How I Learned to Learn.

the single most valuable skill that i've picked up in my life is the capacity to learn quickly it's been integral in my success as a data scientist a content creator and as an athlete a long time ago [Music] i'm by no means a master of this but i'd like to share my experiences in gaining this meta skill with you hopefully it can help you to pick up that new skill to land that new job or to make that much needed change in your life that we're all grasping for to be clear i wasn't always a great learner actually i wasn't even remotely close to being a good learner to start out with at the very best i was a c student all the way through my first few years of college let's take a trip through my learnings over the years so you can see how i learned to learn i was extremely fortunate to have gone to a very competitive middle in high school i think that some 20 ish of my high school graduating class went to either an ivy league university or another really elite university when i was there it felt like i was constantly around geniuses it seemed like no matter how much time i spent studying i just couldn't compete academically with my peers instead i really dove headfirst into sports because it's where i felt like i could differentiate myself the most and find my own identity from these experiences i had kind of gotten it into my head that i was just a dumb jock and that academics were squandered on me i held these beliefs for all of high school and for a large portion of my college years after high school i had two key interactions that changed my life for the better first i went to a less challenging academic institution for college i came to the realization that i wasn't dumb i was just constantly around elite performers in the past second i had a deep conversation with a high school friend who was a phenomenal student we talked about a wide range of topics but the one that really stood out to me was how he studied he put in five times more hours than i thought was possible it wasn't that i was dumb i just had no concept of how hard the other people around me were working i think that this gets to a really important point the key to getting started with learning is realizing that you're capable don't get caught up in the results of others especially if you're not able to study their process as well now even after realizing that i was capable i still had a long road ahead of me i was slowly improving my grades in college but i was by no means the stellar learner that i am now the next lesson about learning i found buried it deeply in my immense fear of math yes math after i got to college i didn't know what i wanted to study i briefly majored in psychology environmental science exercise science finance business administration and i eventually settled in on economics many of these majors required that i take a statistics class for example i had to take a research methods and statistics class for psychology and a business statistics course for the majors in the business school although i hated it i ended up essentially taking the same statistics class three times across three different departments as i mentioned at the time i hated math so this was complete torture for me as expected the first class was brutal and i barely passed the second class was a little better and by the time i took the third class i was actually pretty darn good at basic statistics the real kicker is that i also started to like it seeing this progress in a field that i was previously terrified by was life-changing to me before this experience i thought people were either just naturally good at math or naturally bad through taking multiple classes of the same sort and improving i realized that i was capable of getting good at math even though that i thought my math ability was previously fixed i would later come to find that this phenomenon is called a growth mindset and developing this the belief that i was capable of positive change was the linchpin that set my learning into overdrive in the upcoming years you also can develop this growth mindset if you realize that you're capable of this incredible positive change now while i found that i could improve over time i also realized that i was unbelievably bored in most of my college classes the ones that i was fascinated in like microeconomics i started to perform really well but in most of the others i was still floundering i experimented with rewarding myself for getting good marks in these classes i would go out for a nice meal or allow myself to go to another party if i got a good grade this sort of worked but it really felt like something was still missing while i was trying to figure this out tragedy struck my cousin who was only a year older than me at the time and the person that i was frankly closest to in the world uh he passed away from a free heart attack this was by far one of the lowest and uh most difficult and worst times in my life to date but i'm also unbelievably grateful for the perspective they gave me having someone very close to me past at this time uh it made me look at how i was living my life i came to this profound realization that life can be short and that i should do something meaningful with the time that i have while i'm here obviously you can find purpose and intrinsic motivation in your life without having a devastating event like this in your life happen but this was something for me that that really moved the needle maybe a doctor help you to heal from a debilitating injury and you find purpose in how medicine can help others to heal or maybe you saw the importance of data while battling the pandemic and you find value in helping people identify and control infectious diseases there are many meaningful places to find motivation through purpose but it requires some serious introspection this motivation was different from the extrinsic motivation that i'd found before with rewarding myself for me this was the missing piece to get to the next step of my journey if you're struggling to find that purpose i found that the book awakened the giant within by anthony robbins was a great resource for finding you know your own mission before i move on i want to make it clear again that it's okay if you haven't found your purpose yet identifying your purpose is a function of your experiences and your beliefs over time there's nothing wrong with you following curiosity as well a good intermediary purpose that i've personally found value in is exploration an example would be that in the short term my purpose is to understand myself well enough to really unearth what drives me this is totally fine for you to push to find something deeper at this point i was starting to dramatically improve my grades and my understanding of the subjects i was taking i was also starting to enjoy my work significantly more but i was also hit with a colossal dose of imposter syndrome historically i was a bad student and now here i am playing this role of the good student is this the real me or is it just a temporary act this was probably the hardest obstacle for me to get past i still believe that i wasn't good at learning even though i was proving myself wrong almost every other day this was a real slow progression but something that helped me to align my beliefs about myself with my current actions was better self-talk something we don't always realize is that we listen to ourselves when we speak if we say we're a bad learner it gets encoded in our mind i started changing the way i talk to myself even doing some pretty uh pretty awkward affirmations for a while until i became comfortable with my new identity as a good learner if you can conceive it you can achieve it anything is possible it isn't just our perception of ourselves that we can change with how we talk about things if we talk about data science being a scary field to learn or a battlefield or something like that we'll be a lot less excited about it than if we described it as an incredible enlightening journey for us how we define ourselves and the metaphors that we use to describe the fields that we're studying have powerful effects on our motivations and our actions at a broad level this is related to your identity if you identify as a quick learner you'll likely do things fast learners do a stupid example is that if you identify as a sword you'd cut things or if you identified as a fish you would swim when you master this concept of identity you don't have to think as much you just do things in line with what you are to this point the previous experiences that i've had with learning and that i've shared are about the philosophy of learning the mindset that you can develop to take flight these last few insights are what i believe to be a bit more actionable something that i realized after i graduated college was that even though i wasn't a good learner in the classroom i'd never had a problem with athletics in the past i kept asking myself what's the difference during this time period i read the book flow by uh by this guy long name and uh things really clicked for me flow's a state where you're in total focus it's attained in an environment when you have one limited distractions two specific goals that are attainable but challenging and three clear immediate feedback there are a couple other criteria but they aren't quite as important i realized that my states when playing sports and studying for class were completely different the sports that i played created a perfect breeding ground for rapid learning while the way that i was going about studying was awful in sport i was meeting all of the criteria for flow i focused quite a bit on golf and i would go hit balls on the range almost every day i would go by myself without any distractions i would also make games with clear goals to improve my skills and every shot that you hit you get immediate feedback by seeing where the ball went no wonder i could focus so easily during this activity and it just felt so effortless to me with my schoolwork i would always be distracted by the tv or the computer or my phone as i got a little bit older my goals were ambiguous and i didn't get feedback until the day of the test most times when i realized that i could adjust these three criteria to improve my learning things really took off i found a dedicated and quiet place to study i focused on problems with clear outcomes when practicing and i checked the answers after every problem this might sound obvious to others but it was an epiphany for me one place that i've now found really good flow is in online courses these usually have very clear defined learning objectives that match well to challenging exercises as it so happens the sponsor of this video is udemy udemy is an incredible place to find well-structured courses for anything that you'd want to learn obviously there are courses on data science and i hear there's a pretty decent one related to how to land a data science job i've taken quite a few courses in cinematography and video editing in the last few months that have greatly improved the production quality of my content i left a few links below to some of my favorite courses that either i've made my friends or made or that people in my communities have found value in for people that know me this might be shocking but i used to hate to read according to a bunch of standardized tests i was also pretty bad at reading from what i last heard i was around three to four grades behind in reading level i think this was at some point in high school this began to change a little bit in college when i first found enjoyment and the value of information in books but even after i turned my grades around in college i wouldn't have considered myself a good reader this did however change a little bit after i finished college during that time period i was trying to play golf professionally and i ran into a wall i decided it was time to get back to school and learn some new skills to sort some things out the big obstacle for me was another standardized test the gmat and as you recall i didn't do uh great on standardized tests in the first few practice tests that i took i was a woefully slow during the reading sections i was i was legitimately uh i was panicking and through some luck and a bunch of google searches i stumbled on a website called readspeeder.com this isn't sponsored by them or anything this is totally free i just found it essentially it was this free online platform for teaching you how to read faster what i found was that when i was a child i was taught to read in an inefficient way kids are taught to read out loud that gets us into the habit of processing the information from books with the auditory part of our brain if we do some training we can skip the auditory part and instead encode the information with the visual portion of our brain which happens to be larger and a lot more powerful with a lot of practice related to this this retraining i was able to crush the reading section of the gmat which was by far my weakest section going in this flipped my world upside down what other things that i've been doing wrong my entire life related to learning or maybe even other things i became fascinated with the science of learning or what some other people might call meta learning i also found that some things worked really well for me and others didn't and i did this through experimentation for example listening to normal music while i'm studying does not produce good results but listening to music without any words or just straight up ear plugs for silence makes me focus really well if you want to be a great learner you should study learning itself you should also study how you learn specifically as it varies from person to person with my decent score on the gmat i was able to land a spot in grad school i was really excited about this because i identified this opportunity as a way to just truly test my newly found learning abilities this was quite a few years ago when school could be very social and i definitely got to know my classmates and a few of the local bars pretty well with all these extracurriculars i was finding it just a little bit difficult to keep up with my with my coursework around the same time a few of my friends and i we started going to the gym a bit more and we also started playing racquetball uh one more extracurricular to take time away from my study after a few weeks of going to the gym with a group i somehow started to get back on top of my schoolwork and i was still enjoying the same nightlife activities how is this possible that adding something to my schedule actually created more time for me going to the gym created something that i was missing in my life and that thing was structure we would all go to the gym at the same time each week afterwards a few of us would go grab some dinner and then we'd go knock out some of our homework together i also started to develop routines before going to the gym as well pretty soon this one habit that i created going to the gym i created other habits that were associated with it that helped me to efficiently organize my time a few years later i read james clear's book called atomic habits and the confusing success i was having with my gym habits now all made sense a simple habit that you can integrate into your routine today is hitting that like button and the bell you know whenever you watch one of my videos if you're a regular on my youtube channel this last lesson probably won't surprise you sometime during my journey i became obsessed with daily fantasy sports i spent an inordinate amount of time trying to build models to predict how athletes would perform i kept wanting to improve my models and thus i kept trying to learn new modeling techniques i was far less interested in the modeling techniques than i was in predicting the outcomes and winning these fantasy games it occurred to me that one place where i could really learn modeling again would be going back to school to pursue a master's in computer science at the time i wasn't aware of the great resources like udemy for learning these types of things i look back at how driven i was to learn and i realized that this motivation came from pursuing a project i also didn't struggle with the direction when i had a clear goal that i was trying to pursue i wasn't focused on learning a gigantic domain i wasn't focused on learning data science i was only focused on solving the problem that was in front of me later when i was overwhelmed with the huge topic areas that i was learning in school i also found that projects helped me to narrow the future space projects did three things for me first they allowed me to apply concepts to things that i personally cared about thus increasing my motivation and playing on my curiosity next they allowed me to narrow the focus of what i had to learn so i could break these huge problems down into smaller ones and finally they offered immediate feedback on the challenges that i was having in a project it's immediately clear to you when you run into a problem and you get stuck the areas that you need to work on become completely transparent when you're going through tutorials or in class content it's pretty easy to gloss over things because there isn't a hard stop you don't get completely stuck you can't do anything else you can just move on to the next lesson figuring out how to integrate projects into my life youtube happened to be one of those was a blessing for me it's made me significantly more productive it's made me have a lot more fun with my work and it's something i'd love to be able to share with you all since i've become a data scientist part of my job is learning new things almost daily i've come a really long way but i've also got a long way to go the last thing that i want to leave you with is that learning will always be a journey if you become a learner and you find a way to enjoy the process you'll become successful in almost anything that you do thank you so much for watching and good luck on your learning journey [Music] you

Channel: Ken Jee

Views: 11,406

Rating: 4.9853659 out of 5

Keywords: Data Science, Ken Jee, Machine Learning, Sports Analytics, data scientist, data science journey, data science 2021, Meta learning, how I learned to learn, learning to learn, learning skill, learning journey, flow, self help, personal improvement, ultralearning, growth mindset, learning mistakes, Learn new things fast, become a better student, personal growth, movtivation

Id: S4Lei5mOppc

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021