This is me six years ago. I was in China. In my senior high school, I decided to transfer to a military-style boarding school where students need to study 14 hours a day. Students need to be at the track by 6:30 in the morning, and everybody will run half a mile together. Then we study from 7:00 a.m. Until 10:30 p.m. With only two breaks at lunch and dinner time. During sleep hours, any activities are strictly forbidden. So basically everybody have the exact same studying hours. Before I wonder if I want to get better grades, all I need to do is to putting in more hours and study harder. But working hard and spending more time is no longer useful in this context because basically everybody is maximum they're studying hour already. The key to distinguish oneself and achieving higher grades solely depends on how fast they can learn. Hi, welcome to my channel. My name is Han. Having one year of extreme study experience at that boarding school and as someone who has basically spent her entire life in education, the most valuable skill that I've developed is how to learn faster. I've done some self-reflection, and I do have a system. This system got me through high school year and my college years at Columbia University and significantly improved my productivity in life in general. I call it the IEME system, which is very simple and consists with four steps. Let's get into it. The first step is identify a goal. For me, sometimes getting started with studying can be the hardest part because a topic can be very broad and complex and I just have no clue where to start. This is why goal setting is so important and is the first step. It helps you distinguish what you need to know and what you don't need to know. The more precise your goal is, the more clear your learning objects will become. Saying, I want to learn how car works, isn't specific enough, but if you say, I want to learn how car works so I can fix my car's engine, it immediately clarifies that you actually don't need to have a comprehensive understanding of braking systems or electrical systems. Your main focus will be solely on the engines. Everything else is not on your radar. A great formula for me to use is I want to learn something so I can something. When you put your learning objects into sentences, it not only boost your motivation because now you have a specific goal, but also it helps you create a concrete plan because the plan for "I want to learn astrophysics so I can pass my physics class" is very different from "I want to learn astrophysics so I can get an A in my physics class." And it's very different from "I want to learn astrophysics so I can impress girls." If you're aiming to impress girls, you might need to focus on the star terminologies and interesting stories. But if your goal is to pass your exam, you probably need to stick to your professor's syllabus. And if your goal is to get an A, you might need to deep dive into the hard questions. Step two, evaluate priorities. Teachers and textbooks usually go deep into one topic and storing all the examples and details before move on to the next topic. That's a great way to understand one topic in-depth if you got all the time and resources, I discovered that if the speed is your goal, it's actually unnecessary to focus on all the details at the beginning. As someone is very easily get distracted by a very fun fact, I can look into a story for like an hour. After that, I would realize that I actually didn't learn anything about the actual topic. Instead, all I learned is one tiny point. This is also famous for the 80-20 rule, basically means 80 % of your outcomes only come from the 20 % of efforts that you put in. So instead of getting caught up in the small details, you actually should focus on the impactful 20 % that will bring you the majority of your outcomes. I usually rank my learning objects into three tiers: the most important, secondary, and the nice to know. Let's break down into each of these. The most important are the core concept and skills that form the foundation of your subject. Those are non-negotiable, are the absolutely important parts that you need to grasp on, and they are the key players that will bring you the most of the results. Moving up to the secondary tier, those are the topics that are connected to the core or the most important, but they're not as essential as the core, but they really provide context to your understanding of the subject. Finally, we have the nice to know tier. These are the extra interesting facts and details add flavors to your understanding. Well, not as essential, but they can enhance your understanding a more well-rounded learner. If you have extra times in your hands, you can dive into the nice to know step three, make plan. Sometimes when I start reading a textbook and it's really hard to understand, so I start googling it and watching some YouTube tutorials. Those tutorials will often lead me to a new website. After about three hours of learning and searching, I feel like I wasted so much time and actually learned next to nothing. I found that the key is that the clearer, you know exactly what are you going to do before studying. The more efficient the study session will be, determining precisely how are you going to approach your study objects, identify the resource you're going to use, either it's YouTube, textbook, or practice problems. Make sure you know what are you going to do before you start studying. Plan the study order and the study order should be start with the most important and then the secondaries and then save the nice to know as last. Then there's no stress and waste of the time and proceed because you will know exactly what are you going to do. There will be no chaos or randomness your actual studying session. And the final step execute. Once you've got a solid plan ready, just stick to your plan. Some people noticed that I'm learning faster than they are and the reason is actually because I already finished the first three steps and I'm just simply following my plan. But they only started with step four, which is the actual study and that's why they are appears to be slower than I am. Now let's run through a quick example together. Since I was an operations research major, I am going to use the example of I want to learn linear programming so I can pass my optimization exam as my goal. First step, identify goal. Now I know I only need to focus on the subjects that my professor mentioned that will be in my exam. Based on my syllabus to succeed on my exam, I need to know three things. One, formulating applications as mathematical learning program problems, algorithms for linear programming, and third, implementation. Next, we move on to evaluate. For the most important here, I decide to write down three different linear programming problems and three different algorithms. The secondary objects include five samples of linear programming problems, applications, and two examples of each algorithm, along with implementation, aka how to use code to solve a linear program problem, as the Nice to Know category, which includes some challenging practice problems from my homework. Then I create a plan. Well, I would begin with the most important here using the definitions in my textbook. Because I'm more of a visual person, I did a little bit of search online. I found this YouTube video series that is very helpful. I'm going to spend about five minutes each to understand the basics using this YouTube series. For the secondary objects, I will review the slides provided by my professors that contain all the examples. And if I complete all of the above and I still have time before the exam, I will revisit all my homework for further review. And then I would just stick to the plan and do exactly what I planned out for me. So that's it for today's video. Thank you so much for watching. If you found it a little bit helpful, please like and subscribe. I will see you next time.
