I Reviewed 28,655 Flashcards Every Day for 17 Years. I Barely Had to Study.

I reviewed 28,655 flash cards every day for the past 17 years and it's the reason I barely had to study for the last four major exams of my career. I scored in the top 0. 1% on my medical boards at Stanford.

My top choice at Harvard called me to offer me a residency spot days after my interview even though they had months of interviews left. People thought I was one of the smartest people in our class, yet I wasn't. I just never forgot [music] anything.

And this technique is so simple yet so powerful that I did it on my wedding day, my honeymoon. It takes less than 30 minutes a day and the longer I do it, the less time it takes. Now, in case you're wondering, I'm not a genius.

This is a skill and after 17 years and coaching thousands of students, I've made and seen every mistake so that you don't have to. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to start remembering everything you learn and you just have to start with five cards in five minutes tonight. When I got to Stanford Medical School, I did what had always worked for me.

I wrote and rewrote [music] all of my notes. In high school, this had worked really really well and I think a lot of you can probably relate to this where you may have gotten by with just outworking other people, right? And so that was me.

I would write tons of notes. I would rewrite them two or sometimes even three times until the material stuck. This works because the volume of information was not that much so I could just keep repeating the same thing again and again.

In college, I could still mostly make it work but I was already starting to see the strain because the volume was increasing. Now, medical school completely broke things. They say it's like drinking from a fire hose and that is a very apt description.

I did not have enough time to write even just notes on all of my classes let alone rewrite all of the notes every single time. I remember once I was learning embryology, I think I'd spent like hours learning these like developmental pathways and I knew my notes cold. I genuinely understood it.

But two weeks later, not even like months but like literally a couple weeks, it came up again in a different lecture [music] and I remember thinking, "Oh my god, I don't remember any of this. " And I went back to my notes and I was like, "I know that that was my handwriting but I literally do not remember writing this thing. " That moment was terrifying for me and what was so scary was when I started to think about the [music] math.

If I couldn't remember embryology after two weeks, just imagine I had a final in like two months. What was I going to do that? And then I had my boards in like two years.

[music] What was going to happen then? And then in 20 years in my career when I need to use, I mean maybe not embryology but like when I needed to use some other information, what would I do if I had all of this information that I needed to know and lack of an ability to remember it. What I realized when I started to talk to friends and other colleagues was that we all were struggling with the same thing.

The things that had worked for us in high school and the things that had worked for us in college [music] were not working for us as we had more and more material. For some of us, it broke maybe earlier but we were all ultimately reaching the same sort of threshold of, you know, what had worked for us previously wasn't working for us now. And in particular, what was breaking down was our ability to remember the things that we learned.

When the material was less, we could get away with relearning the same things over and over again because there just wasn't that much stuff. But now we had a problem. Then the course structure at the neuroscience program at Stanford changed everything and frankly, I still don't know to this day if he even realized how much it impacted my life.

So his name was Ricardo Dolmetsch. He was a Stanford neuroscience professor who had a child who actually had a rare neurologic condition which drove his own research into how the brain works. He went on to lead neuroscience research at one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and now is running his own biotech firm.

But before all that, he was our professor. And so one day he devoted an entire class to teaching spaced [music] repetition. For us medical students who were struggling to remember everything that we were learning, it was like catnip on steroids.

He walked through the neuroscience of how the brain actually forms and retains [music] memories. What he showed us was as long as you understood how quickly you would forget something and you had an algorithm that would show you that information at the time that you were most likely to forget it, you could remember everything that you learned in the most efficient way possible. In the moment, I remember sitting and feeling electric.

I mean, who wouldn't want a system that lets you remember literally everything that you learn. But here's what happened next. Literally, no one knew how to actually put this into practice.

As a consequence, within weeks the excitement completely collapsed. There were people that started out and they were cramming entire PowerPoint slides into flash cards. They would take like either parts of it and put it into a flash card to memorize just some random details or they would take an entire slide and just hope that by putting into flash cards and showing it to themselves that they would be able to just remember it magically.

What I see these days when I coach students is they they kind of take the same thing where they get excited about using spaced repetition and they find some sort of pre-made deck that has like 50,000 flash cards and then they realize that they get super overwhelmed and they fall behind in reviews and then they end up thinking, "Oh well, it's a problem with, you know, the technique. I guess I'm just not a spaced repetition person. " This is literally what happened in my class.

To a person, people would say, "Ah, I don't know. I don't really think this is for me. Ah, I guess I'm just not an Anki person.

" The issue is is that the tool was fine, it was just our execution was broken. It was literally the wild west. Everyone understood the science and the idea but nobody actually knew how to turn it into reality.

For me, I got so overwhelmed with how many cards that I was doing and how many facts I was trying to memorize that I almost gave up. If you found this helpful, be sure to sign up for our 14-step free program is where I go a lot more in depth in the principles and techniques and how to implement this system. The pain of me forgetting embryology several weeks later really stuck with me and convinced me that, you know, no matter what it was going to be painful, I would rather try and deal with the pain of figuring this out and so I stuck with it.

And so instead of quitting, I told myself, "What would it take for me to turn this system into something where I will be able to remember everything that I learn in a way that doesn't overwhelm my life and doesn't prevent me from doing other things. " Eventually, I figured out two things that changed everything and the second one is literally the reason why I did my flash cards on my wedding day which, I know, >> [music] >> is not quite as crazy as it sounds. But first, let me tell you the one thing that made the whole system actually work.

Here's what I figured out that almost everyone gets wrong. Almost everyone thinks of Anki as a flash card tool. It's not.

Instead, Anki is a spaced repetition tool that happens to use flash cards. This distinction is critical [music] and changed everything for me. So let me explain what I mean.

Most people use Anki backwards. They think, "Oh, this is flash card so let's just make some isolated facts kind of like you may have done in, you know, high school or elementary school where you might memorize a word and a definition or something like that. " In other words, they think I should cram this material more effectively.

That's exactly what happened in our wild west scenario where literally all of my Stanford classmates were making thousands of meaningless cards that were just random discrete facts that weren't really helping them to actually use the information more effectively. What I did is is I leaned into something different. I'd always been someone that had really struggled with memorizing things in general.

Before spaced repetition, what I would do is is I would try to find some sort of underlying principle where I could understand it the material. And by understanding it, not only would I remember it better but especially if the details were changing, I would be able to apply my knowledge even in novel contexts. That was what had made me so successful in college even before I stumbled upon this system.

So instead of memorizing facts and using Anki as a flash card tool, I started by just trying to understand the principles and using Anki as a spaced repetition tool to remember those principles. Because when you understand a principle, you can figure out things that you've never really specifically studied. And for tests like the MCAT or the USMLEs or even the SATs, when they change the details, you can still by using that principle get the answer correct even if you've never seen that particular problem before.

So let me show you what it is that I mean with something very simple. Most people memorize vocabulary words literally word by word. They might say orthodoxy means traditional beliefs.

Orthopedics is bone medicine. Orthodontics is teeth straightening, right? These are three separate cards and they would be three [music] separate facts.

Now, if everything were just three facts, that wouldn't be such a big problem. Let's take an alternative principle-based approach. If you learned that ortho means correct or right, this is going to unlock all of them at once.

So orthodoxy just means correct belief. Orthopedics means correcting children's bones. Orthodontics means correcting teeth.

Not only will this help you remember things better but it'll also help you to figure out words that you've never seen before. Because again, if you see the root in some other word, it'll just be that much more natural for you to understand what it means. Contrast this with the way that we'd been making Anki cards.

We were just literally memorizing a fact and we were just getting one answer. And so if we didn't happen to get that same sort of fact or answer that we were trying to memorize, we were kind of lost. But I learned that if I could focus on the principle behind it, I could figure out stuff that I'd never even seen before.

Let me give you an example in medicine. There's a principle that if a drug can cross the membrane of your brain, like the blood-brain barrier, it can literally cross any membrane in your body, whether it's your skin, your gut, literally any of them because the membrane composition of the, you know, blood-brain barrier is literally the exact same membrane composition of any other cell in your body. So why does this matter?

Caffeine, we know works in the brain which means it can cross the blood-brain barrier, right? It can cross a membrane. What it also means is that it will cross other membranes in your body.

So for example, in the GI tract, [music] if I take it as a pill, it can cross the membrane of my GI tract and get into my bloodstream. I don't have to give caffeine as an IV injection. Same thing with the skin.

There actually are caffeine patches where you can just put a patch of caffeine on and it will just [music] give you this sort of, you know, degree of caffeine over the course of your day. The reason why that is is again, the cell membrane in your skin is the same composition as the cell membrane in your brain. And so if it can cross the membrane in your brain, then it can cross the membrane in your skin.

For really really high alcohol concentration like, [music] you know, scrubs that, you know, used to kill bacteria and things like that, you can actually measure the alcohol in their bloodstream afterwards. The purpose of this is to show you just how powerful understanding principles are and when you combine this with the spaced repetition, instead of treating Anki like a flash card program, you can actually use it in the right way which is a spaced repetition program that happens to use [music] flash cards as a means of testing you on the information. So here's what I watched happen.

My classmates were literally memorizing everything individually. Their card counts kept growing to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 in some cases, cards. Literally, the most popular pre-made Anki decks for medical boards has something like 40 or 50,000 cards in just one deck for just one of the exams.

Literally because you're memorizing everything as if it's a fact. I have been doing this for 17 years and I've got maybe half that number of cards for everything that I learned throughout my five years of medical school at Stanford and, you know, throughout my four years at residency and literally I I've got, you know, cards to help me remember Korean and Spanish and other things. Literally, I have about half as many cards as just one deck because I'm focusing on principles.

In addition to that, I can recall more information in a fraction of the time, and for questions that I've never even seen before, my chances of getting them correct are so much better. The second thing I figured out sounds simple, but it changed everything. [music] It's the fact that it's easier to do something 100% of the time rather than 99% of the time.

Now, let me explain what I mean. It is much more to do something always and never than to do it sometimes. If 100% of the time I do something, I never even have to think about it.

The decision has literally been made. It's sort of like when you brush your [music] teeth. Do you ever wake up and wonder, "Huh, is today going to be the one day that I'm not going to brush my teeth?

" Is, you know, like is today going to be the exception? No, of course not, right? Like you brush your teeth because you have made the decision and the habit to just always get this done.

For me, spaced repetition became one of those things that was just a non-negotiable. I made sure that every single day I would do my cards that were due. The way that spaced repetition works is that if I'm about to forget something, it will basically show me that flashcard that day so that I don't forget it.

And the amount of time that it takes me to forget that information is now extended. [music] Practically, what that means is that if the flashcard program tells me that I need to do my flashcards that day, I should do my flashcards that day. If I don't, I will increase the likelihood that I'll forget that information, and in addition to that, my cards will then build up.

And so I'll have to do twice as many cards the next day. The reason I know how painful this is is there were days where I didn't finish all of my cards on a particular day, and the next day was just so much worse because now I not only did I have to do the cards that were due that day, but I had to do all the cards that I hadn't done previously. So yes, I did my flashcard reviews on my wedding day.

Not because I was a hero, but because at that point, years in, it would have been stranger not [music] to do that. It's sort of like I didn't wake up on that day and think like, "Huh, I don't know. Should I brush my teeth?

" Like it was just so much a part of what it is that I was doing that I didn't even question my need to do it. Now, before you think like, "Oh my god, that's so crazy. " Know that too that you can pre-study.

So in other words, if if I know that I've got like 200 cards that I've got to do tomorrow, I can actually do 200 cards that day. So I think on the day of my my wedding and my honeymoon and things like that, I'd already pre-studied like on a plane or, you know, things like [music] that. Plus, after a few months of this, I could see it was making a massive difference.

After a year, it felt like the ultimate cheat code for schooling. It's important to recognize that I didn't get smarter. I just stopped forgetting things.

[music] And honestly, it felt unfair. The USMLE Step 1, which many people consider to be one of, if not, the most difficult exam in the world, I scored in the top 0. 1% because everything that I'd learned, I had learned well, and I just never forgot it.

Literally, my [music] top choice for residency at Harvard MGH called me like 2 days after my interview to offer me a residency spot even though they had only barely begun their interviews and they had like months left before they would have seen all of the potential applicants. I honored all of my third-year shelf exams, and then the surprising part is is that because I'd learned so much and I'd remembered so much, I barely had to study for like literally all of the remaining board exams that I took, including Step 3, [music] Step 2, and I think I studied for like one of my anesthesia board exams, and then I just stopped studying, and I was still able to pass in many cases like in the top 10% [music] of the exam. And again, I know it sounds crazy, but I'm not a genius.

The literal difference was that the knowledge was just there. I just could maintain it. And because of the nature of spaced repetition, the amount of time that I was [music] spending doing my flashcards had diminished greatly.

I remember once I had a friend who was visiting medical school, and they mentioned me that to someone in my class, and that person said, "Oh yeah, Alec. Yeah, he's one of the two smartest kids in our class. " I remember thinking, "Oh my [music] god, that is so crazy.

" Cuz literally, my first day in medical school, I thought that I didn't belong. I had taken 2 years off to do a full ride in South Korea to [music] teach English, and I had deferred admission to medical school for a couple years. And I remember coming back and thinking like, "Oh, this was a mistake.

I don't belong here. I'm definitely not one of the smartest kids, and I don't know anything about medicine. Like this is so horrible.

" And the speed at which it changed after I learned these techniques [music] and how to combine them together was just baffling to me. And you know how they say that if you want to learn something, you should learn it from not someone who is like a genius at that thing, like naturally good, but instead learn it from someone who is not naturally good, but they had to teach [music] themselves, like they had to learn the process of becoming good. The reason for that is is that if you learn from someone who's not naturally good, they had to [music] teach it was a process-based approach that allowed them to get better.

And so what I learned too was that because I was not naturally one of the smartest kids in my class, but [music] I had to learn the skills of becoming a good test-taker and, you know, becoming a smart person, these were very transferable skills. [music] And so I ended up becoming like the most popular tutor at Stanford in my year by far, and there were just like people that were asking me constantly to help teach [music] them these techniques. And the reason was not that they didn't understand how spaced repetition worked, it's just that they didn't know how to make it practical.

They didn't know how to actually turn it into something that they could use in their everyday life so that they could get more done in less time. And it [music] didn't just work for me. When I started coaching students, not just at Stanford, but literally everywhere, my average improvement for the students that I was working with was more than three standard deviations.

That's like literally going from like the bottom 15% to the top 3%. [music] crazy thing is is that this was measured against their previous peak. In other words, they'd already been studying on their own.

They'd already gotten kind of like the easy improvements of like, "Oh, I just did some practice questions, and and now I'm familiar with the test, and so my scores have gone up. " But like these were people that had plateaued in many cases, and after teaching them these techniques, their ceiling had increased dramatically. I was actually coaching a student recently.

So she's a dentist, and so dentists, they have to take uh one of the medical boards or a a small version of the medical boards so they can do oral maxillofacial surgery, so OMFS. She's not from a medical background. She actually graduated from a uh school abroad, and so she's never gone to medical school.

She was starting in like the 40%, and she ended up in like 2 or 3 months in like 80%. It was literally 83% when she ended up taking her test. This is all to say that these are skills, and [music] they can be learned.

I know you might be wondering like, "Oh, I don't have a lot of time cuz I'm busy in a class, and I've got all these other things, or maybe I'm working a job, or I've got kids, or a mortgage, or something. " So let me show you the actual math because this is the part that blows people's minds. Let's say that you learn just one new thing per day.

You made one single flashcard, and then you did your reviews. Let's do the math and show just how much you would know and how much time it would take you to actually review and maintain that information. This will also explain why it only takes me about 20 to 30 minutes to literally recall all of the 20,000-plus flashcards that I've made in the last 17 years.

So if I just made one flashcard every day, and I made sure that I did those continue to do those flashcards using the spaced repetition algorithm, I would after about 7 months, I would know about 217 things. However, because of the power of spaced repetition, I'd only be reviewing about 14 cards a day. That's maybe 5 or 10 minutes per day cuz you can typically do about 2 to 3 cards per minute if you're going at a reasonable pace.

Think about this. After 2 and 1/2 years, I would know 947 things. But my daily reviews of things that I'd actually have to be reviewing actively every single day would only be about 17 to 18 cards.

That's still under 10 minutes. So in other words, if you just learned one thing every day, and you made sure that you made a flashcard, and you didn't stop doing those flashcards when, you know, the spaced repetition algorithm [music] tells you to do this, you would literally know 730 more things at the end of 2 and 1/2 years, and you would be doing maybe like 10 minutes of studying per day. That is the compound effect.

With spaced repetition, mature cards take almost no time to review. And so adding new knowledge will barely increase your load. And that's just with one thing.

Imagine if you were to do three things a day, or five things a day. The math just continues to scale. Instead of doing maybe 10 minutes, it would be like an hour and a half, but you would know literally, you know, 10,000 things.

That's how powerful this system is, especially if you combine it with understanding concepts. So next I'm going to walk you through practically on how it is that you can [music] get started tonight. Not next week, but literally like right now.

The first step is to download the Anki app. So Anki is free on the computer, and it's free on Android, and on the iPhone it's a paid app, but in my opinion, it is totally worth it. Step two is just pick one thing.

Just use one thing that you are actively learning right now. A class, a language, a professional certification, a hobby, literally anything where the problem is, I'm learning this thing and I forget it. Or something where you tell yourself, "Oh, I always forget blank.

" Next, just make five cards. Literally, just five flashcards. And they don't have to be perfect.

Ideally, it's not just like, "What does ortho mean? " Right? And ortho means correct.

Ideally, it's something where you are you're forcing yourself to use a principle. So in the case of orthopedics, it'd be like, "Using the meaning of ortho, explain the definitions of orthodontics. " Or using the meaning of ortho, explain the definition of orthopedics.

Now, not only do you have to remember the thing, but you actually are forcing yourself to use it, which frankly is the thing that most people struggle with on high-stakes exams. One good rule of thumb is is that if you can get a card right without actually understanding the concept, it's probably not a very good card. If the card forces you to think, that is a good card.

The next step is to do your reviews. So tomorrow morning, when you open the app, do your reviews. This ideally is going to take you less than 5 or 10 minutes.

When you're doing the cards, click either again or hard. Just kind of pretend. The algorithm doesn't work nearly as well if you hit hard.

So much and we see a lot of people who are kind of perfectionists, and they'll they'll hit hard. So just as an aside, like just [music] hit again or good. And ideally, you're hitting again only about 10% of the time.

When you're hitting again or good, the app is going to use the spaced repetition algorithm to decide when it's going to show you each card again. Then you just show up every single day, and you just make sure that you do your cards. And then finally, just add three to five new cards the next day.

Now, why would I say just start with five cards? The challenge that most people have when they start doing Anki is is that they think, "Oh my god, this thing is going to change my life. This is so amazing.

I'm going to go all in on this. " And they make like 20,000 flashcards. The problem is is that in the beginning, typically, your flashcards are not going to be very good, to be completely honest.

Like if you're like me, it took me months to figure out how to make good flashcards, and I learned that in part by making flashcards and figuring out as I was reviewing them like, "Oh, that like wasn't a very good card, or that wasn't a very good system. " If you want to learn how to do it faster, be sure to hit like and subscribe and hit notifications because I talk a lot about Anki and how to make better cards. But for now, just know that I would start by just making a small number of cards.

Get those wins where you are making cards on the things where you absolutely need to remember that stuff, and you would absolutely otherwise forget it. Remember, if the only thing you did was to just make five or 10 cards a day, and just keep doing those cards, and then just keep consistently doing that every day for, you know, 7 months, you would literally know 2,170 things. And it would only take you, I don't know, maybe like 45 minutes a day to review all of that information.

Now, before I wrap up, let me answer three questions that I know that you're already asking. The first is, is it too late to start? Anytime I've done anything that has changed my life, I've always thought, "Oh my god, I totally wished I'd started doing this sooner.

" What I want you to do is to reframe that [music] thought as, "Oh my god, I'm so glad I found something that has the potential to change my life where I would want to go back in time and do this thing more. " They say that the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, and the second best time to plant it is [music] today. Spaced repetition is the same thing.

Maybe you've tried it in the past, maybe you told yourself, "Oh, I'm just like not an Anki person. Oh, it just didn't work for me. " To be honest, most people that say that, like 99.

9% of people that have said that, it's just an execution problem. [music] It's kind of like if someone gave me surgical tools and zero training, I would be an awful surgeon, and it wouldn't be the fault of the tools, it would just be because I wasn't trained to use them correctly. Anki is no different.

What I would recommend though is that you take the attitude of I'm going to do whatever it takes in order to figure this out [music] and make this work, and know that there's going to be some bumps in the road because, like I said, just like when you learn anything new, it's going to be bumpy and you're going to make some mistakes, and the payoff is so immense. Like I literally have to study 20 minutes a day in order to remember every important thing that I've learned and turned into cards for the last 17 years. You know, there have been days where like, you know, my [music] deck got, you know, synced wrong or something, and so I had to like do several days worth of cards.

Like it's it can totally suck, but it [music] is a life-changing thing when you get it right. And so I highly, highly recommend you push through the pain. Second, do I have to use Anki specifically?

To be honest, there's a lot of programs that use spaced repetition. Anki just happens to be free and happens to have a lot of tutorials and things like that, but, you know, there's a lot of things that you could potentially use. The thing I I like about Anki is is that it's not something that you're paying a subscription for.

And so when you commit to doing [music] this, I mean I I I bought the Anki app for, I don't know, 20 or 30 dollars like 16 years ago, but I haven't paid literally anything else um in order to use Anki since then. It's kind of nice to have that ability, to be honest. But if you find a program that works for you, that's totally okay.

Uh what I would remember is just again, these programs aren't flashcard programs that happen to use spaced repetition. Try to find a program where it's spaced repetition that happens to use flashcards, right? Cuz the key thing here is not that like flashcards are magical cuz frankly I hated flashcards before I used Anki.

The only reason that I'm tolerating flashcards is because the spaced repetition [music] algorithm is just so, so powerful. The last question is, what if I miss a day? Anki is set up to give you the flashcards on the day that you are most likely to forget it.

And so if you miss a day, I mean it happens. Like I've gotten super behind on cards before and, you know, it happens. Ideally you catch up as quickly as humanly possible, but like let's say that you, you know, it's been like weeks and you really fall behind your cards.

In [music] that case, what I recommend is that you don't do any new cards, and, you know, whether you make new cards or not is like completely up to you, but like if you've made a new card, don't review it. So actually what I'll do is I'll put this recording in there so you can kind of see. Yeah, so in the settings, in the settings you'll go to the settings and you'll set your new card limit to zero.

And then oftentimes what I recommend is actually to do to set maybe your maximum reviews per day to like 100. So it's something psychologically where, you know, cuz if you're seeing 2,000 cards staring at you of like, "Oh, you've got to do 2,000 cards," you're probably not going to want to study. If you see 100 cards staring at you, you're much more likely to want to do it.

And so um I would recommend setting your old reviews to 100 cards and your new reviews to zero. That way, as long as you just keep doing your old reviews, eventually you'll catch up. Again though, when you've gone through the pain of not doing your cards, you will quickly realize that it is a lot better to do it always as opposed to only some of the time.

Look, I wasn't a genius. I just found a system, and the system did work. If you're studying for boards or any major exam and you want to see exactly how I'd set this up, the settings, the card types, the whole strategy, check out Give Me 30 Minutes and I'll 5x your Anki efficiency.