Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool

if you're serious about your learning and you want to take it to the next level then you have to try writing mini essays and I warn you this will take a lot of time and effort but you'll gain so much wisdom and perspective in return they're also one of my most powerful tools for improving how I write it gives me the opportunity to practice and to really develop the skills and become familiar with the craft but what are me essays anyway well they're not the long boring ones from school where your teachers made you write 2,000 words on some you didn't care about these mini essays are actually fun to write and sometimes they're my favorite part of the day mini essays are short pieces of writing that surround a single idea or topic and in this case you don't have to get frustrated over choosing what to write about because it's already done for you and if that sounds bizarre it will make so much sense you'll see ultimately there are a tool for learning if I encounter something in a book that I find really interesting something that resonates with me I write a mini essay on it and that is true for any piece of content whether it's a book whether it's a video an article even tweets or even something that someone told you one day it doesn't matter where these ideas come from but as long as it stood out to you it's worth writing about and that writing takes the form of the mini essay which is essentially a detailed note and I write it as if I'm going to teach it to someone else and you'll see why that's so powerful very shortly so here's a great example I was reading an article on substack written by Rob Henderson who's an amazing writer by the way I'll link him down below in this article he shares a story from Thomas so's Memoir and it was about how even people who seem friendly and approachable at first can actually be deceiving and you may not always be able to trust them then on the other hand you have people who are kind of harsh and cold at first but as long as they're authentic you can trust them more and it can be bad enough that those people who appear nice actually betray you when push comes to shove this idea stuck out to me so I took the concept and I wrote A minay on it in my own words as if I'm going to tell someone else about it and it's not just some scribbled down note this has a start an end and a middle it has structure to it but hold on a second why go through all this trouble anyway what's the point yes these are short to WR but they still take a lot of time and effort so what what's in it for you why would you even bother putting in the effort to write these I won't deny that these are an investment they do take time and effort but in spite of that I couldn't care less because the reward you receive in return is so worth it every single minute of writing those mini essays is absolutely worth your time 100% ever since I started using these mini essays in my self-education you can say which was about 8 months ago a year maybe I have seen noticeable improvements in not only my reading quality but my writing has gotten more powerful too it's true that the investment is large but I see Improvement in two areas of life that really mean a lot to me and I bet it's the same for you so let me show you exactly how mini essays are so good for your reading and writing now the first huge benefit of mini essays is something that every reader would kill for it's the ability to remember and understand what they read enough to close the covers of the book and say I am confident in what I just read and I can now go and use this and recall the ideas in my daily life many essays help you achieve that by exploiting something called the fman technique and you've probably heard it before but if you haven't it's a technique named after the famous physicist Richard fman he's incredibly wellknown and he was a Nobel Prize winner so if he uses it as the backbone to his success then you bet you can too it's something that anyone can use whether you're a high schooler or a college professor it's flexible it's simple and arguably it's the best learning strategy ever now the first step involves the learning itself which is straightforward you pick up a book you watch something you listen to a podcast anything so long as you're actively learning and I would recommend taking notes in the process cuz that's actually how you force your mind to think and the second thing you do is you actually teach what you learn to others and when I say that I don't mean going out and giving a lecture on it but you're teaching an imaginary audience you're producing something as if you're going to tell someone else about it and you can see where this is going with the mini essays and this is where the fun part is because you can use any medium you want you can write on a whiteboard you can write notes to yourself you can film videos or even record audio whatever suits you best to communicate this point and understand it better now in this case we're using mini essays because I found that they're the simplest form of teaching they're easy they're accessible and anyone can do it almost anywhere and if it sounds intimidating there's no worries because I'm actually going to go into a a step-by-step process later on now this works because teaching what you learn is actually incredibly powerful for your own learning because not only does that mental work of writing Force the ideas to stick but it also let you spot gaps in your understanding and this is the magic of the third step when you write your mini essays you're forced to think when you put ideas onto paper they're exposed to the world and you can confront them clearly because there's been so many times where I've read something and it was quite insightful and I thought I understood it I was like yeah well that makes sense I'm happy with my reading but then I find that someone asks me about it or I try and talk about it on paper by writing and I realize I actually have no idea what he was saying I can't put it into words I can't articulate it but all that time in my head I thought I knew it and it's only until I started writing that I was able to see all the gaps in my understanding and even though this sounds annoying it's actually a really good thing it's a gift in Disguise because now you have the opportunity to make amends you've shown yourself that you're clearly lacking something and now the next step is to just return to the source material and kind of patch those holes and the benefit to Don't Stop pouring in because when you correct yourself when you revisit the material and find out what you missing that very act helps you remember more it's just like in school when you made a mistake you didn't really make the same mistake twice and if you can repeat that process you can learn anything you can walk away from any book any video feeling productive and satisfied with your learning it makes your progress as clear as it can be and that is really the backbone of a a good life of learning and I guarantee if you can take some of the most powerful ideas from a book you love and write many essays on them you will be unrecognizable Down the Line This is truly deep learning and there's nothing that Eng engages you more with the book than writing mini essays so just for that reason alone mini essays are wonderful but that's only half of their value now I'm on a journey to become a better writer every day I try and improve my skills and see where I can go and along the way mini essays have been my most precious tool for getting there there's three main benefits to them that combine into this perfect trifecta of writing the first benefit is volume many novice writers and this included me but they start with a burst of energy and confidence they have this excitement to become a writer they tell every one that they a writer they come up with plans they brainstorm ideas and topics all these different things but in spite of all this action and busyness they don't write anything it's sad and ironic probably the worst form of procrastination too now I'm not saying to be a writer you have to have written a bestseller or grown an email list to 10,000 subscribers but every writer has to have something to show off even if it's not the best quality work at least it's something and then you have to ask yourself the tough question are you a writer or are you a wannabe I was a wannabe but many essays offered a solution a way out of this black hole of procrastination because the only way to escape it and become a good writer is to put in the Reps you don't get strong and build muscle by going to the gym once a month and you don't become a good writer by spitting out 200 words once in a blue moon there are no hacks or tricks in this game and even though that sounds Bleak it's good news because the only thing that will reward you is effort consistent sustained effort every single day it guarantees that if you have that patience and that consistency you will become a good writer that's a promise from me to you and from every other great writer out there I make sure to write every day and I have been for a while now and over those months I can see a visible change it's like practicing an instrument if you practice every single day you won't really be able to tell the difference from day to day but if you stretch that time frame out over the weeks months even years you suddenly see how much you've changed and the progress becomes real and tangible and it's exactly the same in writing many essays are not a hack but they are a tool for helping you get that volume in and by putting that practice in you do get better but how comes how's that possible well a common hurdle for writers is not knowing what to write about and this is something that really affected me in the past I would be sitting there with a blank screen and I'd be confused not knowing what to write and you can just sit there for an hour with nothing happening but with mini essays this pain is completely absent it's gone it doesn't exist your writing topic is chosen for you already it's simply the interesting ideas you've read in a book and that frees up your mind to just sit down and actually write and get those damn reps in through the Synergy by combining my reading with writing mini essays I can easily clock about 800 1,000 words a day and if that doesn't sound like much to you it is to me because before I was doing less than 500 a day so with one change to my routine I've almost doubled my writing output and in theory that means I'll improve my skills twice as fast so if you can fit mini essays into your everyday learning habits you will see your writing skills s now the second benefit to mini essays is novelty when you scroll through YouTube shorts or Instagram reals why are they so addictive what is it about them that keeps you glued to the screen every few seconds you can expect to see something new and that keeps you entertained whereas if you were to watch say a 2hour lecture on YouTube because nothing's really changing throughout that two hours you really you have to have a stronger attention span to stay focused by writing mini essays you're harnessing the power of novelty to keep you writing for long periods of time and you know what that means it means you write more every day it means you get better every day and it means you improve at a faster rate than ever before see you and I we're humans right we have different interests if I sat here and told you that you need to stick to your specialized field and you need to talk about this one topic all the time you wouldn't do that and I would hate to do that I would hate to bottle myself in into to one topic and manyi essays are completely against the idea too because in the space of 1 hour you can write about five different topics all of which are wildly interesting to you because each mini essay takes about 10 or 20 minutes to write all in the space of an hour I can be writing about content creation drug cartels Pride or some literature I read I can switch between all these vastly different topics so quickly it keeps writing fun accessible and refreshing and that allows you to just do it for ages the third benefits your writing is that Min essays help you build a bank of ideas a lot of writers dread the blank page they sit at their computer screen paralyzed not knowing what to write about not knowing where to start trying to squeeze out an idea but nothing happens nothing comes out of it I know that feeling in action hurts and there's no good reason why you should suffer from it and even though I can relate to that feeling I haven't felt it in over a year just because of mini essays ever since I started using them I've never been stuck on what to write ever if anything I have too much to write and of course I'm not complaining at all about that and this is all because I built a bank of ideas that I can draw from whenever I need I use this note taking app called obsidian and with just the click of a button it slaps me in the face with this massive network of knowledge and because I tagged every note and connected it to similar ones I can just jump anywhere into this network and find some inspiration on what to write about for example if I felt inspired to write about a meaningful life I can click on the meaning tag and it shows me everything about meaning that I've written ever and from here I can look around and see what makes me curious and what I can maybe expand upon so for example here there's a note called meaning justifies suffering but then I also see a note about education and how we have to take it into our own hands immediately in my mind I see hold on a second maybe I could connect those two ideas somehow maybe how meaning applies to our self-education and being lifelong students for example these are two wildly different ideas coming together to form something new and exciting and that example is with a narrow view I can open up this entire graph to reveal a 100 maybe a thousand different entry points of writing there's just so much to talk about that you really never run out of ideas with this and as a bonus tip you can actually use each mini essay to help you write the final piece of work so for example if I want to flesh out an idea more I sometimes look back at the mini essay I wrote and maybe I really liked how I phrased something there or maybe I used a quote that was really powerful and Punchy or perhaps I like the structure and I want to kind of copy that into my bigger piece of work the mini essays always give you that foundation and that starting point I always think of it as my own personal writing assistant in the pal of my hand it's brilliant I couldn't live without many essays and if you think it's time for you to also step up your reading and writing game then you might be wondering how can I actually apply this how can I actually write them and where should I write them and all these different questions so now I want to dive into the raw details that can help you actually apply this concept and start writing your own so first what makes a mini essay what the dos and don'ts well first and most importantly they have to be short because if you're writing too many words then they just become full-blown essays and that's good in itself but it kind of defeats the purpose of this as a notetaking technique so if you feel that desire to write a fullon essay do that but keep the other mini essay shorter and more concise mine are roughly 100 to 300 words long which is just a few paragraphs as a good rule of thumb I try and fit everything on one page without having to scroll this is important because it stops you from Rambling which I have the tendency to do it helps you practice being brief which is such an important skill for any writer out there exactly how you structure these mini essays is completely up to you in my case I write these knowing that I'm going to release them to the world at some point in time so because of that I try and keep it informative entertaining and actionable but of course that's just me you might have completely different needs and the structure of your mini essays should reflect what you want so for example you might be practicing your storytelling so maybe you want to include a story in each of your notes or maybe you love Pros or poet and you kind of want to integrate that element into it this method is yours and above all it should serve you to achieve your goals and that means you adjust it to your needs and you have that confidence to to carve your own path of learning and that remains true but there's one tip in writing these mini essays that will save you from a bunch of stress and that's to keep them restricted to a single concept or idea so what that means is every single mini essay should be about one thing and one thing alone and this is important because as soon as you try and integrate many different elements Concepts it starts getting complicated you start to lose the clarity of the message and it just becomes a jumble i' save the connections and the more complicated stuff for longer pieces of writing I know it's tempting to pull other ideas in sometimes but trust me on this one it will make the process so much easier if you stick to a single concept the final question is where do you write these essays I use a free note taking app called obsidian and that's where you've seen all the footage I put on the screen I would recommend it because it can be used offline and it has this really nice graph feature that just lets you see all the notes you've ever made in a visual format and of course it's simple it's minimalistic it keeps things focused on the writing rather than all these other gimmicks and features and after a whole year of using it it's continued to serve me well but of course the options are endless really there's so many not taking apps out there I would just recommend that you use something that a allows you to connect notes which is important and B allows you to use it offline that means you can of course connect ideas and form new ones and keep your knowledge somewhat arranged but it also means you can use it wherever you are and you don't have to rely on having an internet connection but whatever you choose the most important thing is to stay consistent the platform is not the important part the important part is showing up every day to write if you make many essays a habit I promise you you will become a better reader but also a skilled writer it's my favorite way to kill two birds with one stone and really make this life of learning I can be happy with I hope you can find Value in this method and of course if you have any questions on how you can set it up or which note apps to use or anything anything at all related to this my email is open the comment are open and as always I'm happy to help you there I hope you enjoyed the video and of course subscribe for more

Channel: Odysseas

Views: 324,098

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Id: N4YjXJVzoZY

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024