Learn To Learn in 109 minutes

I've been a learning coach for over 13 years. I've spent thousands of hours

years. I've spent thousands of hours learning about learning and I've taught this skill to tens of thousands of people. It's no exaggeration to say that

people. It's no exaggeration to say that learning to learn for me has been life-changing. I went from studying 20

life-changing. I went from studying 20 hours a day desperately trying to enter into medical school to working as a doctor while running a business full-time and ranking first for my

masters of education after a month of studying. For the students and

studying. For the students and professionals that I coach, learning to learn has not only given them better results and performance, but also the confidence to progress in their career

make more money, pass competitive examinations while earning back valuable time to spend on friends and family. But

learning to learn is not straightforward for me. It took years of experimenting

for me. It took years of experimenting and reading through complicated research to figure it out. So, in this video, I want to give you a single place to get started. I'm going to teach you how I

started. I'm going to teach you how I think about learning as a learning coach. I'll teach you some tactics, but

coach. I'll teach you some tactics, but most importantly, I'll teach you the principles and approaches you need to have because tactics change depending on what you're learning and what your goals

are, but principles remain the same. So

I'll teach you the principles and the process you need to follow to master complex skills and knowledge in half the time. And there are four parts to this

time. And there are four parts to this video. In the first part, I'm going to

video. In the first part, I'm going to bust some common learning myths. I'm

starting with busting myths because they're really problematic and it's maybe even more important than teaching you the learning tactics themselves.

These myths are fundamental blockers to improving. If you believe these, you

improving. If you believe these, you will not improve. And they are so common that over 95% of people believe in at least one of them. So, that's the first part., With, the, myths, out, of the, way,, I'm

part., With, the, myths, out, of the, way,, I'm going to move into the second part where I talk about how you can create a learning system. Learning is messy and

learning system. Learning is messy and it's complicated and it's also invisible. It's really hard to improve

invisible. It's really hard to improve at something if you don't even know how to think about it. So, one of the most important first steps to become more efficient at learning is to see learning

as a system as opposed to a cluster of methods and techniques that you just use every now and then. Once we see the components of our process as part of a

learning system, we then look at which part is holding us back and then work on that. Just figuring out how to think

that. Just figuring out how to think about learning as a system probably took me 2 years. As I explain about the learning system, I'll also be teaching you about the science of memory and how

your memory works. And so this part can be quite large. It'll be broken up into multiple uh different segments depending on each component of the learning system. With that covered, in the third

system. With that covered, in the third part, I'll go through the different orders of learning. One thing I've realized that makes learning to learn really difficult is that there are so many different ways we need to use our

knowledge. When you're learning for an

knowledge. When you're learning for an exam, it's different to learning for your job. And even at your job

your job. And even at your job different types of decisions and problems require different types of learning at different levels. And so

I'll teach you how to think about all those different levels in a really easy and productive way. When you know how to think about the orders of learning, it gives you a really clear goalpost. You

know exactly what level you need to aim for and you know what you need to do to be able to achieve that level. You can

assess whether your own learning is effective or not based on how well you're achieving that goal. And because

you can assess that yourself, you can improve and you can iterate on your learning ability much more quickly than having to ask someone else for feedback or getting an exam result back to get feedback. And then in the fourth and the

feedback. And then in the fourth and the final part, I'll go through some crucial self-management skills. Self-management

self-management skills. Self-management refers to the way that you manage your time, your priorities, your focus, and your attention. Self-management is what

your attention. Self-management is what allows you to have the time and the energy and the concentration to do effective learning when you need to sit down and actually do it. If your

learning skills are great and your self-management skills are useless overall, you're going to be useless. And

there are a lot of misconceptions and advice that I've seen floating around there that I think makes self-management harder than it needs to be. So, I'll

teach you some simple principles and strategies that you can use that will solve most of your biggest self-management issues. Now, as you can

self-management issues. Now, as you can see, this is not a short video, and by the end of this video, you're not going to be the world's best learner. Learning

to learn takes time. And if you're not willing to spend that time to learn this skill, then you're not going to learn the skill. But for those of you that are

the skill. But for those of you that are willing to put in the work, this is your ultimate beginner's guide. So, first

let's start with busting some myths. The

first myth, first two myths actually are the time and IQ myths. Let's say that you're struggling with your learning volume.

You've got a lot of work. You've got a high workload. There's lots you need to

high workload. There's lots you need to learn. There's lots you need to keep up

learn. There's lots you need to keep up on. And you've got other things that you

on. And you've got other things that you need to do. You need to get your job done. You need to spend time with your

done. You need to spend time with your family. You need to, you know, do your

family. You need to, you know, do your everyday household chores. And on top of that, you're meant to get enough sleep and and exercise regularly. There's a

lot of stuff on your plate. And on top of that, you have all the stuff you need to learn. And so, it can feel like

to learn. And so, it can feel like you're on this hamster wheel where you're just constantly trying to keep up and you never have enough time. And

while feeling that way is completely valid and accurate, the way we interpret that problem is a myth. Because the myth is that we don't have enough time or

that I'm just not smart enough. I don't

have the IQ points to be able to learn all this stuff so quickly like other people can or my memory is just not that good. So, it takes me a lot longer than

good. So, it takes me a lot longer than other people. And while that's partially

other people. And while that's partially accurate, everyone's different. Everyone

has different levels of sort of baseline intelligence. They don't need to have

intelligence. They don't need to have the processing power of the world's smartest scientist. They don't need to

smartest scientist. They don't need to have the memory of a of a memory champion. Just being able to increase

champion. Just being able to increase your attention by 20 30%. Being able to understand things 20 to 30% more deeply seeing how things fit and connect

together 20 to 30% more easily. That

translates to 20 to 30% more free time that's available for you. That that

could be an entire evening that's now freed up. That's an entire weekend you

freed up. That's an entire weekend you don't need to spend. That's 20 to 30% more difficult problems and more complicated issues that you can deal with. That could be a promotion. That

with. That could be a promotion. That

could be a salary raise. Everyone can

get 20 to 30% more effective than they are now. And actually, if you think

are now. And actually, if you think about it, it's only logical because most people are terrible with their learning.

Their learning strategies and the methods and the systems they they're using are not very sophisticated. And

also, it's not your fault. If you were like me, no one taught you how to learn properly. No one told you what the

properly. No one told you what the science of learning is. No one told you how your brain actually works. And even

for me, when I was going through and reading through the research and understanding this, it's complicated.

Like really complicated. And it took me over a decade of reading the research and applying it and experimenting and teaching it to thousands of people that allowed me to see how it can really

click and how your brain is actually meant to learn. So, the two myths that I want to come back to here is that it's not about not having enough time. That's

not the real problem. The real problem is that it takes you too long to cover what you need to cover. The problem is that the time you do have, you're spending it on relearning the things that you're constantly forgetting. The

issue is not a lack of time. The issue

is a waste of time. And that comes down to your process, the way that you learn.

The issue is also not because of your IQ or your intelligence or your memory.

Your ability to learn can be trained.

And even if everyone's genetic potential is different, everyone can be 20 to 30% better. And that is a significant

better. And that is a significant improvement to your life. And today in in this day and age, learning to learn is the most important skill that you can

learn. It is more important than

learn. It is more important than learning about AI or learning about coding or whatever else you're learning about. Nothing is going to make you more

about. Nothing is going to make you more competitive in the job market than being great at learning. In fact, it is because of AI that it is so important

because now you can't get away with just learning the bare minimum. AI already

does the bare minimum and more. And it

does it faster, better, and a thousand times cheaper than you. You do not have any competitive advantage to bring to the job market if all you can do is learn to do things at the bare minimum.

Now what employers are increasingly expecting of you is that you can do more than before. You can solve harder

than before. You can solve harder problems and you can solve them faster.

And whether or not you can do that depends on how quickly and efficiently you can learn. Now the second myth is the learning styles myth. In other

words, the myth that refuses to die. If

you're not familiar with the learning styles myth, it's saying that everyone has a unique learning style. A common

way that people talk about this is visual, auditory, read and write kinesesthetic. But actually any way of

kinesesthetic. But actually any way of categorizing it by saying I learn through this. I'm better at learning in

through this. I'm better at learning in this way rather than this way. This is a myth because decades of highquality very reliable research has shown that the

human brain is capable of learning in multiple different ways and people generally do not have a set style of learning that is better for them. What

that means is that there is not a style that is more suited for you that's different to someone else. And so for you, you should learn to use that style more. That is not true. And probably one

more. That is not true. And probably one of the reasons this myth refuses to die and is actually still taught like I've worked with universities uh like teacher

training organizations, you know, people that are meant to be teaching people how to learn and they still have learning styles in here. You have to understand that this is not one of those things where there's like a one or two papers

out that say that this is not true. Like

this is to the point where people are not really studying whether learning styles exist anymore because the research is so conclusive that we're moving on to other things. People are

now researching why do people keep believing in this myth and the reason people probably keep believing this is that it seems to be counterintuitive. it

goes against our own lived experience that there are certain ways of learning that seem to be more effective and work better for us. So surely the research is

missing something and that is also a totally valid feeling and the thing is the two things are not contradictory to each other. Here's the reality. First of

each other. Here's the reality. First of

all, most people are visual learners.

This is because the human brain is extremely efficient at processing visual information. Compared to how quickly you

information. Compared to how quickly you can process written information, your visual information processing ability is tens of thousands of times faster. And

this is true for everyone. Unless there

is a pretty significant medical abnormality. And the easiest way to test

abnormality. And the easiest way to test that, if I show you a photo of something, how long does it take for you to understand and process the information from the photo versus if I

explain to you every single thing going on in that photo and I write it out in paragraphs. However, another aspect of

paragraphs. However, another aspect of reality is that most of us grew up in a very reading and writing dominant education system. And so a lot of the

education system. And so a lot of the habits and the preferences we have for learning are reading and writing dominant. And this is the reason why

dominant. And this is the reason why other than visual learning, reading and writing tend to be considered the most common and most effective styles of learning. Now, you might be thinking

learning. Now, you might be thinking well, if I feel like I'm able to learn more effectively with visual learning compared to listening to someone, which most people struggle with, by the way

uh, or I I feel like I need to sit down and write out my notes in order for me to to learn it. Doesn't that mean I have a learning style? That's a good question. And the answer is actually

question. And the answer is actually surprisingly, no. What you're talking

surprisingly, no. What you're talking about are actually learning preferences.

And here's the difference. This is the key part. Learning styles as a theory

key part. Learning styles as a theory says that each person uniquely has a learning style that is more suited for them and so they should lean into that

learning style. If you are a visual

learning style. If you are a visual learner, you should do more visual learning and that's where you're going to get your most efficiency from. And

your brain is probably not wired to be good at the other styles of learning.

Now, what we know from years of very thorough research is that we do have learning preferences. Learning

learning preferences. Learning preferences say that there are certain ways that your brain is better at processing information, but those things tend to be the same for everyone.

Everyone tends to be better at visual processing. Reading and writing tend to

processing. Reading and writing tend to be a habit that we have. So, each of us have different habits of learning. But

the difference here is that it isn't a good idea for you to double down on the particular habits that you feel have been effective for you in the past. Even

if you're more comfortable with a visual or read and write or an auditory or experiencing like doing stuff style of learning, there is always an advantage

for you to learn how to learn through these other modalities and styles. Mixed

modal learning is advantageous for everyone. And also as a working

everyone. And also as a working professional, you don't get to choose how you learn things. Sometimes if you really struggle with learning when someone is explaining something to you and every time you learn, you have to

have a diagram or you have to go away and sit down and write copious amounts of notes to be able to learn effectively from that. That's going to be a pretty

from that. That's going to be a pretty big limitation in your life and that limitation doesn't have to exist. So

yes, you can have learning preferences and habits that you're more comfortable with, but that's just your starting point. But it is a myth to think that

point. But it is a myth to think that that cannot change and evolve and it is unwise to think that it shouldn't change and evolve. So that's the learning

and evolve. So that's the learning styles myth. The next and final myth is

styles myth. The next and final myth is that learning should be easy. Learning is a big and

complicated process. It's very energy

complicated process. It's very energy consuming. Your brain has to do a lot of

consuming. Your brain has to do a lot of stuff to create effective learning. It's

not like breathing or walking where your brain can basically do it automatically without even being aware of it. And

research that looks into the behaviors and learning strategies of high performers versus low performers has found a difference in something that's called the misinterpreted effort

hypothesis. It basically says that most

hypothesis. It basically says that most people when they use a learning strategy that makes it feel like they have to work harder and think harder, maybe get

a bit more confused and work through that confusion, they perceive that that feeling is undesirable. That if I feel this way when I'm using this strategy it means that the strategy is not

effective. However, this is incorrect.

effective. However, this is incorrect.

This is the misinterpretation of the effort. Feeling and thinking that way is

effort. Feeling and thinking that way is actually a good thing. It actually means that your brain is engaging at a higher level, kicking it up a gear, and that is going to result in better retention

better memory, deeper understanding. But

instead, what happens and what most people do is that they will use a technique that is effective. They will

think it's not effective, and they will actually go back to a technique that they think is more effective because it feels easier. This is sometimes referred

feels easier. This is sometimes referred to as a counterproductive adjustment.

And so when I go through in this video and I talk about the learning system and I talk about different tactics and principles, you're going to see this come up over and over again, you're going to see the trend of engaging your

brain, thinking actively, thinking deeply. It's not going to be a walk in

deeply. It's not going to be a walk in the park, especially if you don't have these habits of really active learning and most of your habits are around rope memorization. This is going to be

memorization. This is going to be challenging for you. And when you feel this is challenging and then you feel oh, this is not working. I want you to remember this. Learning is not meant to

remember this. Learning is not meant to be easy and you don't need learning to be easy. What you need is learning to be

be easy. What you need is learning to be effective. You need learning to be

effective. You need learning to be efficient. And the cost of effective and

efficient. And the cost of effective and efficient learning is effort. And that's

mental effort, not spending more time.

I'm not saying work harder, put in more hours. I'm saying when you do put in the

hours. I'm saying when you do put in the hours, think deeper. Push yourself to a higher standard of thinking. put in the mental effort that's required for effective learning. If you don't do

effective learning. If you don't do that, you will not be better at learning and there is no amount of tactic or strategy or principle that is going to

help you. So, that's myths. Now, let's

help you. So, that's myths. Now, let's

think about building a learning system.

When I do workshops or seminars or even one-on-one coaching and I ask someone "How do you learn? What's your learning process look like?" Most people can't tell me. It's very, very vague and very

tell me. It's very, very vague and very superficial. It's like I'll look up

superficial. It's like I'll look up something and I'll read some books. We

don't normally think about learning and the process of learning. It's not a common everyday thing to think about.

And so, as a result, when we have an issue with our learning, like it takes too long, our memory is not good enough.

We don't understand things deeply enough. We can't solve complex problems.

enough. We can't solve complex problems. We write notes for hours and then 3 weeks later we come back to it and realize we don't remember any of what we wrote. When we have these problems, we

wrote. When we have these problems, we don't know how to fix them because we don't know how to think about this. And

so while there are many ways of thinking about this, this is one particular perspective uh that I think is pretty easy to understand and pretty useful for problem solving. There are two main

problem solving. There are two main components that we need to anchor into as part of a learning system. The first

part is encoding.

The second part is retrieval. Now this

is going to be a simplification of some really complicated research. So, it's

not 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough for it to be useful for you.

Here's what happens. Information comes

into your brain.

Your brain does a series of processes.

It thinks about that information in all sorts of different ways. It filters it.

It asks itself, "How is this relevant?

Why do I need to hold on to this? What

is it connected to? Where does it fit?"

And after going through that process the symptom, the outcome, the the byproduct of doing that process is that

we create memory. Memory is this this artifact, this byproduct of the process of just thinking about information in certain ways. And that process of

certain ways. And that process of thinking about this new information seeing it from these different angles seeing how we can fit it into our existing knowledge structures. This

process is called encoding. So when you do encoding really well, it produces more of these memory byproducts. So your

memory is stronger. It's stickier.

You're not going to forget it after one or two days. You're going to forget it after 3 or 4 weeks or 3 or 4 months even. If it's incredibly important and

even. If it's incredibly important and the encoding process is done, you know very very extensively, then you may not forget this for years, decades even. You

know, if you find out that you're about to have a child, you're not going to forget that anytime soon. You don't need to create flashcards and say, "What am I going to have again? Is it a pet or is it a child?" And then go through every

single evening, you know, testing yourself. Oh, it was a child, of course.

yourself. Oh, it was a child, of course.

And then, you know, repeat that on your space repetition algorithm. Having a

child means a lot. It affects you in all sorts of different ways. Every way that it affects you, that is one connection that's being formed. That's a way that

your brain is trying to see how this new information fits in the big picture of your life. And because it fits in so

your life. And because it fits in so many different ways, there's lots of memory created from that. Whereas, if I tell you, hey, I need you to pick this thing up for me at this address, you

know 419 C flat 3 on this road, you might not remember that for even like 15 minutes because those numbers mean nothing to you. Whereas that exact same address

you. Whereas that exact same address those exact same numbers, if I said "Hey, I need you to pick this up from this address." And you think, "Wow, I

this address." And you think, "Wow, I used to live at that house," you're going to remember that address because it means something to you. This is a way that your brain is meant to work. We

want this to happen. You don't want your brain to be remembering every trivial random, irrelevant piece of information.

Things that are relevant, that have an impact, that are worth remembering, you want your brain to remember. and the

things that aren't and that are random isolated bits of information, you want it to prune out. Now, the issue is when that random isolated piece of information is something that you

actually need to learn for your exam or for your job and you don't see how it's relevant, but you do know you need to remember it. That becomes a problem for

remember it. That becomes a problem for your brain. You're basically telling it

your brain. You're basically telling it to do something that it's not built to do. And effective encoding as a part of

do. And effective encoding as a part of your learning system. Having the skill of encoding means you know how to turn that information that feels irrelevant

into something that is relevant and connected. You have the skill of finding

connected. You have the skill of finding patterns perspectives angles connecting and applying that information in such a way that it tells your brain

hey, I know you thought this was not relevant and you want to throw it away but actually if you think about it in this way, you can see how it's really important and worth holding on to.

That's the skill of learning, but that's encoding, right? That's new information

encoding, right? That's new information coming into your brain. What do you do with that information to turn it into memory? Retrieval on the other hand is

memory? Retrieval on the other hand is when this information already exists stored in your memory. You've already

done the encoding. And retrieval is when you pull this memory out and you use it.

Anytime you use it as a form of retrieval, explaining it to someone solving a problem, answering a question just randomly reciting facts. As long as you're doing it from your memory, that is retrieval. Now, retrieval is

is retrieval. Now, retrieval is important for a couple of things. First

of all, you need to retrieve the knowledge for it to be useful. Like

unless you're just learning something because you just have joy in knowing things, usually the reason you're learning it is to use that knowledge in some way. That involves retrieval. So

some way. That involves retrieval. So

you need to be good at retrieving the knowledge in the right way. If you

learned something and you encoded it in a way that is very isolated, very, you know, random, far removed, just wrote memorization, but the way you need to use that is for complex problem solving

you know, nuance discussion, answering complicated questions from an expert.

The way you encoded that knowledge is not going to be useful. Even though it technically exists in your brain, you don't know how to use that. It doesn't

connect in the way that it needs to connect. So, you're going to struggle.

connect. So, you're going to struggle.

And that is part of being good at retrieval is practicing retrieving the knowledge in the way that you need to retrieve it before you actually really need to retrieve it. And the other

benefit is that by doing this retrieval it also helps with reenccoding it. So there's

actually this cycle that happens where every time you retrieve information, it also helps to strengthen and consolidate that knowledge. And this is really

that knowledge. And this is really important because if you are not good at encoding, the issue is that your memory

is going to be bad. So poor encoding leads to poor retention.

It also leads to superficial understanding. And what that translates

understanding. And what that translates to is usually not being very good at complex applications of knowledge like solving complex problems, having deep discussions. So if you're trying to

discussions. So if you're trying to become an expert at this thing, you know, you're you're a tech leading about a new tech stack and you know that the people that you need to answer questions from important stakeholders that are going to be throwing all sorts of

different perspectives at you, the level of expertise you need to build is is pretty high. So if your encoding quality

pretty high. So if your encoding quality is low, you're going to struggle with that. Now on the other hand, if your

that. Now on the other hand, if your retrieval is poor, so poor retrieval this leads to a drop in your knowledge

fluency or your ability to recall that quickly. It also increases the risk of

quickly. It also increases the risk of there being gaps in your knowledge that you didn't detect. Because you don't retrieve the knowledge to test yourself you don't realize that there's a gap in

your knowledge or that you've understood something incorrectly. And so one of the

something incorrectly. And so one of the purposes of doing retrieval is to find those gaps in your knowledge before it really matters. And sometimes you don't

really matters. And sometimes you don't need to do deliberate retrieval uh to to mitigate this risk. Like you might be able to learn something, produce something, you know, apply it into your work and you just present it. And if

there are mistakes and if there are gaps in that, you just either figure it out along the way or you present it and you get feedback saying, "Hey, this is wrong, this is wrong, and then you go fix it." like it may not be a

fix it." like it may not be a significant consequence, but it's worth understanding that retrieval is a tool that helps to mitigate that risk because sometimes you won't have that flexibility. Let's say that you have to

flexibility. Let's say that you have to present something at a conference and you need to really know your stuff. You

don't want to be on stage answering a question for the first time and realizing, I've never thought about it from that angle before and now I look like a fool. You don't want to be sitting that really important exam and

realizing for the first time, oh yeah I've forgotten this or I've never thought about it this way before. I've

never tested myself in this way. But the

other issue with poor retrieval is that it increases knowledge decay.

And knowledge decay is basically the fancy technical term for forgetting something, memory fading away. And this

is something that you should have an understanding of.

If you learn something for the first time, your knowledge decay is going to be at a certain rate. So in this case this might be quite steep. So let's say

that this is after 1 day and this is your day zero. So you learn something on this day. So this access is time by the

this day. So this access is time by the way and this is the level of knowledge that you have left in your memory. So if

you learn something on day zero after one day on this graph maybe that's dropped to 10% which means that you forgot 90% after one day. Now let's say 6 hours after learning it you decide to

test yourself on this knowledge. So

that's going to happen let's say around here. So you do a retrieval practice and

here. So you do a retrieval practice and you try to recall this from memory and then you reconsolidate this knowledge.

So what that allows you to do is it allows you to see hey I forgotten like 50% of it already. I'm going to relearn that 50%. And then as you consolidate it

that 50%. And then as you consolidate it because of the fact that retrieval itself helps with re-encoding what's going to happen is that that knowledge is now going to decay a little bit more

slowly.

And so after another let's say one day from that. So this is let's say day two.

from that. So this is let's say day two.

Your knowledge is not decaying all the way down to 10% anymore at this point.

Now it's only decaying down to let's say 40 or 50%.

And again, if you were to test yourself again and do a retrieval session this is going to be even slower. And

here you have what we might call residual long-term memory where even after, let's say, 3 or 4 weeks later your knowledge might still be at 80%

retention. And this is a good place to

retention. And this is a good place to be in because now you're not you're not forgetting things every single week.

That knowledge is stickier. And it's

stickier because you have repeated that knowledge. You've reconsolidated it.

knowledge. You've reconsolidated it.

You've revised it multiple times and that's kept your knowledge topped up.

Some people talk about this as deepening the neural groove. Every time you repeat it and go over it again, it deepens the neural groove which makes that memory stickier. And so this graph that I've

stickier. And so this graph that I've drawn here that shows knowledge decay is famously called the ebbing house uh forgetting curve. And this practice of

forgetting curve. And this practice of repeating things frequently enough is called spaced retrieval. Sometimes it's

uh referred to as spaced repetition which is actually not technically a correct term. Now, here's the really

correct term. Now, here's the really interesting part about learning to learn is that space retrieval and repeating something over and over again and relearning it basically is not the only

way that you can reduce your rate of knowledge decay. You can with better

knowledge decay. You can with better encoding also reduce the rate of knowledge decay. And this is actually

knowledge decay. And this is actually fairly obvious. Years ago, I talked

fairly obvious. Years ago, I talked about this concept and people were like up in arms like as if this is like impossible. But actually, it's very

impossible. But actually, it's very intuitive. You know that some people

intuitive. You know that some people when they learn the same material are going to forget it more slowly. You know

that even for you, some subjects, some facts, some concepts, you will just remember that for longer than you will for other things. So this knowledge decay curve is not like fixed for each

person. If you are like this person, it

person. If you are like this person, it doesn't mean that you are doomed for the rest of your life to always forget everything you learn extremely quickly.

Part of it is heavily dependent on the way that you encode that process. Now

the way that people encode is usually very subconscious. Uh, and part of

very subconscious. Uh, and part of learning to learn is turning that into an actual skill you can control. But if

you do encode to a higher quality, you spend a little bit more effort thinking about how it connects together. you turn

it into part of a a connected schema then it means that even after learning it for the first time, you could have a knowledge decay curve that looks like that. And now you can apply something

that. And now you can apply something like space retrieval on top of that, but instead of having to retrieve doing flashcards or reooking at your notes every 2 or 3 days to keep on top of your

knowledge, you can look at it every two or 3 weeks and that's still enough because your knowledge is fundamentally just not decaying so rapidly. You don't

have to be so aggressive in how frequently you do your space retrieval.

And this is kind of the best state you want to be in. You want your attention and your knowledge decay when you first learn something to be as slow as possible. Because when you resign

possible. Because when you resign yourself to learning new information through space retrieval as your primary method of holding on to that memory

it's incredibly time consuming and also tedious and very monotonous. And it also makes you hate learning. And what can easily happen is that you get this overwhelm. Uh and if you're using flash

overwhelm. Uh and if you're using flash cards, I call it flash card overwhelm because it means that every single day you have hundreds of these flash cards to get through and you need to get through all of them because otherwise if

you don't, that information is going to decay. And so this is really a moving

decay. And so this is really a moving the boulder uphill kind of situation.

Like you're constantly having to push that boulder uphill because soon as you let go, it's going to start rolling back towards you. Whereas with better

towards you. Whereas with better encoding, what we're saying is let's make that hill not so steep. So even

though we do need to keep pushing it every now and again, we don't have to be pushing it literally constantly. And so

without a doubt, when it comes to the thing that is the most lifechanging about learning to learn, it is encoding.

Getting good at encoding is the thing that truly makes you feel like your your experience of learning is changing. If I

ask you the question between encoding and retrieval, which skill is the most important for you to get good at first?

The answer obviously should be encoding.

And if you said that, you'll be wrong.

And this is the point that I want to make is that in practical reality retrieval is actually the most important thing for you to focus on first. The

reason is that retrieval skills can be learned very quickly and they produce an immediate benefit. The benefit is not as

immediate benefit. The benefit is not as powerful and is not as long-term as the benefits you get from learning encoding.

Learning good encoding skills requires you to rewire the way that your brain habitually processes and thinks about information. For some people, if they're

information. For some people, if they're already starting from a high baseline they can improve their encoding and upgrade it very quickly in a matter of two or 3 weeks. For most people who

don't have a very high baseline level of encoding, it's going to take you months sometimes even years to learn to upgrade your encoding skills. And so what happens is that if you get too

overzealous and focus too much on improving your encoding skills before your retrieval skills are at a certain level, then you're actually going to make things harder for yourself because

now you don't have the habits of proper encoding. you don't know how to do it

encoding. you don't know how to do it accurately yet. It's going to take you

accurately yet. It's going to take you weeks or months to figure out how to do it accurately. And so between now and

it accurately. And so between now and when you figure out how to do it properly, you're not receiving the benefit. And that time and attention and

benefit. And that time and attention and effort that's sunk into trying to improve your encoding skills is actually taking away from your normal studying process or spending that time with better retrieval. So your performance is

better retrieval. So your performance is actually going to drop in the immediate time. Until your encoding gets good

time. Until your encoding gets good enough, your performance is actually going to drop. And so for most people trying to get better at learning, the path that needs to follow looks like

this.

So if this is time again on the x- axis and this is the amount on the y- axis the level of encoding for most people is

fairly low. And then as you slowly learn

fairly low. And then as you slowly learn to do this, this will eventually get better. Most people start with some

better. Most people start with some level of retrieval, but not much. In the

initial phase, you're going to need to increase this up until the point where you're able to achieve the outcomes that you want until you can get the level of fluency, until you can get the level of

risk mitigation, until you can get the retention and and sort of long-term knowledge that you need. So, until you hit the objective, the outcome that you're looking for, you're going to have

to do that mostly with good retrieval practice. And so let's say that with

practice. And so let's say that with this level of encoding and this level of retrieval you're getting you know let's say uh your your results are going from

this to this. So this blue line this is your results. This is your actual

your results. This is your actual performance.

This is the encoding skills and this is your retrieval.

Now what also happens is that the amount of time you need to spend also increases because as you do more and more retrieval you now need to spend more and more time. So unfortunately what's also

more time. So unfortunately what's also going to happen is that the time you're spending on learning is actually going to go up. What we're prioritizing here is locking in a certain level of performance or results in this early

phase. Unless you're happy to delay your

phase. Unless you're happy to delay your performance uh improvements until later uh we want to start by getting to a certain level of performance or results that we need for our work or for a

project or for an exam that we're sitting. And then we can work on the

sitting. And then we can work on the efficiency. And so how that efficiency

efficiency. And so how that efficiency plays out is that as your encoding skill slowly develops, what happens is that your memory naturally starts improving.

Your retention naturally starts improving. So naturally what happens is

improving. So naturally what happens is that the amount of t amount of retrieval you need to do starts going down naturally. You don't need to spend as

naturally. You don't need to spend as much time doing retrieval because you're just not forgetting it that quickly anymore. There's no point reviewing it a

anymore. There's no point reviewing it a few days later because we can leave it for a few weeks and still have the same level of retention. So your retrieval starts going down as your encoding goes

up. At the same time the time that you

up. At the same time the time that you spend goes down as well.

And because most of what is timeconuming about learning is actually doing retrieval really well and relearning things and testing your gaps. When

retrieval goes down, time follows it.

And your performance should stay stable at worst or actually increase as your encoding gets better. And so the part that trips people up when they're first learning to learn is that they'll try to

learn these, you know, encoding strategies, but they won't focus on the retrieval strategies or they'll be too focused on making sure that the first thing that goes down is the amount of time that they're spending. And so what happens is that their performance just

tanks because they're not doing any of this. And so their performance actually

this. And so their performance actually goes down and it doesn't increase until the encoding increases. And that period of time is like I said like months potentially even years. So that's

encoding and retrieval. So when you think about learning divided broadly into these two phases, you can think about where the issues are and then which part is actually holding you back

the most. So if someone has pretty good

the most. So if someone has pretty good retention, they've got solid memory they're they're able to understand things fairly deeply, but the issues that they're having are that their fluency and their recall is a little bit

too slow or they're realizing that there are these gaps in their knowledge that they didn't detect before. uh or for some some parts maybe the knowledge decay is a little bit uh too fast then I would say okay well that seems to be

mostly a retrieval problem so the way that you're going to fix that is mostly by focusing in on your retrieval now if someone has really poor retention their learning is really shallow they're not able to really solve complex problems

using what they've learned they'll spend a lot of time consuming a bunch of stuff learning a bunch of stuff then they'll look back on it they don't really remember what they wrote they don't really know what to do with this knowledge they kind of get more and more

confused as they're learning. That's

really clearly an encoding problem. It

means that as you consume information you're not turning that into usable memory, usable knowledge structures. All

you're doing is just hoarding resources basically. And so that ultimately is

basically. And so that ultimately is something that needs to be improved by getting better at your encoding. And so

that's something that you should be working on slowly working on on the side, just getting better and better at it gradually, letting your brain find new ways of thinking about and processing that information. However, in

the interim, you're going to need to beef that up with better and higher quality retrieval methods. So, what I'm going to, go, through, now, is, how, you should be thinking about retrieval, what type of strategies there are in retrieval practice and how you get good

at this. But before I get into that, I

at this. But before I get into that, I want to let you know about something that might help allay some of your confusions. We've covered a lot of stuff

confusions. We've covered a lot of stuff and this is really just still scratching the surface. Like, not even scratching

the surface. Like, not even scratching the surface, we're just blowing gently on the dust on the surface when it comes to learning to learn. And so it's common uh to be confused about what you need to work on, what's important for you, what

your next step needs to be. And so to help you a little bit with that, there is a free quiz that I've made which will have a look at the learning system that you're currently using. And it will then break that down and then it will tell

you, hey, this is the part that probably is the weakest for you. You should focus on this. It will give you some

on this. It will give you some recommendations um and some instructions in terms of how that's going to help you and what you need to do to get better at it. And so if you're looking for a tool

it. And so if you're looking for a tool to sort of quickly assess what your current situation is and get a bit more direction, then I'd recommend checking out that uh diagnostic. It's a learning

system diagnostic quiz. I'll leave a link in the description for you if you would like to check it out. It's totally

free for you to do and you get that personalized report at the end. Now

let's dive a little bit more into how you get really good at retrieval. Now

when we're talking about retrieval and getting good at retrieval, we have to remember that retrieval is really about using your knowledge. So, it's useful to think about this in terms of how you're going to need to use your knowledge for

whatever you're learning this for. And

we want to somewhat match the way we need to use this knowledge with the retrieval practice that we're doing.

We're basically simulating the real world experience for ourselves. And the

two dimensions of retrieval you want to nail down is the method of retrieval that you're using and the frequency.

I'll talk about frequency first because this is an easier one to understand.

We've already talked about this concept with this forgetting curve here.

As you know and we've discussed your knowledge is going to fade. Your memor

is going to fade. This is called knowledge decay. You don't want to wait

knowledge decay. You don't want to wait so long to retrieve something again that that knowledge is almost completely evaporated. You want to hit that

evaporated. You want to hit that knowledge after you've given enough time for meaningful forgetting to have occurred, but not so long that you've actually forgotten all of it. And so

this is actually just going to be a judgment up to you. You're going to have to try it and see what that frequency looks like. For most people, I say that

looks like. For most people, I say that you should try to review something new that you've learned one day after learning it, then one week after learning it, and then one month after

learning it. But this is sort of just a

learning it. But this is sort of just a starting template. This isn't saying

starting template. This isn't saying that this is definitely right for you.

If you learn something for the first time and then you do it after one day and you realize, okay, your retention is sitting at about 80%, pretty good, and then you do it after one week and you realize it's at 10%. Well, this gap

this drop is too significant. It's going

to be really challenging for you to reill like 90% of the knowledge that you've lost on that day. And you know take into account that you're constantly learning new things as well. So, it's

not like you just have this one thing to learn and then retrieve later. If you've

forgotten 90% of this a week later, you there's probably all sorts of other things that have happened during that week that you're also imminently about to forget. So this can become very

to forget. So this can become very overwhelming. So if you notice that

overwhelming. So if you notice that there is this big drop, then you would move this timing forward. So at what point do you get something that's maybe like 50%. Well, ideally the same as what

like 50%. Well, ideally the same as what it was before. So you did it after 1 day. You saw that you had an 80%

day. You saw that you had an 80% retention. So how long do I need to wait

retention. So how long do I need to wait for that to be an 80% retention? So if I do it on one day and then I do it immediately the next day, probably your

retention is going to be greater than 80%. It might be 90%. It might be 95%.

80%. It might be 90%. It might be 95%.

Because you've literally just reviewed it the day before. And so this is going to be overkill. And so maybe the sweet spot is if I review it after 3 days

then I'm back down to 80% retention. And

that's good because going from 80% to 100% you can fill that relatively efficiently. And so you can start with

efficiently. And so you can start with this basic timing of one day, one week one month, but then you actually assess your level of retention and you move those dates closer together if you feel

like your retention is dropping too fast. Or you move those dates further

fast. Or you move those dates further apart if you feel like your attention is also still like really strong and really good and actually this is overkill. But

the ultimate goal here is to make sure that we are hitting a certain level of frequency that keeps that knowledge topped up rather than letting it decay all the way down. And each time you top

it up, it should improve your attention and make that knowledge decay a little bit slower for that piece of information. Now, this does depend on

information. Now, this does depend on the method of retrieval that you're using. If you use the wrong method, you

using. If you use the wrong method, you may be testing yourself in the wrong way. So you think your attention is

way. So you think your attention is really good, but actually it's either not or it doesn't actually matter because that's not how you need to use that knowledge. So a really common

that knowledge. So a really common example is if you need to learn something for complex decision-m there's lots of different things going on at work, really complicated project, you

need to make high stakes decisions. And

the way that you learn about new stuff to make that decision is through flash cards and rope memorization. So you can do your flash cards and you can do your wrote memorization and your retention may be 80 90 95% but at the end of the

day it's meaningless because you're not testing yourself in the way that is relevant for how you actually need to retrieve it. And so when you test

retrieve it. And so when you test yourself in that way you may realize that actually your ability to use that knowledge functionally is only at 50%.

And so this is why it's really important to be clear about how we need to use this knowledge and then that becomes our northern star. That becomes the goal.

northern star. That becomes the goal.

and the retrieval method springs back from that. But the major aspects about

from that. But the major aspects about getting your method right are that first of all it should be generative.

So what this means is that it needs to involve you actually doing something with that knowledge rather than just thinking about it. If you just sit there and you mentally review everything that

you've gone over, there is some benefit to just doing that. But that benefit is not going to be as strong and also just not worth the the time and opportunity cost of instead

generating something with that knowledge like creating a question, creating a problem, solving a problem, explaining it, writing it out, actually force yourself to do something with that

knowledge. And on top of that, you

knowledge. And on top of that, you should try to push yourself to manipulate that knowledge. In most situations, you

that knowledge. In most situations, you generally don't want to be in a habit where the method of retrieval you're using is simply just recall. That may be okay if you are studying for a specific

exam and you know that those exams know need you only need to just recall information. But especially in a

information. But especially in a professional context and especially even just in more like slightly more complex exams, the way that you need to use that information is often going to be with

other pieces of information. Like it's

not enough just to know this fact. It's

like now that you know this fact, what does that mean in terms of this or this?

or how do you apply this fact into this?

Or when you combine these two facts what happens? And so when you practice

what happens? And so when you practice your retrieval, you want to get used to using that knowledge for something as opposed to just like recalling it and saying it for what it is. And finally

you want to make sure that you're doing this as much as possible from memory.

This is using something that's called free recall. Free recall means that

free recall. Free recall means that you're recalling that information from your memory. you don't have any cues and

your memory. you don't have any cues and you don't have any structures that kind of make it easier for you to recall this information. For example, if I have a

information. For example, if I have a fill in the blanks, that's not free recall because you have the context of that entire sentence minus the blank.

That would be cued recall. Whereas, if

the question is saying, "Here's this problem. How would you solve it based on

problem. How would you solve it based on everything that you've learned?" There's

very little structure. there's not as much guidance and you're needing to recall lots of different ideas from your memory, manipulating it, doing things with it, generating a response. And that

is going to produce the greatest overall benefit to your memory and your understanding. If you struggle with

understanding. If you struggle with doing that, that's not a bad thing because remember, one of the main goals of retrieval is to find gaps. So when

you do the retrieval and you realize hey, I'm struggling with this. My

fluency is not very good. I've got

knowledge gaps. I'm forgetting things. I

don't know how to use the knowledge in this way. That's not a bad thing. That's

this way. That's not a bad thing. That's

telling you this is a gap that you need to work on and it's a good opportunity to work on it before you needed it for whatever real world actual thing that

you need. As a little pro tip, as a if

you need. As a little pro tip, as a if you're a working professional, there's a really uh big problem with trying to do retrieval practice, which is that it

just adds more work onto your plate. And

that work is not necessarily directly related to the actual work you need to do. Like creating a retrieval strategy

do. Like creating a retrieval strategy for yourself to top up on your knowledge feels like it's not really helping you like get the job done or finish a project or like deliver for a client or

something like that. And so it can be difficult to fit retrieval strategies into your schedule. And this is the point that I want to make about this is

that retrieval doesn't always have to be a deliberate separate session. In fact

if you're working professional, I would actually encourage that you have that as your last resort. There are two different ways that you can think about doing retrieval. One way of doing this

doing retrieval. One way of doing this is deliberate and the other is opportunistic.

You want to do as much of the opportunistic as you can. Deliberate

means that you're actually setting aside time in your schedule separately to create a retrieval strategy for yourself and use that strategy. Like you're doing your flash cards, you're answering questions, you're generating questions

you're getting yourself quizzed using catchy BT, you're like literally setting aside separate time that you normally wouldn't spend to do this retrieval

strategy. Opportunistic means that you

strategy. Opportunistic means that you find ways to do retrieval in your existing workflow. And this is better

existing workflow. And this is better for three reasons. First of all, it's more time efficient. You're already

doing things. Find ways to do retrieval doing that. And that means that at the

doing that. And that means that at the end, of the, workday,, you've, already, done retrieval. You don't have to spend extra

retrieval. You don't have to spend extra time outside of work or on the weekends.

Second of all, it's easier to make it more relevant to what you're actually doing at work. So, the gap between learning something new and then making that learning purposeful and applicable and relevant to your context gets

shortened down by a lot. And number

three, deliberately trying to create retrieval strategies in your existing workflow can actually increase the value that you're able to do at work compared to not doing that at all. I give you a

really common example of doing this.

Let's say I learn something new and I'm a manager or a team leader and we're tackling this new project and I have to learn all this new stuff to be able to to to, deliver, on, this, project, properly.

I might decide that I normally need to brief my team in terms of how we're going to run this project. And I'm going to identify that that's an opportunity that I could turn into a retrieval strategy., And, the, strategy, I'm, going to

strategy., And, the, strategy, I'm, going to use there is teaching. So I'm going to try to teach from memory what I have learned. And I'm going to manipulate

learned. And I'm going to manipulate that by packaging everything that I've learned in a way that feels logical for the team to understand. I'm going to organize the knowledge. I'm going to

package it up. I'm going to teach it and deliver it in a way that I feel is intuitive and logical and allows the team to have clarity and alignment and know what they need to know to be able to deliver on this project properly. And

that might be a 30 minute 45 minute training session that's wrapped in as part of a briefing meeting. Now, I might not normally think about doing that, but by doing that, not only am I creating

value and clarity for my team, I'm also consolidating my own knowledge. I'm

doing good retrieval that strengthens my own understanding, finds gaps, and I'm doing that at a frequency, which is probably early enough. I've learned it.

I've just learned it, and I'm going to teach that the next day or two days later in a briefing meeting. And so I encourage you to think about your existing working day and think about any time that you need to use what you have

learned and ask yourself, is there a way that I can do the same thing, but just draw a little bit more on my memory test my memory a little bit more generate a little bit more, use that

information and manipulate it a little bit more, and just turn that existing task into a retrieval opportunity. The

only things that you need to have deliberate retrieval sessions for are the types of things where you're not using that on a daily basis at work. You

might need to have a separate retrieval session uh scheduled in just to be able to top up on that knowledge. Okay, so

let's zoom out now and just uh do a bit of a recap. So we've talked about how you should think about learning as a system and that is broken up into two components encoding and retrieval. why

encoding is important for your memory but why retrieval is actually practically usually the most important thing to start with if you're a beginner. We've talked about the ways

beginner. We've talked about the ways that you can do retrieval correctly and that you need to make sure that the method and the frequency are matched up.

And if you're a working professional you should find more opportunistic ways of doing retrieval instead of deliberate sessions. And throughout this

sessions. And throughout this explanation, I've spoken a lot about working with information in different ways like just fact recall versus solving complex problems. like that

theme has come up a lot and this is actually a really important other way of thinking about learning that translates to not only the method of retrieval that you use but also the way that you do

encoding correctly and this is the idea of orders of learning. It's really

important to understand the orders of learning because it gives you a easy way to identify how much you need to learn something. How deep do I need to go? How

something. How deep do I need to go? How

good do I need to be at this topic? it

becomes a guideline for the types of retrieval strategies that you should use. If you need to be really good at a

use. If you need to be really good at a topic, you find the right order and then you find a retrieval strategy that's going to hit that order. And this also translates to the way that you do your encoding. If you know that the way you

encoding. If you know that the way you need to think about something and learn something is at a certain order, you make sure that you do that type of thinking upfront when you first learn

that information. And so in your daily

that information. And so in your daily learning experience, understanding the orders is going to become your mental goalpost of how you know when you are learning something good enough. And the

easiest way to break up orders of learning is just into higher order versus lower order. Lower order learning

is when learning is very isolated.

This is talking about individual facts understanding individual concepts explaining things in isolation. You do a lot of this when you're doing early

schooling and you're just asked to like explain a concept, recite a definition regurgitate some facts. That's all lower order. At a certain point, it flips in

order. At a certain point, it flips in that most of the things that are valuable uh for learning are higher order. And higher order is when

order. And higher order is when information is integrated. This is when concepts aren't just meaningful to know by themselves. Concepts are important to

by themselves. Concepts are important to know because of the influence and the impact it has on something else. This

fact is not something that is just a fun fact for a party trick. This fact is important because that influences the way that you make decisions about something else. And so anytime you need

something else. And so anytime you need to do any kind of prioritization or evaluation

or comparison or complex problem solving these are all higher order knowledge

requirements. Prioritizing something

requirements. Prioritizing something accurately means that you understand the implication of prioritizing one thing versus all the other things that you could be prioritizing. When you evaluate

how important one thing is, you're evaluating its importance relative to the importance of everything else. If

someone's trying to solve a complicated problem, but they're not used to thinking at a higher order. They don't

know how to start. They don't know how to approach things. They understand that there are lots of different concepts working together. They understand that

working together. They understand that they are related to each other, but they don't know how to navigate those relationships. They know it's connected

relationships. They know it's connected but all it does is create overwhelm. As

opposed to someone who's good at thinking at this higher order, and they're used to it, and they've tested themselves, and they've encoded the information in this way. They can say "Hey, yes, all of these things influence

each other. Here is the way that they

each other. Here is the way that they influence this. If I change this thing

influence this. If I change this thing this thing goes down. If I remove this I need to replace it with this." they

understand how the components connect and so they can work with that knowledge in a productive way. Now there's a few interesting phenomenon uh about working at a higher order compared to working at

a low order. First of all, working at a higher order because it's integrated forces information to fit into a network. Forces information to fit into

network. Forces information to fit into a schema.

And this is how your memory works. Your

memory is stronger when information belongs inside a network or a schema.

And so when you try to learn things at a higher order and you try to apply your knowledge at a higher order, your memory gets stronger. One of the results of

gets stronger. One of the results of this is that you achieve this flatter knowledge decay curve that we were talking about. And as I mentioned there

talking about. And as I mentioned there if you're not used to thinking in this way where you're constantly comparing information, thinking about how one thing relates to another thing, thinking

about which is more important compared to other possible options. This is

difficult to do. These are new habits of thinking that you need to develop. Now

sometimes you do need to learn at a lower order as well. Like I said sometimes there'll be certain examinations that you could try to integrate everything into a big network and a schema, but it might take you so

long and you only need to learn like 50 different facts. It's faster just to

different facts. It's faster just to smash those through some flash cards.

You just have to accept that that information because it's not connected into a schema. So this is not in a network, not in a schema. This

information is going to be lost very quickly. So the knowledge decay is going

quickly. So the knowledge decay is going to be very fast. Again, sometimes this is acceptable and sometimes this is actually overall more efficient. But

especially as a professional, there's not many instances where lower order learning is that valuable because most of the time you can just write it down and you can look it up later. And the

ability to sort of just have memorized facts and details in isolation and only using them in isolation is is pretty niche. So understanding the orders of

niche. So understanding the orders of learning has a couple of different implications. One of the implications is

implications. One of the implications is it gives you that goalpost on how you should be thinking about the information when you first learn it, when you do the encoding. So when this information first

encoding. So when this information first comes into your brain, you want to put on your higher order hat and say, "Cool.

So here's this isolated piece of information that's entered my brain. How

can I connect this with something else?

How can I find a pattern here?" And

there are various strategies that you can use for this that I talk about a lot in in my other videos. Some of the ones that I would recommend you starting with is trying some kind of mind mapping.

Correct mind mapping is very effective because it forces your brain to think in relationships because you literally have to draw the relationships. Now you can also do mind mapping without doing

higher order thinking where you just draw things, draw some arrows and connect some things here and there. You

don't really think too deeply about it.

You don't think whether this is the best way or this is the right way. You don't

think about other ways that you could do it. you just connect a bunch of things

it. you just connect a bunch of things together and you call it a day, that's not going to be very effective. But if

you're really challenging yourself to evaluate prioritize restructure ideas, and really get a clear, organized, big picture understanding,, mind, mapping, is, going to help you with that. Another very simple

thing that you can do is creating analogies.

The act of trying to create an analogy is actually a way to activate higher order thinking. To create an analogy

order thinking. To create an analogy you often have to take a group of related concepts and facts and then think about how they're related together to find some other type of way to represent that. And when you create an

represent that. And when you create an analogy and you think, does this analogy make sense? That forces you to examine

make sense? That forces you to examine those relationships, whether you've understood them correctly, whether you've understood each component correctly. And so creating analogies is

correctly. And so creating analogies is an incredibly effective, useful tool that you should use frequently whenever you're learning new information. You can

also apply this exact same thinking when you decide on the retrieval method that you want to use. So I've mentioned that you want it to be generative. You want

to manipulate the information and you want to do it off free recall. Well, any

form of higher order retrieval is actually going to be manipulating and generative, by, default., And, one, of the most famous examples of this which is

incredibly effective is to teach something to a 10-year-old. Famously

called the Fineman method. When you try to teach something to a 10-year-old you're doing a very similar thing as creating an analogy. You're thinking

about how all of these things relate together. You're thinking about which

together. You're thinking about which thing is more important, which is less important, and how you can reexlain that in simpler terms. And then when you think about those simpler terms, you go back and ask yourself, does this still

actually make sense? Is this still accurate? And because you're forcing

accurate? And because you're forcing your brain to think in networks and think in relationships, this is higher order. And because you are teaching

order. And because you are teaching someone, you're generating it. And

because you're doing it hopefully from memory, you're doing free recall. So

this is a example of a great retrieval strategy. And so what that looks like

strategy. And so what that looks like when it comes together is that you take in some new information. You draw some mind maps to try to see how the relationships play out. You spend a bit

of time cleaning it up until it feels organized and it makes sense to you. You

try to create some analogies with what you've learned. And as you do this, you

you've learned. And as you do this, you should feel that your knowledge is not only becoming deeper and more nuanced.

You're starting to see how uh the complicated overwhelming parts are starting to make a bit more sense. Your

memory is getting stronger. And then

later, you can test yourself by teaching it to a 10-year-old, an imaginary 10-year-old. You don't have to find your

10-year-old. You don't have to find your local ambient 10-year-old to teach to.

And then when you do this, you then test your knowledge and you find more gaps and you top up your memory. And so this is just one example, but what I said at the beginning about how what matters is

the approach, the principle to follow more so than the tactic itself. You

don't have to use mind maps. You don't

have to use analogies. You don't have to teach it to a 10-year-old. You can do anything you want. Any method or technique is going to work as long as you recognize the principle of trying to

think in networks, think in relationships. Think about why is this

relationships. Think about why is this thing important relative to something else. Create connections and move away

else. Create connections and move away from the lower order habit of just trying to understand and remember individual facts and individual

concepts. The hard part about learning

concepts. The hard part about learning to learn is not doing higher order learning. Most people can think in

learning. Most people can think in relationships. Most people can think in

relationships. Most people can think in terms of what is why is one thing important compared to another thing. The

hard part about learning is that most of us have really strong lower order habits. And it feels wrong and

habits. And it feels wrong and destabilizing and and highly uncertain to not really try to remember or

understand each individual thing that we're consuming. It doesn't seem to make

we're consuming. It doesn't seem to make sense to us. And so the biggest challenge is actually just being okay with that feeling. Is to learn something new and say, "I don't fully understand it. I definitely don't feel like I'm

it. I definitely don't feel like I'm going to remember it, but I understand it enough to start thinking about how it could fit into the big picture, how I

can group and arrange and connect this information with everything else. And as

you go through that higher order process of grouping and relating and creating connections, that is what allows you to develop better memory and retain it. And

that's what allows you to understand it more deeply. And this is the part that

more deeply. And this is the part that when we talked about the myths earlier on, the learning should not be easy.

Like this is the quintessential example of this. When people try to just learn things in isolation and just remember a specific fact or a concept that's actually really easy to do. You

just understand like that that's the easiest way of going about learning.

When you tell someone, okay, cool. You

don't need to understand it. I want you to see how it fits together. I want you to map how it connects together. I want

you to create analogies. I want you to simplify it. I want you to group it. I

simplify it. I want you to group it. I

want you to rearrange this information into a way that makes sense for you.

That's difficult. That can be overwhelming. That can be confusing.

overwhelming. That can be confusing.

Most people will feel that and think "Nah, this is not working for me." And

they'll step away. And if that happens to you, you will never get better at learning. So far, we've talked about the

learning. So far, we've talked about the learning system. We've talked about

learning system. We've talked about encoding. We've talked about retrieval.

encoding. We've talked about retrieval.

But there is still an aspect that we haven't talked about yet which is the self-management aspect and this is something that I call the enablers.

Enablers are sort of the third part of a learning system because it's not tied to your ability to learn exactly, but it's what gets your butt in the seat. is what

allows you to when you have three hours in your calendar blocked out for learning something, you actually do that. You sit down and then for the

that. You sit down and then for the three hours you actually get high quality learning out of it. You're

focused, you're concentrating, you're not procrastinating, and you know how to juggle your competing priorities uh and manage your time. So, as I mentioned, I want to show you some simple principles

to help you solve the biggest self-management issues. Now, at this

self-management issues. Now, at this point, you may be feeling like we've covered a lot and it's very confusing.

Uh, like it makes sense, but you need more time, you need more examples, you need me to walk through step by step you need to see the specific tactic or

the specific strategy. And if you feel that way, well, I mean, part of it that that's good. It means you're really

that's good. It means you're really paying attention. If you are looking for

paying attention. If you are looking for more examples, if you want some more walkthroughs, you want something that's a bit more step by step and you're not trying to figure out how all of this kind of fits together, you just want to be told this is what you need to do.

Here's why you need to do it. Here's how

to do it correctly, then there's a couple options for you. First of all, I have a lot of other videos on this right? Like each of the things that I've

right? Like each of the things that I've talked about in this video, I have multiple videos going into them in more depth. So, please browse around, watch

depth. So, please browse around, watch some more videos that will help you get a better sense of things. The other

option, if you want to take a little bit of a faster approach and you want something that's even more guided where you're not even having to think about which video to watch, what's the what's the best video to learn, whatever technique, what do I need to do next

the best option for you is going to be to join my actual program. So, I do have a paid program that I go through step by step teaching you like this is how learning works. This is what you need to

learning works. This is what you need to learn first. I go through the learning

learn first. I go through the learning system and all the different components with examples and walkthroughs. Now

like I said before, learning to learn takes some time. So, this is not a program that you will be able to kind of smash out in a in a single weekend. If

you are really low on time, like you're studying for an exam and that exam is like one month away, I wouldn't recommend joining um because it's just you're not really going to get much of a

benefit in just kind of one month unless you're doing the program like full-time for a month. Um, I I would recommend this for people who want to improve their learning skills, want to get a

really good understanding about how to think about their learning and have those tactics that that are in play and also have a bit of time to actually practice this. I completely understand

practice this. I completely understand the mentality of trying to get the best possible result in the shortest period of time. I have the same mentality for

of time. I have the same mentality for me like it took me a super super long time to figure out how to learn effectively. I try to make that much

effectively. I try to make that much much faster for you and the people that are on my program, but it still takes time. So, if you're in a position where

time. So, if you're in a position where you're not ready to commit sort of a few hours a week to actually improving the skill, then I'd say try to get to that position first uh before joining the

program if if you want to. If I look at the data on who tends to find our program most effective, it tends to be people who have lots of stuff to learn.

like there's there's constantly new learning coming up and they're trying to fit that in into their busy schedules.

So, we're talking about a lot of software engineers, a lot of healthcare professionals, uh post-graduate students and researchers as well as just your your your academic student, your your university student trying to study for

exams. So, anyway, if you're interested I'll leave a link to the program in the description. You can go on the website

description. You can go on the website read a little bit more about it, see if it's right for you. But for now uh let's go into the enablers and the self-management skills. So there are

self-management skills. So there are three different ways that I like to divide enablers. First of all is time

divide enablers. First of all is time management. Next is task management and

management. Next is task management and then it's focus or attention. So time

management refers to things like scheduling, time blocking. These are common

time blocking. These are common strategies that are used.

Task management is really talking about prioritization.

When you've got a lot of things that you could be doing, how do you decide what to do? And then focus or attention

to do? And then focus or attention management. This is stuff in terms of

management. This is stuff in terms of preventing yourself from procrastinating, not getting distracted having good concentration

or being able to enter into states of deep flow.

This is what focus and attention management is about. And the important thing is to understand that these three things are actually not separated. If

you are great at prioritizing, but you're terrible with your time management or you procrastinate all the time, it doesn't matter that you know what you should be doing, you can't actually do it. Likewise, if you're great at time management, but then your

prioritization is terrible, it means that you schedule things and then you you follow your schedule, but you're spending your time doing the wrong things. And so, overall, these are not

things. And so, overall, these are not techniques for the sake of it. The point

of using these techniques is to overall improve our productivity and the amount of control that we have over our lives.

We want our life to go in a certain direction. We want to do certain things

direction. We want to do certain things learn certain things, upskill in certain areas, spend the time that we want to spend in the way that we want to spend it. All of these aspects, time

it. All of these aspects, time management, task management, and focus management need to work together. So, as

I go through to explain the principles of doing these parts correctly, you should be thinking about which is your bottleneck. and then constantly evaluate

bottleneck. and then constantly evaluate and come back to where your next bottleneck is as you develop these skills. So, let's start with the first

skills. So, let's start with the first one, which is time management. Time

management is the easiest one to get right. It is mind-blowing how

right. It is mind-blowing how complicated people make time management or how I guess overrated time management is. To

do time management effectively, all you need is a schedule that you maintain and a level of time blocking. Go get

yourself Google calendar Apple calendar, whatever. Just get

yourself a calendar. On your calendar block out time for when you want to do things. If you want to study between

things. If you want to study between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. on a Friday

5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. on a Friday evening, on your calendar, go to 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., put a block there

p.m. and 8:00 p.m., put a block there and just call it study. If you want to do your groceries on a Saturday morning put it into your calendar. If you want to catch up with someone, have coffee

with a friend, put it into your calendar.

Just create blocks of time in a schedule that you maintain. As long as you do that, most of your time management problems

will be solved. The skill requirement to do this right is not very high. But a

lot of people feel that they have a time management problem and they feel that way because they never have enough time.

There's so much stuff that they need to do. There's not enough time to do it.

do. There's not enough time to do it.

The schedules that they make don't get followed at the end of the day. There's

all the stuff that they were meant to do that now has to get put back onto their backlog or move on to the next day constantly feeling like it's never enough, no matter, how, much, they, do.

Always busy, never productive. This is

not a time management issue. There is

one little strategy which you can do on a time management front which is just to be conservative with your blocks. Like

if you think that something's going to take you one hour, you just got to be really honest with yourself. Is it

really going to take me an hour? And

actually, this is super simple to fix as well because you don't even have to be honest with yourself. All you have to do is actually track your time. Set

yourself a schedule and then actually track how long it took. How how did your day actually go? When you track your time, you will see the real life that

you lived in the real way that you spent your time versus the way that you intended to. When you're first sort of

intended to. When you're first sort of new with scheduling, it's easy to get over ambitious and then just pack your schedule every waking minute with stuff.

As you get more experienced and you start tracking your time, you realize things take way longer than you expected them to. And so the solution to this is

them to. And so the solution to this is just to under schedule. Be really

conservative with your scheduling. Plan

to do less in your day than you would like to. Undercheduling is vastly better

like to. Undercheduling is vastly better to overchuling. Overcheduling is when

to overchuling. Overcheduling is when you like you may call that just scheduling. That's when you plan to do

scheduling. That's when you plan to do all the stuff and you never get it done.

If that happens to you often where your plans and your schedules never go according to plan and every day there's always stuff that you plan to do that you're never finishing, you are

overcheduling. You are living in a

overcheduling. You are living in a fantasy world where your own interpretation of what you think you can do in a day is not based on reality. If

the schedules you set are not reflective of reality, there is no point setting the schedule. You can't improve on that.

the schedule. You can't improve on that.

And so you have to start from a baseline where you understand how long things actually take you and you schedule things realistically. So track your time

things realistically. So track your time and see how long things actually take you. And you may find that you don't

you. And you may find that you don't want to schedule it that way because that means that you're able to get even less done in a day. You had a hundred things that you needed to do and you

plan to do 20 of those today. But then

when you track your time, you realize to schedule it responsibly and accurately you're only able to get five of those things done. Guess what? You're only

things done. Guess what? You're only

getting five of those things done anyway. The only difference is whether

anyway. The only difference is whether you are aware of it and you can plan for it or you don't plan for it and then you just feel like crap at the end of every day because you realize that it didn't go according to plan. Even if every now

and again you give yourself like an intense packed day that's super busy and you, you know, have to be like really on the minute every minute of the day. You

can do that once in a while, but that should not be your norm. When you get to a point where you can schedule and you see reality for what it is, now you can

plan. Now you can properly plan because

plan. Now you can properly plan because the issue of having too much to do, not being able to fit it in, not having enough time, that's not a time management issue. That is a task

management issue. That is a task management issue. So I'm going to put a

management issue. So I'm going to put a big yellow star next to task management because this is the part that most people under value. This is the part that probably is going to make the

biggest difference. This is the part

biggest difference. This is the part that people are really bad at. 99 out of a 100 times when someone comes to me and they say they've got a time management issue, they have a task management issue

and the issue is in the way that they prioritize or don't prioritize. So, how

do you properly prioritize? So, there

are a few little tactics that are going to make it easier for you to prioritize.

Number one is collecting your tasks.

Try not to have everything that you need to do just floating around in your head.

Write it down. You can use a to-do list software if you like or you can like literally write it down in a notebook.

You can write it down on your phone and in your phone notes app. For me

personally, I used to use a lot of different apps for this. I I just use the notes app on my iPhone now uh for for most of this. But the point is that you just want to have a single place where when you think that there's stuff that you need to do, you can just put it

down. You can chuck it into a reminder.

down. You can chuck it into a reminder.

It's just there. You don't have to think about it anymore. The second thing is give yourself time to prioritize.

This needs to become a habit. If it

becomes a habit, you don't need to have like too much time set aside separately just to prioritize. You'll learn how to fit it into your just everyday life. But

if you're coming from a situation where you've never really sat down and properly prioritized your tasks, you need to carve out like 20 30 minutes in the evening, the night before for you to

go through all the tasks that you need to do and then start prioritizing them.

When you first start doing this, it's going to take a while because you've got a backlist of all these different tasks that haven't been prioritized before and now you have to prioritize all of them in bulk like in one go. That can be

timeconuming. But just work through

timeconuming. But just work through this. You have to do this if you want to

this. You have to do this if you want to solve the problems about having too much to do and not knowing how to do them.

And so here's what you're going to do when you're actually sitting down to manage your tasks.

You're either going to execute or you're going to categorize.

When you see a task that needs to be done, ask yourself, is it going to take me more than 2 minutes? If the answer is no, just do it now. It's better to have that task off your list, off your radar

giving you the benefit of whatever benefit that task was meant to give you than thinking about how to prioritize it. So, this is called the two-minute

it. So, this is called the two-minute rule.

If it's going to take you less than 2 minutes, just do it on the spot. If it's

going to take you longer than 2 minutes categorize it. Now, there are lots of

categorize it. Now, there are lots of different ways of categorizing tasks uh and prioritizing them. I personally like to use the Eisenhower matrix. Uh but

there's a very specific way that I use this if you're familiar with this. Uh if

you're not familiar with this, I'll I'll teach, you, how, to, do it., So, the, steps, are pretty simple. You just divide well you

pretty simple. You just divide well you at least you mentally think about these four different grids. And these grids sit on an axis of urgency and importance.

So in this top right corner, this would be your focus corner. These are the things that have a high level of importance and a high level of urgency.

To the left of this quadrant, you have things that are a low level of urgency and a high level of importance. This is

your schedule quadrant. Now, this is an important

quadrant. Now, this is an important point. Most people don't distinguish

point. Most people don't distinguish urgent versus important. And this is because people prioritize based on feeling. This feels important for me to

feeling. This feels important for me to do. The issue is that the human brain is

do. The issue is that the human brain is not very good at feeling intuitively the importance of something that's long-term. So most of the stuff that you

long-term. So most of the stuff that you feel is important to do. What you're

feeling is actually the urgency. And

there are a lot of things that are urgent that aren't important. And the

way that you should measure the importance is based on the consequence if you don't do this. So let's say I need to clean my house, right? And I

haven't cleaned it for a little while.

Starting to get a little dusty. Starting

to look a little bit, you know, like not pleasant. And this is feeling more and

pleasant. And this is feeling more and more important for me to do. And so one day there's a weekend that comes along.

I've got all this other stuff to do. And

on top of that, this household chore give my house a deep clean comes up and it feels like I've put this off for too long. This is important enough that it

long. This is important enough that it needs to be like prioritized today. So

you ask yourself, yes, we're feeling that it's urgent, but if I didn't do it what's the consequence? So, if I don't do it today, well, I'm not going to have enough time to do it for an entire other

week, and then my house is going to get even dirtier. Okay, so what? And the

even dirtier. Okay, so what? And the

correct way to answer this is that you balance that against the consequences of everything else you could be doing in that time. So, let's say the reason I

that time. So, let's say the reason I haven't been cleaning my house is because I've been really busy and I've also been really stressed. I've been

stressed in my personal life. I've been

stressed at work. I've got a lot of stuff I need to do. I'm under the pump.

I haven't felt good. Even if I've had time to clean my house, I didn't feel like it because I was just too burnt out. And so, another thing that I think

out. And so, another thing that I think is important for me to do this work weekend is to go for a run, do some exercise, start getting back on my exercise habit and rebuilding my

physical health. And these two may be

physical health. And these two may be competing. If I clean my house, I'm not

competing. If I clean my house, I'm not going to have time to go for my run and vice versa. And that becomes how you

vice versa. And that becomes how you assess the importance of it. Because the

decline of mental and physical health may not seem urgent, but the consequence of not prioritizing this is probably greater than the consequence of letting

your house get one week dirtier. And

often the things that are the most lifechanging for us are the things that are important but not urgent. Because

often the things that are here are the things that by the time it becomes urgent, it's too late. It becomes

something that is now I haven't been exercising. I haven't been taking care

exercising. I haven't been taking care of my diet. I haven't been taking care of my sleep. Now I'm burnt out depressed as hell, and now I need to quit my job to give myself the mental

space to recover. So now it's urgent for me to have great mental and physical health. I can't do anything about it

health. I can't do anything about it anymore. That's the type of thing I wish

anymore. That's the type of thing I wish I had made that a priority 3 months ago.

I see a job opportunity opening up and it requires me to learn these different skills. That job is not going to open up

skills. That job is not going to open up for another 6 months to a year. So if

you put that off and then 6 months passes and there's an interview that comes up now it's urgent. You can't

learn that skill. You don't have enough time yet. That becomes a I wish I

time yet. That becomes a I wish I prioritized that 6 months ago. And the

big thing that we want to avoid with prioritization is falling into the urgency trap. every single day you're

urgency trap. every single day you're just doing the things that are urgent but not doing enough of the things that are not urgent but still important.

Because when we stay in the urgency trap and we're only doing things that are urgent, often the things that are urgent for us today, we can fix by doing

something that's not urgent. We can

improve a system, learn a skill, get better at. You can learn to learn. If

better at. You can learn to learn. If

what's urgent for you right now is that you have to study all this material because you're constantly forgetting it.

Well, actually spending time learning to learn actually solves the urgent problem that you have. Obviously, not today, but eventually. So, when you spend more time

eventually. So, when you spend more time in the important and not urgent quadrant, over time, that reduces the amount of stuff in your urgent quadrants. And so, if you do this

quadrants. And so, if you do this activity and you realize everything is always urgent, you have to think about it as well, what could I do to prevent the urgent things in the first place?

And that solution is not going to help you right now. But time is going to pass no matter what. And when time passes you want to be in a position where at least one day you've got less stuff to worry about. And that's the reason why

worry about. And that's the reason why this quadrant is called schedule.

Because it means that if there's something that's important but not urgent, you start by putting this in your schedule and you protect that time.

You say 1 hour a week, 30 minutes every evening, 10 minutes every evening. I'm

gonna schedule and protect this time to work on this thing that's not urgent but could be life-changing. And you actually start with that. This is

counterintuitive. You start with scheduling the thing that is not urgent.

and the remaining time after you've protected the other things your sleep you know your your sleep routine whatever the other non urgent important things are once you've protected that

time the remaining time is what you have available to work on the first quadrant which is the focus stuff so this is the stuff that's both important and urgent

now if you go down from here you have the stuff that is low importance but high urgency this quadrant is called batch Because this is the type of stuff that

you want to be able to get done very quickly in a single go. This could be responding to the email. It could be doing like various house chores. But

because it's not important, you don't have to do it to a high quality. You

just need to get it done. Even if you don't get it done, because it's not important, the consequence is not that severe. And when you think about the

severe. And when you think about the consequence, don't think about it in terms of is there a consequence or not.

Think about it as can I handle the consequence or not? Can I recover from the consequence? When I talk to a lot of

the consequence? When I talk to a lot of students, uh, you know, one of the one of the big urgent things that they have to do every single day is homework.

But then in this type of situation they're also learning from me how to learn effectively. And so I'm saying

learn effectively. And so I'm saying hey, you should study in this way. And

now they have to make a choice. Do they

do their homework or do they spend their time studying using a different method which I've recommended to them which is probably much more effective than homework? And when they try to

homework? And when they try to prioritize it, sometimes they'll prioritize homework because it's like if I don't do it, I'm going to get in trouble. So it's like, cool. So what

trouble. So it's like, cool. So what

what's what's the actual consequence?

You're going to feel bad. Can you deal with that? Because if the answer is yes

with that? Because if the answer is yes that's not a very big consequence. Oh

if I don't do my homework, my teacher is going to give me a stern talking to.

Okay. And then what? And so again, we want to be very clear about assessing importance. Not just using our feeling

importance. Not just using our feeling but being explicit about what is the consequence. Can we handle that? Can we

consequence. Can we handle that? Can we

recover from that or not? And sometimes

we can change a task into a simpler faster version of the task that mitigates the consequence that we're afraid of without having to commit to the original full version of the task.

Like if it's about doing my homework then the alternative is that well, can you just do your homework as quickly as humanly possible just to the point where you're not going to get told off because

that might only take you 15 minutes compared to 2 hours if you were to do it like to the best of your ability. Of

course, many of you are not doing homework if you're a working professional, but you know, you get the idea. And then we've got this final

idea. And then we've got this final quadrant here, which is uh stuff that is both not urgent and not important. And

this falls into a quadrant which is called delete or sometimes uh delegate if it's possible for you in your position. This basically means that it's

position. This basically means that it's not urgent and there's no consequence.

It's not a needle mover in your life.

Just don't do it at all. And here's a hot tip is try to put as many things into this quadrant as possible. Raise

your threshold of importance until you're only doing the stuff that really matters and get used to deleting things off of your task list. If it's important enough, it'll make its way back onto

your list and then you'll be able to rep prioritize it later. Don't hold on to old priorities that you're just kind of like clinging to because you just don't really really want to delete them. Just

delete it. Unless you have the the the freedom of endless time, there's always something else you could be doing. And

that something else might just be relax.

Do nothing at all. Have some me time.

Just chill out. If I can choose between sitting on the couch, relaxing, watching a TV show that I like in an evening so I can just unwind from the day versus

doing something on my delete quadrant that is not important or consequential for my life or urgent. There is no chance I'm going to be doing that. I'm

sitting on the couch 10 out of 10 times.

It is better to do nothing at all than to do the things that are in this quadrant. And the two biggest mistakes I

quadrant. And the two biggest mistakes I see is the first one where I talked about is urgency trapping where every day you're just doing only the urgent things and you're not doing the things that are not urgent but still important

to you. The second one is that people do

to you. The second one is that people do not put enough into this delete quadrant. They are too afraid of

quadrant. They are too afraid of consequences that do not matter that they can just deal with. And when people feel really busy all the time, but they're not moving in their life in the

way that they want to, usually it's a combination of those two issues that's causing that. You're not going to be

causing that. You're not going to be able to solve those issues unless you exit those two traps. So that's the eyes now matrix. And if you can use this and

now matrix. And if you can use this and you can use it in the way that I've explained as as ruthlessly prioritizing as I've explained, then most of your

other time and task management issues will start fixing themselves. And until

you do this, I wouldn't hold out much hope that anything's going to change or get better. This is ground zero for

get better. This is ground zero for improvement. This is where improvement

improvement. This is where improvement starts. So now let's talk about focus

starts. So now let's talk about focus and attention management. So as a reminder, this is about being able to focus, concentrate, get into deep flow and not procrastinate. And while this

can be a complicated topic and the psychology behind this is very complex and there are lots of different tactics and strategies that you can use, the simplest way I think you should think

about this is that there are short-term and there are long-term strategies to address this. the short-term strategies

address this. the short-term strategies for each of these issues, uh, like procrastination, solutions for procrastination, building habits, you know, developing concentration, not getting distracted, the short-term

strategies, these things tend to be very easy to apply. They tend to be pretty effective,

but they're also often not sustainable.

uh either because it's literally too hard to sustain as in it just takes too much effort to keep using that every single day every time you need to get some work done or the effect of it

starts diminishing and it's just you sort of get used to it. On the other hand, long-term strategies, these ones tend to address the underlying

root cause.

As a result, the effect is much more long-term and more permanent.

But there's a very long time to value which means that from the moment you start working on the long-term solution to the point it actually starts really solving the

problem can be weeks, months, sometimes even years. And so the overarching

even years. And so the overarching approach is that you can use whatever short-term strategy is effective. By all

means use them. You change them around.

And when one of them stops working, you can switch to another one. Do whatever

needs to be done, but do it with the understanding that it is a shortterm solution and that long-term you will need a long-term solution. The issue

comes from when we don't understand this clearly and we use a short-term solution assuming that this is now the true solution to the problem. Let's talk

about procrastination as one common example. Procrastination is largely an

example. Procrastination is largely an emotional coping mechanism. It's less to do with the fact that you love social media or you know addicted to gaming or

whatever it is and it's more to do with the fact that there's a task that has a lot of work that you anticipate and that makes you feel uncomfortable potentially overwhelmed and you get the sense that

there's going to be a high amount of effort you need to put in to complete this task. And so to avoid that feeling

this task. And so to avoid that feeling of discomfort and overwhelm, we pick the easier path which is not like solving the issue like getting the task done and

now you're not feeling overwhelmed uh because there's nothing to do anymore.

The easier part is just to avoid that and trigger a happy feeling by getting distracted. And so it's a it's a

distracted. And so it's a it's a cognitive emotional shortcut. And so you can use short-term solutions like app blockers to remove these distractions.

And you certainly should do that because it makes life easier for you. However

even when you do all of that, if the underlying issue is still there and every time you encounter a big piece of work, the only strategy you know is

either suffer through it and just do it or find an easier alternative not to feel that way anymore. Even when

everything is blocked, you will find something else to do. You'll start

picking up distractions you never would have even touched before. I remember one time when I was in like a really bad procrastination rut a couple of years ago. I I had like blocked off all the

ago. I I had like blocked off all the normal distractions and for me a big one used to be Instagram. So I I blocked off Instagram and I was, you know, in a

pretty busy period with work and I remember sitting there huge project that I needed to start on and instead of starting on it, I I actually went on to

the app store to look for new mobile games to download and play and like I don't even I don't normally do that. I

created like a whole new behavior just to look for an easier alternative rather than facing that work. So that's a that's a psycho emotional thing. Nothing

to do with the distractions themselves.

So the problem isn't me. And if I don't recognize that, then I might use a solution like an app blocker, find that it's working fantastic, which is great

and then expect that that is going to be the problem solved for the rest of my life. And that's not true. The problem

life. And that's not true. The problem

will come back because the underlying reason is still there. And so what I'm going to focus on are some key trends that I've observed in terms of long-term solutions that do actually work. And in

terms of the short-term solutions, I think, you know, I've talked about some of the short-term strategies and tactics in other videos before. Just use

whatever works. I'll give you a couple that I would recommend that you can start with because they tend to be very powerful short-term solutions. Um, but

understanding that whatever short-term solution you're using, that just gives you a bridge and some space to start building and working on these long-term solutions because once those short-term solutions come to an end and you're

getting diminishing returns and they're not effective for you anymore, you need that long-term solution there. If if

those short-term solutions you you exhaust all of them and you don't have the long-term solution left, now you're in a worse place than when you started because you still have the problem.

You're still procrastinating, you still can't focus, and you still can't concentrate. and now you don't have good

concentrate. and now you don't have good high yield short-term solutions to use anymore. We'll start with the short-term

anymore. We'll start with the short-term ones. Uh the the the two that I would

ones. Uh the the the two that I would recommend that you can start with are blockers and accountability.

So blockers are types of solutions that eliminate a distraction or a problem. So

app blockers, website blockers are examples of this where the thing that you would normally get distracted on it's just you can't access it anymore.

And the most important requirement for a blocker to be effective is that it genuinely feels

hard to bypass.

If you've got a blocker and all you need to do is like within 5 seconds like click it and turn your blocker off that's not going to be an effective blocker. Use blockers that take so long

blocker. Use blockers that take so long for you to bypass and take so much effort that you just cannot be bothered.

In this situation, what we're doing is we're fighting fire with fire. There's

something that you need to do. it's

going to take a lot of effort and then there's a distraction you want to access. But in front of that distraction

access. But in front of that distraction is another wall of high effort. So now

your two options are either spend high effort doing something that is productive versus spend high effort accessing a distraction. When it's

effort versus effort, it's a lot easier to take the path that it's at least good for you. The second type of solution is

for you. The second type of solution is something that creates accountability.

This could be an accountability partner or an accountability group.

Accountability is much stronger than reward and consequence. And so I know that there are a lot of reward and consequence uh psychology based apps and

solutions out there and yes they're they're nice uh and they can be a nice little addition to creating consistency like every time you you know like resist a distraction or do

something you know have a concentrated work session you grow a tree or like your little your little jelly bean gets a little bit happier or something like that. Like it feels nice. It's good. It

that. Like it feels nice. It's good. It

gives you a little bit of a dopamine um a dopamine hit for doing something that normally doesn't give you a dopamine hit. Like engaging in a long-term

hit. Like engaging in a long-term productive activity like studying or learning something which doesn't have dopamine traditionally associated with it, you've now given yourself a way to

create that dopamine. Or if you give yourself like a consequence that you're afraid of, then you're giving yourself a very primitive way to motivate yourself towards doing that productive thing.

These types of solutions don't tend to work long term because one of it is that you start getting desensitized and so you need more and more dopamine to do that and the other thing is that it actually just feeds into the underlying

issue which is the need for dopamine.

Dopamine is one of those chemicals in the brain that we experience in the modern day at much higher levels and much more frequently than the brain is sort of naturally

evolved to be able to tolerate. Like

that's a very artificial type of situation. And so when the brain gets

situation. And so when the brain gets lots of frequent dopamine, it kind of reduces its ability to concentrate. And

so in a way makes the problem worse. And

so the reason accountability solutions work so well is that it replaces that dopamine based mechanism with a social mechanism. So instead of being motivated

mechanism. So instead of being motivated by sort of a shortterm fluctuating feeling, it's trying to resonate more with a deeper sense of identity. So uh

if you say to your accountability partner, hey, I'm going to do this thing. This is my goal. Then the

thing. This is my goal. Then the

motivation becomes your sense of identity as being I'm a person that keeps my word. I'm a person that does something and is going to follow through on it. And identitybased

on it. And identitybased motivation is much more durable and consistent than dopamine-based motivation. Humans also very social

motivation. Humans also very social creatures uh biologically and so that social mechanism is very strong. So

finding one, two, three people that are like-minded that you want to keep each other accountable with that's a great way of using an accountability based mechanism. Even though I say that this

mechanism. Even though I say that this is short term, you can use accountability group for actually a very long time. Uh partly because of the fact

long time. Uh partly because of the fact that the group dynamics just make it more interesting and more sustainable but also because of the fact that as the group changes and the group dynamics change, it also I guess in a way keeps

things fresh, stops that mechanism from being saturated and also the identity based mechanism, it's just more resilient to saturation. So although

this is technically still a short-term solution uh and you don't want to have an accountability buddy for absolutely everything that you need to do for the rest of your life, this is something

that can last you pretty happily for months, even years. And so it's a great mechanism to bridge you into developing these long-term really sustainable

solutions. So what are some of these

solutions. So what are some of these long-term really sustainable solutions?

I found that there are three things that you should aim to get good at. And if

you can get good at these three things everything to do with focus concentration procrastination entering into flow becomes much much easier. In a

way, these are the three biggest barriers for most people. You want to get good at number one being bored

number two doing hard things and number three refocusing.

These are three mental skills, as in they are things that you can train yourself to be better at, and they have an outsiz return on investment. The time

that you spend on getting good at these things will return to you reward several fold beyond that. So the first one is about being good at being bored. If you

are not okay with feeling bored, you're going to have a very difficult experience of life. Boredom is

a very healthy and natural state for your mind to be in. is a very unhealthy very artificial state especially just

due to social media where you feel the need to be entertained constantly. This

is that dopamine addiction. So there are two aspects of this. On one side constantly seeking an escape from boredom increases procrastinating

behavior, increases distractability.

Being good at being bored means that you're not looking for ways to distract yourself. And so that trains your brain

yourself. And so that trains your brain indirectly to just have better concentration, lower distractability more focus. But on top of that, being

more focus. But on top of that, being bored also has an advantage of its own.

When your brain enters into a state of boredom, neurally what happens with your brain activity is that goes into something called the default mode network. The default mode network is

network. The default mode network is it's called the default mode network because when scientists first discovered they discovered that it's the default brain activity of people when they're just at rest not really thinking about anything basically when they're bored.

And what happens during this time is that you get this very wandering sort of omnidirectional seemingly sort of random thought pattern. And what's actually happening

pattern. And what's actually happening is that your brain is using this opportunity of rest to consolidate and integrate the things that it's learned and ideas and problems it's solving.

This is the reason why there's such a thing as like shower thoughts. Like

you're just having a shower and you just have interesting ideas and thoughts about things. This is the reason why

about things. This is the reason why sometimes you're having great ideas when you're just trying to get to sleep because your brain is given the time and space to do this wandering and integration. So, if you're trying to

integration. So, if you're trying to make a difficult decision or you're thinking about a problem or you've been doing lots of learning and thinking or self-reflection and you want to internalize that and you instead of it

just being like fresh new thoughts, you want to really own that and make that part of you and you want to have more interesting ideas and progress with your thinking. It's really important to give

thinking. It's really important to give yourself that space to let your brain consolidate everything. And part of that

consolidate everything. And part of that is putting yourself in a situation where it can just be bored. So, how do you do this? How do you get better at being

this? How do you get better at being bored? It's very easy. I guess very

bored? It's very easy. I guess very easy, but hard if you hate being bored.

Just sit in a room and do nothing. Just

literally just sit there and just do nothing. And at certain point, probably

nothing. And at certain point, probably like one or two minutes in, you're going to start feeling bored and you're going to start feeling restless like you don't want to do this anymore. What's the

point? You know, I I'd rather be doing something else. How long do I have to do

something else. How long do I have to do this for? When is this going to end? How

this for? When is this going to end? How

much is enough? Just let those thoughts and those feelings come and just sit through it. Just keep doing that until

through it. Just keep doing that until you are okay with just not doing anything. And recognize that when those

anything. And recognize that when those thoughts come and make you feel restless, that's basically the same things that on a day-to-day basis would be making you distracted, lose

concentration, and unable to enter into deep flow. So that's the first one. Get

deep flow. So that's the first one. Get

good at being bored. The second one is get good at doing hard things. Your life

is, going to, be, full, of, doing, hard, things that take effort to resolve. And if

every time you encounter something that takes effort, your response is to avoid it, that's also going to make life very hard for you. So you have to train your brain to recognize that effort does not

mean bad. You want your brain to be able

mean bad. You want your brain to be able to understand something's going to take effort, but you just do it anyway. And

this is really difficult. This is the reason why some people recommend that you take cold showers in the morning.

Maybe I just need to get better at doing hard things. I hate taking coach

hard things. I hate taking coach showers. So, uh I haven't found that to

showers. So, uh I haven't found that to be particularly successful for me personally. Now, I'm not saying it

personally. Now, I'm not saying it doesn't work, but for me, it hasn't worked so well. What has worked well for me is just really leaning into the zygic effect.

So, the zygic effect is that your brain likes to finish something that has already started. A

lot of the mental anguish involved in doing something that's really difficult is the process of just starting. And

once you've started, it's easier to just continue going or to finish it off. Once

you've started, you can put it down. You

can come back to it the next day. And

it's much easier to just keep going because you've already started. And even

if it's 1 or 2% through the task, just the fact that you've started makes it mentally so much easier to just do it.

And so the way that I try to combat this is that anytime I feel that sense of resistance and I notice, ooh, this is going to be a lot of work and I feel that urge to procrastinate and put it

aside, I just give myself the goal to leave it incomplete. So my goal is actually not to eat, not to finish it at all. I'm not even concerned about

all. I'm not even concerned about finishing it in my mind. I'm not even starting it. All I'm doing is I'm just

starting it. All I'm doing is I'm just setting myself up for when I do start it. So, I'll just open up the tabs that

it. So, I'll just open up the tabs that I need to. I'll collect the resources.

Maybe I'll just read very quickly to familiarize myself and get a layer of the land. I'll set up my notes. And as

the land. I'll set up my notes. And as

part of doing that, naturally, I get a certain type of flow and I think, okay maybe I'll just I'll just prep a few of the main ideas. I'll get started on a few different structures and a few scaffolds and a few questions. I just

make it easier for myself later when I am properly starting. And half the time I feel good enough about just doing that that I'll just keep going and it's easy enough for me to push through another like 30 minutes, one hour and do a

decent amount of work. In the worst case scenario, I don't feel like doing that.

But I have genuinely made it easier for myself to start the next time. And over

years of applying this and doing this what's happened is that every time I feel that impulse that this is going to be a lot of work, I still feel that tendency to want to avoid that work. I

think that's very biologically ingrained. But I no longer feel the need

ingrained. But I no longer feel the need to put it off. There's almost this primitive version of my brain that is trying to avoid the work. And then

there's like another version of me that knows that I'm tricking that primitive part of my brain and it still gets tricked. Like the zygic effect is just

tricked. Like the zygic effect is just really powerful. And so even though I

really powerful. And so even though I still feel the same feeling of not wanting to do the work, I'm better at just doing it. So that's what it means to just get good at doing hard things.

And the third thing is getting better at refocusing. So refocusing means that

refocusing. So refocusing means that when your mind is drifted, get better at bringing yourself back to attention. And

that point of attention could be anything. It could be some studying

anything. It could be some studying could be a meeting, could be listening to someone speaking, could be uh just on nothing, planning, thinking, whatever it is. But it's the act of recognizing when

is. But it's the act of recognizing when your mind is drifting away and being able to bring it back to a point of attention. And this allows you to have

attention. And this allows you to have deeper focus. When you are locked in

deeper focus. When you are locked in you've got deep flow, you're less likely to break out of it. When you feel yourself being distracted, it becomes easier to not distract yourself. You

gain more control over your mind as opposed to your mind sort of just doing its own thing and you're sort of just a passenger seeing where it goes. And so

the way that you can get better at refocusing uh ties in very strongly with the way that you can get it get better at being bored. Because for both of these things, you can use principles of

mindfulness meditation.

And mindfulness meditation does not involve you having to shave your head and sell all your material possessions and um you know forge for herbs in the mountain as you sit on a shakti mat

every night. uh all you need to do is

every night. uh all you need to do is just focus on one thing and just just keep focusing on that one thing and then every time you re realize that your mind is wandering away from it, you just come back to focusing on. So you can do

mindful dishwashing just just be really conscious of the way that you're washing the dishes and like feel the bowl and the water and you know everything that you're doing and just be just be very very attentive to everything that you're

doing and then when you notice that your mind is wandering just bring yourself back to it. You can be like mindful painting. You can be mindful walking

painting. You can be mindful walking where you're just aware of every step that you're taking and how it feels under your foot. Or the most conventional one which is mindful breathing where you just sit there and

all you do is focus on breathing and you just bring yourself back to breathing.

And every time you notice that your mind is wandering, you just come back to breathing. The breathing one is

breathing. The breathing one is especially good because it increases the risk of you getting bored because it's just breathing. Like it's not it's not

just breathing. Like it's not it's not an exciting thing to do. But as a result, it becomes a better training tool in a way because you're so at risk of being bored that your mind is going

to wander rapidly and very aggressively.

So it gives yourself lots of opportunity to practice just coming back to your breathing. Coming back to your breathing

breathing. Coming back to your breathing and it gives you lots of opportunity to practice just being okay with being bored. And so a lot of people will do

bored. And so a lot of people will do this and they'll say, "Oh, this is not effective for me because I feel bored."

That's the wrong way of thinking about it. That's the point. Like you want to

it. That's the point. Like you want to feel that way. And then your ability to bring yourself back and be okay with that feeling is the practice. When you

get good at that, that translates outside of that meditation to when you feel those same feelings in your workday when you're learning, when you're studying to be able to control your mind and bring yourself back on focus. So

those are the principles for effective long-term solutions. These are the types

long-term solutions. These are the types of things that you want to get good at and practice getting good at for months.

You want to put aside a little bit of time, multiple times a week, just getting good at this across the next months, years, however long it takes however much you want to practice this.

And then in the meantime, use whatever short-term solutions are going to be effective for you to just sit down concentrate, do the job, but understand that they are short-term. One day they

will stop working for you. And so when you do this alongside some basic task prioritization and a minimum level of time management, you should have a baseline of productivity and you combine

that with a learning system of decent encoding and retrieval, operating at the higher orders, doing retrieval with the right method with the right amount of frequency. When you combine all of those

frequency. When you combine all of those things together, not only do you have good self-management, but also you have better memory, you have deeper understanding, you have greater ability to apply your knowledge to solve

complicated problems, which translates to better results and performance both for exams and for your job. Now, even

though we've talked about a lot of stuff, I would still consider this the basics, even though I think that this is going to help a lot of people get very far in their learning journey. And this

stuff took me years to to really figure out. Um, if you are again looking for

out. Um, if you are again looking for something that's a little bit more step-by-step and a bit more guided, then you might want to check out my program.

Uh, again, I'll leave a link to that in the description below. Otherwise

remember you can also check out my other videos where I talk about some of these parts in more depth and give more examples and more details and different types of tactics. You'll see the common trends appearing as you watch more and

more of my videos. I hope that helps.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.