I Spent 10,000 Hours Studying. Here's What I Learned.

I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years in that time I've easily studied well over 10,000 hours I've studied medicine learning science uh Computing and AI education marketing business accounting all sorts of things and in the first 5 to six years of studying I probably wasted about 80% of my time I've made a lot of mistakes but I have learned from them so in this video I'm going to compress 10,000 hours Of studying into 15 important lessons that every student and learner of any age should know lesson number one cram early there's this

really logical piece of advice that one of my seniors gave to me when I was first entering into University and honestly this is probably the only reason I was able to make it through that year even though my Pro sisters were so inefficient he said if you are the type of person that crams before an exam and that works for you And you can cram and do decently before an exam and that was me you during a lot of high school then just do the same thing just cram but do it at the very beginning

don't wait until before the exam just cram the whole paper at the very very beginning and now you have an additional 2 three months where you can spend your time finding gaps for filling gaps and just getting to that next level of confidence and the reason I give this Advice to you is that not every situation requires you to have consistent diligence of studying for the entire year and the worst case scenario is really you leave it to the last minute to cram and then you realize it's not enough and then now you're screwed so

if you feel like you can go faster than the cohort and you feel like you can finish things faster just do it like get through through that stuff as quickly as you want to some of my uni Students are actually doing that like they're finishing their entire Year's curriculum even for like medical students with huge curriculums they're finishing in April May and then they're spending the rest of the year just literally two three hours a week on just topping up their memory looking for gaps adding a few bits here and there like it's such a

relaxing experience of University very different to how I went through uni listen number two don't Create learning debt I think this is probably one of the most important Concepts that I've picked up over the years when I was in my first year of University trying to enter into medical school and studying like absolute crazy 17 18 19 20 hours a day barely sleeping at all a lot of my time was spent on what I now realize as creating learning debt here's what I'd do I would go to the lecture during the lecture I'd take a

Bunch of notes then I'd go and and then I'd review my notes and while I'm reviewing it and and reading from the textbook I would then go and make a bunch of flash cards in this process of going through the textbook making flash cards rereading the notes going through the lecture slides would take me somewhere along the lines of roughly 2 hours per lecture and I was trying to be pretty comprehensive and so with three or four Lectures a day this time would accumulate two around 6 to 8 hours per day on reviewing making flash

cards reading through the textbook and at the time I thought this is time well spent because I'm doing a lot of good studying but as I said before I was studying way more than 8 hours a day if I was studying 8 hours a day I think I would have been really happy I was studying double that amount of time so what was I doing in the extra 6789 10 hours a day I Was reviewing the stuff that I studied in the previous day and the week before that so after I create let's say flash

cards for 3 4 hours I then spend another 3 or 4 hours to go over my flashcards and this is what I mean by learning debt when you're studying the primary focus is to take that information store it in your memory and then be able to use that information in the level and way that you need to use it for your assessment or using it at work whatever you need to Learn it for so time that does not contribute rute to that is a waste of time if I spend 2 hours making flash cards the

time spent on making flash cards only creates learning in my brain when I then spend time later to go over them there's very very little learning generated from just making the flash cards in the first place and so what I'm doing is I'm actually taking the learning I need to do today and I'm offloading that to a future version of Myself I'm saying hey you you need to learn this and you're giving yourself a task to deal with later that is debt you have created for your future self and so here's the problem with learning

debt is that debt does not scale this becomes really obvious if I do a little bit of Maths for you so let's say if we use my example I'm spending 2 hours and in this two hours what what am I doing I'm creating a bunch of flash Cards and I'm also writing a bunch of notes by by the time I finished this 2 hours I can tell you I can promise you I didn't have a great level of knowledge and if I tested myself on this a week later my retention would be 50% if I'm

lucky so now this has become debt and so the next day I now need to spend let's say another hour to go over my notes and to do my flashcards so now that's an hour of debt I've given myself but remember tomorrow I need to do the same thing so I'm also spending in 2 hours on this day creating a new set of flash cards and notes for the stuff I learned on that day and I'm creating another set of debt for myself where I might need to spend another hour going through that material but

the debt accumulates so the thing that I did on the first day just by doing it the next day that debt hasn't cleared I still don't have the retention that I need from it so normally if we look at some Research around space repetition and how long takes to really get that information solid depends on the type of information but it's usually between three to seven repetitions is necessary to get the retention that you need so I now need to do this again and again and again and so every day I'm actually building up more

debt that I'm able to clear and that's why by the end of the semester I would get to a point where I've got 2,000 flash cards that I need To do and I'm spending four to 5 hours every every single day just clearing through flash cards that I made previously and barely hanging in there in terms of getting through my textbook readings going reviewing the lecture recordings and I'm already watching those lecture recordings at double or triple speed there's nothing more I can do because I've got so much learning debt I need to get through

in order to have made that previous learning useful And until I go through and do those repetitions every single day I'm not extracting the value of learning from that previous time that I spent and one thing that I realized very clearly as soon as I entered into medical school was that there is a low ceiling of how effective this strategy can be at a certain point you just don't have enough time to do all of this repetition every single day you are just trapped in this Rat Race like this constant NeverEnding Grind of doing flash

cards at least that's what it felt for me for that first couple years of University and so if we fast forward and let's say I'm now in my fifth year of University I've learned a lot about how to study and what does my studying look like now to reduce the learning debt so what changed is that I might be spending the same 2 hours up front or sometimes even longer but in the 2 hours I'm getting like 80 to 90% of the learning that I need to Get done first I'm not trying to give my

future self anything to do my objective is to learn it really well have a really good retention a deep understanding really connect it all together in that session and there are a number of other other strategies that I often talk about that that help with that but it's never possible to make this 100% there is still going to be some stuff that you're not able to get done that you do need that repetition for that you do need to Make those flash cards for because it is a valuable tool but it's only that 10 to

20% and so the amount of debt that I'm carrying forward into the next day is minimal and also because my knowledge is so much deeper the first time I learn it my retention is much stronger so I don't actually need to repeat and review this every single day to keep on top of it I can review it like once a week and my retention is still high enough that it's sustainable and so now I only need 15 Minutes every 2 or 3 days to clear through the debt that I've created for myself and that's very

manageable so take a really honest look at the way that you're study and just ask yourself how much of the time you spend on studying is spent on things where you know you haven't really learned it by the end of that time and you're relying on your future self to do something to make that valuable if you are spending a lot of time doing that You're creating learning debt and I strongly believe that it's impossible to improve your learning efficiency until you address that it's lesson number three study more then study less if you were

to ask me what is the number one thing that you can do to get better grades better performance the number one most important thing that you can do is just study more and this is different to the advice that I normally give but here's how it works in the early stages Of this x-axis is the number of hours that you spend studying and then here you've got your performance if you're starting with not studying at all and then you go from not studying at all to just studying more your performance is going to increase a

lot and so there's actually very large proportion of people who are just not putting in enough hours and not doing enough work to get the results now what happens eventually is that extra hours Start contributing less to your performance so you get this thing called diminishing returns right so at a certain point every extra hour of studying that you're doing per day is only increasing your performance by like one or 0.5% and then you get to a point where actually it inverts so the more hours you do your performance starts declining and this is because

you're dropping an efficiency you're burning yourself out And so the trajectory of becoming better at studying is to first of all get to a point where you feel like you are actually studying enough and I would say and this varies a lot but if it's a fairly competitive type of program that you're that you're studying in then somewhere along the line of 3 to 5 hours a day is probably very reasonable and beyond that you're definitely going to start getting diminishing returns and potentially even dropping into the Negative so this is the study more part

and then comes then study less this is the part that a lot of people Miss once you get to a point where you do think you are actually studying a reasonable amount your next focus is how do I then study less and the reason you switch focus is because the type of improve Improvement and gain that you make with your study skills changes from an effort gain to an efficiency gain if your solution to not getting the performance That you want is just to put in more hours then you're not getting improvements in your process

or your efficiency you're just getting improvements in the effort that you're putting in which is fine when you're at low effort but if you are already at reasonable or high effort then getting more effort gains is not likely to lead to the performance that you want especially if there's a big gap between the performance that you want and the Performance that you're consistently getting and so by actively trying to study less and at the same time improve your performance which I know sounds crazy and feels like a radical idea for some people by actively switching

that focus it forces you to examine your process and think how can I make it more efficient remember that studying efficiently means being able to do more with less and if you are already on this path of increasing your Efficiency then your next lesson is lesson number four study less then study more and I know that sounds like exactly the opposite of what I just said but here's how it goes once you are now at that point where you are already working hard and you're trying to improve your efficiency and you're thinking about how to

study less the biggest barrier you'll face and the biggest barrier I faced to actually improving and figuring out how to be more efficient is that you just Don't have enough time at the moment at that present situation you have a certain level of performance which will say p and you're achieving this by having a certain process which may not be that efficient so we'll use a smaller bar for this we'll make it red and we'll say that's P process combined with a certain amount of effort that you're putting in and at the moment you're putting

in a reasonable amount of Effort when we start trying to reduce this effort that process is not going to at the exact same time increase to become more efficient it's not that easy there's some trial and error and experimentation and mistakes you need to make to figure out how to learn more efficiently so when your effort drops your performance may actually drop at least a little bit and so what I'm saying is don't go from studying like 10 hours a day to now studying 2 hours a Day because your performance will plummet go from 10

hours a day to 9 and 1 half hours a day to 9 hours a day but expect that you may have a small decrease in your shortterm performance but you need the extra time you need the extra time that you free up from studying a little bit less to figure out how to study more efficiently you need time to reflect to think to learn about studying to watch this video to improve your process and so there's a common Sense saying that everyone knows work smarter not harder but there's nothing wrong with working hard and so

some people say work smarter and harder but as a coach from a practical perspective I think the most important one is work smarter then harder because when you work too hard you don't have time to figure out how to work smarter create time to work smarter once your process is more efficient you can reinvest those hours that you took out Before you can increase your effort again if you really need to or you can use that extra time to sleep more touch some grass and just thinking about it now I think I probably could have

made the same progress on improving my learning efficiency that took me two years of University in like six months if I had just understood this because I was so not willing to study less lesson number five plug the leak if you are in a boat and the boat is leaking and Filling with water your number one priority is to plug the leak you don't spend your time bucketing water out from the boat because it's futile and the longer you wait to plug the leak the more water there is for you to Buck it out later

even after the leak has been plugged this is exactly the same situation with studying I do a lot of work with students that are transitioning from the high school into University especially for competitive programs and one of the most common pieces of feedback that I hear from these students is that as soon as they enter into University it just feels like they're hit with the Sunami of work and uncertainty that they've never had to face before in high school and I felt that like full force when I entered into University I was like the volume

and the workload and the the difficulty is so much higher than I expected and a lot of People aren't able to adapt to that and if it doesn't happen in University usually the next place that happens is in graduating and entering into the workforce and then they're hit again with that wave of responsibility and pressure that they didn't experience in University and across my years of seeing thousands of people that get hit in the face with the tsunami the successful Learners are the ones that plug the leak first let's say that there are two types

Of people the first type of person gets hit in the face with the tsunami huge workload realizes they're sign a fall behind retention isn't where it needs to be they're not on top of their knowledge and so they study more fine they study more and they realize they are still falling behind and they're still feeling like they're constantly playing catchup and so they respond to this by studying even more and even more and even more until they get to a point where they are Spending their entire time studying uh and they're not doing anything anything

else other than studying just to be able to feel like they are not drowning okay if you haven't guessed already that this person is what I did then you have the second type of person which is they have the same initial experience they're overwhelmed they feel like they're falling behind and initially they just try to study a little bit more but then they realize that that isn't enough and They realize that the issue here is that there is a leak the process that they are using is not enough to keep up with the pace they

really realiz that even though they're falling behind just a little bit right now and they're only two or three lectures behind if they're fallen behind now if they wait three or four more weeks they're now going to be 20 lectures behind and so they realize that and spend their time to improve their process rapidly so that they are At least not falling behind anymore and there's still three lectures behind but every single day that passes it's not adding more lectures to the backlog it's not letting water continue into the boat at the end of the

day these two students are going to be in very different situations one student is going to be burnt out studying like crazy with a lot of stuff that they've fallen behind on that they need to catch up with the other student will also have worked very Very hard but they're in a position now that they're not falling behind anymore and they can spend the additional time that they have on catching up on the things that they did for behind on before who do you think will have the better outcome and so here's like a very

quick tip for you if you are if you feel like you're this first person you have a choice you can make with the time that you spend do I prepare for what I'm about to learn or do I review the stuff That I've fallen behind on if you can only do one of the two prepare for what you're about to learn there are certain strategies where you don't even need to be that good at them for it to be beneficial one of those things is just doing a very very quick pre-study if you've got a

one hour lecture coming up spend 15 minutes pre- studying on just what you think are the most difficult and important part of what you're about to learn that may be enough to help you Stay on top of what you are currently learning that may be enough to help you plug the leak it's not a crazy technique you need to spend weeks or months learning how to do it could be about deciding to spend that extra 20 30 minutes on this lecture to make sure you've really got it down to maybe add a little bit more

uh time and effort on critically thinking about the information to process it a little bit more deeply to make your memory stronger Right now when you learn it and not create that learning debt that may be the thing that helps you to plug that leak or at least make that leak smaller and yes you will still be behind on everything that you're behind right now but the real problem is not the fact that you have fallen behind it's that you are falling behind it's still happening and the longer you leave it the further behind you

fall plug the leak then clear the backlog by the way If you're finding these tips helpful and you want even more then you may want to check out my free Weekly Newsletter this is where I cover even more study tips and tricks and principles that took me over over a decade to learn the emails are very quick to read but they can save you 10 plus hours a week again it's completely free the link is in the description below and now on to the next piece of study advice lesson number six make learning hard effective

learning is Not easy effective learning doesn't feel fast at least not at first anytime you learn something that learning happens inside our brain okay let's this is the brain information comes into our brain our brain does stuff with that information it thinks about it and then depending on how it thinks about it and processes that information it outputs it as a memory and we broadly call this process encoding you encoding information into Your memory and you need to do this if you want to have that knowledge to be able to use it and retrieve it

for your applications like an exam and for most people people this middle part what happens in the brain is the major limiter this is the major constraint this is your bottleneck and so if you're having trouble with your retention and the quality of your memory and you feel like you're forgetting things very quickly or if you feel like no matter How hard you study there are always these really difficult complicated questions that you can never seem to answer that's because of what's happening in the step before inside your brain the way that your brain is

processing it is not compatible with producing high quality memory or a deep level of understanding and so it doesn't matter how fast or efficiently information comes into the brain and it doesn't matter how much you repeat Things in your memory of things that you previously learned the major problem is that what's happening in the brain in the first place is not effective so when I was struggling with learning what did I do I watched my lectures double Speed Triple speed to try to get that information coming through faster I did more flash cards I did

more repetitions I took my cruddy memory which was failing me every single day and I just Tred to brute force it through Repetition to be better I spent all my time here and here without realizing that the problem was here in the middle and the thing is that effective learning Active Learning takes mental effort your brain needs to think deep deeply about what you're learning it needs to evaluate it it needs to compare it against what it already knows and compare it with what you're learning it needs to look for actively look for patterns and

that process is the thing That creates effective learning and so if your goalpost is like what mine was where you think that getting better at learning means that learning is faster and easier you're actually going to start making changes to your learning strategies that make your results worse it's like cool I've now got this AI That's going to record the lecture turn it into a transcript and automatically create a bunch of flashcards for me is that saving me time yes could that be Beneficial definitely is that going to solve the fundamental issue no because at

the end of the day my brain hasn't been involved in that process in one way or another I have to insert my brain into that process to do the heavy lifting and to do that deep thinking I have these very clear memories of when I was in high school and I thought you know what I I don't know why like one day I just decided like I'm going to try to be like a diligent student and so I Would every day after school go to the University Library study with all the uni kids um and

I would find a position and I and I would think like ah this is the perfect position for me like I had my specific desk and if someone was sitting there I had like another place and I would go there and I get all my books out and then I would just like study till 10 p.m. and I remember very clearly most of that time I was there I was either distracted falling asleep or Actually asleep the process of studying could be described as tedious uh drowsy monotonous boring if I was studying a subject that

I just happen to really enjoy for me that subject was like Classics I really like classical studies I would be engaged I'd be interested I'd feel curious and my learning would feel more effective and at the time I would just chalk it up to being like this is a subject I happen to be better at that is wrong that is a subject where for Whatever reason I was using a more involved active learning strategy and my brain was spending more effort but because that effort was productive my brain enjoyed it whereas ironically when I was

passive and my brain was asleep and I was just trying to Ram information down Drew repetition into my brain it was not engaged it was not interested it was not actively being used I wasn't thinking critically or deeply about what I was learning and I was actually Getting more tired and drowsy and sleepy because of it because I was getting bored out so if you want to get better at learning don't try to make Learning Easy make learning harder look for ways to think more look at where you're learning and when you're studying and pay

attention to to when you feel like your brain is actively involved in thinking dissecting putting the information together it should feel if you're studying effectively like the Information are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that you're looking at together to see how it fits into a big picture that is a very very accurate representation of what effective learning should feel like for almost any subject for the rest of your life I can promise that and if it doesn't feel like that see how you can make it feel like that it will take more effort but that's

a good thing lesson number seven make the hard stuff easy so when I was in the Middle of my third year of University when I was starting to realize a lot of these things and I had started figuring out a lot more about how to study effectively one of the things I realized was that my hard learning the active high quality stuff was also so energy consuming and it was so exhausting to do that I started feeling daunted by sitting down to study because I just knew how hard I would have to think about it

and if I am Studying and I don't feel like I'm really putting all of that effort and I feel disappointed in myself like it's not effective and I just wasted my time and so what I realized is that there are actually ways of still doing that difficult effortful high quality learning but making it feel a lot less overwhelming and easy to just get into and the trick here is something called layering and Scaffolding layering and Scaffolding our Learning means that we approach the information in these rungs of difficulty and this is what makes hard Learning

Easy so let's say that I have this book that I'm reading here which is contemporary theories of learning which is by the way a great book but can be pretty dense to read now if I'm learning from this book and I'm trying to learn as much as I can from every single chapter and get the full level of detail and retain 90% Of that to the point where I like I've mastered everything in this book that is a big task and that is very challenging to be able to pull off like in a single study

session so layering and Scaffolding that approach means that I set my goal post a little bit easier so instead of trying to get to that level for everything I get to that level so still doing that high quality thinking still doing all of that deep evaluation but I do that just for the Parts of the information that I feel are easier for me to start with and understand and put together I pick out the key ideas that I feel are already a little bit more intuitive already a little bit more familiar that I feel like

are important building blocks for just understanding the overall scope of this topic and so by the end of my 2hour study session I can't recite every single sentence in here if you ask me what was the exact finding of a specific Study or who said what about a particular Theory I can't tell you that but I would be able to say hey there are four major types of theories that share what seem to be these types of similarities but different these kinds of ways and they seem to relate to each other like this I can

give you an overarching big picture but superficial overview of the topic and so I'm developing really high quality foundational knowledge but it's easier For me to do because I'm working with easier ideas that are more familiar to me and by building that Foundation I now have a great stepping stone for my next layer or the next rung on the scaffold so I can go through this information again and this time I can look at it at a higher level of detail because I have more knowledge about the topic so I now go through and still

pick the things that feel more familiar and easy to me and what you will find is that that Paragraph that you read the first time and you thought man I have no idea what it's talking about you read it now and you have new thoughts about it you think ah I actually see what it means because you have more things to connect it to and this is what I call the snowball effect of learning is that as you learn more and get deeper and deeper especially for big complex topics it should get easier and easier

because you have more things to connect it to and More ways to make it intuitive and relevant lesson number eight build a learning system there is no single technique that you can learn that is a be all end all where as soon as you learn that technique you're done that doesn't exist and what that means is that you can't think of learning as a single technique or even two or three techniques you have to think about learning as an entire system composed of multiple techniques that work together To support each other and what I want

to do for you is give you the basic component of what a learning system should be so that you can actually start building it the easiest way to think about a learning system is to track the path of a single piece of information it's almost like if you were to eat an apple like a bite of an apple you're just tracking the path of that bite through your body when is the first time that information comes in what do you do During that time and then what happens afterwards so for a lot of people let's

say you're a university student for a lot of people the first time the information comes in is during a lecture and then what they do during that time is they write notes maybe annotate some stuff maybe record something Daydream fall asleep whatever it is and the next part where they look at that same piece of information might be in a review session if you're proactive later that Day same day or it could be the day after or maybe a week later or if you're not really so on top of your studying you don't review it

until just before your exam that's what most people's studying system looks like it's really not much of a system and so if this is your system then there are a lot of problems with this and it's no wonder that you may have difficulties for example if the first time you hear it is during a lecture where you have no Control of the information p and your ability to process that information is not super high which some people naturally are super high and they're just very lucky but for most of us uh that processing level is

not going to be super high without a lot of training so you're already sort of starting off of a back foot like someone's just throwing information at you and you're desperately trying to catch it but you're dropping half of it and then so Later when you review it it's like almost as if you just may as well have just started studying it from scratch because there it's all fragmented and you've just got bits of knowledge here and there and you're just going to go through the same material again which is why a lot of people

say well I need to go and rewatch that lecture it's like if you needed to rewatch the lecture anyway why did you even go just just don't go and just you know watch the lecture at Your own pace so to prevent this the easiest way like I mentioned before is to not have that information hit you for the first time during a lecture so every effective Learning System should have a primary ing step and priming means that you are preparing your brain to catch instead of just throwing something at someone and then just expecting them

to catch it you are saying hey I'm going to throw you this thing are you ready here's what it Looks like here's how I'm going to throw it get ready to catch and they're going to position themselves to catch and it's going to be much easier to catch that's what you're doing for your brain you're priming your brain by giving it little anchor points basic structure a basic web of how to think about things main ideas tackling some of those difficult things that if you were to encounter it in the lecture that's going to be

your brain like for the next minute and a Half missing everything that they say do that upfront and this can be done very effectively like I said it can just be 20 30 minutes for a 1hour lecture to develop a really really good priming or pre-study and then following a priming event you should have your what I call a main learning event a main learning event means the first time you sit down with the intention to properly learn it and this tends to be a time intensive activity so this could be again if You're a

university student your lecture attending the lecture could be the main learning event it's the first time where you are dedicatedly intensively sitting down to receive a high volume of information if you're not attending lectures it could be a dedicated intensive study session for that topic the priming session is not the main learning event because your intention is not to cover everything uh and it's usually much shorter so whether your Main learning event is a lecture or a workshop or seminar or full day course or a long study session after the prime is the main learning

event and during this main learning event we want to make sure that we are thinking actively we're thinking deeply about it and we're trying to avoid uh creating learning debt so we're really aiming for that effective learning not just creating debt for ourselves and after a main learning Event we should always have a review now when you do the review or how often you do the review depends on how much material you're learning how complicated that material is and how good the processing you do in the main learning event is if you are very very

good at processing and after learning something just one time you have a very high retention of it then you don't need to do a review for that for potentially a week or so but if you're learning Strategies are not quite there yet and you know that if you wait a week you're already going to have forgotten 50 60% of it then you should do a review earlier and so as a rule of thumb if you just a general normal student is to try to review it one day one week then one month after and that

timing is flexible like it doesn't have to be exact just try to do it within the first kind of one or two days and then roughly next weekish and then roughly sort of two to Four to five weeks after that it's up to you to figure out your timing and how often you need to do your revisions but what's more important is actually what you do during those revision sessions so whenever you do the revision you should be actively looking for gaps and holes in your understanding you're not just trying to cover the stuff that

you already know and are confident in you're actively looking for the parts that You' have missed or you've forgotten you Should also be testing yourself rather than just using something like recognition where you just look at your notes and think yep that makes sense to me you should be testing it based on your memory and testing it in a way that's similar to how you know you're going to need it eventually so it usually means not just regurgitating facts but also more complex deeper types of thinking and as another tip try to address your biggest

Problems first so what this means is that if you fundamentally completely misunderstood a concept that's more important for you to spend your time to fix up than than a little fact or a detail that you forgot to recall major issues with how Concepts relate to each other are much more likely to impact your ability to perform for a much wider range of different tests or applications than just that single isolated fact and the longer you Leave it the harder it gets to go and then like restudy all of that stuff if you realize a major

error later on now as an optional part if you have a lot of stuff that you do think you need to just memorize that doesn't really connect with anything there isn't a deeper way to think about it and it's just a matter of like memorizing it through repetition then you should also be using some kind of memorization tool or technique and for most situations flash cars is a Great place to start and that kind of runs in parallel to all of the stuff it's just you do the flash cards that are due whenever they are

due just making sure that you're not creating so much learning debt that all of your time is spent just doing flash cards again I can go into this learning system in a lot more detail later on but this is what I would consider to be the major basic components of a learning system and if you're missing even one of these Components there are probably going to be very clear issues with your performance or your consistency or your confidence that you could just literally point to what the problem is and the part that's missing in your

learning system and connect the dots uh and I also if you're interested I've got a free quiz that you can do which will map out your learning system for you on some of the most important principles and it will output a score for the different Sections of a learning system so that you can have a better idea of where to work on first if you're interested in that it's free for you to do there's a link in the description below number nine start simple and build slow if you just listen to me talk about this

Learning System stuff and you feel like man I haven't got like any part of this Learning System there are so many things that I'm going to have to work on then that's fine don't worry like you along With everyone else are in the same boat I was in exactly the same position in fact I was in the same position but worse because no one told me what I had to work towards but the most important piece of advice I can give you for when you're improving your learning system is to build things slowly and swap

out what you're already doing with simple strategies that work a really common mistake that I see my students make Because when I teach people how to have a learning system I teach them like everything that they need to know like the stuff that took me years to figure out they're learning it in like three and a half lessons so they're exposed to so many different techniques that you know understandably they start trying to use all of these techniques all at the same time and so their Learning System kind of goes from zero to 100 in

a single step and that's completely not Sustainable there's no chance that you're going to be successful at learning if you try to change too many things too quickly uh and this is because a lot of the ways that you learn are habits and so you're you're really trying to unlearn and relearn new habits all at the same time and your brain is actually not biologically capable of making that much change so quickly so the much better approach that is going to help you to get better performance Locked in as quickly as possible is just look

at what you're already doing which may be like terrible okay that's fine wherever you're starting from just pick a strategy that you think could help you in a way and just swap out one part of what you're doing with that part and just slowly upgrade your system as each new thing becomes a habit and by doing that for every change you make you're going to get an improvement problems you have right now are going to be solved if You have 10 things that you trying to work on because you've got 10 different problems then you're

going to have those 10 same problems until you fix all 10 of them it's much better to just take 10 problems start with one and then have nine problems to deal with and then eight and then seven it's your life just progressively gets easier and easier but I can I can promise you that if you have all of these things to work on and you try to fix all of them at the same time You will spend a lot of time trying to work on lots of things and then after 3 month realize that you

still have the same problems and then you'll be back to square one deciding to just start with one thing all over again you will just waste that time I promise you that this will happen so please just start simple and build slow lesson number 10 create a learning log if I think back to when I was first in uni and I think about now I cannot even count the number of Experiments and trials that I've run with the way that I study it it's literally will be in the thousands and it's unavoidable for any learner

trying to become more efficient if what you're doing is trying to improve the process and not just win through effort alone which we already said is usually not possible you are going to have to do a lot of trial and error and experimentation and even if you are starting simple and building slow there Are lots of things that will be on your mind for you to try to improve on and lots of ideas and that's a good thing the problem is that it can be very overwhelming and I spent the first solid few years working

on multiple different things here and there and not really making the type of progress that I should have made for the amount of time I was spending because I was just dabbling in so many different types of techniques and avenues of improvement And instead what I should have been doing is just picking One path improving that fixing this problem doing enough trial and error until that problem is gone and then moving on to the next one and then again doing that experimentation stacking those gains until that problem is gone and to make it much easier

to figure out which direction you're heading in and how to stack those experiments and fix that problem and to move more effectively a Learning log is extremely helpful a learning log is basically a record of the experiments you're doing what you're trying to do with that experiment why you're doing it and then how that experiment went it's like a record of your progress and I previously talked about a learning log in another video and a lot of you guys wanted me to show you how to actually create a learning log so I'll give you a

basic template that you could follow right now uh you Can do this on anything um at the time I just used a Google sheet uh but you could use notion you could use Rome or obsidian or whatever it is that you want it really doesn't matter there are really six core parts of what creates an effective learning log the first part is what your experiment or experence ience is this is usually just like one or two sentences about what you're trying to do what change you're trying to make the second part is defining what progress

Looks like for you this makes it much easier to realize if you are going in the right direction or not so for example if you are trying a new technique for the very very first time then progress for you is not going to be yeah I figured it out and I fixed it like in one single go otherwise you you would need a learning log right you just find a problem you fix it and you're done but it takes trial and error to fix it so your initial stages of progress With a new technique is

not going to be I solved the problem it's going to be I realized a barrier or an obstacle or a challenge that I didn't expect with this solution and this experiment I realized more about the problem than I knew before and you're equipping yourself with more information to later be able to solve it and it's only in the later experiments that you're actually likely to properly fix it so you want to spend the second time writing a few sentences About what you think would be a win for you so the experiment is I'm going to

try mind mapping then the progress condition is I tried mind mapping and I found a couple of challenges with doing this effectively that I didn't realize before and by taking the time to write it up front it's much more motivating and it keeps a more accurate count of the progress we're making with our skill development as opposed to thinking we're not making any progress uh because we Haven't fixed the issue when actually we're making really good progress we just didn't realize it the third part is a reflection of how it actually went so this is

you now doing the thing that you tried to do and you're reflecting on how you found it here the key is to just be very specific about what actually happened and not make broad overarching statements or try to rationalize why things happened because that's the next part number four is Trends and Habits Trends and habits is about looking at what happened in your reflection which is basically just like a data dump of what happened when you tried the experiment and now you're looking at it very critically to see are there any patterns or similarities or

Trends with previous experiences or experiments or habits about myself about the way I tend to think or respond to certain things that I can see occur again and again this this is really Where most of your improvement is going to come from it's your ability to realize certain habits and patterns of thinking that consistently hold you back a really common one for example let's say you tried mind mapping and then you did it and then you found all these difficulties with it the trend could be that every time I do a type of learning that

makes me think more deeply I tend to think that it's not working and so I go back to doing what I'm used to I'm Not used to making learning like that could be a really really key insight and you can see how realizing that is just like completely life transforming in terms of your ability to improve number five is thinking about the actions that you can take based on those insights so you'll find a bunch of different Trends a bunch of things that you think you can improve on for next time and optimizations that you

can make and then you turn those into action items for you To work on so that in number six you prioritize like I said start simple build slow if you've got 10 different things that you realize that you can improve on you can't work on all 10 of those things so pick just one or two for you to focus on and that becomes your next experiment that you add to your log and anytime you're feeling little demotivated just scroll back like two months ago in your log and think about the problems and the way that

you Thought about it then versus how you think about it now and you'll realize this process just transforms you it is this process repeated hundreds and thousands of times that allowed me to go from a desperate student working 20 hours a day to just barely hang in there to someone who studied so little people asked me how do I do all the other things that I do lesson 11 measure your true learning efficiency there's a student that I've just recently finished Coaching uh who's a surgical trainee so they're a registered doctor they are they've been

practicing for nine or 10 years now and they just about finished with their General surgical training program they're one step away from being like a senior senior doctor and they've already failed this exam one time and they're really really motivated to crack it on their second go and so we got to a point in this coaching where we had figured out a really really good system For him to use that worked alongside his his high workload and how him find those tiny little gaps and address them effectively and we'd run it for a couple of

weeks and he was finding that it was it was working it was working really well and then a week passes and he sends me this email before the next consultation where he says hey Justin I feel like something is really going wrong here I feel really really slow I feel like my learning is actually Slipping backwards I feel like I'm getting worse than before when I started so I was like cool we should well not cool but let's address this so we caught up and in the consultation I asked him what was going on and

this is basically the story that he painted he said that before he would have a single piece of uh a topic that he would need to cover and covering that topic would take him around 3 hours and now it was taking him like 5 Hours to cover that same topic and he's still not able to perform in certain ways like he used to be able to before when a seniors would ask him certain chrans he would be able to recall a lot more of those facts and those details than he is able to now and

now when a senior is asking the questions sometimes he doesn't actually know because he hasn't gotten to a point where he feels solid on that knowledge yet so when you look at this someone Going from 3 hours to 5 hours that seems like a clear situation where their efficiency has gone down right not quite so I said okay let's think about what's happening right now are you able to get to a point where you can use your knowledge think about it together and apply them in more complicated ways where you can have a curveball an

unusual case and you know how to think about it and how to navigate that topic like you feel you have a good intuitive Understanding of that topic and he said yes I feel like I'm able to achieve that now so we call that a high level so are you able to achieve a high level right now yes how long does it take you okay it takes about that 5 hours to cover the topic Plus I'm now spending maybe an extra hour of reviewing that information later so in total it's taking me about 6 hours okay

and what about the low level so you're saying that you're not able to reach that low level they said yeah Right now I'm able to reach about 50% of that low level in the same 6 hours that I'm spending so I said okay well now let's compare that to what we were doing before so you said before it was taking you 3 hours to cover this topic so before were you able to get to this high level where you have that intuitive understanding and you're able to think about the topic in multiple different ways and

use them in these complex applications and he said no that's Something that I've I've always struggled with he said that he remembers being early on a junior in a training program and and really struggling with that so I said okay well how many hours would you spend on trying to reach this level not including just going over at the first time but in terms of time spent going over it again and again and testing yourself again and all these other repetitions bu he said well easily like over 20 Hours and after 20 hours were you

able to get there he said no he still was not able to get there most of the time so I said okay well what about these this low level what were you able to get to so he said yeah low level was really good he was able to get to 90% plus of that low level and was it in the 3 hours that he said no the 3 hours was just the amount of time taken to cover the information the first time and when I asked them how long long it took to cover that Information

again and again how many times you had to repeat it to learn it it was double that amount of times so was 6 hours so now this is a very different picture he has gone from spending six total hours including all the relearning of stuff that he had forgotten to get to 90% here and spending 20 plus hours really Infinity because he never was able to reach this and now he's gone to a point where in six hours he is Reaching this a level he's never been able to reach regardless of how much time he

spent on this and yes his lowlevel Factory call is suffering at the moment but we've got plenty of hours to spare that we can just plug in to The lowlevel Simple Solutions add a few flash cards do some memorization to pad that up and this is how you look at learning efficiency learning efficiency is not how long does it take to cover a topic covering a topic means nothing Learning efficiency is how long does it take in total to reach the level you need to reach and most people that struggle with their studying spend an

infinite amount of time because they never reach the level no matter how much time they spend and when you look at these two situations which person would you rather be this one or this one listen number 12 make confidence answer sheets this is what I think may be one of the easiest And most underrated ways of using practice questions and past papers when I was going through medical school I used to do so many practice questions there was this website that I'd sign up to and it had like I think like an endless number of

questions that I could do uh that tested me in a way that was similar to how the university would test me and everyone everyone in my class used this um used this service and it was great the problem is is that I was Doing so many questions like thousands of questions in order for me to gain a four five 6% increase in my performance and there are so many times where there was something that I covered in those practice questions and then a very similar question comes up in an exam and I just can't remember

and I still get it wrong and the same thing happens at at all levels like that surgical traine that I was talking to about just before the reason that they failed their final Examination was because of way that they had been preparing had these gaps that they had never realized like they hadn't gotten enough feedback from their seniors to realize that there was this part of thinking about the topic that they hadn't thought of before and making a confidence answer sheet solves that a confidence answer sheet means you take a set of practice questions which

you can get from anywhere and when you do them do not look at an answer sheet first Instead go through each question and rate your confidence of your answer this becomes the most important piece of information for you to improve after you've made your confidence sheet go through everything that you had a low level of confidence for and study it to the point where you feel confident confident either in the fact that yep you actually got that wrong and now you definitely know the right answer or confident that yep you got the right Answer but

now you know for sure so get to a point where every single answer you wrote you have confidence on if you have low confidence for an answer it means that there is a gap in your knowledge there and even if you happen to have gotten the right answer it means that you could get a very similar question in the exam and then get it wrong it's you may have just gotten lucky so confidence is actually the most important indicator of your knowledge once you do your Studying to get to a high level of confidence for

all of your answers you can then compare that to the real answer sheet and that can reveal another layer of mistakes because you can have something that you initially had very high confidence on and so you didn't bother studying that more but then when you take the actual answers it turns out to be wrong that is almost always a major red flag like that is a high priority area for you to study again Because there is probably a significant issue with how you've understood it or a significant Gap in your knowledge high confidence with a

wrong answer means that you don't even have the awareness of the problem that is a high priority for you to spend your time to study more into alternatively there may be something that was a low confidence that you studied to get to a high confidence but then you check the answer and it's still wrong again that means that that's Something that you should go in and study a little bit more because it means that the way that you thought about that topic was flawed in some way there was probably some kind of angle you were

missing or some relationship or connection between the ideas that you didn't quite see uh which meant that even after studying it you weren't able to connect the dots the reason this type of error is important is because it tells you about the way you tend to Think about information if you made that mistake here then you've probably made that mistake somewhere else as well if you use this confidence answer sheet system I can guarantee you the amount of questions and practice you need to do to develop real confidence and plug those gaps in your knowledge

will drop by at least half yes it does take a little bit longer to go through a set of questions but in terms of quality learning that happens per hour of you doing this Activity it is like one of the most high yield valuable strategies that I have within my toolkit listen number 13 learn to swim before your drowning when I was in my second year of uni one of my classmates posted up something a week before the exam they were saying hey I've been studying this stuff and I feel like really overwhelmed I feel

like I'm really behind on this what is the best thing I can do before this exam in just a few days from now and so I replied Lower your standards and um that was I mean it was obviously a joke um it was my claim to fame it was liked by like 70 people in my class it was like the most popular I'd ever been um but I mean it's kind of true is that if you're feeling like I've only got a week left before my exam and I've got all the stuff I need to

work on what can I do it's kind of like trying to learn to swim while you're already drowning it's you know there's maybe a Few things that could potentially help here and there but really it's the position you're in in the first place and so if you are thinking about working on these skills and improving your learning efficiency that's great that's fantastic I want everyone that watches my videos to feel that way don't wait until you feel like it's imminent like you need it because by the time you feel like you need it it's probably

because you know there's an exam coming up you Know you're already falling behind something like that if you're already in that position it makes it so much harder for you to actually improve some of my students actually take a gap here just to work on their learning skills so that when they enter into the year they can just do it full force that's if you can like that's actually a really good strategy and I know that's not possible for everyone but if you're in the summer holidays and you've got a break study Like cram ahead

take your whole Year's curriculum that's about to come up use that as practice material to hone your your learning skills give yourself a time limit of how much to study give yourself tests to do and actually use that time or you can go to the beach and enjoy your life but like if you want to spend that time to develop your skills if it's really important to you and it means that you will have much better skills so that the year goes by more Smoothly and as a added bonus because you use the actual material

for that year you've also got a head start you did some early cramming and if you don't have access to that then you can even just make your own curriculum like you could get chat gbt to just literally generate a curriculum for you or you can use Wikipedia it doesn't have to be exactly the same as what you're about to cover even if it's 50% similar like that's a 50% Head Start and the primary Benefit is that you're honing your skills without that external added pressure you're giving yourself that that hyperbolic time Cham the training

time of being able to just focus on working on your skills and then go swimming if right now you feel like it's something that's worth pursuing next year it's going to be even more important it's not going to solve itself this is a lifelong skill so the earlier you develop it the more benefit you get For the rest of your life and if you want the best place to start on learning to swim and you'd rather save yourself some of that trial and error then remember that free quiz that I mentioned that helps you map

out your learning system that link is in the description or if you want to just jump straight into it I've also got a training program that you can check out again the link to that is in the description at ien study.com thank you so much for watching And I'll see you in the next one