniques regularly. Keep learning dynamic! 🔄

Overview

In the quest for genius, Justin Sung lays out a meticulous plan spanning 12 months, with an emphasis on redefining learning over continuous hard work. The initial phase is about self-discovery, understanding what being a genius entails, and setting tailored learning goals. Emphasizing efficient learning over extended studying hours, Justin advocates for cognitive restructuring from month one.

As learners progress into months two and three, the focus shifts to making meaningful changes with immediate impacts on learning efficiency. Justin highlights working on 'rate limiters' and opting for methods with quick, tangible benefits. The aim is to foster improvements by eliminating bottlenecks like procrastination and poor mental health, paving the way for cognitive growth.

The latter half of the journey is about embracing new learning techniques and adapting to changes. In months four to six, stepping out of the comfort zone becomes vital as learners engage in advanced cognitive growth activities. As months seven to twelve unfold, speed and adaptability become the ultimate goal. By revisiting goals and refining techniques continually, the learner solidifies their status as a genius, adaptable to any learning challenge.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction and Month 1 - Discovery Phase 1 The chapter begins with the speaker introducing themselves as a learning coach with over a decade of experience. They then promise to outline a 12-month blueprint to becoming a genius. For the first month, termed as 'Discovery,' the speaker divides it into two phases. Phase one, which lasts one to two weeks, is about understanding what genius truly means and setting the goalposts accordingly. The speaker points out that unlike a hard worker who studies more, a genius has a deeper understanding of their goals.
• 02:30 - 08:00: Month 1 - Discovery Phase 2 The chapter discusses the concept of geniuses and how they manage workloads differently than others. It highlights that geniuses don't need to spend long hours studying because their methods are inherently effective and efficient. They don't struggle with focus or concentration, so they don't need to compensate with additional hours. The chapter also explores the difficulty others face in relating to geniuses due to these differences in approach and mindset.
• 08:00 - 17:00: Month 2 and 3 - Making High Yield Changes The chapter discusses the notion that true genius is not necessarily about putting in more time and effort, but rather about maximizing the effectiveness of the time and effort one invests. It suggests that in order to achieve extraordinary results, one must focus on amplifying the outcome of their efforts, rather than merely increasing their input. The first month is described as a learning phase where understanding the processes utilized by geniuses is crucial.
• 17:00 - 23:30: Months 4 to 6 - Cognitive Growth This chapter explores the cognitive growth observed between months four to six, emphasizing the differences in learning capabilities between geniuses and average individuals. It highlights three key abilities that geniuses possess which average people often struggle with. The first ability is high retention of new information, allowing geniuses to remember and use what they learn effectively. The second is achieving high mastery of the learned material, allowing them to not just memorize facts but also apply their knowledge to solve complex problems. The chapter emphasizes that true mastery goes beyond mere memorization to include a deep understanding and application of learned concepts.
• 23:30 - 31:30: Months 7 to 9 - Unlocking Speed In Chapter titled 'Months 7 to 9 - Unlocking Speed', the focus is on maximizing time efficiency in learning. Rather than increasing the amount of study time, the chapter emphasizes the importance of improving retention and efficiency within the already allotted study time. The goal is to optimize the balance between learning and time management, paving the way to unlock speed in achieving study objectives.
• 31:30 - 39:00: Months 10 to 12 - Adaptability The chapter titled 'Months 10 to 12 - Adaptability' focuses on assessing the current status in terms of retention, mastery, and time efficiency as it relates to a specific goal. The aim is to understand how far one is from achieving the desired goals by examining current capabilities. It highlights the importance of being aware of one's shortcomings, such as why certain tasks take longer than expected, to identify areas needing improvement and adapt to enhance performance.

You Can Become A Genius In 12 Months. Here's How... Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I've been a learning coach for over a decade and in this video I'm going to give you a 12month blueprint to become a genius so let's start with month number one the first month is called Discovery so we can divide the first month into two phases the first phase which can take one to two weeks this is about understanding where our goalpost even is you can't become a genius if you don't even know what a genius means and the difference between just a hard worker and a genius is that a hard worker is able to work hard they can study more
• 00:30 - 01:00 they're able to do long hours the genius doesn't need to do that they don't need to study more because they're fine with the workload their method for tackling this workload is effective and efficient enough that they don't need to compensate with more time they're not struggling with their focus and their concentration so they don't need to study for longer hours the reason that a Genius Feels Like hard to relate to is because a genius is thinking and studying and doing things in a very different different way for the same
• 01:00 - 01:30 amount of time and effort that an average person puts in they seem to be able to transform that into a result that is Untouchable by an average person and so the way that we become a genius ourselves is not to just put in more time and effort it is to think about what can we do that converts that time and effort and amplifies it much more than what we're doing now so in this first phase of the first month we need to spend a bit of time to learn about what the processes are that a genius
• 01:30 - 02:00 uses these become our goals and to help you with this I'll tell you there are three things that a genius is able to do that average people really struggle with the first one is having a high retention of new information that they learn the second thing is having a high Mastery of what they learn so for example you can have a really high retention great memory on something but if you can only regurgitate facts it's a very low level of Mastery compared to being able to solve really complex problems a genius can do both p retention and high Mastery
• 02:00 - 02:30 and the third thing is they can do that with time efficiency and so now that we've got our goal in this first phase it completely reshapes the way that we think about improving it's no longer about how can I study more how can I study longer we're saying we're already studying enough the question is how do we keep the time and if at the same but increase our retention our Mony and our time efficiency and then once you have that we can move into the second phase of the first month which takes another 2 weeks and here we want to figure out our
• 02:30 - 03:00 current status the purpose of this stage is to figure out our current position relative to the goal so how good are we in terms of our retention how good is our current level of Mastery how good is our current level of time efficiency we know the goal we need to see how far away we are from hitting that goal so let's say we think our retention and our Mastery and a Time efficiency are terrible Justin why does it take 2 weeks to do this instead of like 2 seconds it's because if you're bad at it just knowing that you're bad is not enough
• 03:00 - 03:30 you have to also know why you are bad at it one of my favorite questions to ask when I do workshops is I tell everyone to draw their current learning flow the way you do this is you just trace the path of a single piece of information so let's say you learned something new on a Monday what are you doing like did you do anything before what are you thinking about how are you writing your notes as you learn that what are you doing immediately after what are you doing the day after what are you doing the week after and why why why for every single step when I asked this question the
• 03:30 - 04:00 reason I like it is that most people have never consciously thought about what they do with new information their learning flow is just like information comes in I just like think about it and then I just study and that's it and so the reason it takes two weeks is that it takes time to start building awareness about what your own processes and your own thinking habits are what I consistently see with the students I coach is that the hardest part by far of
• 04:00 - 04:30 improving your learning ability and becoming this genius is not learning new techniques it is becoming aware of and then unlearning old habits in learning science this whole concept I'm talking about now of becoming aware of your own process and why you do things and how effective they are this is called metacognition and the research strongly shows it is one of the most crucial ingredients to improve your learning so how do you actually develop
• 04:30 - 05:00 metacognition and develop this awareness so that you can start upgrading well there's two ways you can do this there's a fast way and a long way and you should actually do both the long way is to reflect and reflect often if you want to become a better learner you have to get comfortable with reflecting trying to improve without reflecting is like trying to look better without a mirror it's why a reflection technique is I one of the first techniques I teach in my
• 05:00 - 05:30 program and I'm going to give you a simplified version of that technique that you can use straight away I call it the what how why now what the first what is you write down what you actually did so let's say that you're reflecting on a study session where you wrote a bunch of notes so the what you did is writing notes on a certain subject the two is how how did you write these notes be very very specific with the technique that you use almost think about creating like an instruction manual so that
• 05:30 - 06:00 someone could just follow it exactly and do exactly the same thing you did the third is why this is the meaty part here's where the value starts coming in think about why you did the technique in the way that you did it what was your rationale and when you do this often you realize you didn't even have a rationale you just did it because it's what you're used to sometimes the reason you do things is in response to a difficulty or a challenge you face while studying so note that down down how do you tend to
• 06:00 - 06:30 respond to certain types of difficulties and challenges this is how you discover your current habits and the fourth thing is now what we look at the what and the how we did we evaluate the why we did it and ask ourselves is there a way that I could potentially make this better for next time you come up with just one or two changes that you could make and then you run that as an experiment after you run that experiment you go back from the beginning and reflect on it what did you
• 06:30 - 07:00 do how did you do it why did you do it and then you create the next experiment it's an infinite cycle of improvement I kid you not between the ages of 18 to 22 I did this process for my own learning thousands of times it is without a doubt one of the biggest reasons I was able to improve my learning efficiency as much as I did and go from studying 20 hours a day to less than 20 hours a week in fact you guys have a really easy because this first
• 07:00 - 07:30 month of Discovery this took me like 3 years to do but it's about to get even easier because this is the long way and then the fast way which you should start with is taking my free quiz so I've created a quiz that assesses you on your current Learning System and points out certain things that may be critical habits the quiz is free to do and then at the end you get a personalized report on the things that it notices based on the questions that asks you so if you start start off by doing this quiz then
• 07:30 - 08:00 not only do you get a great list of things to start working on but also teaches you how to think about your learning which means when you do your reflection you can be a lot more targeted have better ideas and you know what to pay attention to the quiz is free to do it's called a learning system Diagnostic and you can check out the description for a link and I want to say that by the end of your first month you will probably already feel so much more confident and control of your learning
• 08:00 - 08:30 I've had people do this for even just one week and then DM me saying that they have a huge list of things that they have realized that they need to improve on because they've just learned so much about how they learn and once you get to that point at the end of your first month where you know what you need to work on and you know what you're currently doing you're ready for month number two month number two is all about making high yield changes one thing you realize after doing the first month is that there are so so many things that
• 08:30 - 09:00 you could do better there are so many things that you can optimize where do you even start and once you feel that I want you to remember this the fastest path to Improvement is by picking the fastest path and this is important because when it comes to learning to learn the thing you should start working on first is usually not the thing that's going to make the biggest overall difference one of my students recently made this mistake so I want to explain this properly as you go through your first month of Discovery and you're learning about the processes that create
• 09:00 - 09:30 good retention and deeper Mastery and more time efficiency one of the things you'll realize and I talk about this a lot the way that you process and think about information the first time you learn it has a strong influence on how sticky that memory becomes and How Deeply you understand it when you think about it deeply and you process it deeply that memory becomes stickier this is the process called encoding it's the act of taking you information and
• 09:30 - 10:00 putting it into our long-term memory that's called encoding if you can do encoding really really well your retention is better your Mastery is deeper and because you're not wasting time on relearning things your time efficiency goes up by a lot so if we could point to just one thing to be amazingly good at it would be encoding that is the thing that is going to make the biggest difference to your overall learning ability and in fact when we look at a genius that is the thing that they have that we know they can just learn something the first
• 10:00 - 10:30 time hold on to it understand it really really deeply and they do it in little to no time and encoding is not the first thing that you should work on improving because it is not the fastest path to Improvement the reason is because to become a really good encoder and to train your processing ability to get all those benefits it takes time these are habits that we have to unlearn and then
• 10:30 - 11:00 relearn and so in my experience coaching I've realized that there are four things that make something a good high yield change to work on in month number two the first thing is rate limiters a rate limiter is basically the thing that holds you back the most so if you imagine like a wooden barrel made of wooden planks and one of these planks is broken in half you try to fill this Barrel up with water all the water is just going to leak out through that broken plank it doesn't matter how nice or the other planks around this Barrel
• 11:00 - 11:30 La if that one is broken water is going to come out there that's the rate limiter and anything you identify during your first month of discovery that you see as a rate limiter is going to be a highe change because it means as soon as you improve it everything else that it has been holding back gets better as well for most students that I work with this rate limiter is procrastination it does not matter how well you can study and how good you can encode information
• 11:30 - 12:00 or whatever you're doing if you procrastinate so much that you can never really sit down to follow a schedule and get stuff done in the first place doesn't matter for some people it's stress or mental health I've had a lot of students who are really really focused on improving their learning skills but they're so nervous and anxious about it and the act of studying creates so much mental distress that they can never really concentrate in this case the mental health becomes the rate limiter working on the the rate limiter is the tide that lifts all boats
• 12:00 - 12:30 and it's not actually worth working on other things until that rate limiter is solved the second criteria for something that makes a great high yield change is things that have a low lead time lead time is basically a term for how long it takes for something to manifest so in something like medicine cancer often has a long lead time because you can have cancer for a very very long time before
• 12:30 - 13:00 you even start to notice any signs or symptoms by the time it's diagnosed may have already been months as opposed to for example getting hit in the face with a baseball bat where the lead time is like zero as soon as it makes contact with your face you know something is wrong for learning to learn there are certain techniques and strategies that have a very low lead time in terms of providing you benefit so encoding has a very long lead time you have to spend weeks maybe months unlearning habits and
• 13:00 - 13:30 learning new habits for your encoding skills to be high enough for it to really solve your problems on the other hand retrieval strategies things that use active recall using flash cards if you're not using flash cards doing interleaving if you're not doing interleaving doing something like pre-study these things produce an immediate benefit because the skill requirement is not very high you could start using it tomorrow and gain a benefit from from it tomorrow you want
• 13:30 - 14:00 to work on these quick wins first so that you have a little bit more time and space to work on the really high impact things like encoding that take time the third type of highe change is an incremental change an incremental change is taking something that might normally have a long lead time I.E it takes a long time for you to get benefit from it and you break that up into smaller components so you can start getting value from it earlier on one example is
• 14:00 - 14:30 with note taking if you want to get to Great encoding you need to know how to think relationally create schemas group evaluate categorize create flows and you have to be able to do this quickly that's very difficult to do off the bat so in a lot of my videos I teach people to go from just linear note taking like they normally do and just start making tiny little mind maps within their notes it's not giving you the full benefit of
• 14:30 - 15:00 the perfect version of the technique but allows you to familiarize yourself with the technique and break up this huge process into smaller chunks in my program one of the early major techniques that I teach is interleaved retrieval the reason is that when you teach someone to test themselves at a high level which is what you should do in inter Le retrieval then you actually familiarize that person with the type of
• 15:00 - 15:30 thinking pattern that they one day need to generate themselves it is easier to test someone at a higher level and force their brain to think at a higher level than it is to tell someone to just think at that level to begin with so if someone's used to testing themselves at this high level and therefore they're used to thinking at this high level then one day when they try to encode at that level it's much easier and the fourth and final High type of change is a
• 15:30 - 16:00 priority change one of the most common reasons people will never make it past month one or month two is because they don't have enough time to commit to Improvement and sometimes we're just so busy trying to stay on top of the problems we have that we don't have enough time to actually fix the problems in the first place but if we don't fix the problem we are dooming ourselves to repeat that problem and that situation usually means we have to re-evaluate our
• 16:00 - 16:30 priorities now if you've been following along you probably realize that there's a lot of stuff to do in month number two and you're right which is why this is not just month number two this is month two and three at the beginning of month two you will have an awareness of what you are doing and what you could improve on and then towards the end of month number three you have a foundation of high changes your rate
• 16:30 - 17:00 limits have been addressed you not only have an awareness of what you're doing and what can be fixed you also have experience actively trying to fix them and frankly for most people even just at this point it's enough for them to reach their current learning goal the problems that they've been struggling with maybe for years can be fixed by this point but if it's not enough or if our goal requires even more than that then we move on to the next few months which is months four five and six these months
• 17:00 - 17:30 are called cognitive growth you remember how I said that the thing that makes the biggest difference isn't the thing that you should work on first now it's time to work on those things this is the path of becoming the genius these are also the months where most people are likely to give up because cognitive growth is not comfortable in fact it's impossible for cognitive growth to be comfortable
• 17:30 - 18:00 because the primary activity that creates growth during these months what we are focusing on is pushing our comfort zone here's what I mean let's say we've got our existing current habits of learning these are the ways of learning that we're used to these are the things that feel easy and comfortable for us our current habits form our current comfort zone now obviously if we want to become a genius we need a different set of habits we
• 18:00 - 18:30 need a set of habits that are going to help us to lock in a greater retention Mastery and time efficiency than we're able to achieve right now and so by definition these new habits that we need to form are going to be new and different to what we are used to so we can say that the things that exist out here outside of our comfort zone this is the Learning Zone we're learning something new so why does this make people give up because as we go into the
• 18:30 - 19:00 Learning Zone we also pass through something in the middle called The Fear Zone and the further we get from Comfort the greater the fear becomes the reason is because there is a higher level of uncertainty as Things become less familiar the level of uncertainty goes up if I set you down and then I just laid out like an entire learning system of every single technique that you need
• 19:00 - 19:30 to do in exactly the right way first of all would be sitting for very long time secondly unless you've had a lot of training that's going to be very difficult for you to perform cuz it's you're just not used to it in other words the uncertainty is very high what if I do this and it doesn't work what if I make this mistake or that mistake and so there is an innate risk and uncertainty with trying something that is new because anything that is new new carries with it the risk of failure and
• 19:30 - 20:00 so the journey through months four five and six you may think that this is where you're learning like all these new different techniques and every single week you're trying a new technique but it's not like that at all what it really is is that you can learn all the techniques you need to get good at in like 45 minutes and for the entire 3 months all you're doing is just getting more and more used to reaching the
• 20:00 - 20:30 higher levels of that technique I can give you an example right now let's say that you have a list of 20 words you need to learn and understand level one technique might be to just try to memorize and understand it level two is look for similarities between those words level three is group the words based on those similarities level four is rate those words out of 10 based on how important you think they are in the
• 20:30 - 21:00 context of the topic Mel five is try to find different types of similarities to group them and then rate the types of groups based on which grouping method you think is the most accurate or most important level six is decide on a grouping pattern that you feel is the most important and then connect the groups together level seven is think of a different way to group them and connect them together and compare how
• 21:00 - 21:30 accurate and important your first grouping pattern is compared to your second level eight is to try to simplify that group the groups and then connect the mega groups to each other so you can see that if you're used to thinking at level one and everything you learn is just try to remember it try to remember it try to understand it and you're suddenly now starting to go to okay not only am I just trying to understand it but I'm simultaneously comparing it with everything else that I've learned and the information that I already have creating groupings thinking about
• 21:30 - 22:00 alternative groupings connecting the groupings together creating a flow out of those groupings and comparing that with a different type of flow and then simplifying it that's a lot more activity that goes on mentally and that could be like eight levels of essentially one processing technique and so every few days every week during these months four five and six you are constantly pushing your current habits through The Spar Zone into to a more uncertain new method of processing
• 22:00 - 22:30 eventually getting to in that example like a level eight and being able to do that more comfortably until that becomes a habit and forms your new bigger comfort zone and so during these months there are two indicators that you are progressing at the beginning of month 4 you're just starting to probe the edges of the comfort zone you're trying new things that are a little uncertain and you're trying to to get your brain to process information in a way that you're
• 22:30 - 23:00 not used to and by month six the progress you've made is that you're not just probing towards the edge of your comfort zone you are able to thrive in uncertainty you have no problem with making mistakes you have no problem with trying a new technique you are so used to trying new things and expanding your comfort zone that the fear Zone has evaporated there is only comfort versus learning and as result of that learning
• 23:00 - 23:30 the other progress you make by the end of month 6 is that your natural processing speed should be noticeably higher than it was before and what this means is that for the same amount of time and effort you able to create a much higher level of retention and Mastery with information that you're learning for the first time you are seeing the light of what it means to have become the genius and if you've made it through to the end of month 6 then the rest of the months become honestly
• 23:30 - 24:00 much easier months Seven 8 and nine become about unlocking speed and here's the secret to being a really fast learner is that learning slow is learning fast there's no point being a fast learner if your quality is terrible if you're making mistakes and errors all over the place you can't just be fast you also have to be accurate and effective and so so to become a meaningfully fast learner you
• 24:00 - 24:30 first actually need to have accuracy for most Learners the high level of Mastery or retention is not something they can reach even by doubling or tripling the amount of time they spend it's like expecting a poor quality machine to produce a really high quality product just by running the machine for longer the quality of the output is determined
• 24:30 - 25:00 by the quality of the process and so for most people that are in month number one or month zero the quality of the process is usually all over the place so even if they spend more time studying and learning the quality and the Mastery the depth of understanding doesn't grow significantly this is why you can have some people that spend hours and hours and hours trying to learn something and then someone else can spend tenth of that time and gain a deeper
• 25:00 - 25:30 understanding of the topic by month 6 the beginning of month 7 what we're aiming to do is unlock accuracy we are now able to hit that top level the genius level that seemed unreachable Yeah by this point we can hit that we're not fast at it it's not graceful but we can get there and once we've unlocked accuracy we can then unlock consistency so it's not just that we can hit it for
• 25:30 - 26:00 one topic sometimes it means now we can hit it for every topic and every subject even when we're busy even when we're tired we can still hit that standard and what naturally happens once we have consistency unlocked is that this technique that we have been training so hard for so long becomes a new habit and when it becomes comes a new habit our
• 26:00 - 26:30 brain is able to do it much more easily and much more quickly the speed comes automatically this is why slow learning is fast when you focus on doing it slowly and properly the speed comes without you even trying to be faster and I see students make this mistake all the time they're so focused on just trying to get faster without having the accuracy and the consistency but what's the point of going faster if you're just
• 26:30 - 27:00 creating more work for yourself later through all the gaps that you're leaving behind that's not getting faster that's called rushing the only way to learn faster is for your brain to find it easier to do the learning and that happens by creating new habits by the end of month number nine uh you've uh given birth to a bunch of new habits and You' ready for the true genius levels of months 10 11 and
• 27:00 - 27:30 12 these months are about adaptability when I was going through medical school I went from studying 20 hours a day to 10 hours a week and then entering into hospitals as a fourth year medical student failing my first run because I realized the way that I was studying was geared too much for exams and not real life practice rek working my entire Learning System having to then
• 27:30 - 28:00 go back to studying like 6 seven hours a day on top of clinical placements and then dropping back down to like 3 4 hours a week and then working full-time while going through medical school so my journey of becoming a better learner has just been constantly up and down and it's only in the last like five years that it's been very stable and there are not many optimizations I need to make anymore so even though at the end of month number nine you got these habits
• 28:00 - 28:30 of being able to hit that high retention High Mastery and time efficiency like you you achieved it like you became the genius what else is left for you what's left is that you now need to be able to do that and have these habits carry you forward even when the challenges get harder how you can perform on a good day needs to become your Baseline on a bad day and so how do you do this you actually just go back to month number one you've now got a whole new set of habits you you're a different person at
• 28:30 - 29:00 this point so go through figure out what's your next set of goals what does it mean for you now your new self to be even better what is your current status and then if you go through this exact flow all over again what are the new high changes you'll realize there are different rate limits there are different higho changes you can make your foundation can get even stronger and a whole new set of habits can be built and by continuing this cycle this
• 29:00 - 29:30 is how you not only just become a genius but you stay a genius you create a gap between you and who you used to be and that Gap continually widens and by following this this is what gives you the confidence to know that you can go into any room and you can learn anything and you will be able to perform at the level you need to perform no matter what the challenges are and if you're looking for an easier way to do this my program i.com is actually built around this very
• 29:30 - 30:00 structure it's a blueprint that I've used for myself and for thousands of students that I've coached and we're sharing it with you I hope it can help you too thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one