Here's how I study for certifications quick.

all right hey this is Jeremiah again so I was asked to make a video explaining a little bit about my my sort of study strategies you know how I how I study as opposed more to like the tools that I used to study so I just wanted to go over that explain a little bit and we'll finish up with an interesting tool that enables one to read an entire book like this in a matter of hours so we'll talk about that I'll tell you what I've used it and why I don't usually use it but I'm gonna save that for last so you know let's talk about general concepts and strategies around studying my personal philosophies about studying and the first thing just to give you a little bit of background so I have used certifications to to build a career so now currently I am NOT an IT I left IT in 2013 I was I ran a business for about seven years completely unrelated to IT well it was a web-based business so I sold stuff online I met with people online so there was definitely IT aspects to it but it was had no I wasn't doing IT but because of some changes in my life I'm getting back into IT specifically back into networking which is where most of my experience comes from and so I've been taking tests and will continue to take tests as I work toward my CCIE using that as a springboard to get me back into my old career and hopefully it won't take too long you know I know it's gonna take a couple of three or hopefully not too much longer than that years to get back to the level of salary that I you that I used to enjoy but I do know it's going to be a bit of an uphill battle to get there so certifications have been a huge part of that career my career started in Beth 1995 really I graduated high school and I went to school the Wright State University while there I was working in computer sales and I flunked out of college that's right I will be completely honest with you in so I started in the fall of 95 my last semester was the summer of 96 and at which point I flunked out my there's lots of reasons why one of the biggest ones was education was just not ever important in my family growing up work was important so I found myself you know and I'm not blaming anyone these are my choices but I I would often work and I worked a full-time job and would skip classes in order to work which didn't make sense so I I flunked out of college I found myself working retail selling computers and with it was a dead end dead end gig right it wasn't going anywhere luckily luckily a friend of mine got a job at a local software company it was a small business that sold medical billing software they wrote their own medical billing platform they sold that and it's long along with all the related computers and networking services so she got a job there as one of their salespeople and then she put in a good word for me and I came over as one of their salespeople but oh my god I sucked just I was not cut out for cold calling and doing those sorts of things so I did not do well in that position now to be fair my friend when she started the their old salespeople had left and she took all of the good contacts the people who were active and bought stuff and gave me all the dead contacts so I wasn't set up for success right my friend kinda screwed me a little bit but hey you know what we weren't making any money so you had to take what you can get so luckily they gave me a chance - you know on the more I was I showed some interest in the technical stuff and I started you know building computers and then eventually that turned into me becoming a technician so I would go to the sites we would run cable now back then it was a coax cable we did token ring networks and this fancy new thing called Ethernet and we had Novell servers and we're just starting off with Microsoft servers so that's kind of where it was and you know but the thing was I made no money I was making no money whatsoever it just well I'm exaggerating obviously I made some money but it was it wasn't good and I worked lots overtime for free I never got paid because I was salaried and even though I made next to nothing and so I was looking on job boards and one day I'm on a job board and I see an advertisement a job posting and they were looking for ACC ie Cisco Certified internetworking expert the salary now again this would have been in 1997 the salary maybe ninety eight was a hundred thousand dollars a year and you got the use of a company leased Lexus that was included as part of your base I had never known anyone that made that kind of money my parents were working middle-class you know lower middle-class working folks I didn't know anyone who made $100,000 a year and I never heard of this CCIE or Cisco for that matter I started looking into it and I discovered this whole world of certification which I'd never even knew was a thing and yet the idea that I could potentially pull myself out of where I was and and begin to excel now at first I might have just started with the hopes of doing better but also just to kind of learn more but eventually once I realized where I could go you know I got to work so I worked toward my CCIE excuse me my MCSE my microsoft certified systems engineer it took two or three tests and you know over maybe six or eight months and then with that under my belt sudden I was in high demand you know I went from a kid who was making nothing at this little local computer shop that a local software company just working for doctor's offices and stuff to suddenly people in the big city Cleveland Ohio a couple hours away you know were calling me up recruiters calling me up saying hey so I doubled my salary overnight once I took my first job and that doubled salary was we're gonna double your salary today once you finish these two additional mcse courses that you have to do once you finish these two additional tests and get your proper MCS see we're going to give you even more so basically I tripled within so I did that in about six months I was managed to triple my salary in a matter of months because of the MCS see it transformed my life they went from you know just barely making more than minimum wage I had no hope for the future because I flunked out of college to making good money the best paid person I knew none of my college friends who most and were just starting to graduate this point we're making anywhere near what I was making nor did they have the hopes of making what I was making for years to come Anna suddenly traveling the country meeting with customers all over the country you know it was an amazing change in my life and that was all because of certification in the MC se so that's where I started but man this Cisco stuff that see sky II that was always in the back of my head that's where I wanted to go so eventually I started studying for Cisco and I got my CCNA and then I got my CCNP and eventually by the time I finally got a real networking job which would have been in 2004 I had my MC se NT for my MC se mm my CCNP and my Cisco Certified design professional DP I eventually let both the MC SES expire but then I got my Cisco certified security professional so I had for most of my career three professional level certifications started off with Microsoft and Cisco then became just Cisco I never got the CCI eight largely because I just didn't have time to study eventually my career advanced to a point where I was just working too much and while I finally had the money and the skill set to pursue the CCIE I didn't have the time and just never happened so that's a little bit about kind of what certifications did for me and why I am such a big huge proponent of certifications it literally transformed my life you know a lot of things happen in my life I got married young and getting divorced and I'm married again and now we have a baby on the way and you know my my wife today she she has an advanced degree from an Ivy League school let me tell you that opens doors I mean she talks about her education doors open and certifications do a similar thing and even with all of her education before I left to start my business which I took a huge pay cut to do with her blessing I still made more money than she did as a college dropout with certifications versus someone with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school so man certifications have the potential to change your life it doesn't work for everyone but it has the potential so I'm a big fan and because they were such a huge part of my life I've always maintained those certifications until I left IT in 2013 so I've taken dozens of Cisco certifications and as part of that kind of learning to study learning how I study learning how I learn was something that I spent a lot of time focusing on since then the business that I got into was coaching people helping people to transform their life and the primary tool that I used is the subconscious mind I have studied the mind since since high school really it's always just fascinated me and I kind of took that and ended up getting certified in subconscious processes and hypnotherapy and neuro linguistic programming and I took those those certifications and built a new career out of that so even even when I switched career certification was still a part of that but really studying the subconscious mind and I want to kind of bring some of that to bear here and just teach you some of the things that I have learned that helped me to study now my usual for almost every exam I have a very simple process the processes as follows step one read the book step two do the practice exams usually boast and if they're available step three take the test in my career I would usually spend you know thirty minutes a night studying I was always working on something and I think I averaged a test once every three months or so for my entire career if you averaged it out one of the highlights of my career was my Cisco might when I initially got the Cisco certified security professional excuse me should've got a glass of water there's a whole story behind it but the long and short of it is I was able to do that in two weeks it was for professional level tests plus a fifth kind of weird test I don't remember anyway so it was for for real Cisco test and then this this fifth other kind of test that I had to do I did all that in two weeks and what I would do I would read the book on day one I would do the practice tests on day two and then I would do the actual exam on day three a couple of those I failed I had to take them to one of them I even had to take three times before I finally passed it eventually actually I gave up on the study material actually though that's what there was no study material it was too new I all I had was the Cisco documentation so that's why I failed a couple times because all I had was the Cisco documentation I had to read it and it was not good studying all right so let's talk about how do I want to put this you know before I get into it one other thing is sort of the goals for studying my goal for studying has always been to pass the exam now sure I want to gain the knowledge but more than that I want to pass the exam and I've seen some other some online kind of you know certification guys who talk about certifications a lot and one or two of them I've seen has specifically said that they don't like that attitude in fact one guy was saying he doesn't even like taking practice tests because he feels like it's cheating and I really with all respect to him I could not disagree more and here's why when you take I was just making a video about the CCNA exam that's why I'm holding this book when you take when you read these two books and you take that exam the CCNA exam or any other exam once the exam is done the vast majority of everything you just learned you're not going to see or touch or do maybe ever maybe for weeks or months so in my opinion we want to prepare you for a for a career or we want to prepare you to advance your career and when you're getting your certification what you're showing is hey I have demonstrated a fundamental knowledge of this technology I've demonstrated that I can study and learn and pass a difficult exam so that if you hire me even if I don't remember some of the details today I can look it up and I can do it I've already proven myself that I have the capability yes I haven't made me done some of the stuff in a few weeks or a few months or a couple years but me and you mister hiring this this hiring manager we know that I can do it so give me the job and I can do it for you that's always been my attitude prepare you know use the certification to demonstrate your ability with the understanding that you're not going to retain the majority of it there are things that you know I I did that cisco security professional exam as part of that I had to learn about intrusion prevention intrusion detection firewalls I think there was a test on VPNs VPNs I did all the time firewalls I did all the time I never once touched a Cisco IDs or IPs not one time you know I talked to our salespeople I encouraged them to try to sell it but people weren't buying so I just never got a chance to touch it you know some of my co-workers back in the day we did a lot of voice stuff so they got trained and some even got certified and called manager I don't know what it's called nowadays but you know what we we've we sold almost exclusively was the what was it called co-manager express the the sort of built-in router version kind of like a key system almost so you know they so when we did do a call manager they always had look stuff up and they had to figure things out that's the real world the real world is you're never going to remember all this stuff study for the exam ask the exam remember what's possible what's capable so that when that scenario arises in your career you can jump on Cisco comm find the relevant information and do it right you know but don't don't worry about memorizing all the commands and all that stuff so that's kind of my general attitude about certifications to begin with now with that all that being said how do you get the most out of your study time how are we going to maximize you know what's going on up here so that you can get those certifications faster and easier now I've seen lots of people talk about you know organizational tools and study tips and and how they take notes and all that stuff is good information I'm not going to talk about that I'm gonna talk more about how the brain works so that you're working in conjunction with your minds natural inclinations for how it worked instead of fighting against yourself and the first thing I want to talk about let's see if we can make this work first let's come over here then we will come over here and we will select that okay so the first thing that I want to talk about is what I call mental energy mental energy now there's nothing weird or woo-woo or whatever about this it's just how much energy your brain has and basically think about it this way when you wake up in the morning you have a your brain as a bucket and it's full of mental energy but as you go through the day some of that mental energy sloshes out some of it drips through and some of it evaporates off and the level gets lower and lower and lower that's just how the brain works you only have so much mental energy when you're studying studying uses a lot of that mental energy studying is taxing on your brain so we need to maximize the amount of mental energy we need to make the most of it so what are some ways simple ways that you can do things you can do to maximize that mental energy well the number one thing so we want to add mental energy is sleep the number one thing you can do to maximize your mental energy is get a good night's sleep another thing you can use a tool which is going to give you a little bit of a boost so you're at work all day you get home you're tired well but you want to get some of that a little bit of a boost another nice little tool is just basic very simple simple meditation and I cannot write or spell meditation so sleep is the best one you know fifteen twenty minutes of meditation when you get home from work it's going to give you a little boost it's gonna pour a little bit back into that bucket it's not going to fill it back up it's no magical tool but it does help a little bit those are your two best tools for adding mental energy we also want to be aware of what subtracts mental energy and then one of the number-one is stress stress causes you to lose emotion mental energy overly emotional events things that are happening if that causes a lot of emotion good or bad use mental energy extended periods of focus like studying use mental energy so we want to avoid as much as possible those things which are going to reduce mental energy now I want to give you a few little tips things that you can avoid things that you can do practical things so things you can do to help boost mental energy one is routine having a daily routine reduces the mental and physical stress on your body if you've ever had children or pets you recognize the children and pets thrive in a routine and for some reason we as adults think that oh we don't need to have a routine but I'm telling you routine makes all the difference what does that mean get up at the same time go to bed at the same time even on the weekends look what did I just was like we were just talking about man you passed this test CCNA CCNP these tests can transform your life maybe not everybody but they have the you have the opportunity to really take control of your life in a way that so many people don't have I can't tell you how many of my friends have college degrees but they'd never experienced the level of control in their own careers as I did with certifications I wanted to do servers I studied servers I want to do networking I studied networking I want to get into security you know get the certs start looking for a job not everybody can do that but with IT you can do that and you can give yourself a nice healthy boost to your income through certification so you know what if - you staying up late Friday and Saturday night is more important than that look I was having a conversation with someone close to me this is about a year your yeah yeah little less than a year ago maybe nine months ago and we're driving in the car we it was a long trip and kind of he was lamenting the fact that his life took a very different direction than my life and while I had you know enjoyed a lot of travel too and I've had a lot of interesting experiences and I've relative you know life of relative ease and you know good income he's had to work very hard and struggled just to can't make ends meet and to get by and and you could tell he was a little bit resentful of me because we had such our youth was so similar and I said to him I said well you know you made different choices that I made and he became very upset by that very upset the idea that his circumstance in life was in any way related to his choices and he said what do you mean by that what do you mean I made different choices and I said dude you know you used to go out partying I stayed at home and studied you used to get high I stayed home and studied you know I went to bed early so that I could study the next day I spent you spent money on booze and cigarettes and guns you know nothing against guns but their expensive hobby I spent my money on books and practice exams so you know that's what I did in my 20s and then later in life I had the freedom and the money to do things so you know you could tell he was very upset by that but you know this is the kind of thing you have to have priorities what are your priorities is it the short term having fun or are you willing to make a few sacrifices in order to have that routine to get to bed on time so have you no routine is probably the biggest obviously exercise this is one of those things that's it's fascinating you don't really notice it until you're not doing it look I'm a fat guy I'm a fat guy but I still go to the gym almost every day I do my cardio I have a bad heart because I'm so fat so if I don't I will die so I have to go to the gym because if I don't I die literally but exercise makes a huge difference to your mental health as well and you it does you know reduce some of your physical energy but it doesn't seem to really reduce too much of your mental injury the boost you get from it is is more than the decline you get from it exercise and diet have an impact on your mental energy if your body is spending a lot of energy dealing with garbage it doesn't have the mental energy to to focus on what you're studying so routine diet and exercise are do's don'ts there's not to posture fees and don'ts let's try that again don'ts well close enough okay so don'ts you're not you might not like this we want to avoid while you're studying while you're studying we want to avoid TV specifically drama you know that's the example I use because it was so popular for a few years there Game of Thrones also what's the zombie one Walking Dead is there anything really big right now I don't know but I tried watching both of those shows and this is what happened you go and you watch a show and when it's over you are emotionally drained those shows are so intense so full of emotion that it just drains your mental energy I recognize that they're you know they're great shows they're entertaining and that emotional rollercoaster is part of the appeal but that emotional rollercoaster is also greatly sapping your mental energy so you want to avoid television specifically those anything that gives you a high emotional state so you know if you're watching puppy rescue videos on you tube and you know the tears are coming that's a bad thing even though there are happy tears it's that we want to avoid high emotion entertainment so this is true of television you know books and stuff I guess have can I can't have a similar effect the other thing that you want to be very very cognitive is the news now the news is one of my pet peeves why is that because the news is not the news what is the product looking listen let's be honest with each other if you're doing your CCNA or your CCNP or you're like me and you're you're moving beyond that then you're a smart person all right you're almost certainly above average so let's be honest with each other let's set aside the the silly dogma of whatever tribe we claim to be part of and let's be real for a minute okay what is the news the news is a tool it is a for-profit tool and anything for profit has a has a customer and a product they have a product that they create that they sell to a customer what is the product who is the customer most people think that the news is the product in that you and I the person watching the news be it on television on the Internet in a newspaper we like to think that the news is the product and that we are the customer no no not even close you are the product you who's the customer the advertiser that's the customer let me tell you when I had my business I advertised on Facebook I advertised on YouTube I advertised on Google and you would not believe the amount of information that I had about you because you are the product I am buying your attention when you watch the news that the intent is not to inform you the intent is to frighten you the intent is to get you angry because if you're frightened if you're angry if you're fired up what do you do you keep watching if you watch the news and you feel informed you watch 30 minutes of news you know like our parents did back in the day well it's time for the nightly news oh that was interesting moving on who's gonna pay for all the advertising no they need you glued to the screen you were the product and so they do that by messing with your emotions I'm not gonna get into anything more than that because I don't want to get political but trust me when I tell you the news is not there to inform you it is there to keep you glued so that they can sell advertising time and that's the exact same the truth about exact same thing about social media and social media is arguably worse because social media creates these echo chambers even more than you know our favorite news and let's again let's be honest with ourselves when we're on social media when we're on the news are we are we working hard to get a true diverse honest assessment of the world events or are we really just want to be told that we're right do we really just want to be told that we already have the right opinions the right beliefs the right ideas and that the other the other people are wrong so we get trapped in these echo chambers and we get all worked up it's the exact same thing they get us angry they get us fired up occasion they get us really feeling good but it's all about staying on that platform and if you're not aware you know people like me in my 40s we are affected less but people younger than me and definitely people in their 20s and 30s today and teenagers oh my god the effects of social media are just like the studies are just starting to come out it is horrible it is horrible the way that it up your brain I mean I can't when you get into the data about what social media does to people especially people who grow up around social media I I can't comprehend how its legal you know free speech and all that aside I cannot comprehend how social media can be legal it it what it has done to an entire generation of people suicide rates through the roof self-harm through the roof it's unreal and it's all linked to social media so listen maybe you feel oh that doesn't affect me like that and maybe it doesn't but it is affecting you I promise you I promise you it is you're not you're a human being so you're affected so these are the things that are sapping that mental energy it's just sucking you drive mental energy and if you don't have that mental energy you don't have the ability to focus and comprehend what you are studying move it on the next thing I want to talk about is retention oops come on Penn retention okay or how do we maximize retention while you're studying well there's a couple ways the first thing is as you're reading through and you're getting these concepts what a lot of people do because this is what we were taught in school particularly if you're of my generation or older you were taught to memorize facts memorize facts memorize figures get the numbers the names the dates that does not lend itself to retention that's not how the brain works language has transformed the human brain in fascinating ways and if you want to maximize your brain we need to maximize language there have been studies that have shown in fact it's a whole thing I've already spent so much time I can't get into it but it's been shown that one of the most powerful ways of boosting intelligence is boosting vocabulary vocabulary why because it gives your brain a building block it's like Legos of ideas when a word and an idea come together it's like a building block in your mind think about this think about this if I say to you imagine a car an automobile you have all these ideas around that one simple word you have you know four tires the general shape the drivetrain the gears stick the steering wheel turn signals maybe you even think about the fundamentals of internal combustion engines all these things associated with one word so when a word encompasses a broad idea your brain can just use that one word in place of all those ideas now imagine if you didn't have that word and you were trying to explain to someone who had no idea what a car was and you had a start you say well it's um it's four wheels what's a wheel okay well it's it's round and it rolls and you have a axle well what's an axle okay it's like it can you imagine trying to explain a car to someone who has no no idea it would take you hours and that's what's happening when you're learning this stuff if you're so focused on the weeds getting down into the deep of it you're just you're getting these little bits and your brain doesn't get the the whole idea so when you can when you're reading about this and you're reading through here and you're reading about you know P vs T okay rapid spanning tree or P V Rapids P V St you know stop read the section stop imagine it now listen your imagination and mine are different I'm not going to tell you how to imagine but you you do imagine you imagine it imagine the flows of data what are the communications what's happening imagine observing it at a high level imagine getting in so that you understand that when with just the word just one word P vs T that brings up all these ideas when you can do that your attention goes through the roof but if you don't focus on the big picture and how it all works together and imagining it happening if instead you sit there and memorize you know interface cost values and timers and different types of BPD use you know yes you can get to say and you do need that information but if you focus on the details and you don't focus on the the larger idea of it it becomes very very difficult for your brain to build upon it so you get all those details then you build it in your imagination into a coherent idea so that later on when you're talking about MST and how you can use VT P to control MST then you have that those ideas are already fully formed you're not lost like wait a minute what was okay how does MST work again you just you have that idea so to boost retention you you do have to read and learn all the little nuts and bolts of it but then you have to take a step back pause and allow yourself to build the idea now part of that you're going to do actively you're going to sit there and close your eyes and allow yourself to imagine the flow of data and what's happening on the switch and those sorts of things okay part of that is active but a bigger part of it I would argue is passive so how do you so we have active and this is imagining and then we have the passive which is the bigger component passive how do you how do you cement these ideas passively you're gonna love it you sleep that's really it here is if there is one thing you take away from this video about how to maximize your ability to learn and comprehend and to retain that is you learn chunks then you sleep while you sleep your brain without any effort from you is going to churn all that material and process it however here's what happens here's our brain bucket again so you're studying okay you get home from work and your mental energy is here you deal with the wife and kids for an hour your mental energy is here then when you start to study your mental energies down here so if it's already here and then you start studying and you're burning through with a little bit of mental energy you have left what happens when you run out of mental energy the the brain bucket is dry but you keep reading you keep studying you keep watching videos what happens is all of that information is just discarded your brain just discards it it throws it out you know a little bit of it might seep through but the vast majority is simply going to be discarded so what do you do you have to you just have to take your time you study as long as you have energy how do you know when you've run out of energy your mind starts to wander you start to get affected by you know he's distracted very very easily look we all get distracted but when it's just it's becomes impossible to focus or you're reading I mean how many times have you done this I know I certainly have you're reading you're sitting here you're sitting here you know reading your book directed it today and you realize wait a minute I have been daydreaming for the past five minutes I didn't I didn't pick up anything that I just read okay so that's how we know that we're out of mental energy once your amount of and Madinah out of mental energy your brain stops recording so what you need to do is study as long as you have mental energy once you feel that hey I'm too tired I can't focus stop stop cramming all-nighters they don't work they never have they never will they don't work don't cram don't pull all-nighters don't if you're exhausted then you just got to go to bed so that is how this works learn why you can once you are once the mental energy is empty that's it and ideally this is the thing ideally you go right to bed because what happens is once the mental energy is low or empty and you start doing other things maybe you keep studying or maybe you start watching TV what's going to happen is your brain is like oh he's still trying to take in information but I got nothing left to give him all right I'll just throw out some of the stuff that we just learned I'll throw out those things we were thinking about earlier in the day I'm gonna try as desperately as I can to keep you know to keep functioning for this person even though I'm exhausted that's what your brain is thinking so once you're out of the mental energy you stop studying you go to bed and ideally you don't wait till you're out of mental energy you wait till you're like okay I'm getting there I'm done I'm gonna get ready for bed go to bed this is also true if you're studying on a weekend or you have some time whatever what I like to do is I like to study for a couple hours go take a nap you want to go through a full REM cycle which is usually for most people ninety minutes if you can't do it then don't if you don't get to complete the whole cycle it honestly doesn't help you at all so I like to study for two or three hours then I go take a nap come back study some more and while you were napping your brain is processing that information maybe not completely but it's getting you along the way so you can keep studying and you know get some more out of that day ok another little tool for studying is what I will call I should just start over here what I call mini work know what happened to my stress again mini work and micro reward this is a pretty simple concept as you're working as you're studying set goals so okay right now before I get up I want to read 50 pages or 30 pages or I want to watch the next 45 minutes of videos set small attainable goals that's the mini work we're not the goal isn't to read an entire book and depending on the chapter it's probably not even to read an entire chapter although sometimes it could because they they might only be 20 or 30 pages it's to read I'm gonna read 20 pages I'm gonna read the next 30 pages I'm gonna watch the next half hour videos and then I'm gonna take a little break now it has to be a little break and during that break I recommend because we're maximizing mental energy we don't go watch YouTube videos we don't play some kind of game even though we think that's what relaxes us and this is a whole other topic I don't have the time to get into it but you're just gonna have to take my word for it it's not actually relaxing you what's happening is it's draining more of your mental energy it's putting you into a light trance State in that you're it's allowing you to zone out but it's not because it's helping to recharge you it's actually draining you whole the topic and just just to take my word for it because we don't have time to go into detail so when it's time for that micro reward just sit quietly go have a snack look out the window go you know step out on outside get a breath of fresh air stretch a little bit just for a couple of minutes and then come back and then what happens inevitably is throughout the day especially if you're doing like a long study session like hours the the work period gets shorter and shorter and the reward period gets a little bit longer a little bit longer and that's okay that's okay but that also just keep it helps to keep you motivated because if you're like I got to read a hundred pages before I can stop man that's grueling but if like okay I only need 220 pages I'm just gonna take a little break twenty pages isn't so bad so many work with a micro reward and then the other final thing about all this study environment quiet peaceful study environment I have done some research because some people love listening to music while I study and I will be honest from what I can tell the research is very mixed so I personally my personal opinion for my own reasons I say no music while you study I think even though it might feel like you're focusing better I suspect that it's actually reducing your retention because rather than a hundred percent of your focus being on what you're studying part of that focus is listening to the music even if you think it's just happening in the back but I don't have a particularly you know you do you do what you feel is best I would recommend against listening to music and you know if you got to put in some earplugs or something to drown out the kids like you know do what you got to do but you do need a calm work environment to study okay I did say and we are fifty minutes in so I did say I was going to tell you about a tool to how you can read a book superfast this is called a rapid reading rapid reading now let me tell you I'll try to be quick this is actually a very simple technique so it's not going to take a minute I have only used rapid reading on a handful of occasions and the reason is is because the way it works you do not have conscious recall if this if it works it my experience says it might work it's purely a subconscious process my understanding the subconscious mind which is extensive makes me question that but this is what the people who invented it say that it is a subconscious process but because of that it's not floating around in your conscious mind so you could read a whole book and not feel like there's anything there until you go and practice do the practice exam or somebody asks you a question and then the answer kind of bubbles up so I have done this on a handful of occasions I mentioned I think I mentioned in this video when I did my CCSP in just two weeks for for Cisco exams in two weeks I wrap it read all those books that's the only way I could do it because these are you know eight hundred nine hundred page books I don't know how big they were but they were that's what the average Cisco book is so they were these monster Cisco books and I only had you know a few days to do the entire thing so I just read it all in one sitting or two sittings I would do half of it take a nap to the second half using rapid reading the other time that I did it was back in 2000 ish I forget exactly when it was the company I was working for heads we had sold our services to a well-known company I won't mention their name and they were doing a massive Windows 2000 rollout they had two thousand dish sites it was gonna be the largest active directory in the world Microsoft was consulting for free and we sold ourselves or rather the month the company sold me as if I was some sort of Windows expert Windows 2000 expert I was not we hadn't even touched Windows 2000 so I ran to the store I bought the book or maybe I ordered it on Amazon I don't remember that was a whole different time back then and I wrap it read the entire book in one day because we flew out like I got the book on Tuesday we flew out on Wednesday to their customer site and I had to present myself as if I was an expert which I would love to make some videos about how as an engineer especially if you are pretty good how you're gonna get thrown under the bus by sales all the time and how what you need to do to protect yourself and prepare yourself so you know we went out there I had no idea because I rapid read the book I did not have any conscious recall of it but you know what like I was able to hold my own during the meetings no one questioned me and in fact not only did they not you know act as if I didn't know what I was talking about they asked me to stay and help them with their own planning so all the sales people got to go home and then I had to stay in town and work with these guys which you know they were good people based on rapid reading the book one time so how do you wrap it read it's actually a let's come back over here it's actually a relatively simple process so this is what you do you take your book you go through chapter one you're going to write down keywords so you have a notepad a pen and your book you turn to chapter one you write down section headings if there's preview questions like the do you know this already section which is a lot of Cisco books you kind of get the key concepts out of those questions you do the review questions at the end of the chapter get the key concepts and you build all hey buddy how you doing my dog just came to visit you so you write down all these key words and ideas ahead of time then you take the book you lay it flat and you ever do those magic I the magic I painting things where you stare at them and then a 3d object comes into focus that's kind of what you're doing you stare at the page you let your eyes relax until the the center line diverges so it'll kind of cross over itself and you'll get like this thick band down the center so your eyes are relaxed you're kind of looking past the book and then you just flip pages I know that sounds freaking insane in fact it sounds so insane that I have a hard time doing it so what I usually do instead is I just scan the page and let my eyes skitter over the page over the paragraphs and just flip pages so you might spend three or four seconds per page as opposed to maybe you know a minute to read it so that is rapid reading you write down the concepts of a chapter and what you're doing is you're priming your brain to pay attention for those concepts then you just flip so when it comes to it you're spending a lot more time writing things down then you are actually reading because it's just so fast to read but even so you know like this which for someone like me I'm a very slow I'm a very slow reader you know I don't even know this is a hundred pages that's probably like eight to ten hours of reading for me actually probably more than that maybe more like 15 hours of reading I'm a very slow reader you know I can do this if I were to rapid read this book probably three or four hours so I would do half the book go take a nap come back rapid read the second half of the book like I said that's how I did that Cisco security professional and that's how I did that Microsoft Windows 2000 thing it's a weird thing because again it's hard to explain until you do it but you know when you're done reading you don't there's nothing here there's you have no new knowledge you have no new new understanding but then you sit down to do the practice exam the next day after you've given your brain time to crunch all that and suddenly you're like oh yeah I guess I know that and oh yeah I know that now here's the thing I don't want to mislead you it might just be a fluke I might have just got lucky I don't do it usually it makes me feel so uncomfortable that I just even though I've done it and I seemingly have had success with it I don't do it so if you're in a pinch you want to try it out I highly recommend you try it out but I don't know it's not how I normally do things so that's up to you okay this is a very long video I hope you got something out of it I'm Jeremiah thanks for watching

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 3,944

Rating: 4.930131 out of 5

Keywords: Cisco, Certification, CCNA, CCNP, Studying

Id: RtVD8BJ5vHE

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020