- Hey friends, welcome
back to the channel. Today We're talking about learning. Now, learning has been probably
one of my main superpowers since I was very young. And learning how to learn
is one of those meta skills that no one ever really teaches us, but that can have an
enormous impact on our life in basically everything that we do. For example, when I was in med school, I learned how to learn, and therefore I could study
for everything that I was doing more efficiently, and that freed
up my own time to do things like set up a business and
set up this YouTube channel. And these days, even though I don't have many
more exams to prepare for, learning is still a huge part of my life. Trying to get better at
making these YouTube videos, trying to get better
at running a business. All of this stuff involves learning. And so in this video,
I'm gonna share nine tips that I found really helpful
that are evidence-based about how we can learn anything
we want faster, let's go. Tip number one is to sharpen the axe. Now this is from a quote that's attributed to Abraham Lincoln, where he famously said that if you gave me six hours
to chop down a tree, I would spend the first
four sharpening the axe. And he's really talking here
about the power of preparation. And this definitely applies
to learning anything as well. Let's say we are studying for an exam and we wanna learn it a little bit better, reading a great book
called "Make It Stick" would be a great way of
learning how to learn or checking out my Skillshare class on evidence-based study techniques. Equally, let's say we're
trying to learn something like the guitar or chess
or anything like that. Something that's not related to studying. We should still spend
a decent amount of time figuring out the meta learning behind what we're actually gonna learn like how we are going to learn the thing. For example, when I was learning how
to play the piano by ear, I spent a decent amount of time
on the learn piano subreddit where people were explaining how to learn how to play piano by ear and just spending a little
bit of time sharpening the axe before I actually sat
down to learn the thing really helped accelerate
my learning process. Tip number two is to use
crutches to optimise our focus. Now, whenever we're learning anything it's really tempting to kind
of learn it in the background like practising the
guitar while watching TV or something like that. But obviously, when we're fully focused on the thing that we're learning, our brain learns the thing a lot better. And so I found a few
different crutches or hacks that have been particularly helpful in helping me focus on things. One is the five minute rule which is a general tip
for productivity as well, which is that if we wanna do something and we're finding
ourselves having difficulty in starting out doing the thing, like actually getting started, overcoming the activation energy. The five minute rule says that, we just have to convince ourselves that we're just gonna do
the thing for five minutes. And then after we've
done it for five minutes we're allowed to just not do
it, but more often than not I find that if I've been
practising the guitar, or playing the piano for five minutes, I do then want to actually
continue to practise. The other thing that's really helpful is to just chuck my phone away. I literally take my phone
and I toss it onto the sofa or on the floor like a good tosser. And then I'm ready to
focus and not be distracted with the thing that I'm
trying to learn, all right? Tip number three is to find
opportunities for immersion. So there's a great book
called "Ultralearning" by a chap called Scott Young where he talks about his journey
through learning languages in like three months at a time and becoming fluent in a
language in three months. And the key to that as
all language learners say is immersion. Just being as immersed in
the language as possible. And the general principle here is that we learn best when
we're in the environment where we're actually
gonna be using the skill. So for example, when I was
learning how to do magic to become a close-up magician, yes I was doing some practise
in front of my webcam and in front of my mirror just to get the slight of hand down. But really my webcam or
mirror is not the arena in which I'm gonna be performing in. And so I made it a point to try and perform magic for real people, as much as possible. I would take a deck of cards to school and I'd have cards in
my room at all times, and so friends would come over, I'd kind of, hey, be like, hey do you wanna see a magic trick? And eventually once I
got okay at performing for friends and family, I started then reaching
out and doing paid gigs, even though I was nowhere
near good enough in my head to get paid to do magic. Eventually, I did end up
getting paid to do magic. And those walk around to
gigs at balls and parties helped improve my abilities in a way that just doing
it in front of the mirror really wouldn't have done . Tip number 4 is to figure
out what are our weak links and then use lots of drills
and stuff to improve them. So if we use med school as an example, I had a few subjects that
I was pretty weak in. Neurology was one of them. If you'd asked me what is
Guillain-Barré syndrome I'd have been like, oh God,
I have absolutely no idea. I didn't even have a mental module for where it would fit into
the subject of neurology. And so when it came to studying
efficiently for my exams, I knew that, okay, I have to drill the
things that I'm weakest on. And I spent just a whole day basically creating a one-page
syllabus of just neurology, just focusing on that one subject. And just because I spent
like eight to 12 hours that day they're doing it, I basically plugged it
as an area of weakness, and that it was no longer
an area of weakness. And the question I would
keep on asking myself every day when I was
sitting down to study was, if the exam were tomorrow, what topic would I be the least happy, or the most pissed off about? And then I would just study that topic. And this is really good
because whenever we're learning or whenever we're studying
or anything like that, it's very tempting to just do the stuff that seems familiar to us. If we're studying for an exam, it's very tempting to open
up the book to page one even though we already
know what's on page one. If we're learning the guitar, it's very tempting to
just play through songs that we've already played before. But really the learning only happens when we're trying to fix our weaknesses and we're trying to operate at
a decent level of difficulty. If something is too easy, we're not gonna learn anything at all. And so if we wanna maximise the learning and learn anything faster, we wanna really hone down on what are these areas of weakness, what are these weak links, and how do we use drills to improve those as quickly as we can? Tip number five is to test ourselves. Now, this is a thing that
in the world of studying is called active recall but it also applies to the world of learning
anything in general. I have a whole video about that, that's linked in the card over there. And if you wanna find out more, you can definitely check
out my Skillshare course about how to study for exams, also linked in the video description, by the way Skillshare is
sponsoring this video. I'll tell you more about
them a little bit later. Anyway, the idea behind active
recall or retrieval practise is that we don't learn by trying to put stuff into our brains, we actually learn counter-intuitively by trying to take stuff out of our brains. And so if you've had that experience where you've read something
in a textbook or on a website and someone asks you
about it a few days later and you've completely forgotten about it, that's just because you
haven't tested yourself on that knowledge. And the word testing has all
these negative connotations because we think of testing
as like a school thing and we get graded and we get judged. But if we move towards
thinking of testing ourselves as being a strategy for learning, everything becomes so much easier. That's why when learning play the guitar there's only so many
tutorials you can watch before you actually start
having to put it into practise. When you're studying for exams, there's no point reading the textbook and just summarising
what's in the textbook, the point is you have to test yourself so that your brain has a chance to work to retrieve the information. And that is what really drives learning. And in the field of learning, there is this concept called the desirable difficulty concept. Which basically just means some things shouldn't be too hard, where for example if I
were to try playing tennis against Roger Federer, it
would just be too hard. I wouldn't really learn anything. But equally, if I were
to try playing tennis against a 10 year old who
doesn't know how to play, it wouldn't be fun, I
wouldn't learn anything because the difficulty is
at two different extremes. I wanna be playing tennis against someone who is at my level or a
little bit better than me, because that is the real arena in which I'm gonna be learning. And that's why having a coach
for example, is really good because a coach can
moderate their play style to be at my level and therefore
I'm more likely to learn as desirable difficulty. And so whatever we
wanna learn efficiently, we wanna apply this concept to try and make it a
little bit more difficult. Learning is not supposed to be easy, it is supposed to be hard. And if it's hard, then it means
we're doing something right. Tip number six is to get intense feedback as often and as quickly as possible. So feedback obviously is how we learn. We do something, we see
that we're doing it wrong and then we improve the thing. And again, feedback is
one of those words that can seem a little bit like dirty at times, especially if we're starting something out where we're not sure of our own abilities. If we get constructive
or critical feedback, that can really be a blow to our ego. If you're that sort of person
that needs the ego massage then at the start of learning something, what you need is praise and encouragement. For example, if I was just
starting to learn how to sing, and people would just give me
critical feedback immediately, I'd probably feel a
little bit like, oh, okay I don't really wanna sing. I'm one of those people
who just can't sing, Equally if I were to start drawing, and people would be like, oh,
ha! Ha! that's really crap you should do this instead. I'd probably feel pretty bad about it and therefore it wouldn't help
me continue on the journey. So I think at the start of
a journey for most of us we need that injection of
positivity and enthusiasm rather than necessarily critical feedback. But if we do decide to switch gears and to start taking learning
something super seriously, we wanna kind of avoid the praise and recognition aspect of it,
which is kind of unhelpful, and instead focus on the
critical, constructive feedback. What can we do differently? Again, this is why
having a coach for stuff is actually really, really helpful. Ever since getting a personal trainer, everything in the gym has improved, my biceps has gotten bigger. I'm at one-step close to
becoming a gymshark athlete because now I have someone
who is like there and then giving me feedback on the things that I
should do differently. Whereas before maybe once in a blue moon, I'd film a video of myself,
send it to a friend, they'd reply a few days later. It's not really a tight feedback loop. And really it's the tight feedback loops that encourage learning
whether it's for exams or whether it's for anything else in life. Tip number seven is the
concept of overlearning which is that when
we're learning something we actually wanna try and
understand or learn it in more depth than we necessarily need to. And the idea here is to
continuously be asking why a thing works the way that it does. So for example, when
I'm working as a doctor and I see senior doctors who, you know, most of being a doctor, admittedly, is about following guidelines and following a prescribed set of rules and basically a flow chart
for everything that we do. And so there are some doctors
who have that view of, all I have to do is
memorise the guidelines, and look them up but then there are other doctors who have a more first principles understanding approach to medicine which is that, okay, I know
what the guidelines are, that I should prescribe this drug but I'm actually gonna
take a step to figure out why that's the guideline
and why do they do that? What's the paper, what's
the evidence around this. And, you know, in my experience, it's hard to say that camp two is objectively a
better doctor than camp one, but certainly the sort of
doctor that I want to be is the doctor who understands
stuff from first principles and understands the
rationale for doing stuff rather than just
memorising the guidelines. This applies to music theory
in the guitar as well. I had a guitar lesson this morning, and we were talking about how it's very easy to learn
how to play anything by just following a tutorial. But when you follow a tutorial, the thing that you're learning is, my fingers are going in
this particular position. Whereas what we wanna try and get to, and John Mayer talks about
this a lot on his Instagram, what we wanna be getting to is just an understanding of music theory. So that instead of, I put my fingers in A, B and C positions, we think, okay, I'm playing a C7 chord and the reason I'm playing a
C7 chord is because of this. And therefore my fingers are gonna go in A, B and C position. And so the end result is the same. We're still playing that chord and we could still probably
just play the song. But when you have that deeper appreciation of the the reasons behind why things are the way that they are, it just makes learning anything else in that particular sphere, much easier and much more efficient. Tip number eight is all about spacing. This is something in the world of studying we call spaced repetition. Basically there's a concept
called the forgetting curve that was discovered by
a chap called Ebbinghaus in like the 1800's. And the forgetting curve is
that whenever we learn anything, whether it's like a fact
or a skill or whatever. We're just gonna forget it. And our memory for the thing
is gonna decay over time. And so we have to keep on practising or testing ourselves on the thing to actually continue to have our brain kinda use up space for that kinda thing, because it's like with our muscles, when we don't use our muscles, our muscles are gonna atrophy and they're gonna get smaller, and we're gonna get less hench. Equally with our brain. If we learn let's say a language
when we were five years old and then we don't use it
for the next 10 years, we're actually gonna
forget most of the language 'cause our brain doesn't
need to have that information in it anymore. But thankfully we can
combat the forgetting curve by using this concept
of spaced repetition, this applies not just to exams, but to any other skill as well. Which is that if we kinda repeat the thing at spaced intervals, so let's say I might learn a
song on the guitar on day one, and then I might repeat it again tomorrow. And then I might test
myself on it again next week and then next month, and
then six months from now. And if I've spaced my
repetition of this thing enough eventually playing that song is gonna go into my muscle memory, it's gonna go into my long-term memory and I won't need to practise
it very much anymore to be able to play it whenever I want. Now, if you're trying to learn something that has specific facts, there's all sorts of different apps that you can use to help with spacing. The one that I personally
enjoy the most, it's free and it's called Anki, after
the Japanese for Ankishimmers which I think is to memorise. And Anki is just like an incredible app that completely revolutionised
my experience of med school. It does have a bit of a learning curve, and so did you know, I have
an entire Skillshare class about how to use Anki, the basics along with some advanced
tips along with some guides and how to use Anki to
learn absolutely anything along with bonus interviews
from other students all around the world that are using Anki for stuff very effectively. If you wanna check that out and any of my other like
10 classes on Skillshare, you should hit the link
in the video description because Skillshare are very
currently sponsoring this video. So if you wanna check
out my class on Anki, or my class on evidence-based study tips or any of my three classes about how to be more productive, then hit the link in
the video description. When I was filming this
video, Skillshare had an offer of giving you 30% off the
annual premium subscription but it actually changed up that offer. So now, if you're one of
the first thousand people to hit the link in the video description, you will get a one month free trial, completely free to Skillshare premium where you can check out my Anki class and all the other 10 classes
I've got on Skillshare. So hit the link in the video description, be the first 1000 people to hit that link to get a one month free trial. This is amazing, it's a no brainer, you can just watch all my classes. So thank you Skillshare
for sponsoring this video. And finally tip number nine is to teach what you are trying to learn. We often have this thing of like, oh I'm not allowed to teach something until I become an expert at it. But there's this concept
that C.S Lewis talks about that I talk about a lot
called the curse of knowledge. Which is that, when we're
trying to learn something, often we don't learn best from experts, we learn best from people
who are just one step in front of us along that same journey. And so the way I think of it is that I would rather learn from a guide, than learn from a guru. Guide versus guru. And I would rather be a
guide than try and be a guru. And certainly for me, I found that when I was
going through medical school, my favourite revision sessions or lectures would be the ones that were
given by medical students in the year above me rather
than those given by world-class Nobel prize winning professors because those guys were old
and like really far removed from the things that I needed at the time, whereas, another medical
student just one year above me was like really, really helpful. And then when I started
teaching medical students, when I started teaching guitar, when I started teaching piano, and YouTube as well with my
part-time YouTuber academy, I found that anytime I
try and teach something, it really solidifies my own
knowledge and understanding and learning of the thing itself. And so now I have a general policy that whenever I'm learning anything, I'm documenting my
process while learning it. And that helps me learn better because I know that I'm possibly gonna be teaching this thing a few months or years from now. If you like this video, you might like to check
out two specific books about learning. One is called, "Make it stick" and the other one is
called "Ultralearning" And you can actually find summaries for both of those on shortform which is my favourite way of
getting summaries of books. That'll be linked in the video description if you wanna check it out. And if you're interested in this science of effective learning, check
out this video over here, which is from a few years ago, but it still genuinely one of
my favourite videos of all time that I've ever made. One of the best ones, I think as well. And that's all about the
power of active recall and why testing ourselves
is the best thing ever. And I talk about a lot of
scientific evidence around it and loads of people have
said that that video alone has changed their lives. So thank you so much for
watching hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you in the
next video, bye-bye.
