How I Ranked 1st at Monash University: 4-step Framework

I recently graduated at the top of my class with my master of education program at Monash University which is one of the top ranked universities in the world and in this video I'm going to be sharing with you four kind of uncommon things that I did that allowed me to place first and at the end of this video I'm also going to be sharing with you one thing that I didn't do that I see a lot of people doing that would have made all four of those things basically useless so stay tuned to find out

by the way if you are wondering where I am this is not a Swanky new office I wish I had a Swank in the office it looked like this but actually this is just the Airbnb that we're staying at I'm in LA right now final day of my US tour meeting up with a bunch of students it's been a good time heading to Singapore next but I'm ready to go back home okay so before we start a little bit of context the program I did was the master of education and general educational studies and going

into it I set myself a goal I wanted to be able to complete the program and get very good results while spending significantly less time than normal and other people would spend on studying because you know I've got a channel I've got a reputation I guess to try to prove I wanted to show my methods in action and actually I already created videos on some of those methods which you can check out those videos do tell you how I studied for it and it's an accurate depiction of the way that I studied all my material

by the end of the year I won the dean's award for academic Excellence which is given the top graduating student of the cohort my work was taken as the Exemplar for high distinction which is the highest possible grade for half of my papers I was the first student to ever receive a hundred percent in one of those papers and for one of my assignments the lecturer said that it was a waste to use it as an assignment so they actually created an entire new method of assessment that will allow me to get the grade by

just getting it published somewhere instead before I graduated I was invited back to be a lecturer and I did all of this online through remote learning in fact the first time I visited the actual campus was to run a workshop for the upcoming Masters and PhD students I now now continue to guest lecture at Monash University teaching learning skills working with Masters and PhD students in education and Monash university has recently agreed to be our more research partner for I can study which is my company that teaches all of these skills to measure these methods

and publish on their success and I did all of this in about 15 of the recommended time or how long other people were studying in fact if you look at just the amount of time I spent studying and taking away all the time on just literally writing essays and assignments I probably only spent about 40 hours across the entire year of proper reading and studying and without these four ways I would not have been able to do that now a disclaimer these four things they will work for basically any subject that you want to use

this for basically any curriculum any structure however they do require you to have certain number of skills in place now obviously I had these skills but if you struggle struggle with these steps then you can train yourself to reach them start with a simpler version tone them down but aim to reach this eventually and I promise you you're all capable of reaching this level with a little bit of practice over time I can say that with confidence because training these skills is actually what I do for a living so let's get started with number one

now the first thing is to aim high and this seems like obvious advice but you really have nothing to lose from aiming higher than you think you're capable of achieving on top of actually setting Higher Goals and pushing yourself to try a little bit harder it also makes you think fundamentally differently there used to be these really popular bracelets and I don't know if they're still popular anymore but it used to say wwjd and it stood for what would Jesus do it was really really popular because it was a way for people to think like

ah what would the characteristics and attributes of in this case Jesus B in my situation and I think this is a really good reframing technique because it's very difficult for us to think about what we should do from our perspective and it can be easier to think what would someone else do that was able to achieve this so when we aim high we can think about what type of behaviors actions characteristics someone that could achieve at that level would do and then we can try to copy them and thinking about it in this way can

help us study smarter rather than just harder it makes us evaluate our own bad habits and catch ourselves on things that we might doing purely because we have been used to doing them and we've been doing them for years and years even though in the back of our mind we really know it's not going to be helpful for us because we know that a truly Elite student probably isn't doing that it's going to make us look for Alternatives and you know they always say shoot for the moon and fall on the Stars if you aim

high worst case scenario you just won't hit that at goal but you're probably going to do better than you would have anyway by the way I've never really understood that saying because the Moon is significantly closer than all the stars that we see in the sky septu is a simple one it is to cram yes cram but cram early I made sure at the beginning of every semester to put aside two weeks where I was going to go through all the content for all the papers as much as I could now I didn't have all

the resources available I didn't have all the lecture materials they weren't released in advance I had lecture objectives to work with I knew the textbook that they were going to use and I knew the general gist of what was going to be covered so I let myself use that as a guiding Stone to get as much pre-study done as possible and cramming is effective in a lot of ways it puts our brain instead of urgency and it makes us work through the material faster and because we're covering more topics in a single session it means

that we're able to find connections and relationships between those Concepts that we might have otherwise missed if they were presented to us week by week in isolated silos however cramming is often done poorly because we do it all the way at the very end when the assignment or the exam is due and that puts unnecessary stress and pressure on us if we simply just do the exact same process but we do it at the beginning it means that now we've got more free time more flexibility and we can either enjoy life and do other things

for me I was still working full-time you know this has happened over the last year and a half basically so all the stuff that I've been doing that you've been seeing on my YouTube I was doing all of that concurrently while studying for my master of education so for me it was really really important to save as much time as possible I know that some of you watching you've got young family you've got kids you've got a mortgage to pay you've got a job that you're working full-time while also trying to study full-time and the

trick is going to be about making sure you can clean out and save some of those days by doing your cramming as early as possible when you're working ahead doing that early cramming you have to do it the right way let me explain there's a few things that we need to think about here so this line is a timeline of learning here all right time then different types of information are more useful for our brain depending on what stage of learning we're at so in the earlier stages our brain is craving more structure it doesn't

do well with lots of fine details it doesn't do well with all those facts and figures and statistics and definitions what it wants to know is how to think about the topic compared to the later stages where then it's going to be a lot better to take in all of those details because those details now become more relevant and this is just all about Connections and this is what research on human cognitive architecture tells us at the beginning our brain has a prior set of knowledge and connections and networks which allow it to make sense

of information now if a new piece of information comes in and we cannot see how they might be connected to what we already know then it becomes very difficult to make it relevant which means that our brain doesn't see what the point is of holding on to it which is why we would very quickly forget it and this is the reason why a lot of the time you'll be studying and studying and studying and then a week later you've forgotten half or more of what you've learned because when you learned it it wasn't relevant and

so the trick to effective learning basically all the principles of efficient learning are are about getting your brain to not prune and get rid of information that it thinks is not worth keeping and the way we do that is to in a way trick the brain into thinking that it's worth keeping and the way we do that is through creating connections and relationships so at the very very beginning when you're first learning about a subject what we want to do is we want to find those key pieces of information throughout the entire text of what

we're learning that we know are slightly more relevant and familiar compared to the knowledge that we all already have and this allows us to create what I often call Anchor points of relevance that means that when we get new information coming in after that we now know how it's connected because we've got more points to connect it with and then as we continue to learn more we can connect it to more and more points so in a way what we're saying is that the easiest way to learn something new is to have prior knowledge on

it already you can't always apply knowledge and everything so what we do is that we build prior knowledge which I know sounds impossible and I guess technically if you really get into definitions it is impossible but hopefully you get the gist it's about taking the level you're at now and then learning just enough to take you to the next level which allows the next level to be more relevant and the next level to be more relevant so that eventually you can cover all of the content down to the finest detail but each step feels relevant

because you're building on the knowledge of the previous step and it often means that you have to go out of order skipping huge amounts of material as you go on your first passes through the material real there is a time to learn everything and knowing when is the right time is something that makes a enormous difference if you spend all of your time at the early stages committing to details and definitions and trying to memorize everything then there's no point because a few weeks later you're gonna have forgotten it anyway you're still not going to

know how to think about it you're still not going to know how it's all related together because you haven't been able to consolidate it a lot of people say that you should go and memorize things first and then consolidate it afterwards but that doesn't actually make sense you cannot learn it first and consolidate it afterwards at least not efficiently Because by the time you come to consolidating it you've already forgotten a lot of it that's how good and efficient your brain is at for getting information that's why the most efficient way is to make sure

that we're consolidating it at the time we are learning it in fact some fascinating Neuroscience research has shown that the quality of your memory later in the future can be predicted at least partially by the type of activity your brain underwent at the first time at learned it which means is that how we think about information now when we first consume it dictates how well we're going to know that information later which is also kind of logical if you think about it so ignore those details at the beginning when I was going through and if

you watch my other videos when I'm actually studying it you'll see that I'm putting this in practice I'm getting a big picture understanding and then each iteration I'm just building the complexity and depth and detail of that information if I run out of time that's fine because I've gotten the most important stuff done first if I really need to cram in those details I can do that a week or two before the exam just Chuck it into that short-term memory cram the details in and even if I forget it a couple weeks later it's all

good because I wouldn't even need it a couple weeks later so it's about being strategic with what information you learn at what stage of your learning process and this is crucial for Effective learning if you don't follow these principles I don't think it's realistic to do well at least at a higher level especially you know for those of you that are in University or those of you that are in high school that are struggling with this this is going to flip your world upside down so how do we actually do this well you can look

at my other video to see some of the techniques that I use in terms of non-linear mapping and how I arrange those Concepts it's quite a bit to go through that video is going to do it more Justice than I can right now literally because I have to check out of this Airbnb in like 20 minutes I need to wrap this video up and by the way here's a very interesting thing is that we actually intuitively already know that there is a time and place to learn different types of information so for example if you

were learning biology for the very very first time in your life you wouldn't say that the most efficient way to learn that is to go and read through 2000 PhD thesis to try to figure out you know basic Elementary biology it'd just be way Overkill and just go over your head you know for example if you want to learn about learning science the most efficient way to learn about learning science is not to spend years of your life going through primary research on learning science to create data system the most efficient way to learn it

would actually be to join let's say a program created by someone that did spend all that time to do that and did all the trial and error for you and then packaged it in a very very nice consumable way for someone like yourself so we know that some information is going to go over our heads if it's too advanced but the trick is realizing that that happens at a micro level to even in a single lecture even in a single chapter even in a single paragraph some information is simply not suited for our brain at

that time and it's better to pick the path of most relevant you will be able to cover all the information you're not going to miss anything it just means that you're going to go through it multiple times picking up different things as you go and now the fourth point and this is actually more of a pro tip but it is to be very resourceful and strategic with the way that you use your resources and the biggest resource that you have often in University setting is the staff the lecturers now the way that I've seen most

people use lecturers is it's kind of like a waste of time because the questions that are being asked the lecturers are the ones that are very very basic surface level they're just saying I don't understand this can you explain it to me you know what is the meaning of this particular thing you said this in the lecture what does that mean you really should be aiming have self-regulated learning skills to the point where you don't need help with those simple level questions these are the types of problems that you need to have the skill to

be able to figure out yourself like you shouldn't really have to ask someone else for low level information like that you can either look it up yourself and learn the skills of looking things up or learn the process of self-explanation and generation now this is obviously for a more mature set of Learners like if you are listening to this right now and you're like 11 12 years old yeah asking your teachers about things is going to be really important part of your learning strategy but even then we should be aiming to get to a point

where we don't really need to be asking for very simple information it's a war skill that's going to transfer through for the rest of your life the way that I like to use questions is to test hypotheses or check things that I have synthesized together that is almost impossible to really figure it out for myself so for example people for one of my papers we were introduced to like 13 different models for adopting new Innovations and new Innovative educational Frameworks and Technologies and all 13 Frameworks we were meant to kind of learn them and see

some of the trends and the similarities and as I was going through them I wanted to synthesize a comprehensive framework that looked at all the different angles that the other Frameworks did so I went through and found the trends and similarities and compared and contrasted and I spent about you know pretty solid hour and a half just going through back and forth with these models to create my version of a model that I thought abided by all the considerations of the other models padded up for the weaknesses of some of the models and enhance some

of the strengths of the other models and at the end of that I had this singular kind of Fairly comprehensive multi-faceted model that made sense for me it's really important that it's for me because I'm the one that put in the cognitive effort to make it make sense and therefore that's why it's going to be beneficial for learning if someone else were to just simply look at it they're not going to get you know that Enlightenment that I did because they didn't put in the work to try and understand it they're not receiving the learning

because they didn't do the thinking either the thinking therefore I'm getting the learning out of it now for me to check if that model is accurate would probably take I mean that's probably honestly like a whole phd's worth of work to do that like that information is probably does not even exist anywhere because I synthesized it it's sort of new and that's what I use the lecture time for I got a meeting with the lecturer and I said hey I've been looking through all this stuff I created a model that I think for me makes

a lot of sense can I run you through it and can you let me know if I'm missing something if there are any red flags if I completely misunderstood some perspectives of it I ran through the thing and they said it looks really good and in fact they invited me back to present it to the rest of the class to show as an example for other people what they should be doing when they're going through the readings so that's an example where someone with years and years of experience can look at it and say yup

that makes sense in a 15-20 minute conversation whereas it would have taken me 15 to 20 months of my own and work to try to verify it now that's a strategic use of lecturer expertise time and this is the same case for when you're working with supervisors or mentors in the workplace as well try to develop the skills to figure out all the basic stuff by yourself use expertise for where expertise is needed and at least of all it's going to give your markers and supervisors a favorable impression because those types of questions are the

ones that show them that you are really a high level thinker which brings us to the final point which is the one thing I didn't do that I see a lot of students doing all of the time where if I had done that all four of the things that I've just told you about would have been made redundant it wouldn't have had any real impact and that is that I did not compromise on the non-negotiables what does that mean that sounds really confusing and actually the statement is confusing let me explain at the beginning of

the paper I was out of a WhatsApp group with all the other students and I very quickly realized that some of the students were really struggling with the workload they were studying a lot of hours and they were not really getting a lot of reward out of it they were struggling to understand the concepts the assignments were really stressing them out their point I essentially already finished the entire semester's worth of material and the students asked me for advice on what they should do and I told them some of the things that I've just told

you right now for example you know make sure to cram early try to study ahead finish through the semester and one of the things that was very common for them to fire back with was but we don't know what's going to be covered the lectures haven't been released yet we don't have enough all we have to work with is this textbook we don't know what parts are going to be relevant all we have is that we know what the assignments are going to be about and we have a very general lecture outline but we don't

know what the material is there's no slides for it yet I can't do it I can't study that way Justin but the thing is I did and that's the difference is I know that in order for me to make things work and order for me to work full-time or Beyond full-time hours while studying for my master of education which is a full-time program and to do well and to do it and only 15 of the time I need to achieve my goal I needed to do that I needed to cram everything in early so for

me I wanted to find the solution so I used what I could I made do what the resources I had available I used Google and Wikipedia and the textbooks and the recommended readings and whatever it is and I tried to figure it out I made an educated guess on what I think is likely to be covered even though the lecture slides aren't there I said well look I'm probably going to get at least 70 percent close and the 30 I'm missing I can pick that up during the lectures but at least I've got that Head

Start it's better than nothing and so I had that kind of solutions mentality I wasn't looking for reasons why I couldn't follow these rules I was looking for the path that allowed me to follow the rules because I knew that they were non-negotiables I had to do that if I was going to succeed at this task and very very very often when I'm working with students and they come to me with their concerns about things and I asked them about what they're doing with their methods and the techniques and a lot of time I've already

taught them techniques and I've already taught them the methods but they say I can't do it because of this reason my commute is too long I'm spending too much you know I'm not able to focus at home I fall asleep in the library I'm you know procrastinate too much but whatever other excuse there is they're looking for a reason why they cannot do it and so I ask the question are you really wanting help why are you just wanting validation for why it's hard for you and the light just turned off I need to check

out my Airbnb in like five minutes I haven't packed yet that's pretty good segue I'll leave you with that thought I'll catch you next time [Music]