How to take notes to maximize your study time.

all right hello welcome back to the basement i'm jeremiah wolfe and uh as a viewer reached out to me and asked about taking notes now i kind of uh not kind of i definitely addressed this in my video about study skills study tools and but that video is also like an hour long and uh very few people have watched it all the way through and i get it like an hour long video is kind of crazy so i just want to kind of uh summarize some of those things and maybe help out excuse me i'll just burp right in your face uh and i'm not gonna cut that out because i got time to edit this uh all right so let's talk about note-taking um all right first off i want to do is share with you the entirety of my notes from the nrc exam ready can you see that it's a little bright reflection from my light this is one hundred percent of the notes that i took for the nrc exam 100 you will find at the top is the um at what the eui 64 address formula so it's the fffe uh you know first and then you take the ffv then you take the mac address but you flip bit seven so um if you're not familiar that's how you make a puie ipv6 address so i wrote that down and then i wrote down the steps for bgp path selection that's the only notes i took so then how how do i learn if i'm not taking notes well so if you've watched some of my videos you might have picked up on the idea that i have been a student of the subconscious mind for decades literally decades it i have had a business coaching people you to use their subconscious mind to improve their lives since 2006 i am a certified hypnotherapist and certified in neuro-linguistic programming and i left it in 2013 and have been working with people full-time now uh that being said one of the things that one of the the big struggles i had in my business was that you know it's it's sort of self-hope let's just call it what it is it's a form of self-help and when it comes to those sorts of things people are not interested in doing work my clients averaged uh six sessions with me to overcome their issue or to achieve their goal six sessions the the vast majority of my clients came to me for severe anxiety the vast majority of my clients had been in therapy for more than a decade more than a decade and in less than two months i could help them overcome that anxiety they saw progress that they were unable to see in over a decade of traditional therapy however very few people are willing to even do that what most people want when it comes to self-help is they want a quick solution they want that one trick that one tip that's going to transform their lives and even though the last 10 one tricks the last 10 1 tips the last 10 books the last 10 gurus didn't help them at all they keep going after that one thing because the idea of doing work to improve your life people aren't interested now you are in a different position how do i know that because you're studying to improve your life you know here's the i still got the university book sitting on my desk you're you're not this isn't one quick tip this is one quick trick this takes time this takes months usually of work uh challenging stuff so but you're there you're doing it right i i get so geeked up i get choked up when people are willing to work hard to improve their lives that just gets me it gets me every time so you impress me right i'm proud of you so that being said what does that have to do with note-taking well it has to do with the idea of listen i'm not going to give you some trick about taking notes that's going to explode your ability to memorize but i am going to tell you how the brain works and i'm going to tell you that we have been misled and i don't think it's intentionally it's just one of those things you know you go to school you're in primary school for 12 or 13 years and at no point at least here in the united states does anyone ever teach us how to learn they're so busy cramming facts down her down our throat that no one ever takes the time to say hey learning has been well studied we actually have some pretty good ideas about what's involved in learning let me help you learn to learn so i don't want to get too too into it but um let's let's talk about you know why i don't take notes and how or why you know this is this is all i need less than a single page like well it's 12 like 16 lines of text it was mine total notes for a 900 page book how could that possibly be so this is what i do the first thing to understand is that vocabulary vocabulary is the closest how to word this as we understand it there is no single tool uh more that more affects your intelligence than vocabulary vocabulary seems to equal intelligence the more vocabulary you have the smarter you are and how do we learn this this is actually fascinating so i mean it's somewhere in south america there was this dictator south american dictator whose sister and i can't remember which country or which dictator i apologize uh anyway whose sister she she made a pet project and she started this school for the deaf okay and um that school had existed for decades at this point now this the study was done some time ago but when they did this study the school had existed for decades and while it was a school for the deaf in reality it was just a storage you know they didn't they didn't help these people and what's fascinating this is so cool it's such a crazy story it's so cool so the people uh usually children were brought into this school and over time because they really weren't they weren't taught like proper sign language um they were just kind of like housed it was just to get them out of society it was it was disgusting all right but they they developed their own form of sign language they developed their own form of sign language and as the years went on that that sign language became more and more and more complex and what they were able to do is they were able to go and and sit down with these people you know a couple generations as i understand it i i i don't have all the details but uh at the top of my head um but they were able to sit down with these people over a couple generations so really the evolution of this form this ver this unique form of sign language that existed only at this one place and was taught from student to student the the instructors were not involved in creating this at all 100 percent created by the the deaf students if you will they created themselves and they built upon it themselves and what's fascinating is that the individuals who were the earliest to have this form of language their only form of language because they otherwise weren't taught they weren't taught to read they weren't taught to do anything they were just stuffed in this school and kept away from society so their only form of language was this uh this primitive sign language that they taught themselves and those early people score very low on cognitive tests as if they had some form of mental retardation but as the years progressed and as that language got more and more complex the individuals who were learning it score higher and higher and higher until the modern people score you know relatively average and the hypothesis around this is that when your brain can have an idea a complex idea and give it a word then you can access that entire idea by just thinking of one word here's an example think of the word automobile or car i feel like i gave this example in in another in another video but think of the word automobile or car that word automobile encompasses all kinds of stuff you know mechanical systems electrical systems uh you know the physics around driving the physics around internal combustion engines all this stuff right and just by saying the word automobile on some level you know some people more some people less but on some level you have a grasp of of of all those concepts right imagine if every time you you had to think about automobile you had to think your way through every one of those systems and put it all together in your mind that would be impossible would take forever you would never be able to have any complex thoughts around an automobile but because your brain has built this whole concept and given it one word you can have complex thoughts about about the automobile and that's what we think how language and intelligence work together so that when you have words that become like legos in building little idea complex ideas where one word in an idea encompasses all this stuff in this next word all this stuff is encompassed by one word and by stringing those words together you can your brain can comprehend large concepts it's fascinating it's a i always say i'm geeked up about it so vocabulary seems to equal intelligence so how does that affect studying well as you're going through the book you have to take your time and understand all the words there is you know i i was joking with my wife about how there can't be any field that has more acronyms than i t and she said oh excuse me she works in the power industry and she says well i bet we could give you a run for your money there are so many acronyms so as you read through here when you come across a new term just off top my head bpdus okay bpdu uh bridge protocol data unit right that's what it stands for i think it's what stands for so as you come across that term you need to stop and you need to understand what that term means in a detailed way such that what the what i recommend doing is not just reading it i recommend visualizing it this is the key visualize so when you're reading and you come across bpdus you're going to read that section about bpdus okay it's an exchange of information between switches that or stop visualize it imagine that flow of data imagine looking into that packet and seeing the different types of information that are inside there is this complex yes does it make reading much longer yes but if you do that it only takes a minute once you've done that from that point on every time you see the the acronym bpdu your brain has this whole idea instead of what most people would do is they would read it okay bpdu blah blah blah blah blah and then they would write down bpdu equals bridge protocol data units away transfer and blah blah blah and then they but they never bothered to actually internalize it so you could take all the notes in the world but it doesn't do you any good if you don't internalize why do it twice do it once while you're reading why also write it down that's my thought do it one time i'm lazy i am lazy and i think it is my opinion that the best engineers are lazy engineers why because we're always finding a way to do things more efficiently we're always finding a way thing the way to make things better faster stronger why so we don't have to deal with it i do it once and i walk away and it works and it's good i'm done right be a lazy engineer read and comprehend don't just take notes taking notes i i feel is taught as a way to make you feel like you're studying when you're not actually accomplishing a whole lot so visualize those concepts and then i also encourage you that especially with new when things are relatively new to you as you read that acronym always explode the acronym in your mind so you see bpdu on the page you say bridge protocol data unit every single time you that helps your brain to remember the concept that you just learned behind that word that is really my key to taking notes that understanding that vocabulary equals intelligence so you have to latch on to those all those acronyms all those words that we're learning and actually take the time to stop read the section that explains it stop visualize it and as so you're learning ospf right you excuse me you start learning ospf okay you get the basics of ospf down you have visualized the the flow of the ospf but now you're moving on to multi-area ospf so once again stop visualize the lsas what's happening you know internalize that make it real to you not just text on a page see it happening imagine what's happening and and allow your brain to take all those concepts and ideas and cram them down into that one word ospf so that when you think ospf boom all that information is available to you and that's it and then so what do i write notes i write notes to help me memorize things that is the only thing i use notes for if there's something where it's a list like for the encore exam i wrote out all the lsas i wrote out all the ospf lsas because i have it all the time for some reason i just couldn't remember type 8 and type 9 lsas i just couldn't remember them so you know what i wrote them all out and that was the final step to memorizing things like that so again for bgp that's what i wrote down for this time there's 12 or depending on how you look at 13 path selection you know to the past selection algorithm so i wrote it out and just memorized it because quite frankly i just couldn't i couldn't there's just too many parts to just for that one thing so i just memorized so if i have to memorize something just straight up you know brute memorization that's the only stuff i write down everything else for me is a is a process of reading visualizing internalizing and linking concepts complex complex concepts uh to words and acronyms so that i have fully internalized that now what does that mean that means that it takes me freaking ever to read i average now this book in rc there's so many actually here's a perfect example uh sorry it's all blown out this is you know two pages it's almost all just captured output so most of that you can just skim real quick but if it's so if it's text i average uh two to three minutes per page my wife she reads like four or five times faster than i do but i read it once and i i'm i don't need to look back at it so you know when i when i did the nrc exam i took the exam monday morning sunday afternoon i sat down i flipped through the book and just skimmed through to see if there's anything that i had missed or that i wasn't quite clear on and a few things i popped up that i wasn't quite clear on so what did i do i jumped online read an article from some networking blog or from cisco's website just to clear it up and wrote down the few little notes that i had and that was it so for me personally that's my approach to notes i don't take notes i don't like taking notes i find usually them to be an ineffective learning tool and i think that they hold you back honestly from really using the power of your brain you got a big brain man you you it's crazy the stuff your brain can do use it use it all right that's jeremiah hey i hope this was helpful and you know what i there's plenty of people watching this you're like dude f you you got no clue what you're talking about i take notes hey i'm not trying to tell you you're wrong i'm saying this is what works for me and try it out try it out all right

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 1,098

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Cisco Certification, Study Skills, Note Taking

Id: irX_X6gr7rs

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020