How To Encode Information Like A Genius (12 Rules)

I've been a learning coach for the past 13 years and I found that proper encoding is one of the most important abilities for any student or professional to master. If you have a strong encoding ability, you are able to remember more of what you learn and to a deeper level. But if you're weak at encoding, you could be wasting hundreds of hours every year.

In fact, I've coached over 30,000 learners and I found that strong encoding skills are so important and rare that it is a hallmark of what we call genius. So that person you remember from your class who never studied and remembered everything that is strong encoding and you can learn it by following these 12 rules. Rule number one, stop fighting your brain.

Encoding is the word that we use anytime that your brain forms memories with new information. And your brain is actually really good at doing this if we stay out of the way. Anytime there's new information that comes in and we want to learn it, our brain starts the process of encoding.

And what it wants to do to put it into our long-term memory is see where it fits. It's like putting a book on a library shelf. There is a organizational structure.

There is a logic to it. And when our brain is able to see where this new information fits and how it's relevant and how to organize it into our memory, that's when we feel like it makes sense. That's when we feel like, okay, I understand it and I feel like I'm going to hold on to this.

When it doesn't fit anywhere, that's when it feels like I don't know what to do with this. I'm not sure how this is relevant. And you can feel that you are about to forget it.

And your brain is not going to hold on to that piece of information because there's no need to. And it's very important that it doesn't just use up energy on just holding on to every scrap of random piece of information that it gets hit with. And so your brain is trying to organize and make sense and place information somewhere that it belongs, where it connects, where it's relevant, where it influences other things.

And then for the things that don't fit anywhere, it says this is not worth keeping and then it's going to throw it away. Good. Good brain.

And so now if you take that information that was just thrown away and forgotten and then you tell your brain no you need to remember this put it back in and it still doesn't fit anywhere and so your brain forgets it again and then you pick it up again and you say no you need to remember this that process is extremely inefficient. You are having a shouting match with your brain and this is basically the spectrum of the quality of encoding. On one end you have techniques, methods of learning, note takingaking, listening, reading that help the brain to see how it connects to create structure and to organize it.

And on the other end you've got techniques where you are not helping to connect it. you're not seeing the big picture. There is nowhere for it to fit.

You're just repeatedly smashing it into your brain. And that's a process we call wte memorization. Being a good encoder is about realizing that that is not going to help with our memory compared to finding a way to make it more relevant in the first place.

And you have to make that switch because the second rule is to prevent learning debt. Learning debt is what happens when you keep fighting your brain. So let's say that this is us and we're going to learn a new piece of information which is this square.

It goes into our brain and initially we feel like we don't know how it's relevant. If we keep fighting our brain, it's going to stay irrelevant which means our brain is going to continually forget it. It's going to put it in the dump.

And so what do we need to do later? Well, later we now need to spend time to look at what's in the dump. We need to then spend time to learn it again.

We need to spend time to think about it and realize, oh, it's still irrelevant. And we need to spend time to repeat it and tell our brain, no, you need to hold on to this. And so, what's your brain going to do?

Well, it's still irrelevant. So, it's just going to forget it again. And then this entire process has to repeat again and again and again.

And this is all wasted time. By not taking the time here to turn this irrelevant information into something that we think is relevant, we have created all of this debt for ourselves. Learning that we just put off until later and now the future version of us has to pay that off.

And if you have a habit of creating learning debt where your ability to learn depends on how much repetition you can do later, it's very difficult to ever improve your encoding because every time there is the opportunity to practice the skill and make the irrelevant relevant, we just say, "Nope, I'll just deal with that later. " And so, what's one way that you can break this habit? What's one way that you can make it easier to turn the irrelevant into the relevant?

Well, this is rule number three. Don't over eat information. I often talk about learning as a two-phase process.

Consuming and digesting. Consuming is what gives you the information. Digesting is what makes that information something that sticks in your memory that you can use.

That's basically what encoding is. Digesting and encoding in this example are the same thing. And so this is what I mean by overeating information.

And it's very easy to do this. Everyone falls into this trap at some point. If you are sitting there in a lecture and you're listening for an hour, dense information coming in, and then afterwards, you go and read through a textbook for another hour.

Again, lots of information coming in. And at that point, you decide, okay, I'm going to get all this information that I've collected, and I'm now going to start trying to see how it fits together, making it feel more relevant, connecting the dots. You are already overeating.

That is going to be much more difficult and more timeconuming and overall less efficient than just digesting constantly but frequently throughout that entire process. So, as you're listening, listen, listen, listen. take some information and then try to piece it together even in a very simple way.

A little summary, a little synthesis, a tiny mini mind map and then you go back to listening and collecting information. Getting into the habit of constantly trying to digest what you're consuming and making sense of it as you go creates the snowball effect of learning. As you learn more, more things start to make sense to you.

you start seeing patterns and trends and so the new information that comes in becomes easier to connect because you've got a better foundation. You've got more anchor points to connect to. And so as you get more and more information, learning becomes easier and easier.

On the other hand, if you just consume for a really long time and then try to digest all of that at once, instead of having two or three concepts that you're trying to put together, you're now working with 25. And it can feel really overwhelming and cognitively taxing to work through all those possible interactions and relationships and make it work. This is also one of the reasons why I always recommend if you can to pre-study before entering into something like a lecture or a workshop.

It gives you the opportunity to just consume a little bit some of the most important things and to digest that in your own time so that when you come to the live event which might be a little bit faster paced, harder to keep up with, you have that foundation to work off. That snowball has already been built. If pre-study is not already part of your learning system, I highly recommend it.

And if you're not sure about your current learning system and you're not sure how to improve your learning system, I also have a free learning system diagnostic quiz that you can take. Everyone has some learning system whether you know it or not. But that learning system may not be the best.

This quiz helps you to map out your learning system across five important domains of learning among which encoding and pre-study are part of it. And at the end, it even actually gives you a score for your encoding skills. So, if you're interested in that quiz, it's completely free and I'll leave a link in the description below.

Now, the next four rules are actually tactics. There are four types of thinking that you can do that will force you into more effective encoding. So, if you took that quiz before and let's say your encoding score was like 10%, then just doing these four tactics could increase that to maybe 50 or 60%.

So, starting with rule number four, simplify everything. Here's the trick. Stop trying to remember or understand what you read or hear.

And I know that sounds really counterintuitive if you're new to this because it feels like, well, that's kind of the whole point of learning is to remember and understand it. Being able to remember and understand something is a side effect of doing the right type of thinking. Just trying to remember something and trying to understand it is actually not the most effective way to achieve that.

Confusing, I know. On the other hand, if you try to simplify it, if that's your number one goal for any new piece of information that you hear is you're just trying to simplify it, then your brain will automatically go through the right motions and processes that allow you to understand it and remember it better than if you were just trying to remember and understand to begin with. Even if you incorrectly simplify something, the work that went into trying to simplify it will make your memory of it stronger when you get the correct version.

And this is especially useful for really dense technical complicated information. Like I remember going through medical school reading these definitions like anaphilaxis is a life-threatening severe systemic hyper sensitivity reaction involving IG mediator. Like it's like okay so basically your immune system hits the panic button.

You know being able to frame something that initially is complicated in a way that is just simpler and more intuitive to understand allows you to work with that concept more easily. And this is really important because the next rule, rule number five is to compare everything. Before I talked about how good encoding means making the irrelevant relevant.

Well, this is the first part of how your brain creates relevance. Your brain fundamentally operates in networks, which means that information is only meaningful because of its relationship to other pieces of information. You might say, "My house is really important to me.

" Why? Because of the implication it has on shelter and stability and security and warmth and all these other things. So, forcing ourselves to compare new information with another piece of new information or to compare it with something that we already know.

This is basically opening up our brain and the networks within it to this new one to see where it can fit. We're actively looking to give it meaning by finding similarities and differences. And once you've done that, once you've been able to simplify something and then see the similarities and differences of this piece of information compared to this other piece of information, then we're ready for the next step, which is rule number six.

connect everything. Once we go through this process of trying to simplify and trying to compare all these different concepts with each other, then we can actually see how they connect with each other. We start seeing the influences and the impacts and the implications.

We start building the network. We are creating memory. And I deliberately use the word everything when I say simplify everything, compare everything, connect everything because you have to do this consistently.

It's not simplify when you feel like it. It's not compare things when it feels obvious. It's every single time.

A strong encoder is someone who has a habit of every piece of information that comes into their brain. They are examining it. They are trying to simplify, compare, and connect it.

And sometimes they're not successful. They don't know how to make it simpler. They don't see what it's similar to at all.

They don't see how it could connect with anything else. And this is what makes good encoders also have really good questions. The question is not just hey what does this mean?

It is hey this seems kind of similar to this thing but also very different from it and I feel like it might connect with this other thing but I'm not sure. It's much more targeted and at a certain point if you are encoding the right way and you're doing following these steps, you will feel that at a certain point there are a lot of connections and similarities that are overlapping. And that's actually a good thing because that means you're ready for the next step.

And it's the fourth tactic. Rule number seven, group everything. Before you group things, this is what your organization, your mind map, how your thoughts are currently organized.

Something like this. It's this kind of complicated network of all these different things that are connected together. And yes, there's connection, but it's also so overwhelming that there's no way we're going to be able to remember this.

Grouping is about taking this and then simplifying it again, making it easier for us to hold on to and package into our memory. And the way we do this is by looking for these patterns of shared similarities. So for example, we might see that these three items here are actually connected to each other.

So maybe they actually share a single similarity and that could be the name of the group that they form underneath. So instead of representing it like this, if we look at all the different shared similarities, we can actually simplify the exact same network down to something that looks a little bit more like this. And so this is actually preserving all those same connections.

But look at how much more organized this looks and how much easier it is to remember. And so again, this is that digesting. It's about not necessarily taking in any new information.

It's about looking at the information you've already got and then looking for these patterns and these trends and doing that deep thinking. And that thinking is you doing the encoding. The very process of looking for ways to organize it, of creating groups, realizing that those groups don't make sense and therefore thinking of a different group.

That is the encoding process. And so that the time spent doing that leads to better memory, leads to a deeper understanding, saves you hundreds of hours every single year that you spend studying just through how much it improves your retention and efficiency. And the awesome thing is that a genius is able to do these steps.

They are looking for comparisons. They're making connections. They're grouping and they're simplifying and they're doing it automatically.

Sometimes they're not even aware that they're actively doing it. But by teaching you these techniques, you can do the same thing. You don't have to be born with it.

Even if you're not built different, you can build differently. And I'm really making this uh a point and I'm emphasizing this because of the next rule, which is rule number eight. Get used to thinking hard.

By this point, I think you've realized that this is a lot more mental effort. Digesting it takes effort. It takes concentration to be able to do this.

It is a lot easier just to read through, speed read some textbook, listen to a lecture on three times speed, and just smash your face infinitely into flashcards. But there is a reason most people are not very efficient at learning. Because getting to the point where you're efficient at learning means doing this stuff, doing the hard work, and getting used to thinking at that level.

And one day it will become a habit. And so thinking at that level will be just as easy as however you're thinking now if you're not at that level. But if cutting down on wasted time while learning, improving your attention, getting a deeper understanding, being able to solve more complex problems, if these are things that you've struggled with, you're not at the level that you want to be quite yet, you have to go through this process.

There's no way that you will reach that result without going through this path of getting used to thinking like this. Now, thankfully, there is one way that you can make it easier without it detrimenting your learning, and that is by using Short Form, who is a sponsor of this video. Short Form gives you book summaries and guides on thousands of the world's most popular books.

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Now on to rule number nine which is to do everything again. Learning is endless which means that encoding never ends. Just because you created a nice mind map, created a nice network for what you have learned right now doesn't mean that that's where it ends.

And you may have done a lot of hard thinking, you're sweating bullets. Unfortunately, we have to keep going. As you learn more, as you get even more detail, as your knowledge deepens, as you realize there might be gaps or mistakes in the way that you encoded the information, you have to then re-evaluate what you've constructed and then restructure it.

There have been many times where I've created a mind map of something and I feel like it makes a lot of sense. I test myself and I realize I got it wrong. And even at a micro level, you know, I was talking about how you need to be consuming and then digesting frequently.

So you take a little bit in and then you digest it and then you take another little bit in and then you digest it. That process of digesting, what that really means is take in a little bit of information, couple of concepts, simplify them, compare them, connect them, group them together, and then take in the next bit. With that next bit, you now simplify that.

compare it, connect it, and then group it. And what will happen is that as you are continuing to collect and consume more information, you realize that the way you grouped and connected it before isn't enough. You have to re-evaluate your groups to encompass the new information.

And so mentally you are constantly I I mean literally if you're an effective learner who can encode efficiently, you are constantly in a cycle of simplifying, connecting, comparing, grouping, taking new information in, and then doing it all over again. And this is why rule number eight is really important. You have to get used to thinking hard.

But the good news is that even though it might sound really overwhelming to just constantly be doing this, it's actually easier than you might think. The hard part is just setting up those initial habits. Once you have your habits of simplifying and comparing and connecting and grouping things together, it's straightforward to just keep thinking in that way.

And at that point you will feel that the control you have and how strong you can make your memory and how deeply you can understand something is a rare skill that most people you encounter will not have. Now this next rule is actually uh another tactic that helps you to do all of those previous ones using a single technique which is to use better analogies. Creating an analogy is actually like a magical technique.

Anytime you want to create an analogy, you have to simplify the information, compare it, connect it, and group them. You have to to create an analogy. Now, you can't just rely on only using analogies for the rest of your life.

But having that as one tool to achieve this as part of your learning toolkit is incredibly valuable. Now, why do I say to make better analogies? Well, it's because a better analogy makes your learning even more effective.

It takes a powerful technique and really supercharges it. So, what is a better analogy? A better analogy is one that is more comprehensive in that it involves more of the key details and concepts of what you're trying to learn while being simple and also accurate.

And it's balancing these three parts of an analogy that can be challenging. Whenever you create an analogy, it's often very simple to make a simple analogy for only two or three concepts and how they relate to each other. But once you start adding additional concepts and more factors and more conditions, then our analogy grows.

Suddenly it's not just learning is like eating and then digesting. It's like, but then there's also depends on how spicy the food is and then what you ate before and whether you know you're already full and how far you are from the toilet. And so now the analogy just becomes itself like a whole thing to try to memorize.

And so that's why we need to make it simple. But then if you make it too simple, you actually start losing accuracy. And so, as you probably have guessed by now, when you're trying to make a really comprehensive, while simple, while accurate analogy, the thought process and the effort that goes on mentally to see whether it makes sense and to make it meet those conditions, that is also helping with your encoding.

Now, the next rule is something that makes everything that we've talked about easier to do. It is your best friend when it comes to learning, which is note-taking. Rule number 11 is to use notetaking as an offload.

If you're carrying like five plates of food and you're about to drop them, you give a couple of those plates to your friend. You let them carry it so that you can focus on what you can hold. When it comes to learning, note takingaking is that friend.

While the human brain is extremely powerful, it also has very well-defined limits and it is not good at holding on to multiple pieces of information at the same time. So, if you're trying to balance like 12 different concepts and see how all of these concepts can be simplified and compared and connected with each other, there are probably very very few people in the world that could manage that for new complex information just mentally. So, the way that we use our note-taking needs to be in the realm of hold on to this thought for me.

Here are a few concepts. Maybe they relate together. I'm just going to jot that down so I don't have to hold on to that.

Could it be like this? Could it be connected like this? Where does this fit?

Jot that down. Get to the habit of thinking on paper. And there are two huge advantages to how this helps with your encoding.

Number one, it actually makes it cognitively easier because you can literally see the thoughts on paper and you can actually, you know, visualize it. You can move things around. You're not spending so much time just trying to remember and juggle the information mentally.

The second thing is that your notes start becoming a reflection of your mind. After all, it is a mind map. And this is really useful because you can then look at your notes to find gaps in your knowledge or areas where your memory is going to be weaker by just evaluating the types of connections.

If you see this straggly piece of information way out there that's not connected to anything, you know that you're likely to forget that and that you're not going to be able to solve complex problems with that information. That becomes a weak point. You don't even need to test yourself.

You can look at your notes to find areas of weakness in your knowledge. I think that's pretty cool. And learning to do that is crucial because of the next rule, which is rule number 12.

Challenge your hypothesis constantly. You will never know you are wrong until you know you are wrong. Every piece of knowledge we're crafting, every network we're forming is just a hypothesis.

This is just how we think that knowledge is structured right now. I've been studying about learning science for a pretty long time now, like 13 years, and everything I know about learning is still I think of it as a hypothesis. I'm willing to challenge any part of how I think learning works when new information comes in.

This is what allows me to be flexible and adapt my structures very freely. And it is this mindset, the willingness to constantly challenge your hypothesis and to constantly challenge how you have understood something that allows your expertise to keep growing quickly. When we don't challenge our hypothesis, it makes our knowledge very rigid.

Mistakes and gaps in our knowledge stay hidden. Especially when you're just starting a new topic, everything's a hypothesis. There's almost no chance you're going to get right the first time.

But if we group it a certain way and connect it a certain way and we say, "Okay, well, now that I've connected it and now that I've grouped it, I'm just going to keep it like that and we continue to learn things that suggest that maybe this group is not the best, unless we stay open to the fact that this was just a hypothesis, we're not going to change it. This becomes rigid. So the mistakes and the misunderstandings that we formed early on stay there.

they become the foundation where all the additional knowledge is built on top of. So those are the 12 rules to dramatically boost your encoding abilities. And if you're listening to it and you're thinking it doesn't sound simple, it doesn't sound sexy and quick to just apply it.

That's what learning is. If you're looking for a shortcut to learning, I'm sorry to say that it doesn't exist, but there is a path which is up to you to take.