How To Become A Top 1% Learner (Full Masterclass)

I'm Dr Justin Sun I'm a former medical doctor and I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years I run a learning program called I can study which has helped tens of thousands of people from around the world learn to learn more efficiently and achieve their dream results and today we're discussing how to remember everything you read and learn so in this video I'll tell you what the scientific research says is the Best way to learn but I'll also cover it from a more practical perspective and tell you what that research means for you

my goal is that by the end of this video I want you to be able to understand the research on learning not like a researcher but in a way that allows you to understand how you learn and more importantly how you can improve to be a more confident and effective learner so today's discussion should be extremely helpful if you're in school at Any stage of school or even if you're not in any formal education whether it's applying knowledge and learning for work or passion project s or something on the side any area of your life

where you need to learn and apply new knowledge now before I dive into the research there are a couple of things that will probably surprise you about today's discussion first of all you'll realize pretty soon that most of what you know and think about learning is probably Wrong or at least incomplete regardless of your level of achievement even if you're a top learner and what that means is that your idea of how to become a better learner and what that involves is probably not accurate and trust me I was in the same boat I was

generally a pretty decent okay learner not the best but certainly not the worst when I entered into University I realized that the world is a big place and there are a lot of people that are much smarter than Me I had to work really really hard I studied a lot and I ended up getting really really good grades and so when I entered into medical school and I was going through medical school trying to cover that enormous workload while working full-time at the same time learning about learning science I thought I would have a pretty

good head start on most people I had good grades I thought about my learning I'd certainly experimented more with my Learning than most people but as soon as I really dove into it boy was I wrong but it's the realiz you were wrong and realizing what is actually the truth that creates those breakthrough moments that means that you can create those big changes in your learning efficiency and in your overall ability to learn and I've been now doing this for over 13 years and still every year there's new research that comes out there's new observations

that I'll make in my own Practice that teach me more about what it means to really become a great learner and one thing I really want to emphasize is that if you're new to this Journey on learning to learn or whether you have been following my channel and my work for a long time or maybe you're already even on my program you'll probably going to learn some new things in this video and don't beat yourself up over the fact that you didn't know this stuff even if you're a great learner Don't think that it's an

insult to your capability your or your ability to learn it's not your fault most of the stuff is not taught in any mainstream education now part of that is because there is a lot of research that's very insightful that's only come out recently and hasn't trickled down into the mainstream but even when it is taught I have seen many times that it is taught incorrectly usually even if they are saying it is evidence-based they haven't spent an Extensive amount of time really looking through the research to understand it and I find that a lot of

the common advice and recommendations and talk of learning research is just a rehash of the same things that everyone is saying I've even seen formal recommendations and advice given by universities on how to study and and how to learn that is outdated or inaccurate in fact there's even some research on this that shows that up to 98% of teacher training Curriculums globally have scientifically outdated or inaccurate information and the stuff that does get talked about tends to focus on a very very narrow scope of the research and what that means the danger of that and

why that matters to you is that it means that the way that we are used to thinking about learning and how to learn effectively and the advice that is so accessible to us makes us focus in a very narrow Direction and in my experience when you Only focus in a narrow direction and you are ignoring all these other factors that actually influence your success it's a lot of misguided time and effort and it creates a lot of frustration and demotivation in fact I would actually say that when you focus too narrowly and you're not thinking

about all these other factors that are very rarely talked about I would say that statistically for most people it becomes almost impossible to actually become a Better learner so prepare to learn a few new interesting things in this video that will change your perspective on how to become a better learner and that's a good thing now the second thing you'll realize is that a lot of the research isn't really geared to actually help you be a better learner and that's because the purpose of research isn't always to help the Learner in fact a lot of

it is just exploring how learning work some of it is just research for research's sake Um a lot of it is focused on teachers like how teachers can teach in a way that makes learning more effective and so if you look at the entire body of like learning science a a very small fraction of it is actually about what Learners can do to make their learning more effective I say it's probably what I'd call a new or emerging field and so I think for this video one of the most valuable things that I can actually

do for you is to package that research in a Way that's personally meaningful and relevant for you and I think I'm able to have a very unique position in doing this because you have these researchers that are amazing at research and you have got these Educators that are amazing at educating and you've got Learners that can you know have great achievement but there's virtually no one that actually sits in between them to look at the research and to guide Educators and to guide Learners in in Translating all of that and that's what I've solely focused

on for for years now and so what I'm really excited to share with you is some of these very interesting nuanced observations where if you apply this in one way it can just be a complete GameChanger but if you apply it the wrong way then it could become completely useless and a waste of time so that's what I'm going to try to do in this video and without any further Ado Here is my ultimate guide on remembering everything you read and learn based on the research now the first major question that we can start off

with is just by asking what is the best way to learn something and it's really important to recognize that if that's the primary question we're trying to answer and that's what we're looking at the research for you're not really going to be able to improve that's surprisingly a terrible question to ask If you actually want to become better and the reason is because learning is a massive very complicated process and so asking what's the best way to learn is kind of like saying what's the best tool for building a house it completely misunderstands how to

use methods for different purposes and what it really means to become a proficient learner and so the real question we need to ask ourselves is how does learning and memory even work in the first place if We can understand what learning actually is at a at a cognitive or neurological level and we understand what are the conditions that if we meet that creates the perfect recipe for high quality memory and high quality knowledge then we can actually reverse engineer that we can work backwards and create techniques that we know are going to trigger those things

and so for over the last 100 years at least there's been a lot of research that has come out around how Learning actually works and how memory works and it's a lot to go over all of those things so what I'll do is instead of just talking about a a single study or a single piece of research I'm going to synthesize it for you and tell you what are some of the most key findings that have come up consistently that we generally at this current point in time understand based on all of that research this

is some of the core principles of how learning works and I want to frame It to you in terms of the impact that it actually has so let's say that if this trophy here represents the goal that we're trying to achieve right let's let's say that this is a first in our class for some kind of exam or getting some kind of job promotion whatever it is this is why we're learning this is the prize that we've got our eyes on and in order to do that we have to learn new information and we don't

have to just learn new Information we have to learn new information and have a high level of retention retention meaning how long we're able to hold things in in our memory often we talk about long-term memory here but also not just retention but our ability to use that information in a deep meaningful way there's no point having a really high retention on 300 different facts what's necessary is to actually be able to use that information in a way that's contextually Appropriate so you're not just a fact regurgitation machine like just vomiting out fact after fact

you're able to do what's called evaluation you can judge the importance of information and you can use that to solve problems so this is in one word something that is often called Mastery uh or or levels of knowledge and this terminology comes from uh research like what Bloom's revised taxonomy or solo taxonomies Which are uh strands of research that have tried to categorize different levels of knowledge quality and while there's a little bit of debate in terms of exactly what the different levels are the most important thing is to recognize that there are different levels

of knowledge and towards the bottom of this level of knowledge which is in a way the most useless kind of knowledge is uh very isolated Memorization and then above isolated memorization which is just regurgitation you then have isolated understanding now here's a question to you how many of you have heard the statement memorization is not real learning understanding is real learning but that is not actually true because understanding can still be isolated so the key heror is in this term isolated this is where the problem with this lower level of knowledge or The lower level

of Mastery lies is that anytime information is isolated it exists in The Silo and there are very few times where we need to use that knowledge in a silo so if you imagine trying to solve a complicated problem the reason it's complicated is because it involves multiple Concepts that come together in a certain way and then you have to apply them in a certain sequence you have to get the order correct you have to get the relationship and Interaction between the concepts correct you have to understand that accurately and so none of that is isolated

even something as simple as knowing right the right question like high quality questions to ask this requires you to not be thinking in isolation to understand the right question to ask you have you have to understand where the gaps are in your knowledge and those gaps are usually going to be in terms of how one thing relates to influences uh Or compares to another thing and so anytime we're doing any kind of learning that is very isolated very compartmentalized very siloed where we're just focused on memorizing this thing or understanding this thing being able to

explain just this thing we are already working in a low lower level of knowledge Mastery and this becomes very problematic for some other reasons that I'll share later in the video so what's the alternative to Isolated well the alternative to isolated is something that I often call Integrated and so integrated learning is really where we want to be and integration essentially means all those things that I said before that you're not doing an isolation you are deliberately comparing and contrasting finding similarities and differences trying to explore which concept is more important than another concept how

you apply them in different contexts this is Integrated thinking and what we know is that this is the level of Mastery or level of knowledge we probably need for most reasonably competitive high level goals so we've got the retention and the Mastery we have to have a deep level of understanding that's integrated while also being able to hold on to that in our memory for long enough that we need to use it and it's when we have these two things and we're able to achieve the these two things in a time that is Viable for

the real world pressures uh and constraints that we have that is what we would say creates an efficient effective learner so instead of now asking what's the best method for learning we can actually refine and focus down that question a lot more we can ask the question what creates high levels of retention what promotes high levels of mastery and deep uh understanding of of integrated knowledge and what allows us to do that in a fast Efficient time scale and luckily for us a lot of these things can be achieved by understanding that memory and your

retention and your Mastery and your level of understanding are actually related to each other when you develop a high level of Mastery and a deep understanding of knowledge it also promotes a higher level of retention and this is now coming back to strands of research that uh we often call cognitive architecture or human cognitive Architecture uh it's also related to a strain of research that's called schema Theory and again you'll notice that right now I'm not pulling up a specific study that shows this thing or or another thing and actually that is one of my

kind of pet PE when people often talk about research because that's not really how research works just because one study says something doesn't mean that it's true in order to really understand a topic you have to be Reading dozens if not hundreds of studies about a certain topic that's been conducted across different types of people different types of pressures different types of challenges to understand the full scope of it and I actually believe that one of the major reasons why there is so much misinformation about learning floating around is that people don't go through that

process they they find a single article That says hey doing this is going to be effective and therefore they just kind of promote it widespread without realizing no what that paper said is that for this group of people in this set of conditions with this particular method for this particular subject when tested at this particular time scale it was effective but I do understand some of you really want to read through the primary research so I will actually link to what I think are some of the most Useful high yield articles to get you started

on this learning research Journey if you want I'll leave that in the description but I'm going to keep the discussion centered around things that I think are just more practically meaningful for you where I've synthesized a lot of This research so that you don't have to so coming back to cognitive architecture and schema Theory just as a recap these are two strands of research that explore what creates high Retention and what creates a high level of Mastery and so what the research in these strands showed is that when you have a high level of Mastery

you tend to have a higher level of retention as well and the reason for that is because the brain seems to organize information in networks or schemas and the trend is that anytime new information comes into our brain and is put into a schema a network it's connected with other things there's a pattern that's forming and It's integrated then it tends to be something that's stickier our brain sees this as something that's more relevant it's more worth holding on to and therefore it's less likely to forget and this is the important part the process we

use when we are studying significantly affects the quality of the schema that we're forming which therefore significantly influences our Attention and our Mastery and so this now sort of flies in the face of the belief that an effective learner is someone who's just born with it they're just built different they're just a genius they just have a good memory while I have a bad memory but I can tell you I I don't think I have a good memory you know you ask all my friends I'm honestly uh embarrassingly forgetful for a lot of things uh

you know people ask me hey remember when you went on that Trip somewhere you know and then I'll think hm did we go there are you sure we went there and they'll show me a photo of like me at that place I'll be like oh yeah that that's a thing that happened but when I'm studying and when I'm deliberately applying certain processes I'm able to confidently learn a massive volume of material and have an extremely high retention on that and that's something that I I have confidence to say and so the key concept here is

Understanding that the learning process that you use whenever you're learning anything when you're reading something or you're studying something something whether it's for school or for work or for anything else in life there is a process that's happening there there's a physical process of how you're studying and and what you're doing and then there's a cognitive process of what's going on inside your brain and the effect of using the right process in our Brain is high quality learning now I don't want to oversimplify it sort of natural intelligence or IQ what you're born with genetics

this does have an influence but the important thing is to recognize that you can probably increase your learning ability much more than you think you can and even if your genetic potential whatever that means is 50% less than someone else's most people and this is very true In my experience working with so many so many students most people are only really operating at like 10% of what their potential really is so whether someone's potential is you know 50% versus 70% or 100% it it it's such a small difference compared to actually using more of that

potential and I think probably most people will go their entire lives without ever reaching anywhere close to where their genetic potential for Learning actually is so let me give you a a key takeaway here to summarize some of the things that we've been saying is first of all understanding that the process of learning significantly influences the outcomes of our learning and the outcomes of our learning we've been talking about as having good memory retention and deep levels of knowledge AKA Mastery and what that good effective process and that good effective outcome actually looks like is

when we're Forming these schemas the second thing we talked about is the idea of your potential but what I want to add to this is that when we commit to the process of improving the way that we learn using better mental cognitive processes for learning trying to create those schemas it actually trains and rewires our brain to be better at those things and so in a way our potential for learning can even grow and expand and this is something that's been demonstrated to us through a Strand of research uh investigating something that's known as neuroplasticity

which is in summary your brain's ability to evolve and grow and mold it's called plasticity because it's kind of like a PL plastic if you imagine molding plastic or melting plastic and then reshaping plastic is referring to the ability for our brain to rewire itself and restructure its connections now the research on neuroplasticity is actually very complicated but there are A few things about how neuroplasticity works that become really important if we want to actually train ourselves to become a better learner one of those things is that there is a level of intensity and duration

of pressure that's required to retrain your brain and often when I'm coaching I refer to this as the pressure for neuroplastic change which sounds like a mouthful but it's a very simple concept if you imagine yourself going to the gym to to Get stronger and your lifting weights that weight is applying a resistance it's applying a load to your muscles and it's the fact that your muscle is having to fight against that resistance that it grows and it gets stronger it's a very similar thing with changing the way that our brain thinks if I teach

you a great technique that makes you think in a certain way and that way of thinking is is different and it's it's a good process that leads to a high quality Schema and all of that stuff it tis all the boxes but it's different to what you're used to then we now have this tug of war there is in an existing set of habits of learning that you already have that you have picked up over the years of experience that you have with learning and now I'm telling you to do things differently and so we're

going to have a difference between what you're comfortable with doing and the habits of thinking and processing information Which may or may not be Optimum and then there's this new process that is not yet a habit so if you try this new method for one study session and then 2 hours later you look at it and you think you know what I don't think that really helped me I don't think it improved my retention I don't think it improved my Mastery all I felt was that it was really really difficult the counterintuitive thing here is

to recognize that that doesn't Actually mean that that was not effective it could just be that you need more practice it needs to become something that you're more comfortable with there's time that's necessary for that old Habit to be phased out and for you to gain competence and accuracy and fluency with this new process and and to turn that into a habit and so while I will talk about what are some of the processes and the things that we can be doing and what we should be focusing on To improve our process of learning and

become a better learner what's more important to address out right is that even if you know everything that you need to do every method that's going to be the best method of learning for you you may actually stop yourself from learning and improving on any of these things because we mistake difficulty for ineffectiveness and so this is actually the next major concept and strand of research that I Want to introduce to you which is the idea of misinterpreted effort hypothesis and there are actually many strains of research that relate to this illusion of fluency illusion

of competence Q utilization Frameworks monitoring judgments all of these are terms of if you search for you will find related research but it is all talking really about this General principle here and what this research on the Misinterpreted effort hypothesis uh has shown is that most people even incredibly intelligent people mistake learning that is difficult or different from being ineffective they are misinterpreting the effort they're saying High effort must mean it's not working but actually any learning method that is effective that produces a highquality schema that improves our attention and improves our Mastery and makes

us a better more efficient learner Involves mental effort and this is actually I think ironically a mindblowing concept for a lot of people even though when I explain it it's going to sound very obvious learning happens in the brain which means that if our brain is not actively working it means it's probably not actively learning it is when the brain uses energy and effort and turns that energy and effort into valuable useful meaningful processes and patterns of thinking that take this new Information that you are reading or consuming through any other form and then creates

these schemas it's building that knowledge and that process of building knowledge takes effort always takes effort and always takes energy this is what in the research broadly speaking is often referred to as active learning it is any method of learning that actively involves our brain it's an incredibly broad term and we can make sort of Blanket statements that Active Learning is always more effective than passive learning where our brain is not really doing anything and by the way later in the video I will provide some practical advice and techniques on how you can do that

Active Learning but I can't possibly cover every single technique that there is to know others this video would be 10 hours long but I still want to be able to help you with a little bit more of that detailed information and Give you some additional support so I have created a free Weekly Newsletter that takes 3 to 5 minutes to read but the techniques and the principles in that can save you 3 to 10 hours per week and these emails are basically basically Tred to distill what I think are the major lessons and realizations that

I had in my experience of upgrading the way that I learned and just pack those into these emails as I said it's completely free I'll leave a link in the Description if you'd like to join and we'll get back to our discussion on the misinterpreted effort hypothesis and so far what I've explained may seem very obvious to you but I can tell you for a fact this is not as obvious and intuitive when we are making our own decisions about how to become a better a learner because imagine I gave you a technique and then

you're trying it and while you're using this technique you're just thinking man this is really hard to Use this is really difficult then it is very natural you can imagine that you'd come to that conclusion that I'm not going to try this anymore and actually what's even worse is when we take that to another level where we're saying that even our existing habits of learning take too much time and too much effort and we're going to make it even easier we are going to take our brain out of the equation even more so it takes

less effort we have misinterpreted the effort So much that we believe that the lower the amount of effort the easier learning is the more effective it becomes and if you don't believe me think about this example how many of you have thought about know someone or personally do use AI use a bunch of apps that will do this learning process for you it creates summaries for you it will create uh notes for you it will you know there's even entire there's an entire industry of people just selling notes from Previous year students that did really

well as if the magic is in the notes that they made as opposed to the knowledge they built in their head I've worked with so many people who have these extremely elaborate note taking setups and stacks of different apps that communicate with each other so that they can do as little input and effort as possible to get to a of notes that's like beautifully collated but the question is what's the point there Wasn't any actual learning that happened as part of that process and I think what a lot of people are surprised about is that

for me I went from that person I was the one who had those very elaborate um sheets and note-taking apps and stacks and over the years I've begun to use less and less and less to the point where now it's extremely simple I don't use most apps software automations things like that what I've realized is that the most Important thing to Be an Effective learner is just to be able to do the core thinking process effectively and if you're good at that thinking process you don't need all this other stuff in fact it actually just

becomes a distraction I often compare it to going to the gym to try to get stronger but thinking lifting weights is tiring and too timec consuming so you just get someone to lift it for you and because the weight is moving up and down and You're seeing the weight move up and down you assume that that means you're getting the benefit of it and that sounds ridiculous but that's the way that a lot of us myself included used to make this kind of decision about how to be a better learner and as long as you're

misinterpreting that effort and you're avoiding that active aspect of learning and thinking that effective learning means easy learning you will probably never be able to truly improve And I say that to you not to call you out but so that if that is you and you resonate with that to recognize that this is going to be a major barrier and that this is important for you to focus on so we've discussed the idea of active learning and we've Loosely defined Act of learning as your brain using processes that take effort in order to form these

high quality schemas that produce better memory and better Mastery and that this process of active learning Is active so now let's finally get to that big question so what are the things that I should be doing what are the methods that I should be using that are going to be great Active Learning methods that take all of these boxes well that's a great question in the first place I want to talk talk about is the idea of understanding your learning style now learning styles is this idea that came around in the 7s early 80s is

where it really gained Popularity and it was the idea that we each have a unique learning style often the one that's talked about is varc visual auditory read and write kinesthetic but there are other sort of acronyms that talk about you know different ways of categorizing it even Bloom uh from Bloom's taxonomy which I talk about all the time bloom had his own uh Bloom's learning inventories which is basically his version of learning styles and so learning styles Is one of the most heavily researched things within learning and every month there are articles that will

come out and explore how do we help students figure out their ideal learning style how do we apply different learning styles for teaching how can we uh help someone become B at their ideal learning style and understanding learning styles is an incredibly important piece of research because learning styles is not a real thing and in fact while I said That there's all this research that comes out to this day that says we need to find ways of of of helping people discover their learning styles there's another strand of research that is exploring why do people

keep researching about learning styles because we have now at least two solid Decades of research that has shown that people do not have a learning style and if you hear me say that and intuitively you disagree with that let me explain Why you probably actually do agree with me but there's a special Nuance here people certainly do have learning preferences and they certainly have learning habits but the idea of a learning style suggests that there is something neuroanatomically or genetically that means that a certain type or style of learning is favorable to one person whereas

another sty type is favorable to another and my favorite analogy for Talking about why this is not actually the case is to talk about bananas I remember reading this thing and this is not something I've looked at the original research on but I remember reading this thing that says that a banana is 50% genetically identical to a human being now look I don't know if that's true but I I I think that's something that's being thrown around a lot human beings are diverse and the the human brain is incredibly complicated And what works for one

person in learning certainly doesn't always work for another person in learning that's incredibly important to to recognize that if you just copy someone who's a great learner you're not necessarily going to get the same results because your brain is not the same and you don't operate in the same way you don't have the same habits that the other person has but that's the key is that it's the habits and those habits are things that Were're formed and if we actually you think about the human brain the human brain of every single human is 99.9% exactly

the same and that unique individual variation and personalization while it is important is really an end stage of becoming an efficient learner that's only when you have certain basic good principles down pat and those principles of effective learning are basically universally the same for every single human being I often it to walking The human body is very effective at walking on our legs and so if you have this for whatever reason habit of walking on your hands purely in a handstand there is probably no level of practice or training that you can do that gets

you to the point where your hand walking is going to be better than your foot walking unless you have some kind of disability and the same thing for learning there are certain ways of thinking that the human brain is just Good at it's adapted to be able to do this kind of thinking very effectively while it struggles to do another type of thinking and so when we look at this research we know that most people are visual Learners and they gain a lot of learning from visual media and this is because we know that the

human brain processes visual information tens of thousands of times faster than written information we also know that reading and writing tends to be the second most Common learning preference SL learning habit and a lot of that is because our education system is designed around reading and writing and so while there are individual variances and different habits here's what we can say as a blanket statement what the research tells us is that most people will be able to learn through any style or modality if they're taught how to and they have time to practice and build

that into a Habit and basically everyone will benefit from learning in more than just one style or modality and there is a benefit to learning to be able to do that because again from a practical perspective being restricted to needing to learn through one style or modality is incredibly restrictive and in the research a lot of the the scholars comment on the the negative part of learning styles being that it's not just Saying that it doesn't work it actually creates a fixed mindset and pigeon ho holding of what you are and are not capable of

as a learner and this is the reason I said understanding learning styles was incredibly important because you have to realize that your brain is is capable of a lot yes even even even even your brain you know I I know you're probably sitting there you're shaking your head and you're thinking are you sure about That you don't know my brain but trust me your brain is capable of learning and adapting to a lot of things it is very very good at learning and if you want to become a better learner and you want to make

learning easier for yourself it is always in your best interest to learn how to learn through multiple modalities and styles it makes you more flexible it makes you more adaptable it makes you a more powerful learner and it is simply just about training processes and Building new habits so the main point that I want to make with this learning styles thing is not that you should worry about the learning styles it is that there are not learning styles and we need to shift our perspective from what is the method of learning that is right for

me and what is the box I need to trap myself within and instead think what are my current habits what are my current preferences when does it work for me When does it not work for me and how can I change and optimize those methods and those habits so that it works for me better and more often that's the perspective that you need to have to become a better learner and so I'll summarize that by saying that learning is not something that is fixed but rather we should be thinking about it with a growth mindset

of what can I do how can I grow to meet my learning needs now I want to make something clear I've Just talked about why learning styles don't exist but some of you will know that I do talk about learner types which do exist your learner type unlike your learning style is a reflection of your current processes and habits that you use for Learning and what I've noticed is that people tend to have fairly predictable sets of habits and processes and different combinations and that creates your learner type so why is a learner type important

because when you Understand your learner type it allows you to see where your biggest learning strengths and weaknesses really are sometimes I feel like and this is really the case in my early years of experimenting I spent so much time trial and error on trying to figure out how to learn better without actually realizing what was holding me back in the first place and what I should lean into more it was very confusing and so one of the major goals for me when I started Coaching was I needed to help other people figure that out

for themselves how can they avoid that unnecessary trial and error that I went through and now how I've created it is through a quiz so there is a free quiz that I created that will ask you a series of questions on the most common processes and habits and it's not everything but they are the ones that I think are the most defining of type and it will then actually score you and rate you and then Tell you what your learner type is with a report that says hey this is probably your learning strength lean into

that more and then these are the things that are holding you back you really want to place a lot of priority on that and a lot of the times it may not be what you're expecting which is a good thing to save you time on Improvement given that you've watched this far into the video it probably means that you're pretty serious about learning so for you As a gift uh I'll leave a link to that quiz in the description as well now the unfortunate news is that I basically took this entire piece of research around

learning styles and I just said that's not where you should spend your attention on so then where should you spend your attention on what is the method of learning that you should be focusing on that's going to help you to become a better learner and have better memory and better Mastery and achieve All these great things that I've been telling you you can achieve this entire time well no discussion about learning science or or research or methods of learning would be complete without talking about one of the most well-studied and legitimately incredibly valuable methods and

techniques that you should apply within your learning system which is spacing and if you already know what spacing is or you've heard of the term space repetition or space Retrieval then make sure to pay attention to this one because there's a way of thinking about this that most people that are familiar with this concept completely Miss for those of you that aren't familiar here's the quick recap back in the late 19th century uh 1885 this researcher very early influential researcher called irman ebbing House created this study um and from the study produced something that was

known as the ebbing house forgetting Curve and this is probably one of the most important principles to understand to really have a good foundation of how learning in memory Works The eing house's forgetting curve looks something like this we have time on the x- axis and we have our memory or you could call it retention on the y- AIS and the experiment went something like this he would teach his participants a particular new piece of information and then he would get get them to try to Recall that information after a period of time and what

he found was that after a period of time let's say one day that retention would drop precipitously I mean we you know we' go from uh you know let's say a 90% retention after a few seconds down to 10% retention after one day and importantly and this is where the spacing part comes in he found that when you take that same piece of information and you teach this person again after a period of time let's say a Day later and then you test them on it again that um memory Fades a little bit more slowly

and when you do it again and you space it again that memory Fades even slower still and so this process of memory fading and that retention dropping with time which we are all viscerally familiar with uh this is something that's called knowledge Decay it's a common term you'll see thrown around in the research And knowledge Decay obviously is not a good thing if we basically didn't have knowledge Decay we would just be able to learn something and just remember it completely for forever but everything has a knowledge Decay All Information experiences knowledge Decay it doesn't

matter how well you learn it it doesn't matter what it means to you you give it enough time and everything will experience the knowledge Decay now some of sometimes that decay occurs over Years and years and years and years and years and years and sometimes there are certain things that stick into our memory so strongly that it creates such a core memory that that knowledge Decay happens so slowly that we're not actually going to forget it for the rest of our lives uh but technically based on how the brain works if we were to live

forever we would eventually come to a point where one day we get it to and so the reason eping House is fting curve is so influential and everyone talks about this is because what it shows is that spacing is an effective way of making knowledge Decay slower and based on this we have very popular techniques now for example flashcards using uh popular flash card apps the big ones obviously if you know about it is anky but using flash card apps that use a combination of act recall and spaced retrieval and I'll talk about what Active

recall means uh in a little bit and so therefore if you take new information and you load it up into something like flash cards and you set it on a timer and modern apps like Anki have extremely Advanced spacing algorithms that are substantially more sophisticated than back in the late 1800s when eing house was doing his experiments um and it will it will tell you when you're likely to forget a piece of information and therefore when you Need to just hit it again with another pulse to keep that knowledge Decay uh from getting too Steep

and these are very very effective tools and I used flash cards extremely extensively through medical school um thousands and thousands of flash cards a great proportion of my life on Earth spent making doing flash cards and if you're particularly interested on why this works then you may be interested in learning about the spacing effect uh Which is the branch of research within cognitive load Theory which tries to explain why spacing works but again uh I I don't think that it's particularly important for you to understand why spacing works as much as understanding when spacing doesn't

work so well and what the alternatives are so so if you go down this path which many people do and I went down super deep down this path then you will end up with a vast amount of knowledge on flash cards that You just need to repeat and here is an area where only research recently is coming out to express what the limitations are is that it's very easy to enter into a flash card overwhelm if you think about it like this what we're saying is that for each new piece of information that we learn

let's say that that's this Square new info when we place it into a flash card we are saying that we're utilizing the spacing effect to help consolidate that information and Keep it into our memory we're using that as the vehicle to achieve high levels of retention so that means that to achieve the benefit of the spacing effect we have to do the repetitions you can't just make a flash card and then automatically have that retention higher you have to then do the flash card you have to do the space retrieval and recall it again to

get the benefit of it and so there's time spent in creating this first flash card but then obviously We have to then spend time to do that flash card again when it's due and usually for most pieces of information we have to repeat this process around 3 to seven times for us to reach a level of retention that that's suitable for for our goals you know let's say we're trying to reach a 90% plus retention on this it takes somewhere between three to seven repetitions for that knowledge Decay to be slow enough that we're not

Realistically going to forget it anytime soon and what this means is and here's the danger that for each new one piece of information we're trying to learn we are committing to 3 to seven times of repetition in the future and this is something that I call creating learning debt learning debt is something that I've observed which is when you do something for that prepares you for your learning but it's your future self that has to do something with it to actually Get the benefit of the learning the great example other than flash cards and just

making a ton of flash cards which your future yourself somehow needs to find the time to finish all of them is just writing a lot of copious notes the process of actually writing notes is not something that automatically creates high efficiency learning there is a right way of writing notes that can be very effective and there is a way of writing notes that is actually Detrimental it's like it would have been better to not have written the notes in the first place at all and uh there is a Great Piece of research uh a review

of research done by Jansen who is a prominent uh scientist in the cognitive science space which looks at what seem to be the trends of effective versus not effective note taking when we think about it in terms of what process the brain actually uses and without going into too much depth in it and it is um Quite detailed if you're interested I'll make sure to link that in the description as well um it comes back to what I was talking about before and that methods of notetaking that are active that use our brain to actively

connect information together form a big picture relate ideas and form a schema in a way that's integrated tend to produce better impacts on our retention and better impacts on our level of knowledge and Mastery when we don't write notes in a Way that does all of that when we writing notes very passively and you're just kind of like just typing things out as the lecturer is talking to you or something like that this creates learning debt because in order to extract the benefit of the time you spent on writing those notes you have to spend

time later to review and consolidate those notes and when it comes to flash cards boy does learning debt build up quickly if you're anything Like me for a single lecture a 1- hour lecture I may end up with between 30 to 50 new flash cards which means that sometime in the future I need to do something like 150 flashcards and that is per lecture and I would have three sometimes four lectures a day which means that every single day I'm making something like 150 to up to 200 new flash cards that the future me needs

to cover three to seven times each which means at some point next week I'm going To need to fit in the time for like 500 to 1,000 repetitions of flash cards and next week guess what happens there's a whole new set of flash cards that I'm creating and the the unfortunate thing is this strategy would work perfectly fine if we were able to get to a knowledge Decay that is slow and gradual within that week if within that week I can make these flash cards and do the repetitions and by repeating it a few Times

in that week alone I'm able to just basically lock down that knowledge and I don't really have to worry about repeating them again the week after or the week after that this would actually be a strategy that works fine for retention but unfortunately it doesn't work that way and actually what we find and the research is actually incredibly varied in terms of how long it takes it it depends on what you're learning your prior level of knowledge the type of Flash card that you're making how how frequently you're doing it how complicated the the the

concept itself is it depends on many many many factors but generally speaking it takes weeks of this constant spacing to get to that level that we want to get to which means that you're actually accumulating and stockpiling this debt almost endlessly and so a very common phenomenon that I observe in University students especially very proactive University Students who are really motivated to learn effectively they will spend hours making flash cards within their first week and by the second week of the semester they're already starting to get over won't they're already on the back foot and

so there's actually a key limitation with any method of learning that relies heavily on just the spacing effect alone and that limitation is that it can become unsustainable it just the the numbers do not work out it doesn't Scale but there is actually another limitation with uh this particular strategy that I've mentioned in terms of using flash cards and is that it doesn't address the Mastery aspect of it and this is a double-edged sort because now we are using all of our time on Just for example covering flash cards heavily relying on the spacing effect

which is already unsustainable which means that the time we're spending on this just get gross with time but also even though We're spending all of that time we're going to struggle to reach those higher levels of Mastery why because if we think about the process mentally that is an involved and just answering these flash cards it is usually still very isolated we're testing on our ability to recall discret answers to single questions or regurgitating specific facts and because we're still working in that isolated way we're not training our knowledge and building our knowledge to Be

able to use it in that integrated way so anytime we come across a complex problem or have to apply it in a certain way this method is not well suited to achieve that goal and so the limitation here number two is that that there is a Mastery limit now you might say well Justin can't you just make flash cards that ask on multiple different concepts like instead of saying hey explain this process or Define this term you say how Does this concept compare with this concept now technically you could but there are so many combinations

and per ation of relationships between these different concepts that that just adds to the unsustainable problem all over again and trust me again I made the mistakes for you I experimented a lot with trying to get to a point with having these multi-relational integrated flash cards and it's it's it's either too timec Consuming to even just make them in the first place or like there's so many questions that I come up with that I'm never doing them I'm I'm already struggling getting through just my simple regurge questions as is now here's the kicker this technique

of just loading up flash cards or just writing notes and then just just regurgitating notes and then going and rereading notes later these are very very very common study techniques you probably already Know this and so this begs the question why is it so common well for one a lot of people will encounter this as the first technique that they're using and they're going from a state of complete passive learning to Now using something like flash cards which tests you and invokes this thing that I said before uh which is the active recall which I'll

talk a little bit more about later and so the active part of this active recall is the fact that it's having to use our Brain with we're recalling on that knowledge and we're drawing from our memory to try to answer this question and so that's a more involved process and as it's a more involved process our brain is doing more to build that knowledge so therefore it's often one of the first kind of effective learning strategies that someone will use and they won't really appreciate the limitations of this until a little bit later but the

other thing is because This is a technique which sits on a very small list of techniques that are very easy to use and therefore it's much less likely to trigger what we talked about before which is this misinterpreted effort hypothesis because the proced effort is not very high it doesn't take a lot of effort to build out a bunch of flash cards it doesn't take much effort to scroll through your app and answer them it's just asking you the question all you got to do is answer them and so This technique is actually fairly effective

and it's very easy to use and so what I'm saying is not don't use it this is the devil stop doing it what I'm saying is understand the limitations of this technique so that you don't run into the Trap of being overwhelmed by it I'm a huge fan of using flash cards and any type of active recall space retrieval technique but only when it's aligned with our goals and what we're trying to achieve and if we're finding Issues with the limitations it's it's unsustainable we're feeling overwhelmed or we're spending all of this time doing the

cards but we're still not able to reach that level of Mastery that we want then that indicates that there's a problem there's a gap in the Learning System that we need to fill through another method and that method may be a little bit more effortful than doing flash cards and we have to accept that so what else can we do on top of this to Supplement our flash cards to solve some of this problem achieve that high level of retention and achieve a higher level of Mastery you know what's the what's the golden technique here

here's a hot tip from my years of coaching is that any technique that is based around retrieval which is the act of calling information from your memory and then using that this is as opposed to often what we call encoding which is new information coming in and then putting That into our memory for the first time retrieval is when we are taking that memory out you know encoding is like putting it in the Box retrieval is like taking it out of the box and I'm really oversimplifying it but retrieval when I say retrieval I'm talking

about taking Knowledge from outside of your memory any method that's based around retrieval tends to be easier and more bang for buck if you're a beginner learner than any method that increases That quality of knowledge and the encoding in the first place the difficulty to gain really good high quality encoding skills which means that that knowledge comes into your brain and the knowledge Decay curve instead of you falling off having 90% drop in knowledge after you know by the end of the week if we can change that so that by the end of the week

you have 90% of the knowledge remaining your retention is 90% that actually fundamentally Solves a lot of different problems I mean just imagine if you remembered 90% of everything that you learned after learning it just one time that that is what it means to develop our ability to encode and that's an incredibly powerful and worthwhile thing for most people to pursue but it takes time it is a much more complicated process and in my experience with you know this is what we do with at with With my program at I can study we are teaching

people these retrieval and encoding skills and we always always always start off by teaching the retrieval skills because retrieval skills you can learn them very quickly you can do it correctly very quickly like the learning curve is very very low and it's a effective technique that produces noticeable short-term changes to your uh retention and your knowledge Mastery and it's something that provides That kind of like immediate Improvement and so if you're just starting out and thinking well where do I start with improving the way that I'm learning I would say start with your retrieval techniques

think about your retrieval techniques and I'm going to give you a few that you know hit hit the um right cognitive principles so that you can start with those ones and once you're pretty comfortable with reasonable retrieval techniques then you can start Working on improving your encoding strategies and as you improve your encoding strategies then life kind of just gets easier overall because it's just less stuff that you're forgetting that's when you're really going to start feeling like that pressure is lifting off uh and that you're you're you know reaching a level of performance and

learning efficiency that just feels completely unreal but that Improvement takes weeks slash months whereas getting The benefit from retrieval is something that can take hours days a couple weeks so let's talk a little bit about what are some of the retrieval strategies that are active that help us to form a good schema and therefore will help us with producing High retention and high Mastery now there are really many techniques that can work and it's more useful to think about it as the criteria that if this Technique hits it it's probably going to be effective and

I'll give you some examples of techniques that just hit it off the bat as well the first thing is that we want it to be helping us create a schema so what does that mean again creating a schema means that it's testing our knowledge in a way that is relatively integrated number two we wanted to use active recall so as promised what is active recall active recall is really anytime You are retrieving Knowledge from your memory and often the word that I've already described retrieval and active recall mean the same thing now in the research

strictly there are some Nuance differences depending on how it's being used in context but anytime you're taking information from your memory can be considered active recall but what's important is to define the different types of active recoil because not all forms of active recall are actually Effective there are three commonly talked about forms of active recall and some people argue that these are not all active but it really depends on what their definition of active recall is and I haven't seen anyone come to a consensus on it but the three different methods uh that are

often talked about are free recall cued recall and then recognition free recall is when you're retrieving knowledge without any kind of Prompt for example if you just memorize the list of 10 words and then you try to recall that list of 10 words that's free recall cued recall is when there's a prompt so for example you memorize a list of 10 words and then there's a question what is the list of 10 words or what is the fourth word on that list it's a q recognition or recognition based recall is when you're simply recognizing it

so let's say that there's a list of 10 things we then show you a list of the 10 things and then you make a decision ah yeah yes I leared that I recognize that for most learning uh for most instances except for a few rare exceptions recognition-based recall is not very useful but it's also dangerously common and a very very common example of people using recognition based recall and I distinctly remember doing this not realizing how detrimental it was for my Study hours of time that I wasted if I if I'd only known this when

I was in high school I remember doing loads and loads of practice exams and I couldn't be bothered writing out the answers to the exams and so what I would do is initially I would just answer it in my head and then check the answers and eventually because I just wanted to get through more practice questions I went through reading the question maybe thinking about it for Like 3 4 seconds to just generally feel whether I'd be able to answer it and then I check the answer and then see if it made sense to me

and if it made sense to me I'd be like oh yeah yep I know that and that is dangerous SL useless because our ability to recognize something is extremely high compared to our ability to recall and generate that Knowledge from memory it's kind of like if you were to take a a a coin like a like a Money a monetary coin of whatever country you're living in you've probably seen that coin you know hundreds of times and if I showed you that coin you'd look at it and you'd say yeah I that that's a coin

like that's that's my country's coin if I showed you a different country's coin you'd look at it and be like hm yeah that's not my country's coin you know there's some subtle differences that I'm recognizing but for most people if I said to draw That coin from memory I doubt there are many people who would be able to accurately draw it and this is the thing is that when you are testing yourself and you're using recognition based on the answer or an answer sheet and your assessment of whether you know that or not is whether

you understand the answer and it makes sense to you then you're falling into this recognition trap just because you recognize and the answer makes sense to you does not in any way Mean you would be able to generate that answer without having had the answer provided to you so recognition is a huge trap but what about free recall or cued recall free recall and cued recall cued recall to a lesser extent are both much more effective methods the reason that cued recall can be dangerous sometimes is when we expose ourselves to the Q too much

and too frequently and so we get this I often talk about it as like a q saturation and that we're now not Actually retrieving the knowledge in a contextually appropriate way we're just testing our ability to recognize the Q and this what happened to me uh when I was doing heavy heavy flash cards and there are these flash cards that I would have repeated like 10 times across the course of you know let's say a couple of months and I can read the first three or four words of that flash card question and I can

tell you what the answer is and so you got to ask yourself if I'm Not even fully reading the question sometimes sometimes I'm reading just L like literally the words that I'm reading is like tell me what the and I'm like oh yeah tell me what the I know which flash cut that is because I only have one flash cut that's worded in that specific way that's no longer testing your ability to retrieve that knowledge in any way that's meaningful anymore and so what we're doing is we're falling into this illusion and so I would

sit These tests and there would be this question that asks about that exact same fact or the exact same concept and it just doesn't come to me I get a blank or I only think about it after the exam or I know know that I've studied it but I just cannot summon that knowledge and use it in the way that I need to and it's incredibly frustrating experience which you probably felt before that happens when we rely a little bit too much on the cues and so I often say that If you're using um a

method of queued recall you should always be switching up those cues always be switching up those prompts so that you're authentically testing your knowledge now the benefit of free recall that often isn't there in cued recall is that free recall allows you to do more elaborate types of recall you're able to use your knowledge in a more integrated way because the scope of it is much wider for example a great example of a free Recall active recall strategy that creates an integrated schema is teaching to a 10-year-old you know often uh people call this the

Fineman method even though Fineman technically I I'm pretty sure fan didn't actually describe this method but anyway everyone understands there a fan method which is taking a topic and then being able to teach it to a 10-year-old and the reason that this works is because when you teach a topic You're having to freely recall it there isn't it's not a set structure that's given to you you have to create that structure and that means you have to compare and contrast ideas and concepts with each other and that helps promote that schema formation you're making a

judgment at an integrated level but also by adding the two at 10-year-old you're having to simplify that information so you're having to crit evaluate it even more you're having to make a judgment About what is or is not important this is the difference between something like teaching to a 10-year-old versus a brain dump a brain dump is simply just tell me everything that you know about this topic it's a free recall exercise and it can be very effective however it doesn't Force us to evaluate that knowledge to a deeper extent it's very possible to do

a isolated brain dump just here's every single fact that I can think of just laid out there whereas when we're Teaching and especially teaching in a simplified way we have to piece it together we have to create a big picture we have to think about analogies we have to think about the order in which we're going to introduce ideas to see what makes sense and to know what makes sense we having to make these decisions about what is more important than another how does this concept relate to this later concept and therefore this becomes a

really effective strategy to use if You're not already using it now the final thing about picking a retrieval strategy is I often say that you need to practice how you play so imagine you are using a teaching strategy teaching it to a 10-year-old that's great you're going to be able to reinforce your knowledge your knowledge is going to get deeper your attention is going to get stronger however let's say that the way you need to use this knowledge in your exam or at work the Way you need to apply it is through coding a certain

app if that's the way you need to use the knowledge then teaching about how you would code the app still creates a gap between the level of knowledge you need to get to and the level of knowledge you're testing and reinforcing at and this is because there is a differentiation of knowledge which often is differentiated as procedural knowledge versus Declarative knowledge versus conditional knowledge and in simple terms this means that not only do we need to know what which is the declarative we also need to know how to apply it or use it and to

to execute on it which is the procedural and we need to know when and why which is the conditional knowledge so if we use coding because coding is a great example there is a declarative knowledge component which is understanding the Language learning about the language learning about the syntax understanding how to build certain functions for what purpose and how those different functions come together if you don't have this declarative knowledge you're going to struggle to create a strategy create a plan for an app that you want to build if you don't have the procedural knowledge

though the procedural knowledge is your ability to actually create that bug free code and Build the app you may know the approach you may know how it all comes together but when it comes to actually writing the code you can't quite remember exactly how it's meant to fit together and your you know your code is full of errors and all sorts of things the procedural knowledge also has to be there to supplement the declarative knowledge and the conditional knowledge is about having almost you can think of it as almost wisdom knowing that there Are many

different types of approaches and ways that you can tackle something but when and why one approach or one feature or one uh function is more appropriate than another another example would be in mathematics or physics there is a declarative component which often in mathematics is very very very underemphasized and most people do not learn the declarative part very well which tells you why the equations and Different concepts that you learning about in math do what they do how to use those equations and how to transform your problem into something that you can actually solve this

means that when you look at a math problem you know how to approach it and what sequence you need to use to unpack it and get to a solution the procedural part is being able to actually solve the equations accurately and so you can see that if You don't have the declarative and the procedural you're not going to be able to actually use the knowledge in the way that you need to and so what we need to do is we need to think about how will I need to use my knowledge and therefore how can

I make sure that I'm practicing how I play if I know I need to code an app I should be trying to code apps as part of my retrieval practice strategies if I know I need to solve math problems I should be solving problems at varying Levels of complexity to match the type of challenge that I know I'm going to face if I'm learning a language same thing if I'm playing an instrument whatever it is that you're learning you should be matching the practice with how you play a really common area where I see people

almost never do this is when it comes to writing essays they think about writing essays as almost entirely this procedural activity and all they do is just practice just writing things Down without actually thinking about how they're organizing their ideas and their themes and stringing together a narrative which is actually the thing that makes the essay and the contents of it good it doesn't matter how good the procedural part is it's still going to not read very well and make a lot of sense and it's going to lack a lot of that depth if you

don't have the declarative knowledge to back it up and in almost everything you will ever learn There is usually a combination for most procedurally heavy subjects there is often a declarative component and that declarative component is often a high yield area that if you were to focus on will probably make more of a difference to your results and your performance than the procedural part so here's a couple of different retrieval strategies and let's see how they stack up to this criteria let's say that we are doing practice papers practice exams great so Is it a

good technique does it help us create an integrated schema of knowledge well it depends on the questions that we're being asked so that actually depends you can look at the types of questions you're asking and make that assessment for yourself especially if you're creating questions using something like AI which is a great strategy to use if you don't have just like a bunch of practice material available to you make sure that you're Prompting it to create questions for you that are integrator that are testing you at higher levels a great prompt that you can just

use is to say create questions for me along the spectrum of Bloom's taxonomy levels 2 to 5 and it will know what that means what about the next criteria active recall especially making it free or diverse cued recall again it depends it depends on how we're answering it if you're answering it like how I was answering practice questions Back in high school where I'm just checking the answer straight away then that's a lot less effective or if you're really trying to do it in test conditions making sure that you're really generating and testing your ability

to retrieve that knowledge down to the detail and really forcing yourself to create that knowledge and actually write it down or speak it then yes that's going to be a lot better and the third criteria does it help you to Practice how you play so again if those questions are geared in a way that's very similar to how you need to use that knowledge in the actual exam then yes that's fine if you're learning it for work or something that's not an examination again think how will I need to use this knowledge and therefore what

type of tests can I give myself so practice questions is it a good strategy to use it depends it can be great but it Can also be a surprising waste of time okay now let's look at a another type of retrieval strategy which is rereading or rewriting notes or maybe let's take it a step higher and say that we're not just rewriting them but we're trying to summarize those notes as well as we rewrite them is it helping us form an integrated schema not much it's the summarization aspect of it probably helps us to think

about it at a big picture level a little Bit more we are still operating in a relatively isolated way unless your summary is like radically different from the isolated version of that information like what you're creating is not even a summary it's almost just like a synthesized uh review of the topic that you have sort of like pieced together and like completely rearranged which most people are not doing then most of the time creating summary notes is not going to be overtly very effective Compared to what else you could be spending that time doing what

about active recall so again it depends are you creating the summary notes based on your memory or are you just looking at your existing notes and just summarizing it and then just writing it down straight away so again depending on whether it's purely from your memory depending on how open you are with with restructuring and summarizing it um and versus how just paragraph by paragraph You're going through it which is much more isolated the level of Effectiveness here really varies but again most of the time it's not going to be extreme High levels of free

recall that's allowing you to do lots of elaboration and a lot of the time you're referring to your notes that's right next to you as well so you're not even really doing a lot of active recall from your memory and is it helping you practice how you play unless the way that you need to use the Information is to take existing information and to just provide a summary of it not really so a technique like summary notes notes is I would give that overall probably not worth the time compared to the Alternatives now if you've

been using sumary nodes and you're saying Justin I disagree with you wholeheartedly I'm I'm ready to to start a war with you based on that statement summary War summary notes are amazing For me well then here's what I'm saying is that if you think summary notes are great for you then using some of these other strategies that do hit all of these boxes then you're going to have your mind mind blown because the benefit you're feeling from the summary notes probably just comes from those brief Parts where it is helping you to have a more

integrated schema where you are using slightly more active recall or free recall or where it does happen to Align a little bit more with practicing how you play but if you create a technique and modify that so that it is fully aligned with these criteria it's going to be even more effective and so again what I'm saying is not that if you're doing summary notes you know you should be banished to um you know inefficiency prison uh but it's just to call out that there are things that you can always optimize about techniques and if

a technique is working for you it's Important to understand why it's working for you and how you can make it better and which parts of the techniques that you're using are probably holding you back and wasting time which you can remove and it's this process of constant iteration evaluation and back and forth that produces a effective learner so we've talked about a lot of stuff let's quickly recap we've talked about the fact that in order to achieve our goals we need to have a high retention and we Need to have a high level of Mastery

what that means is that we need to form integrated schemas of knowledge that process to form integrated schema of knowledge this is what allows us to achieve that high level of retention and high level of Mastery we've talked about the fact that it's possible for us to to improve our ability to do this type of thinking and to learn more effectively because of neuroplasticity and that when we make That a new habit it becomes faster and by the way that's the thing that helps us with the time being able to do those processes faster as

they become habits but in order to turn those into habits it requires a level of pressure that has to be sustained at a level of duration and intensity to create that change in our brain and a lot of the time most Learners misinterpret that pressure of effective learning or of new habits forming with ineffective and they say Because it's difficult it's hard to use I'm not used to it therefore it's not working for me and then they will leave the improvements at the door and they won't pursue down that path to really get the benefit

of it we then talked about what is the right way to learn what are the processes that when we use create that schema we talked about Active Learning being that process of using our brain and it has to be involved in that process and anything That creates the passive learning is not going to help us and that our ability to learn is not fixed rather it is something that we can train and that we can grow across multiple different modalities and it's about evaluating and assessing that that produces a better learner and then we focus

specifically on the idea of retrieval practice as one strategy that is going to be a very useful starting point for you to improve your learning abilities and remember More of what you read and learn specifically we talked about the ideas of making sure that the retrieval strategy we use has a level of spacing in it but we're also creating integrated schemas we're using active recall and we're practicing how you play I know that this will be a comment what is the best spacing interval a rule of thumb that I generally say is review everything you

learn After one day and then one week and then one month but this varies a lot depending on your time management and and what else you've go got going on like if you wanted to review it 3 hours later instead of a whole day later I'd say yeah okay that's that that's fine if instead of one week later you said two weeks later I'd say okay yeah that that can work and in instead of one month you said okay what about every 3 weeks or what about every six weeks I'd say yeah That's probably fine

as well I mean it's really just about having the consistency of the spacing uh more than just really getting that spacing algorithm super super tight the research does not clearly show that that makes that big of a difference uh what makes vastly more of a difference is what you're doing during those spacing sessions um and making sure that that retrieval strategy that you're using abides by these Principles so if you have a method of study right now that has the spacing and it abides by these principles of a schema active recoil and practicing how you

play then what else would be left for you well as I mentioned before there is the other side of the coin which is how we do our encoding now I'm not going to talk at length about the research on how to do effective encoding uh as a quick reminder encoding refers to the process we use when we First learn information and this heavily affects our knowledge Decay when we encode information very effectively to begin with it means that we forget less there's less stuff we need to repeat and retrieve on in the first place and

ultimately it makes our lives easier because we just retain more naturally but the reason even though this is really incredibly powerful and I think this is one of the most impactful things that um we we teach in in my program at I can study the reason I'm not going into this one in in a lot of depth is because the research on what is or is not effective en coding is extremely complicated and so what I'm going to leave you with is a summary of the principles that we know you can safely say if you're

trying to do this with your encoding it's going to be a it's going to be a good bit so here's the first thing is number one and this is probably the most unifying Principle that you need to make make sure that you're hitting is always relate information to the big picture ask yourself what is the purpose of learning this where does this fit in the big picture of this topic it fits somewhere where does it fit in relation to everything else that I'm learning number two try to simplify what you learn and these two things

work together you learn new information at the time that you learn That information aim to simplify it to the point where you can simply see how it fits into a simple big picture look for the simpler Concepts look for the simpler ideas build that big picture in the simplest way in the fastest way first what this does is that increases that overall Network the overall schema this is referred to as scaffolding it's this idea that the end goal of the level of detail that you may want to have is is very very high but Right

now we need to scaffold our way up to that level of detail we're not ready to learn every single detail and for that to stick into our brain it's not realistic because our brain is going to forget it if we go all the way back to what we talked about before human cognitive architecture and this idea of schema Theory we know that the brain is very efficient at learning but it is way more efficient at forgetting and as soon as you take information that's Irrelevant you're fighting a losing battle you're never going to beat your

brain forgetting information if it doesn't think it's relevant because learning is an incredibly energy consuming thing for your brain's perspective it's trying to conserve energy it's trying to keep you alive it doesn't care about your exam it cares about keeping you alive so it's not going to hold on to information if it's not relevant and so therefore what we Need to do is we need to say hey this is relevant and unfortunately we can't just say this is going to come up in my exam please remember it I need to know it it's relevant that

doesn't work unfortunately otherwise learning will be very very easy in order for our brain to be convinced that this new piece of information is relevant it needs to fit somewhere it needs to see that it's connected to something else it needs to see that this information has an Influence on other pieces of information and that means that when we are studying we need to take the time and the effort to deliberately look for those connections to build that to understand that big picture and once we have a simple understanding then we can number three learn

in layers we add on another layer on top of the scaffold of extra detail and then we see how that detail fits into the big picture and then we add on on another layer of extra detail And again see how that fits into the big picture something like mind maps which you those of you have been following me for while know that I teach uh very extensively mind maps are a great tool for doing this but my Ms are a absolutely useless tool if you're not using them in this way if you're trying to just

study you know writing notes in just like a passive way if your brain is not really actively involved in the process of figuring out the big picture Simplifying it creating relationships forming a schema adding on layers if that's not what your brain is trying to do then it doesn't matter what your hand is doing whether it's creating a my map or typing out notes it's all going to be much less effective and this is the part where teaching about an encoding strategy isn't as romantic as easy sometimes as a retrieval strategy because I can't just

say hey teach it to a 10-year-old that's a technique that You can use because the majority of what produces the benefit of proper encoding is actually just how you think you can use an extremely rudimentary technique like literally just reading a book and if you think in this way as you reading the quality of your knowledge will be incomparable to someone that's reading it passively so you can take literally any technique any study technique that exists and if you think about it in this way it becomes more efficient and it Becomes more effective the knowledge

quality is much higher and this is the reason why you can't just copy successful students because a lot of successful students they are doing this encoding process at a much higher level because of their uh their existing habits of learning and again some of it is genetic as well we call this deep processing and when this deep processing is is is already at a high level you can use any technique and you can do very Very well because your brain is just building that knowledge effectively and you don't need necessarily all these other techniques now

if you have great de processing and then you use a technique that facilitates this all of this great encoding and Fa facilitates those natural processes then you're going to be unstoppable but most top Achievers just out there in the wild they don't have great techniques they actually have Very mediocre techniques but they've got excellent deep processing and they're able to do this encoding very very well but again you can learn it you can learn it and you can train yourself to do it and when you train yourself to do that you can achieve those results

that usually only those Geniuses uh are able to achieve but it does take time and actually this is the final point that I want to talk about which is how long does it take if you're just starting This journey to get to a point where you're able to do all of this stuff you have gr encoding you've trained and reprogrammed your brain on how to think about things you have a great Learning System with good retrieval practices that's in there how long can you expect it will take for you to basically Master this the first

question is that if you want to master this it's going to take you several years even with constant diligent effort but the good news is That you don't need to master this so this is where there's not a whole lot of research the idea of actually training these skills and Learners is extremely extremely novel um and training it at this like systematically in the way that it you know I've kind of talked about it now where it's a IC picture uh the program that I run I can study is the first program to ever try

to actually do That at a cognitive level and so what I'll talk about now is a little bit of the data that I've observed to give you an expectation about how long some of these things might take and kind of the interesting things about what seems to make the biggest difference in people that are able to learn and retrain themselves very quickly versus people that take like years and barely improve at all I would probably generally say that if you're not actively pursuing Improving your learning skills you're not actively trying to retrain yourself on how

you're thinking it's not a priority for you if it's just something that you sort of dabble with here and there you may never really see a noticeable Improvement um or the Improvement that you'll see is fairly small and will take you like potentially decades in fact that's actually really common is that a lot of the Learners that we come that come into the program That have that are like 40 50 60 years old they will say that they a lot of the things that they figured out across the last 30 years of them trying to

figure out how to learn these are things that we teach them in like the first five lessons and that's because just that rate of neuroplastic change that pressure if you're not maintaining that if it's not at a certain level and you're not really really actively monitoring it the just the rate that you Grow at is so so so so slow and so that's the first thing is that most people never really learn how to remember more of what they read or learn because they never give themselves the opportunity opportunity to and they're not in the

in that Journey for long enough so let's assume that you are then how long does it take we normally see that after the first month there are noticeable changes in your ability to remember and have that retention or have That depth of Mastery or at least just understanding what's holding you back from that and so even if your retention and Mastery hasn't already improved you know why it hasn't improved and you're actually taking steps to like systematically unlock that we'd normally expect that within about the first 3 to five weeks for for the vast majority

of students and if that's not the case it probably means that there's uh an issue somewhere and I'm going to talk about What the biggest issue is in just a moment getting to a point where you have increase your learning efficiency and your retention and your Mastery is about 30 to 50% higher than it was before and the time it takes for you to reach that um level is about 30 to 50% less than it used to be we' normally expect that that can happen within the first 1 to 3 months the biggest thing that

makes a difference to how quickly someone improves the range is massive someone That improves by let's say 30% and it takes them one month to get there versus another person who learns the same methods it could realistically take them 3 years to achieve the exact same level of result and without data from over 10,000 Learners that we've evaluated and done surveys and and and um assessments on what that data has shown is that the variable that seems to make the biggest difference on how quickly someone improves is actually how willing they Are to make mistakes

and what we found is that the students who go into this wanting to just learn the best technique learn it in a single go and basically this misinterpreted effort thing that I talked about they are not appreciating the fact that this is a skill that takes trial and error to learn they put off making these mistakes and they they try it like once a week whereas the people that are just like I'm committed to just Learning this and figuring it out and learning from those mistakes they're making a mistake every 1 or two hours they're

just like trying it seeing it trying it seeing it and so they're learning like 10 20 times faster and developing that skill 10 to 20 times faster than the people that are really resistant to trying it and and actually giving it a go and making those mistakes that's the reason why deliberately teaching Frameworks for how to change That mindset became an integral part of the early part of our program um because we found that that was actually like it wasn't the learning skills it wasn't a time management it wasn't task management it wasn't the prioritization

like it wasn't any of that it was just the fact that people didn't understand how to turn mistakes into learning and therefore have the confidence to be able to make the mistake because they know that that's going to help them improve Their result so if that's you and you're thinking yeah that's the thing that's probably going to hold me back like you don't need to wait for anything else like I don't need to tell it to you again if you know that something that you need to work on take the stuff that you've learned from

this video watch some of my other videos join the program PR if you like take the techniques give them a go make some mistakes learn from those mistakes and then accelerate your Growth that way so that's the overall guide and even though I went through a lot of stuff this is only like honestly it's like less than 1% of the scope of the research there are so many other things that are important to to talk about and to understand about learning it's a very complicated process like I mention and I've spent the last 13 years

going through like volumes of research papers trying to figure this out and turn it into something actionable for You so for those of you that are interested in diving a little bit deeper into the research I'll leave the links to the articles that I think are really great starting points for you and if there's anything that I talked about here or anything that you know about or seen in the research that you want me to talk about in more depth let me know in the comments happy to do that in another video and if you

are focused on just trying to become a bit Lear And you want to not necessarily read through research for days and try to figure this out and you want to just learn the package and the system that I already figured out just present it to you in a guided program for you to follow as I mentioned iin study.com that's the best place to learn it it's where I spend a lot of my time like outside of this YouTube thing just helping students answering the questions doing demonstrations designing programs And lessons if you want to join

the program is ii.com I'll leave a link in the description as well thank you so much for listening I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and I'll see you in the next one