## [Stop Studying. Start Learning | TEDxUOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQXMl4GycD0) - Studying != learning. - Research shows that some of the most effective study strategies _require more effort._ - It'd be like going to the gym and thinking, "These weights are too heavy. It's not working." ##### Lower-order learning is isolated & boring - It's just memorizing facts, disconnected from other information. - It's irrelevant and boring, so you forget it. (Often things like flashcards.) - As you learn more, you get overwhelmed with isolated information. ##### Higher-order learning is integrated & relevant - You're comparing and connecting information into a network of knowledge. - It's relevant to you, so you remember it. - It creates a snowball effect: as you learn more, your learning becomes more efficient and easier. ##### How to do higher-order learning? The research is quite complicated so there's no agreed upon method or resource for higher-order learning. Step 1: Metacognition: Learn how to learn. - Tune into the feeling of lower-order versus higher-order learning. - When you're reading something and you're feeling like "I'm not going to remember this." Your brain is telling you, "this is irrelevant, it's isolated." - When studying, keep a tally of when you have this feeling of lower-order learning. Step 2: Relate and group information. - Prioritize information by asking yourself "How important is this? What purpose does it serve?" - This takes real mental effort but this is the learning taking place! - This back-and-forth thinking is what higher-order learning feels like. Step 3: Leverage note-taking. - Don't just write notes sequentially. Knowledge isn't linear. - You don't want software that makes this too easy. You want to stop and think about how to illustrate / diagram groups and relationships. ## [I got called out by a Stanford learning scientist](https://youtu.be/5cbQudbxHi4?si=A9LIjckQRM13mBwn) - Just Sung: I see myself as bridging the gap between research and practice. A lot of the basic research isn't really aimed at being implemented in practice. - Benjamin Keep: Right. The research community isn't generally doing research to help the practice community. They're doing research to find out why the brain works how it does. - Sung: A lot of people aren't really leading the charge. For each concept, there's 2-3 people pushing the frontier, and everyone else is trying to fill the gaps. So, there's a bandwagon effect that occurs with this publication bias, that's self-validating each other. And then because there's a lot of research behind it, it is perceived as "well researched." Case in point: learning styles. - Keep: Someone has to grapple with how research is done. - Sung: The people who are asking for citations for everything, are the people who it's not going to mean anything. And the people who aren't asking, know how to look it up themselves. - Sung: A lot of researchers are citing things and, let's be honest, they're often just reading the abstract. - Sung: When you're first writing and publishing, you want so many citations as a statement of your rigor. But as you become more confident in your publishing, you include only the most necessary and important citations. - Keep: If you look at papers that are retracted, nothing happens, there's no consequences. - Sung: In the inquiry-based learning space, there's not a lot of high-quality research. Now you've got meta-analyses saying it's not actually very effective. While some of the principles behind inquiry-based learning might be true, the low standards of the research bring in questions. - Keep: Flashcards are really easy to do and test. If you're going to design a project-based learning scheme, the number of decisions you have to make and the number of areas things can go wrong, are so many, so that makes research a lot harder. - Sung: I should have clearly differentiated active recall and spaced repetition, they're often grouped together. The common problem is when you over-rely on active recall and spaced repetition, which are both lower-order forms of learning. It's monotonous and not the most efficient. - Sung: "Spaced retrieval" is the proper term in academic literature but the term in common usage is "spaced repetition." - Keep: The language used in the research community and the practice community often done align. - Sung: One of the first things I teach people is how to do spacing correctly, and different forms of retrieval using interleaving principles. Because encoding requires a more complex set of skills, there's a lot more that goes into higher quality encoding. So one of the first things I teach people is SIR: spaced interleaved retrieval. From there, you can build on that and fill the gaps. - Keep: Flashcards focus on isolated, decontextualized facts. They don't utilize synthesis, knowledge reorganization, comparison / contrast, or applying things in new context. People are so focused on their flashcards that they're not focusing on the information very deeply. - Keep: I think the best learners either don't use flashcards, or use them very sparingly. - Sung: A lot of people will say, "I made a silly mistake," but if you're making that mistake more than once, it's not a silly mistake. What they're often doing is confusing their ability to retrieve an answer with their ability to understand an answer. If you're not confident with your answer, even if you got it right, that probably means you should study that more. - Sung: People don't understand the difference between free recall versus cued recall. They'll build pattern recognition for a very specific cue (say, of some flashcard) without having to activate the retrieval process that would happen in any other context. So all you'd have to do is change the wording of the flashcard, and all of a sudden you can't recall the information anymore. So flashcards can create an illusion of competence. - Sung: Guided self-explanation versus spontaneous self-explanation: When you do spontaneous self-explanation, you are able to have more generative effects and have stronger learning. In cases of free-recall, is it the retrieval or the generative cognitive process that is improving learning? - Keep: Retrieval is a memory modifier. - Sung: Encoding is _any_ process that is taking information and shunting it into your long-term memory, whether it's high-quality or not. If it's decayed very quickly, then that likely indicates it was encoded in a lower-level strength. - Sung: Constructivist models suggest that if the structure you've encoded the information is architecturally of a higher-order knowledge structure, something that's more integrated or relational, that correlates with having longer term, more meaningful retention of the information. So you could say that the processes that lead to that higher-order knowledge structure are more effective and of higher-quality. - Sung: It's not that encoding is hard, it's that encoding to higher-quality encoding. And by higher-quality encoding, I'm generally referring to higher-order thinking, leading to higher-order learning outcomes, that generates higher-order knowledge structures. - Sung: When I'm referring to higher-order learning, I'm referring to Bloom's taxonomy as guidance. When referring to knowledge structures, I'm referring to SOLO taxonomy as guidance. Even though I know that's not how they were designed to be used. - Keep: When it comes to learning, you want your memory to change. It's a feature, not a bug. When learning, you don't know necessarily know when knowledge is going to be useful - Keep: If flashcards aren't effective retrieval practice, what do you want to jump to? - Sung: As soon as possible, you want to jump to higher-order learning. From Bloom's taxonomy, that means applying, but more so, analyzing and evaluating. You want to take an idea and then look at it in relation to another idea, and compare and contrast between them. Doing this with multiple different ideas. And with evaluating, we want to figure out how we can judge and prioritize them. - Keep: To follow on, spaced repetition apps get the spacing part, but they miss out on synthesis, reorganization, comparison, application, and contexts. That's why they're not terribly effective. - Sung: I've interviewed with dozens of EdTech companies, and of those, maybe 3 had at least one person who really understood learning science in a way that I thought was ethically right. - Keep: Generally speaking, you want to practice the skills that you want to get better at. If you're studying a language, having a conversation in the target language is a retrieval practice. - Sung: Retrieval practice has a lower learning curve and is easier to execute correctly (e.g. flashcards, testing) compared to encoding methods (e.g. mind mapping, elaborative rehearsal, self-explanation) which require complex micro-decisions, self-regulation, and training to execute effectively. - Sung: The lower barrier to entry for retrieval practice is why I teach retrieval practice first, where most people are starting from a base of relatively low meta-cognition and unfamiliarity with higher-order learning. Correct encoding principles are much more complex. - Sung: Retrieval practice is essentially always effective. The effectiveness of it scales with the quality of the knowledge structure you have. If you have a weak knowledge structure that's fairly isolated, then your ability to do higher-order retrieval practices is limited. - Sung: If you're able to create a reasonably good, well-integrated knowledge structure right away, then when you're doing retrieval practice, you're able to hone in on smaller issues much faster and consolidate at a wider level. And the full range of higher-order to lower-order retrieval practice methods is very high yield and meaningful. - Keep: You don't have to choose between encoding and retrieval. You can do both! You want to do both effectively, focusing on higher-order thinking. ## [The Perfect Mind Map: 6 Step Checklist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zT_2aBP6vM&t=1s) Studies found that mind maps: - Improve critical thinking - Enhance creative - Increase metacognition Most people don't like to do mind maps because they can take more work or don't know how to properly do it. ##### GRINDE - Grouped - Reflective - Interconnected - Non-verbal - Directional - Emphasized **Grouped** means we should be aiming to fit ideas into different groups / boxes. This simplifies the knowledge by chunking things together. Imagine trying to build a house with a tree: You can build a much more sturdy structure if you use branches (groups of knowledge) instead of just leaves. **Reflective**: Notes should be reflective of whatever is going on inside your mind. Students are used to, misguidedly, writing notes *linearly*. **Interconnected**: We're connecting the groups of information together. This helps to make knowledge less isolated. **Non-verbal**: By using more creative methods of expression, it contributes to the retention and depth of that knowledge. Words should eventually be the last resort. **Directional**: We're creating not just connections but we're arranging things with an order / directionality. We can see how ideas join together and lead to others. Directionality gives us *flow*— a cause and effect relationship. This creates a logical scaffold. **Emphasized**: We make the main, most important points more distinctive by using bolding, underlining, coloring, etc. This forces you to justify a hierarchy of importance which is an important part of high-order learning. ## [Learn faster and retain more than your friends | E3 Bigger Plate](https://read.readwise.io/new/read/01hhaxevwqycpw42hxhdyvr7pr) Most people study in the following way: 1. Learn 2. Write notes 3. Revise notes 4. Apply that information This method of studying comes about from the creation of formal education and is relatively modern in terms of human evolutionary history. Then we go into a career and the learning is much more organic and not as structured as in school. In our evolutionary past, we'd learn in a very organic way. We'd be observing things in nature and make conclusions about whether things are safe, whether we're navigating correctly, whether we're tracking our prey, etc. Note, we're learning in a very direct and relevant way. Inquiry-based learning is much more in tune with our brain's evolutionary past. We want to have a purpose for our learning. Our brain only wants to keep memory of purposeful, useful things. So, you need to increase the relevancy of your learning. Ask yourself, "How is this helping me in my life?" "How can I apply this in my life?" "Why does this matter to me?" You need to make it relevant somehow! And if it's not relevant _somehow_, then why are you learning it? Now that you've made the information relevant, you know what to look for, you're asking yourself questions and it will be better memorized. So here's the more optimal study method: 1. Be clear on the problem 2. Hypothesize the solutions 3. Do the learning to solve the problem 4. Iterate You're making your brain hungry for information. You're not just mindlessly stuffing information into your brain. ## [3 Steps to Write Essays Faster and Procrastinate Less](https://read.readwise.io/new/read/01hhb0p54seyer9j49wq2zgxwf) Most students write the essay very linearly. This is not the most effective way and feels overwhelming. Instead, **construct your writing in _layers_.** ##### Step 1: Conceptualize Have a strong conceptual understanding of the topic. For example, if it's a text, don't worry so much about how you're going to write about it. Instead, think about the main themes and main principles in the text, and especially, how do they relate with each other. ##### Step 2: Start with the questions Start with an outline: Write down the series of questions, in order, where if these questions were answered, they would form the main points of your argument. This forces you to think about this from the perspective of the reader. What would the reader be thinking and what next questions would they have? This leaves you open to different arrangements of points as you're writing. ##### Step 3: Answer each question Answer each question and support your answer with the relevant evidence that backs up your point. ## [You're not Lazy: How to End Procrastination For Life](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hg1pcszzev3bvd13shjwv8yc) Three part process for ending procrastination: 1. Specify the exact behaviors 2. Analyze & work on the drivers of the behaviors 3. Slow down your brain via meditation ##### Specify the exact behaviors - Procrastination isn't one behavior, there's many: eating sweets, watching tv, snoozing alarm, etc. - By being specific about the behavior, we can specifically approach it. - Environment -> Trigger - The behavior is a symptom, a side-effect of something else. - Make the desirable behavior easy to do - Make the undesirable behavior a lot of effort to do ##### Analyze & work on the drivers of the behaviors - Write down the procrastination behavior using this format: - Intentions: "The intention was to study." - Event before: "I was eating dinner & planned to study after." - Event during transition: "I thought about going downstairs to study but decided to spend 20 minutes digesting on the couch." - Event result: "I ended up turning on the TV and watching a recommended series." - Feelings: "Initially motivated but overwhelmed about where to start." - Triggers: "Comfortable couch, Netflix logo, & recommended series." ![[procrastination-behavior-rubric.png]] ##### Slow down your brain via meditation - Remove distractions: app blockers, uninstall app, etc. - Practice mindfulness meditation. - This takes the most effort as it will take time to retrain your brain. ## [How CEOs Need to Learn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9rwQxsD1w) ##### How to learn a new topic This system is counterintuitive. You're trying to achieve mastery of a topic before you even understand what the concepts individually are. We're trying to build a fluid, omnidirectional knowledge structure. 1. **Scope your resources:** Before you dive in, get a scope of what you're about to learn. So if it's a course, get the syllabus or make a list of all the keywords. 2. **Skim read:** Get a book summary or flick through the book quickly and look for headings, bold words, diagrams. You can do a 200 page book in 20 minutes. 3. **Make an unordered list of keywords:** It's important the list has no ordering or hierarchy. Breaking the order from the book breaks the cognitive bias of tending to think about it in the order it was presented to us. _You're trying to create an omnidirectional fluid structure of knowledge._ 4. **Search for words you don't understand:** Go and learn a bit about it. This might take you another 5-10 minutes. 5. **Build the mental model based on your prior knowledge:** This can be done using a mind map / chunk map. You're skipping the process of trying to understand it fully. We're just creating a hypothesis of how the information will be structured. This forces us to depend on our existing knowledge set. Of course, maybe 30% of it will be wrong. *But we'll form this overarching structure of the knowledge. At that point, we have a schema or mental model that normally takes months to develop.* ##### Laws of learning 1. You will always need to rearrange your "schema". 2. If what you learn is isolated and irrelevant when you learn it, you will forget it. ## [How Avoiding Stress Can Lead to Burnout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttQMlbj6awo) - Stress is necessary to a fulfilling life. Overcoming a challenge is tied to living a fulfilling life. - If you're in a job or profession that's stressful, you always have the option to leave. But if your job doesn't feel fulfilling, even if the job is low stress, you should leave. Otherwise, the stress won't feel worth it. You should take that as information and realign your goals. - Are you going to deal with the stress of unfulfilling or overwhelming work? Or instead deal with the stress of pursuing something new? You want to align with what you truly want so that when you deal with stress, you can feel like this is a path you chose and desire. - A high reliance on motivation to achieve a goal leads to burnout. If you require motivation to get out of bed every day, you're going to burnout from that eventually. - Ensure your daily work isn't relying on motivation. Instead... - Automate & process - Form habits - Delegate work - Make the process inherently enjoyable - Think of motivation as a resource you should guard. - The human brain naturally enjoys, and is motivated by, learning. Rather, what people don't enjoy is _studying_. If you dislike studying, then change how you study so that you you're learning and therefore tapping into that intrinsic joy and motivation. - There's toxic productivity. Productivity isn't inherently a good thing. Productivity is ultimately about producing the outcome you want. ## [How to never burn out again: 3-step framework](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vPAYLYLbMQ) Most students go about achieving their goals by pushing themselves to their limits over-and-over. There's a fundamental problem: motivation and productivity are coupled. Motivation is influenced by multiple factors. It's never a constant. If motivation is going up and down and our productivity is coupled to that, then our productivity also goes up and down with it. That means in the troughs of motivation, we have failures which demotivate us and therefore our productivity goes down. This creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral and we eventually burn out. ![[motivation-productivity-spiral-burnout.png]] Once you're burnt out, the conventional advice is to relax and recover: meditate, yoga, hiking, etc. But if you don't address the fundamental behaviors that lead to the burnout in the first place, you'll burn out again. Eventually, you'll take an _entire_ month break but it still won't be enough. Burnout is a _symptom_. Let's find the root cause. When we study, what exactly is getting us better results? It can't be just putting in more effort, because then the people who study the most would always have the highest grade. You need to improve your metacognition so that you know how to study more effectively and have more predictable results. This means your frustration will reduce, which means your motivation won't decline. Therefore, you won't burn out. As a learner, there are 3 steps to avoid burn out: 1. Map out your learning system 2. Regular reflection and experimentation 3. Feed results into the next experiment ##### Map out your learning system Strategically create a system of complementary study techniques. Start by noting all the techniques that you're currently using and ask yourself... - "Why do I use this technique? How is it supported by learning theory?" - "How do these techniques complement each other?" ##### Regular reflection and experimentation Think about each component of your learning system and analyze which is the most effective... - "Is this working for me?" - "What is the expected outcome?" - "What is the actual outcome?" Then, introduce a new learning technique into your system. ##### Feed results into the next experiment Analyze the outcome and experiment with modifying your techniques or trying new ones. ##### Conclusion You might think this is taking too much time. But the truth is: There actually is no alternative. You need to spend effort on this systemized approach to improving your learning system. ## [5 Tips for Becoming a Top 0.1% Student](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npALpfdatws) The reason I'm doing top 0.1% instead of top 1% or 5% is because to go from doing poorly to fairly well, you can just study more. If you want to be at the 0.1% elite level, you have to do different strategies. That's the focus of this talk. When you know what produced what result, you gain control. And that control gives you confidence. You can walk into an exam and know you're ready. ##### Tip #1 Beware of norms, beware of tactics everyone is doing Common things tend to lead to common results. Do the things that the top 0.1% students are doing and the others are not. ##### Tip #2 Don't chase outcomes Outcomes are the result of a process. You can't fix outcomes, you can fix only processes. Obsess and chase over the processes. ##### Tip #3 Assume you're wrong The illusion of competency states that, when you know a little bit, you think you know a lot. If there's one thing I see blocking learners, it is this. If you feel confident and you haven't spent a _significant_ portion of your life learning it, like years, decades, assume you're wrong. ##### Tip #4 Work smarter before you work harder Hard work isn't unique at the top, it won't separate you at the top levels of competition. ##### Tip #5 Hard work doesn't mean _more_ work If you want to get good at something, you have to traverse the fear zone, it's stuff you don't know. You can't just put in more hours doing the same thing. ![[learning-zones.png]] ## [Why your IQ doesn't really matter?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u0SAVIbK7Y) - You can improve your IQ score by training for it. If the IQ test was a true measure of intelligence, you wouldn't be able to improve your score by training for it. - But what even is intelligence? - For example, Justin is really good at education and studying because it's what he's worked on. But that doesn't mean he knows everything or is the smartest person in every room. - "Intelligence" is really this false label. What does it even mean? It's really about producing some outcome. There's many ways of being "smart" and performing highly. - If you are using study techniques and not improving, maybe the method is flawed, not your intelligence. - The main thing holding people back is not their intelligence but how they study. - Math is a method of thinking. The more you practice and become familiar with math, the better you get at math. ## [The ultimate guide for studying with ChatGPT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0bHMsDlTmE) In a nutshell, we're aiming for higher-order learning, our desirable difficulty, as quickly as possible. We can use ChatGPT so make us more efficient at getting to higher-order learning. Higher-order learning is becoming key in this modern, internet-connected age. It used to be enough for you to just have information you can recall. But with things like Google and ChatGPT, information is easily findable. Higher-order learning will be the last thing, if ever, that technology can do. Starting with first principles, there are four key processes that you must do. We'll discuss how ChatGPT fits into this. 1. Figure out what to learn 2. Find appropriate information 3. Processing information 4. Information retrieval ##### Figure out what to learn with ChatGPT With ChatGPT you can generate an introductory overview or syllabus to help guide you & create a knowledge schema. "Act as an expert in Social Psychology who's teaching a beginner. What are the 20 most important concepts to start studying and in which order? Why?" ##### Find appropriate information with ChatGPT This is straightforward: Just use ChatGPT (or Google, etc.) to help surface information. Limitations: ChatGPT doesn't know what's actually true. It's limited by the quality of your inquiry. It's not great at giving detailed, advanced information— it tops out. ##### Processing information with ChatGPT You want to get as quickly as possible to higher-order thinking. That's our desirable difficulty. ChatGPT can't do this for us but we can work with it to help facilitate it. You can get AI to generate structures, analogies, examples, or metaphors to explain concepts and then you spend time analyzing that explanation and thinking how you can modify it. Here, you're offloading the lower-order creation of the analogy and spending more time in the higher-order task of evaluating that analogy. If you're creating a chunk map (or mind map), you could share details of the map to ChatGPT and ask it for feedback. "Are there any relationships I'm missing?" ##### Information retrieval with ChatGPT ChatGPT can't help you with practice & information retrieval, that has to happen in your own brain. But it might give you advice on something like an effective interleaved retrieval method. ## [Debating best-selling author Scott H. Young](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtwaJu80Rk4) If you want to truly know a topic, you're going to have to read like 150 books on the topic, there's just no way around that. Justin: I tend to look at stuff from constructivist models of learning, specifically that are more pedagogically focused & based on psychology. The cognitivist school of thought is about how the brain works, how learning works at a cognitive level. Recently, people have been working to bring together constructivism and cognitivism. We've got psychological theories on ways we "construct" learning, but then the cognitivist perspective is talking about the cognitive processes that allow that construction of learning. I'm interested in exploring that intersection. Justin: When I first made my learning course, it was originally just for students, but now 40% of my users are professionals: CEOs, entrepreneurs, programmers. Justin: Spontaneous self-explanation as a generative tool of self-learning is so powerful, you don't even _want_ the teacher to give the explanation. ChatGPT on spontaneous self-explanation: Spontaneous self-explanation can lead to deeper understanding and more personalized learning experiences. However, it's most effective when balanced with teacher guidance, especially in complex subjects or for learners who are still developing foundational knowledge. Justin: I started learning about things from a constructivist perspective, which is common, but then I swung to cognitivism and now I've landed somewhere in the middle. ## iCanStudy course curriculum ![[justin-sung-icanstudy-curriculum.pdf]]