we ran a poll on our YouTube community and not surprisingly the majority of us agree studying is boring but I've spent over 10 years building my learning skills now teaching them in a program study Quest and I never thought I'd say this but studying is kind of fun so I want to share three lessons from my personal Journey that I made studying not just bearable but actually enjoyable if studying is boring to you you're not hitting the learning Sweet Spot the way that you're studying doesn't engage your brain to enjoy learning Robert Bjork describes this
concept called desired difficulties where there's an optimal level of effort we need to expend a sweet spot in order to both enjoy and learn from studying if it's too easy we'll get bored but if it's too challenging get frustrated and also bored think of it like playing a video game let's use valorent as you get better and you win matches you're going to rank up and queue against more competitive players but what if you were only allowed to play against complete noobs you know like First Time Players the first few Pub Stomps you know might
feel pretty satisfying but eventually you're gonna get really bored and then stop playing on the other end if you're throwing matches against the best Pros in the world you're gonna get steamrolled over and over and no matter how much effort you put in they're just too good and yeah you'll probably also get bored and stop playing our brain enjoys a challenge but not futility if it feels pointless to try both trying too hard or not trying at all it is really hard to enjoy what we're doing but if we hit that challenge Sweet Spot which
Bjork found to be just a little bit outside of our comfort zone it's addictive to our brain and yes this is partly why we can play video games for five straight hours without feeling bored but there's a very important Nuance to desired difficulties that I want to talk about just because we hit that sweet spot doesn't necessarily mean it's better for learning because studying and learning are not the same thing studying is like the physical actions and the study techniques that we use learning is what we get out of using those so it's more than
just about making it more effortful we need to hit that sweet spot for the right type of effort for example I can make practicing flash cards more challenging by dimming the lights in the room or putting a movie on the background like sure that's more challenging it's not really going to help me get more out of doing flashcards so the question I ask myself when I'm bored isn't just how can I challenge myself more but how can I challenge myself to think about what I'm learning more reviewing the same flash cards 10 times or even
20 more times for my exam it's more challenging sure and in hindsight regrettably that's something I used to do a lot in medical school with like monkey and REM notes but challenging myself that way with doing more reps doesn't make me think about the information any differently I'm not learning anything new when I review that flash card again therefore I'm not challenging my brain to think and I'm gonna get bored what if instead you laid out five flash cards on your table and then you challenged yourself to find what are the similarities and differences between
these different concepts or how can I describe what this flash card is saying using an analogy turn it into a game and now you're engaging your brain to think differently so next if you're the type of student that can't focus on a subject then you don't see why it matters I'm sure you've probably thought while studying why am I learning this because this information is useless and I'm never going to use it if you have to ask yourself that question then you need to make it matter and make it more relative I'm not gonna lie
in medical school there were a lot of classes that I felt this way about particularly like biochemistry and obstetrics but I found allergy medicine really interesting and fun to learn about and I'm positive now it's because I personally suffer from terrible allergies I have food allergies I can't eat peanuts cashews and other nuts I can't drink alcohol without turning into a tomato you know being outside all year round makes my eyes and my nose cry I can have pets because of dog and cat dander even my own sweat breaks my entire body out in hives
and because allergies impact me on such a deep and emotional level learning about how that works was like learning about myself it was like I was solving my own problem so that got me thinking if I can figure out a way to understand how the thing I'm studying is used to solve real world problems would that make it more interesting and the answer was absolutely yes like say your physics class learning about frequency and pitch and all you see are the equations it's a pretty elusive concept to grasp and it's hard to see how that's
useful but what if instead you learned it in the context of how a piano works or how guitar produces music now all of a sudden understanding sound waves and frequencies in Pitch becomes super interesting because it's relevant to how it's being used in the real world so my point is if what you're learning seems boring or irrelevant then make it relevant as chattybt how is this concept being used in the real world watch documentary about it or watch some YouTube videos about it read up on case studies if we can understand why a concept matters
to solve our own problems or how it was used to solve other people's problems especially the people that we admire or look up to like other creators or influencers or celebrities and stuff it immediately becomes much more interesting and enjoyable finally studying might be boring because you view it as a chore not a lot of people get a dopamine Rush from taking out the trash or cleaning the toilet those are things that we see we have to do not necessarily the things that we want to do but you can change your perspective and stop viewing
studying like a chore and the reason this works is because of how our brain interprets perceived control when we feel like we have no control we get stressed out hopeless and then we lose motivation but if we can reframe our mindset said to look at things through a lens of gratitude we can actually enjoy it because the only thing that we can't control is our mindset it's like if you're baking a cake for your friend's birthday and you think ugh I have to bake this stupid cake because they want it it's gonna be such a
drag that statement in itself comes from a place of having no perceived control but if you think it's dead I want to make this cake because I know it'll make them happy and I like their nice things for my friends then it becomes something you actually enjoy you've regained control because you want to do it for your own fulfillment and so think about this in terms of studying if you know you're going to spend 20 hours studying for next week's exam like that's for sure gonna happen how do you want to approach it you can
either be stressed out feel like you have to study like it's a chore or you can accept it relax and enjoy the process the choice is yours you're going to study 20 hours either way do you want it to be stressful or do you want to be joyful now if you'll notice the thing that each of these three lessons have in common is how they're focused on what's happening in our brain versus what's happening on our computers or on our notes and that's because enjoying learning has nothing to do with the action study techniques or
the fancy apps we use it's all about the way we train our brain to think about information to make it matter to us on an emotional and relevant level and to see it from a class half full versus half empty point of view these are all topics and mindsets that Mike and I dive really deep into in study quests our learning skills program to help you all build systems to learn smarter and faster and less time so if that interests you definitely check it out enrollment will be opening up again soon or it might already
be open depending on when you're watching this video in any case I hope these lessons were helpful for you if you want to know how I tricked my brain to be addicted and love studying you're also going to want to check out this video right over here
