stop trying to learn faster instead learn more efficiently and if you don't know the difference between those two things that might be why you are struggling to get the grades that you want there is so much productivity and studying advice out here on YouTube and I very rarely see anyone talking about the difference in this video I'm going to give you a very simple two-step framework to improve your grades by becoming a more efficient learner rather than a faster learner and at the end of the video I'll give you my Golden Rule on when you
should definitely not try to get faster if you are new to this channel welcome I'm Dr Justin Sun I'm a full-time learning coach in the head of learning at ien study I'm also a former medical doctor and for the last decade I have worked with thousands of Learners from around the world to help them learn more efficiently so let's start with why trying to be a fast learner can actually make you worse at learning one of the first things that I started learning back when I was in high school uh entering into uni was speed
reading and my thinking was very very simple if I I can read at like 300 words per minute right now if I can double that to 600 then I have doubled my learning speed and so I installed this app uh on Windows that taught me all these things like sub vocalization and the grouping and the skimming and like eye training drills and after about a month of training like an hour or so a couple hours every day I managed to get my words per minute up to like over a th000 with 90% retention and comprehension
and so I thought damn I'm unstoppable now now about 2 months later I started my first year of uni which was the competitive premade year to enter into medical school and as many of you know how that story played out if you've watched my other videos I had to study a lot like I was studying my crazy 20 hours a day 7 days a week and so one thing I realized which is very obvious to me now is that learning to read faster didn't really improve my learning speed by that much by tripling my reading
speed my actual learning speed probably only increased by like 5% and that's because even though I technically had a high retention and comprehension like over 90% it's not real it was based on these simple fact recall assessments that were done like 30 seconds after I'd finished reading a very isolated passage of text and none of that is realistic in reality we're reading large volumes of information over hours and we need to use that information Beyond just simple fact recall and we need to retain it not just for like 30 seconds but for days or even
weeks and so my bottleneck was not in how fast I could read and consume information it was how I was processing the information in my brain once I had consumed it all I'd done by increasing my reading speed was make it so that I was trying to drink out of a fire hose and here's why the story is relevant to you even though reading speed is the technique that I was working on this would have been the same for any other technique fundamentally the the problem was that I believed that I could get better by
doing the same thing but faster knowing what I know now about how Learning Works that is completely flawed in fact it's actually worse than flawed it's actually harmful it's harmful because it takes away your focus on working on things that would have actually made a bigger difference it entrenches existing habits that aren't really serving you anymore and it increases the errors that you make and those errors in your learning you then have to spend more time to just fix them later and the problem with just trying to study faster using the same method becomes really
obvious when you think about it like this do you actively try to think more slowly normally like are you deliberately studying there and being like today I'm just going to hit a casual 60% like I know I could think about this faster I know I could just process the information better but today I'm just going to take it easy and only work at like half my capacity most people most of the time are thinking at a speed they that is fairly Optimum for what they can do with that method without increasing errors so whether it
is reading or it is the way that we are writing notes or typing notes or whatever it is the problem is not how fast we are doing it it is just how we are doing it if the machine is broken when you crank up the machine to make it faster you're just increasing more errors that you got to fix later and I see a really common example of this with like AI these days where people are like hey you can use this app to you know it like types out all of your notes for you
you just take the recording from a lecture and it just pumps out like magically these notes you're done your studying is done you don't have to study ever again you're going to be amazing like yeah you've got notes but it doesn't mean you learned anything and people like Rave about these apps they're like oh it saves me so much time that's the equivalent of like a robot that says they're going to go work out for you and now you're like oh I've saved so much time because I don't have to waste time at the gym
anymore my robot is lifting the weights for me it's like congratulations you won the prize for missing the the point and that is exactly the type of thinking that I had when I was going through uni for the first few years I was just focused on like speed just being faster just saving time that's all that mattered which is why it's no wonder that by the end of like literally my first month of University I was already starting to feel overwhelmed and like the more I tried the more I was falling behind I could just
never keep up and despite like studying even more to make up for that which is ironic I still wasn't walking into the exam feeling confident so if that sounds like you then this is what you should do this is what I wish I had done a lot earlier actually measure your retention and understanding properly do this don't worry so much about how long it takes to study something pick something study it for 2 or 3 hours use whatever method you feel like comfortable with and at the end of the session create a little test for
yourself 15 questions five of these questions should be lowlevel Factory call definitions explaining processes and Concepts isolated five of these questions should be midlevel applying it to a simple problem to solve or combining two concepts together to see how they're related to each other like how does one thing affect this other thing and five of them should be high level these are usually going to be like short answer or like mini essay type questions where you're taking at least three different concepts and you're saying yes they're related to each other explain why they're how they're
related but also let's talk about the impact or the significance of that relationship if you change one thing how does it affect everything else so now You' got 15 like test questions that you've made yourself one week later test your attention and understanding by doing that test do it purely based on memory do not review your notes beforehand since you're probably not going to have an answer sheet for this you can check whether your answers make sense at the end of the test by looking at your notes looking things up asking someone asking a teacher
asking a lecture for the high level questions you're not really going to know whether it was like a correct answer or not but you'll generally get a sense for whether it made sense and whether it was like a good answer or you missed a few things as you're exploring and learning more about the topic now that in itself is actually a very very effective and Powerful revision technique and once you do it you're probably going to start doing it regularly like forever because it's just so good even without the answer sheet like trying to figure
out if you got the right answer is incredibly beneficial learning but the added benefit is that it gives you a accurate representation of how good your methods really are you'll be able to see the retention you have for low level midlevel and higher level and you'll be able to see your ability to actually tackle those different levels of questions generally speaking if you get over 90% I'd say that's great that's really really good 80% and over still pretty good 70% and over it's acceptable less than 70% probably something in your methods can be optimized it
doesn't mean that everything that you're doing is bad it just means that there are some parts of the way that you're studying that aren't really serving you anymore for this type of content for that level of Challenge and so now we have some real data on how effective our learning methods actually are and you might find that it's better for some subjects and worse for other subjects but when you continue to do this you get a really good idea about whether your methods are actually serving you or not armed with this data we can then
move on to step two of the framework so just to reiterate the problem with step one was thinking that we can get better just by doing the same thing but faster and the second problem is that trying to learn faster often makes us skip the part of learning that is the most beneficial while spending more time on the thing that doesn't help it reduces the value you're getting for the time that you're spending it actually lowers your efficiency and instead of just explaining it to you myself here's an email that I recently got that explains
it perfectly I I kid you not I received this email literally yesterday morning while I was planning this video so here it is as you can see it's a little long uh but if we focus in on this sentence I think it sums it up perfectly where it says I realized I was so fixated on trying to finish all my content as quickly as possible and I was avoiding actually processing the parts of the topic I felt were difficult and then later on they went on to say they they triy to push through and they
thought about it patiently like a detective trying to so overc case instead of a chore that I had to do and I really like the way that they put it fact I might use that analogy in the future a lot of the time when we're focused on trying to go faster and I felt this a lot is that anything that makes us slow down is perceived as bad it feels like it's making us less efficient but actually the the reality is that real efficiency is about knowing when it's worth slowing down it's understanding that sometimes
you actually have to let your brain sit and think think about it and the reason I like that detective analogy is because a detective's job is to solve the case they're looking at these Clues and they're trying to piece the puzzle together and figure it out that's their job they're not thinking about it like oh yep I looked at the clues yep I tried my best I couldn't really figure anything out couldn't solve the case but that's that toas picked off the list oops couldn't catch the criminal bit of luck next time that's not how
they're doing it probably I hope there's a commitment to figuring it out they are determined to see the pattern even when it's not obvious and that takes time you can't just rush your brain to see that pattern just by like forcing it to like see patterns harder like I'm pretty sure cases don't get solved like in animes where you know like the detective is like what's the missing clue like what's the solution and then someone's like think about it we're running out of time think harder and they have this like flashback Montage of all these
things that they saw over the last few months like the woman's ring she was wearing it on her left hand the door it had a smudge on the left side of the door knob the gun it was angled 15° clockwise the pieces they're connecting together oh I know the solution like I don't think that that happens you know those scenes that I'm talking about that's literally never ever happened to me in my entire life no in in real life learning requires making connections and deciding which connections are worth keeping and which ones are not as
important that all takes time and just patience and because that takes time if you try to rush it you're actually going to miss out on making those connections that directly create better memory and understanding aka the actual learning is being skipped and what we end up doing is we spend more time on just consuming information and maybe documenting information and less time on actually learning it in the first place on the other hand if you know which parts are worth slowing down for the value you get per hour you spend increases your efficiency actually improves
by strategically slowing down you get slower at covering content and reading words but you get faster at building knowledge see the difference so after you did step one here's what you can do with step two start by watching another one of my videos and this is not like just one of those sneaky kind of like like this video like plug type things I'm I'm actually serious yeah I appreciate the extra views but I have a lot of other videos where I talk about different techniques and most of the time I'm creating those videos with an
audience in mind that doesn't have a lot of like training and and like Advanced learning strategies like these are things that I think most people can kind of pick up and start running with so watch a a video if you want one to start with I think the nonlinear note taking video is probably a good place to start I'll put a link to that in the description and try to integrate that into your method you don't have to like change everything even if you just take a few parts of it and then integrate it and
change your method just whatever is comfortable for you study the same thing again another two or three hours and do the same process test yourself and after you do this a few rounds you'll start noticing how making small changes in your methods affects your attention and your understanding and you'll realize how by changing how you are going about learning you can increase your overall efficiency not by being faster but by getting more out of the time that you're putting in which brings me to my Golden Rule that I promised you at the beginning if you
feel like you need to study faster to keep up it almost always means you really need to figure out where to slow down feeling like you need to speed up probably means that you are falling behind it means that what you're doing now isn't enough in other words this is a sign that your current methods are leaking effort and time and therefore you're not getting enough value out of the time that you are currently spending and so it's true it's not about spending more time if you've got limited time but the answer isn't getting faster
it's figuring out which parts are wasting and leaking time remember doing the same thing but faster only amplifies your errors which is actually going to make you more stressed which may be something that you have directly felt multiple times where you felt like what you weren't doing right now was enough and then you tried to be faster or you did more of it and you actually ended up with more problems to deal with more stress more anxiety more uncertainty if you feel the need for speed the answer is to keep making changes to your methods
until that feeling goes away and this can take a little bit of time some people might be hesitant about spending time when they feel like they're running out of time but trust me just trying to go faster is a dead end it's a dead end that I have gone down many many many times before and I can tell you there's nothing waiting there for you like at the end of that you're going to have to do a U-turn and get back out again anyway now for me the way that I learn now I feel mentally
much less rushed than I used to feel when I was in my like first year of University and my learning efficiency is like three four times greater than it was back then I know what I need to do I I have a systematic way of building knowledge and I know exactly what I'm going to get out of the time that I'm spending it gives me a lot of confidence it gives me a lot of control for me it took me years to get to this point and but hopefully by sharing some of the things that
I've learned along the way it's going to take a little less time for you now if you do want to head start on this to figure it out a little bit more easily then you may be interested in joining my program at I can study.com which is my over decade of personal and professional experience helping people learn more efficiently packed into a stepbystep program everything that I've talked about in this video and everything that I've talked about in almost every single other one of my videos has been distilled down into this step-by-step program so if
you interested you can check that out I'll leave a link to it in the description below but otherwise thanks for watching and I'll see you next [Music] time
