How To Train Yourself To Be A Genius (in 5 Stages)

I've been a learning coach for over a decade and I've realized there are five levels of Learners starting from beginner through to genius and at each level of learner you face a different type of problem and it's only when you overcome these problems do you progress to the next level so today I'll show you how you can identify which level of learner you are and I'll teach you how you can progress to become a level five learner we'll start with level one which is the beginner when you're a beginner you're really not studying at all

and so you're going to get poor results or inconsistent results at least and it's not going to be sustainable when things get tough and so the problem you have as a beginner I simply call chaos just completely not in control and the way that you go from level one to level two is very simple all you need to do is just study more the answer is spend more time and just by going from studying 1 hour to 5 hours you already become a level two learner this part is very simple at level two you are

what I'd call a novice learner you know you're at level two when you are putting in a reasonable amount of effort and you're doing better than doing nothing the learning strategies people commonly use in this level are writing lots of notes and lots of repetition based learning so for example rereading notes rewriting notes rewatching or Rel listening to lectures and the main strategy the main solution for overcoming problem problems or difficulties achieving a more difficult goal and learning is just spending more time when the going gets tough if your main solution is to just study

more then you're probably in this level which means you'll probably also have the problems of level two Learners which is leaking and what we're talking about here is a leaking memory at level two you're doing lots of studying which means you're taking lots of information in however our brain and our memory is very good and very efficient at removing any knowledge that it thinks it doesn't need to hold on to if it's not relevant or connected enough so what you will feel is a very high rate of what's known in the research as knowledge Decay

which is just forgetting things which the research suggests for an average learner and the average learner is at level two after about a week they would forget around 50 to 70% of what they studied the week before now your rate of knowledge Decay AKA how fast you forget things depends a lot of different factors but one of the most important factors is how you actually process and organize that information in the first place when you first learned it now just studying more hours doesn't mean you actually process and organize that information any better it just

means you have more poorly organized stuff so it's just more things you will forget but usually there are certain subjects or certain Concepts that for whatever reason we're able to connect to a little bit more easily sometimes we have more knowledge about it sometimes we can create an analogy out of it that other people just couldn't see sometimes it's just taught to us a little bit more easily and so another problem that we' find is that our results are very inconsistent and variable we can study a lot for one subject and then do poorly and

then study even less for another one but actually do better for some reason and so our results will fluctuate a lot depending on just how natural it feels if you have a high studying workload at level to You'll also have the problem of feeling quite overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that you need to manage you've got lots of information coming in you have to remember a lot of it you realize you're forgetting a lot of it and so there's this constant burden of trying to relearn the things that you've forgotten over time this also

increases the risk of burning out just from that high volume and it also increases the risk of anxiety uh stress and frustration due to those inconsistent results and so while just studying more and spending more time was the thing that got you from level one to level two before when things were easier that's not going to be the thing that gets you from level two to level three the strategy that gets us to level three is going to be smart repetition and we're essentially talking about using strategies like active recall and space repetition for those

of you that aren't familiar active recall simply just means testing Yourself by recalling things from your memory from the things that you've learned before and then space repetition just means that you repeat and review the material that you have previously learned on some kind of regular interval so if you learned something on a Monday then you may review it again on a Wednesday and then on a Saturday and then on a Sunday and probably the most common and actually pretty effective strategy that ticks the boxes of active recall and space repetition are to use flash

cards and so once we're doing the smart repetition we are in level three intermediate at this level you are actually more active and thoughtful about the learning strategy you're using you're not just about putting in more time and just doing more and more you're thinking about using a strategy that's meant to be more effective for the time that you're putting in and you're more targeted you realize you had an issue with leaking memory so you're implementing a strategy to prevent the leaking as a result you'll often find that as you do this repetition your retention

and your memory also improves at this level as an intermediate level learner you can usually get through a lot of your common learning challenges uh you can get through most high school curriculum you can go through University uh and unless you're really aiming for those top marks you may not really notice uh much of an issue here it will certainly be better than what you were doing before and if your natural processing ability is also very high you can also end up getting quite good results just at this level with nothing else now on a

day-to-day basis at this level your studying usually consists of of still writing quite a lot of notes but instead of just doing Bland repetition of rereading or rewriting we're doing a lot of that repetition through flash cards utilizing active recoil so it's a more effective form of repetition but for many of you uh the average person who doesn't have very very high depressing skills or for even if you do have great de processing skills at some point in your life when it does become challenging enough the workload is high enough and it's difficult enough you

will run into these problems and the problems at level three are what I call Plateau when you plateau you will realize the limits of just repetition based learning in general and there's usually two main things that I observe in the students that I coach that reach this Plateau the first is that they are spending a lot of time on their flash cards and doing the repetition they're entering into what I call space repetition overload it's to the point where there are so many things that they need to do their repetition on and they've got such

a big backlog and an existing workload of stuff that they're not even able to get through all their space repetition in the first place so they're falling behind on their repetition schedule I've often heard people talk about it like a endless grind or like a hamster wheel of flash cards and I can relate to that feeling intimately well because that was my entire life for my first year of University which is why I also know that staying in that situation facing these problems means that you're still at a very high risk of burning out which

is indeed what happened to me and the worst part about the plateau is that it's almost impossible to really hit the highest levels of knowledge depth and Mastery using these strategies so it means even if you do more flash cards and even if you spend more time studying those tricky curveball questions the real complex problems to try to solve uh being able to engage in those really deep meaningful discussions or write like those really amazing essays that still is Out Of Reach and that's because to be able to do that level you actually have to

think in a different way to how we're thinking about learning up until this point and so to graduate and solve these Plateau problems it's not about spending more time or doing more repetition we have to now Focus Fus on quality as I said before one of the most important factors for how leaky your memory is is how well we process and organize that information in the first place otherwise your brain is going to very efficiently remove it so quality is about how well we do that processing and organizing we have so far said that hey

we've got a leaky bucket but with smart repetition as long as I can have a cup underneath it to catch the water and then fill the bucket back up we can keep that bucket relatively topped up the problems with plateau and that overload that's basically us no longer being able to keep up with how much water is leaking out so this is the point at which we start plugging those leaks and when we focus on quality there's actually two ways that we can do this the first way is that we improve the quality of the

encoding process encoding is a technical term for taking new knowledge and then putting it into our long-term memory when we do high quality encoding it helps us to keep that knowledge in our brain for longer it's easier to retain it and the process that we use to organize it that results in a better memory also drives a deeper level of understanding which means those curveball questions those complex problems that beautiful essay that we really struggled to reach we can now reach that level because we're starting to think at that level so the strategies involved with

improving your coding these are going to be things like exploring higher order thinking and higher order learning that I constantly talk about in all my other videos it probably means changing up your note taking to use something that's a little bit more relational one of the high yield strategies you can add at this point is also to start doing some basic pre-study to familiarize yourself with complex Concepts before doing a deep study session or before attending a lecture and that helps to give your brain a bit of a head start in organizing and processing this

comp licated concept but the second part of quality is that we can also improve the quality of our spaced repetition and active recoil sessions so instead of just doing more flash cards of the same flash cards and just doing more and more of those we can actually improve the quality of the type of repetition we're doing to graduate from level three and get to level four you should start using some kind of active flash card management method where you're actively pruning the flash cards that you don't need so you're not just keeping this huge backlog

and you're also changing your flash cards as they get too easy to make sure you're consistently testing yourself at the right level if you're already great at recalling some of these basic facts then start merging some of those together to test yourself in a more complex way how do these two facts relate to each other try to use them for some basic problem solving you should also start doing more diverse types of testing in the first place this means applying your knowledge in more complex ways or in ways that you feel like you may be

assessed doing practice questions making your own practice questions swapping practice questions that you made within your friend group uh just applying your knowledge and just like executing it in the real world these are all ways of testing your knowledge actively recalling it from your memory finding gaps that you can go in and review in a more targeted way and not only does this help by giving you that repetition but it also helps you to re-encode that information into your memory more strongly than it initially was encoded so even if you didn't encode it very well

the first time around and so your memory is very leaky it gives yourself this opportunity to look at the concepts again for a second time and ask yourself how could I organize this information to make it more meaningful how can I apply this in the real world and give this information more context and so by doing these things not only does it improve the quality of our encoding which means that we have less to forget but it also means that when we do our repetition it's more effective and once you're able to do this as

part of your everyday Learning System day in day out you have officially become a level four learner which we'll simply just call Advanced now as an advanced learner the main thing is that you're able to reach those higher levels of Mastery that were very difficult to reach in the lower levels in the lower levels sure you may be able to have good retention on facts but those trickier applications the deeper knowledge applications they were always Out Of Reach as an advanced learner because you are actively thinking in a more advanced way in a more connected

way and you're actively testing yourself at a higher level you are able to reach that level now you'll also notice that your memory is just generally better and you just don't need as much rep repetition anymore when you do the repetition it's also a completely different experience in the lower levels repetition was just about getting through as much content and work as possible hoping you're going to remember all of this and hoping there aren't any gaps anywhere as an advanced learner when you do the repetition you're much more targeted you're able to find gaps in

your knowledge very quickly and then fill them in the right way at this point you're probably doing a moderate amount of note taking and you're doing much more th compared to writing this indicates the important transition of an advanced Learner in that they care more about how they are thinking about the information than what they are writing about the information your notes are probably a little more organized but they organize nonlinearly because you've realized that using nonlinear note taking like mind mapping is much more effective at showing complex relationships which is where the value of

learning really lies you are testing yourself very strategically at a variety of different complexities and levels and when you use the flash cards you are using them very strategically as well just to mop up these lower level very specific details that don't fit anywhere else flash cards are now being used for its best purpose naturally as an advanced level four learner you should also be getting very good and very consistent predictable results you should feel much less anxiety about learning or doing assessments because you have so much control over your outcome now some of you

might be thinking how is this only level four out of five like what I wouldn't give to just be at level four how do I just get to level four forget about level five I just want level four and I've got some good news is that you can get to level four pretty quickly and one of the things that will help you is my free Weekly Newsletter but seriously in my years of coaching I have seen some students struggle to move through these different levels for years and I went through a lot of these same

struggles myself and so I've distilled down what I think are some of the most important pieces of advice important perspectives techniques and strategies for learning that I think are the most impactful to help you move through these levels there's an email every week it's completely free if you're interested I'll leave a link for you to sign up to that in the description below but now let's move on to the problems of an advanced learner because even an advanced learner has problems and the most common problem here is inconsistency what a level four Advanced learner will

often find and this is what I found I probably hit this stage around my fifth year of medical school is that you know everything you need to do and if you do those things the outcome is very consistent the problem is that doing all the right things and learning in the right way is timec consuming sometimes and so when we don't have enough time unexpected things pop up it makes a big impact to your ability to perform and so what ended up happening for me and I see this often with my students is that in

those situations we actually revert down to a lower level instead of doing what we know we should do because of that stress and the pressure uh we end up just reverting to something that feels easier to do which is actually less effective and damages in the long run and so while you have the tools to do very well and you know how to use them what's in consistent is how consistently you can actually use the tools this is especially true in fastpaced learning environment so for example if you're in a workshop or a lecture and

you've got lots of information delivered to you at a high density and you don't have a lot of your normal adjuncts for learning so you're sort of bombarded with this information and you're not really sure what you meant to do with this at that point we revert to our younger University self where we just like mindlessly typ as many notes as possible to give our future self a chance and so to graduate from level four to become level five the trick here is we optimize and that was meant to be a picture of a wrench

right you can see that it's a beautiful wrench so optimizing your learning system means removing unnecessary old habits of learning and then replacing them with better ones it's taking everything that we're already doing and then just upgrading them and then turning them into habits so that we can do them faster with less effort specifically in this transition I tend to see people start using more comprehensive methods of nonlinear note taking it's deeper and goes into more details it's more organized and they're able to do it more quickly they're continuing to do active flash card management

and and good types of testing like they were before but they are upgrading their actual higher order thinking skills so that becomes more habitual and easier to think at those higher levels more consistently what goes hand inand with this is being much more aggressive about identifying when we start thinking in a more isolated ineffective lower order way and stomping those habits out and finally one of the most important Transformations that has to happen to go from a level four to a level five which is to become the mechanic of your own brain this involves constantly

monitoring the way that we are learning and understanding how do does me using this technique affect my memory and my level of understanding with the time and resources that I have available if I do less of this how's it affected if I do more of it if I introduce this additional technique we're monitoring our Learning System and we are monitoring our own situation and we're starting to understand how to push and pull different levers to adapt our Learning System for different types of challenges as you can imagine going from a level four to a level

five uh usually takes a considerable amount of time time because unlearning old habits is a arduous process but once you have gotten into level five the coveted genius level of learner you're able to learn High volumes difficult Concepts very effectively uh you're able to hold on to that information with a high level of retention and in a shorter time than the average person and you can also adapt and overcome as your learning situation changes it's at this level that people will look at you and think how are you able to do that we've got the

same number of hours in a day how are you doing so much more than I am well the answer is moving through these steps so what problem could a genius level learner possibly have well the main problem at this level is bordedom and I'm actually serious here is that I've had students who they got to a level of their learning where they were able to tackle their curriculum so fast that they already finished their entire Year's worth of study and it's only like March or April and they're asking me what do I do now like

I don't I literally have so much free time I don't even know what to do and so I'll give you the advice that I gave to that student which is just do more things enjoy life explore what life is when it's not all consumed by studying in other words I guess what I'm saying is that once you reach this point your real solution is just to live laugh and love so I hope that helps you figure out which level of learner you are and what you need to do to get to the next level thanks

so much for watching and don't forget to live laugh love