How to Study More in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months

In this video, I'm going to show you how to study more in 12 weeks than others do in 12 months. And I'm going to be doing this by sharing with you five strategies that have allowed me to score in the top percentile of my country while maintaining a perfect GPA in medical school. And these are the same strategies that I've taught to thousands of students over the past few years as a learning coach.

So, let's jump straight into the strategy number one, which is called the Pareto squared principle. So the normal PTO principle which is called the 8020 rule as well. It basically talks about how 20% of the things that you do will get you 80% of the results.

But at the same time this also means that 80% of the things that we're doing are only getting us 20% of the result. And so that time is less efficient and effective. So an example of this is that we know that in maths it's a really good idea to do practice questions.

If you spend 20% of your time there, that's going to get you 80% of the results. Whereas, if you were to spend time writing up more constructive and comprehensive notes for maths, that's going to take up a lot of time, but only probably lead to even less than 20% of the result in the end of the day. Now, most study tips, they just tell you to focus on the 8020.

Again, focusing on the 20% that gets you the 80%. but they miss out often in a way to make this more effective and more powerful and that's actually by squaring the Pareto principle itself. So here's what I mean.

When you identify the 8020 task, you can do the 8020 on the 8020. And so this is the Pareetto squared principle. And I do this all the time as well.

For example, in medicine for one of my exams, I only had one week to learn stuff. So I needed to focus on the 8020 of the 8020. And that's how I finished a whole term's worth of content in just one week.

And so for this case in medicine, it is about hyperfocusing on the learning objectives and understanding how the key concepts work together. If I understand the fabric of that first and the principles underlying all of this, then I will be able to figure out a lot of the other content and how it works afterwards. And going back to the example of maths, if you were trying to get the 8020 of the 8020, you know, again that doing practice questions is okay and useful, but to get that to be even more effective and focus on the 8020 of that would be to focus on comparing the answers that you get by the end of doing each question and comparing that to the answer sheet and asking why you think you got the question right or wrong, understanding that thought process underlying how you got to that answer.

And that's the 8020 of the 8020. So for the rest of this video, I'm going to be covering the four other 8020 strategies that will help you study more in 12 weeks that takes most people 12 months. So next up is number two, pre-study.

When it comes to building a house, there's a better way to do it and a worse way to do it. Now the worst way to do it is to do everything haphazardly. You're just building the roof before you've even put up the walls and the frames.

uh and you don't even have concrete on the floor yet to put the foundations. Whereas the better way to do it is to do it in a logical order, which would be to put down the foundations, the concrete, and then put up the wood frames. And then that basically means you've got the walls.

And then once all the walls are all done, you can put in the actual roof. And what this means is that you never have to backtrack and do things that should have just been done in the first place. So if you think about how much time that saves, it saves a lot.

And the problem is is that when it comes to learning, most people are doing it in the worst way of building that house. They're not putting down the foundations first and then building up from there. So we want to make sure that we're approaching our learning in a layered way as well.

So we can do this through this strategy called pre-study. Now I want to make this clear that pre-study is not just studying earlier before you go to class or you learn the actual subject matter. It is a particular technique where we are setting up that foundation so that we can build up from there and have that as our foundational layer.

So here's the step by step on how to pre-study. Number one is that you want to make sure you've got your high yield resources for the topic that you're learning. This might be something that lists out the key ideas or key concepts that you need to learn about and it's the right and correct information.

Number two is to ask yourself what are the most important concepts when it comes to understanding how this topic works. Number three is to get a piece of paper or your iPad to actually then go ahead and mind map those key ideas and how they might be related or connected together. And so number four, one of the big questions you can ask yourself here is well what is my intended purpose for the information that I'm learning?

How do I intend to use it? So for example, you might be learning about certain diseases in medicine so that you can better diagnose when there are signs that a patient has a certain disease. Or if you're learning about physics and the theory of the physics, you're learning that with the intended purpose of understanding the underlying foundations of all physics applications that come after it.

So you have some more context. And so number five is thinking about well now as you map out these key ideas you're going to go the extra mile and think about how they connect and how you can represent that. So for example you could have a single arrow going from uh one concept to another or it could be birectional and that has different meanings.

You could say that the arrow means that this causes that or that this is a part of that. All you're trying to do here is you're just trying to represent your thinking in a way that it makes sense to you with the mind map. You can have as much fun as you want with this.

This back and forth thinking of do I put it this way or do I put it that way? Is this really right? Is it wrong?

Like all of this thinking is really important because this is forcing our brain to engage in this very critical thinking and allows us to actually better learn and encode this information because of that tossing and turning about how can I represent this in the best way possible. Now one thing that really helps you of pre-study and makes it much more effective is the next strategy which is number three ctopical reading. So ctopical reading refers to looking at all of those high yu resources and learning the multiple different perspectives that you see from these different resources at the same time.

This is really helpful because you need to be conscious of the fact that there are multiple different definitions for a particular concept depending on the different schools of thought and there are many different schools of thought for almost everything. And so the best thing that you can do is to know all of those schools of thought otherwise you're going to be missing a certain perspective when you need it most when you're trying to answer a particular question like in an exam. So how do we do it?

One of the key things that we want to do with synopical reading is to make sure again we're looking at highquality resources all talking about the same thing. So then we can when we go ahead and we read those different perspectives, we're actually to able to put them pretty much side by side and compare and contrast them to understand well why is this person saying this and why is this person saying that and then they're able to find the similarities and differences and critique that. This helps us understand and build a better picture of what a concept actually is at the end of the day.

Essentially, all it comes down to is finding those resources, having them open at the same time, reading one section, comparing it to the other, and then doing this again and again and again, and looking at all of different perspectives. Now, once you have done synopical reading, you should have a pretty broad understanding of the topic that you're learning. So in order to understand what you have learned much more deeply now we want to use the next strategy which is the testing effect number four.

Put simply the testing effect is putting your knowledge to the test seeing if it actually can withstand difficult questions and environments and situations. So when you're going ahead you're doing your syntopical reading and synopical learning you are deepening your knowledge but you need to make sure it is actually deep. And so this is where the testing effect comes in.

Now, there are many different ways to test yourself and each of them have different pros and cons. We all know that practice exams are great and you should definitely do them if you do have them. But sometimes they are not available and you know this all too well if you are in university.

So just like anything they are just one tool in a toolkit and so there are many different ways we can go about that testing. And so let's take a look at that. One really really important example is that when you're teaching someone something that is testing your ability to synthesize that knowledge and actually present it in a way that is understandable.

It's able to take that learner or the audience on a particular journey to understand the certain foundations and fundamentals of a of a particular topic before you dive into the smaller details and how it works at a nuance level. And being able to transfer this expertise is a very challenging task. And so this is particularly effective as a testing strategy if you're going to have to answer a very detailed question in your exam.

So for example, an essay question. There are many different ways to test yourself. And the favorite one that I have, I'm going to go through in a moment.

But there are other ones like for example, you could create flashcards. You could get your friend to ask you questions or do group study with them. You could try and create a project based on what you are learning.

There are many different ways of doing this and you can also use tools like chatbt to really amp this up and challenge your thinking and knowledge. Now, something really important to mention when people watch my videos talking about uh encoding and learning information better on the first time you hear things like synopical reading and pre-study and the parto principles and stuff. The trap is that sometimes people focus on this way too much and forget about the testing, which is why I'm making this a point.

You need to do both. Even though you might do the PTO principle, the the synopical reading, inquiry based learning and stuff really well, that you don't need to test yourself as much, you still need to test yourself because it's going to be very unlikely you'll learn something once and remember it for forever. It needs to be at least tested at least sometimes.

The really important thing to note about the testing effect is that yes, the better that you do learning beforehand, the less testing you will require, but do not forget it. Do not neglect it. There was a student that I was consulting once and um he actually had disappeared for like 12 uh months doing his own thing.

And when he came back, he was like, none of none of this is working. And I was like, okay, well, so what's going on? And then we looked at his uh learning system and he had been really engrossed into the idea of encoding that he would do all of the mind mapping, the synopical reading and everything, but he never tested himself.

And so the only point where he would be tested is literally in his exams. And so he completely failed them entirely. And so I hope this comes across as a quick lesson that you do not want to forget the importance of testing yourself.

And so now let's take a look at some of my favorite ways to do that. And my favorite of them all is when we're using something called the generation effect. And what this refers to is that things are better remembered when we are the one who is producing that information ourselves.

And so this can manifest in many different ways. So for example, when we are trying to answer a question from our prior knowledge, we are generating that answer ourselves from our own knowledge that we've been learning. Similarly, we can create our own questions.

We can generate our own practice questions. And this is extremely powerful because you're starting to think like your examiner. And so, in many times when I'm coaching students, they actually end up predicting questions on their exams without really even intending to because they're thinking from the same thought process as their examiner.

So, one of the key ways that I turn this up to level 11 is that I try and self-generate new thought experiments with the information that I'm learning. So, I might be learning something in physics. Uh let's say it's to do with like voltage and current and potential, energy, power, wattage, etc.

I might ask myself, okay, what would happen if I reduce the current by this amount and increase the potential difference and then change this wire for that wire and added this much resistance? And then I just think through it and then I'm generating well one that question, but two trying to generate the answer without looking at anything. And so this is all in my head.

And again, the difficulty of this is what creates the learning. The thinking creates the learning, not the answer. And so this is really really effective because again you're putting yourself in the mindset of a problem solver and this is what you need to do when you are ultimately tested in an exam for example.

You can do this for everything that you are learning and all you're trying to do here is predict the next piece of knowledge that you would like to figure out but you're trying to figure it out first without looking at any answers. So for example, if you were about to learn about, you know, photosynthesis and everything, try and think about what would happen in the process of photosynthesis before you even go about learning it. Anyway, here is the example that you could have as a thought experiment where you generate it for yourself and then the answer.

So for example, you might be looking at the day and night cycles of, you know, photosynthesis and cellular respiration for a plant. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, if it's in a greenhouse and it's a closed environment and we're looking at the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide, how would that change over time as we're going through the 24-hour cycle? You know, um it's going to be some periods of, you know, daylight and then it's going to be night.

What would that graph look like exactly? Would it be um just a straight line of carbon dioxide in the air and then it just like spikes straight up during the night or is it going to be something different where there's a little bit of a slow increase? Now, this becomes a really interesting thought experiment because you're going beyond just the simple examples that are given to you.

But this is the challenge that you you would need. The really cool thing is that there are things like chachi that can now actually answer these questions whereas before you would never have the answer. But even if you can't get the answer, that sometimes is a really good thing because it's forcing yourself to develop the skills to know if you're right or wrong even without having an answer.

And that is something that you can develop. And that's through developing the certain skills of reasoning to follow let's say certain first principles thinking to understand if this must be true or not. Anyway, that's a more complex thing for another time.

When I was running year 12 exam preparation classes each year, I would be creating for them challenging maths questions that would force them to draw the derivative graph of a certain function. And this function would be something that they have never seen before. And that was completely intentional because I didn't want them to remember the shapes that they see with common uh functions.

I want them to approach with first principles properly understand okay when this slope of this function is changing what does that mean my derivative function should be doing is the slope number on the original function is that a high number or a low number and then that would equate to the y you know coordinate of the first derivative graph and so again with these crazy graphs that I create those who are able to answer this question were actually taking themselves through the the appropriate right thinking to actually do this. They were not memorizing. They were properly understanding what do derivatives actually do.

If you follow all of these five steps, especially including the last one, this is one of the key things that will help you study more in 12 weeks that takes others 12 months. So that's the five strategies that will help you study so much more effectively. And if you are interested in more videos to supercharge your learning, then you may like this video here.

Thanks for watching and take care.