The Ultimate Mind Map Tutorial | How I Remember EVERYTHING I Learn

I've taught mind mapping to thousands of people game says this is the best mind map guide I've ever watched with a capital best SAA says been teaching my maps for 30 years it's about time someone start getting it right fantastic well thanks appreciate you so this is the ultimate mind map tutorial I'll be going from a blank page to a complete mind map so you can follow along step by step I'm Mike I'm a doctor turned learning coach and I created study Quest it's a program that helps you get better grades while studying less and

we have students from all over we got Med students we got computer science we got all the ivy league students and they're all academic weapons who save about 2 hours of study time per day and a key part of their success is our technique called the tree notes it's really a combination of Mind mapping and concept mapping done in a way where you maximize how much you can learn and minimize the amount of time spent learning it and we teach it this way because learning isn't just about getting good grades if you want to earn

more with your mind then you need a way to retain and apply even the most complex Concepts so let's jump right on in I'll be mind mapping some marketing concepts cuz I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs and side Hustlers on our Channel now so I thought i' use an example that will actually be helpful to you so tree notes tree is an acronym for the four steps and each of these come from evidence-based techniques we'll start with T which stands for thought process so back in medical school a really big mistake I would

make is I would just jump right in and I would just start trying to memorize everything right without really thinking about what order should I be learning these things in it's a big mistake right I was too occupied with learning all the leaves of the tree these are the facts and the details and all these things you had to memorize but I realized that if you understand the trunk of the tree first which is the thought process then everything else becomes so much easier to understand so if we have a bunch of keywords we're trying

to learn we want to First identify what are the main Concepts and then what are the details and by using the 8020 rule we can identify the 20% most important keywords cuz those are the concepts and just kind of ignore the 80% other keywords for now because those are the details we'll come back for them later because the most important Concepts that makes up the trunk of our tree so looking at my keywords here I'll create an outline of which are the concepts and which are the details it should be pretty obvious which keywords are

Concepts and which are details but let's say you have no idea whatsoever well you can use chat GPT to help do a little bit of the heavy lifting for you so I'm studying for my marketing exam here are a list of keywords I need to know please separate them into Concepts and details for me so I'll go ahead and leave these prompts in the description for you so you can just copy and paste if you want to use them and from this exercise you might find a lot of Concepts but to make the trunk of

the tree you really want to focus in on two to four of the most most important Concepts so here we have paid advertising we have cold calling we have organic content and we have warm Outreach all right so I'll set aside all the other keywords for now and I'll just work with these first and I'll just lay out all these Concepts onto the page make sure to leave some room in between them so that I can kind of brainstorm what are the connections between these Concepts and this is super important to figure out connections between

these the typical mind map would just write the topic in the middle and then the four branches coming off of it like this but the problem here is that you don't think about the connections between the Core Concepts and without those connections your tree becomes really weak and flimsy and this keeps all the branches isolated and harder for your brain to retain so an easy way to connect these Core Concepts is to ask evaluative questions how do these ideas relate to each other what are the similarities what are the differences is there a cause and

effect are they all parts of a bigger hole is there a chronological order to them is there a logical or scientific basis for why these are all related right these are all questions that will help you connect these words together and of course you can use AI to help you brainstorm as well but it's always a good idea to try it with your own brain first because that's the way that you're really going to remember it again I'll leave some of these prompts in the description if you want to use those all right so let's

go through some of of these terms I've identified these four terms to be the main concepts of the material and what they have in common is they're all forms of marketing in order to find more customers so first we have paid advertising this is when you pay money usually a lot of money to show an advertisement to a bunch of people all at the same time right think about the uh the ads that you see on TV commercials these could be the ads at the beginning of YouTube videos next is cold calling this is where

you call people one at a time they're usually strangers hence the word cold like a cold approach another version of cold calling that you might be familiar with is going and knocking on people's doors to see if you can try to sell them something so using evaluative questions right let's compare and contrast cold calling versus paid advertising so cold calling deals with one person at a time you're calling one person on the phone at a time or you're knocking on a person's door one at a time compare that to paid advertising it's usually not not

one person at a time it's a lot of people at a time you're making a commercial probably thousands or even millions of people are going to watch it all at the same time so next is organic content we're all pretty familiar with this right this is the content that you see like this YouTube video for example or Instagram or Tik Tok or writing blogs uh on the internet so again evaluative questions how does content relate to the previous two main Concepts well content can can also be viewed by thousands of people all at the same

time so it's similar to paid advertising in that way but unlike paid ads you don't have to pay money to put it in front of people like I didn't pay any money to force you to watch this YouTube video right I just published it to my channel and the algorithm just showed it to you and then we have warm Outreach this is basically reaching out to people one by one kind of like cold calling but unlike cold calling this is reaching out to people who already know you and since you already know them it's usually

free for you to contact them whereas cold calling is reaching out to strangers so it can cost money sometimes because you have to pay to acquire lists or emails or phone numbers to contact but warm Outreach is contacting people who are not strangers maybe they already follow you on social media maybe they subscribe to you on your mailing list or on your YouTube channel maybe they're just your friends or your family members on your contact list so asking those evaluative questions really helps us think about the relationships between those four main Concepts and it really

helps me see that the connections have to do with how many people you're reaching out once is it one person at a time or many people at a time and the other connection I see is how much money it costs it costs money to do paid advertising it also costs money to do cold calling although not as much and the other two are generally free so thinking about these four Concepts in this way will really help me draw out my thought process how do they all connect well I see them kind of like this so

we got paid advertising and content creation reaching many people and we have warm Outreach and cold calling reaching one person at a time and then what do they cost well these two will generally cost more money compared to these two these two will generally reach More Strangers while these two will generally reach more people that already know you so what's the thought process here well to me it's kind of like a matrix right we got the X access we got the Y AIS it's not perfect but this is how I would roughly picture it now

here's the important part everyone's thought process will be a little different right it's your personal relationship to what you're learning so for example in the world of habits there are two very famous authors you got James clear and you got Charles doig they both wrote best-selling books about habits but if you open both of their books and put them side by side and then you look at their table of contents you're going to see that their headings and their Frameworks on habits they're similar but they're also slightly different right you'll see that the topics that

they wrote about in the order of topics in which they put their chapters they're slightly different that's because they both have their own unique thought process on how they think about habits and that's what makes learning and science so fun is that people have their different approaches and they debate about it right there's all these different perspectives and it's up to us to evaluate these different viewpoints and then synthesize them and form our own conclusions this is something called syntopical learning like if you just searched on Google or YouTube on how to mind map you

probably found me that's why you're here watching this video but you also find dozens of other people who are all teaching their approach to mind mapping right everyone teaches it slightly different so students will just gravitate towards the thought process that resonates with them the most so that's how you want to think about it right every author every teacher every Professor every lecturer they all have their own thought process and when they teach you they try to convey their thought process of the subject to you but not all students will understand it in the same

way right that's why some professors make no sense to you but other professors it just clicks so when you have Mastery or expertise on a subject that means that you have such clear and a useful thought process for that subject that you're able to teach it better you're able to make better content you're able to deliver more value and that's how you use your knowledge to earn more money in your work and your career so thought process right super important don't skip the step it makes up the trunk of the tree next is R which

stands for relationships we're going to add all the rest of the keywords into the tree now these will be the branches and the leaves but we want to add them by relationships an easy way for me to demonstrate this is to show you what you don't want to do so what we touched on briefly before is that a typical mind map will put the main topic in the middle like this and then you add keywords one by one in a very hierarchical manner right and this is not ideal because it forces our brain to think

of these groups as isolated from each other and so it encourages us to start memorizing all these details and that's not what we want to do knowledge isn't stored in our brains like a filing cabinet where information is just siloed away in folders right it's more like a tree with networks and connections a strong tree has a network of roots and branches and to achieve that we want to add our keywords in relationships this is relational learning it reflects how our brain prefers to store information so when you're adding your keywords in relationships you can

do this layer by layer right you can start with the sub branches and then you can connect them as you go again always making sure to focus on relationships rather than o them to stay isolated if you want to add them in layers you can start by ranking all your keywords by which ones have the most relationships with the other keywords so this word target audience right I know this has multiple relationships with other terms whereas this one SEO has less relationships with other terms so this term will probably be a bigger branch and then

this one will probably be a sub Branch so after doing more critical thinking using the valuative questions to compare and contrast these terms together I found that all these relate together as one big funnel the thought process here is like the start of the funnel that gets the attention right gets the eyeballs from all the customers and it takes the customer down a funnel where they start to build a deeper connection with the brand the deeper they go and actually this funnel can be our new thought process going forward just be aware that your tree

note can grow and evolve as you continue adding relationships to it and also just a side note here is I highly recommend you do this with an iPad or a tablet rather than using paper and Pen because it's so much easier to erase and kind of move things around if you find a better fit for that somewhere else on the map and trust me if you're doing it right you're going to be doing a lot of erasing and a lot of moving things around all right so you're just going to continue adding all the keywords

by relationship until they're all added to your tree right next we have e which stands for expressive the brain remembers visuals better than it remembers words like if I told you to think of an apple then you probably think of it visually first right you probably think of a red piece of fruit rather than thinking of the word Apple a p p e plus visuals are much more efficient than words right it would take me several seconds to read this paragraph but I could just look at an image and instantly know what it's telling me

and when it comes to you having to review your notes like for an exam then imagine having pages and pages of paragraphs to read right it's going to take so long so right now if you have a lot of words on your tree then you want to go through and turn them into visuals we teach dozens of different visualization techniques in our program but to get you started I suggest you think about how to represent these parts of your mind map using visual Frameworks which are much easier to remember so you can see I already

started implementing expressive as I was going along right I express these ideas as a matrix and then I express these ideas as a funnel but there are so many other ways you can have pillars pyramids Cycles flow diagrams charts I mean there's so many more examples our brains are already familiar with these visual Frameworks so when you apply these to what you're learning it makes it so much easier to just instantly remember your notes all right the second e stands for efficient and this refers to making it efficient for review again there are dozens of

techniques here that we teach but a great one to start with are pneumonics and this is something that I used so much in medical school we had acronyms we had abbreviations we had Rhymes all of these things to help us remember a great example of a nemonic is the tree method that you're learning right now in this video where each letter reminds us what to do and in what order and actually trinos is just one of the many skills that we teach in our program there are others that we use alongside it to make it

even better so for you if you have a list of processes or keywords then you can form an acronym you can form a rhyme right anything to make it easier to remember and you can definitely use chat GPT to help you brainstorm here so looking at the marketing terms here we have a neonic for a sales script it's going to make it a lot easier to remember all these steps and in what order to use them so at this point you've gotten all your keywords onto your tree it's time to put your knowledge to the

test and the challenge is can you close all your notes pull out a blank piece of paper or a blank iPad screen and actually draw your mind map from memory and this exercise is similar to the blurting technique right or active recall where you close your notes and you write down everything that you can remember about the topic which I think is really beneficial for your retaining the information but if you can actually redraw your tree note complete with all the relationships and the structure and the Expressions that you created then this would truly reflect

your Mastery of the information once you're able to redraw your topic several times from memory with ease that's how you know that you're ready for an exam or that you're just ready to use that knowledge in a masterful way anywhere where you go like if you're at a job interview and you get asked a question you can just mentally retrace the steps to your mind map in your head and you'll be able to recall information pretty effortlessly this is why some people are really good at creating content or being on podcasts or just creative writing

this is how Mastery of your knowledge can translate to more than just getting good grades but actually leveling up your earning potential so this tree note example was on marketing concepts but I do have another example if you're a med student or even a Premed student then I do have a prior demo on a medical concept if you want to check that out then I'll leave a link in the description and if there's any other subject you want me to try then definitely let me know in the comments below and of course to all you

synthesizers and innovators out there who are really looking to turn your knowledge into online income this is how I would recommend you approach learning this is how I built a channel and a business around my knowledge so trust the process and keep practicing see you next time