My Most POWERFUL Study Trick (Any Subject)

people are always asking me justin what is the best way of studying what's like your top studying tip most of the time that question doesn't really make sense because learning is very complicated thing and so it's not really possible to answer that but it does make me think you know like what is the biggest most important thing to increase your studying efficiency what would make the biggest difference and there are so many possible contenders but i'm gonna say that this may be the thing if you did nothing else but just this it could possibly be the thing that makes the biggest difference for those of you that are new i'm dr justin sung i'm a former medical doctor and a full-time learning coach i am really excited about this particular topic because i think this is going to help a lot of people let's take an example topic for example let's say we're studying like biology okay and this could be any topic okay literally any topic and let's say that you want to learn like year 9 biology okay year 9 and biology so in order to learn uni in biology what is the most efficient way to learn it there's something that i really need to clear up here is when i say the word efficient what i'm actually talking about is the time it takes to reach the level of knowledge mastery we need for the goal so for example if you're only getting tested on retrieving like simple facts and memorizing definitions then that's a very low level of knowledge mastery how long does it take to get to that level compared to let's say that we're getting tested on discussing a network of ideas and the influence that these ideas have on each other or advanced applications if you're a you know senior high school in university or beyond you're going to be tested at these higher levels so again how long does it take to get these higher levels some people will look at only how long does it take to hold on to the information or they won't even think about efficiency at all but it's important that we look at both both the effectiveness in terms of how much knowledge mastery can we get and then also the time efficiency in terms of how long does it take to get there because obviously you know doing passive flash cards just again and again and again it might it might be okay for the low level but it's a very inefficient way of getting to the higher levels and so the time efficiency of that is is terribly low but let's assume that we're trying to get to a reasonably high-ish level of knowledge mastery here what is the most efficient way of us to get to that level with something like eni and biology i want you to think about that for a little bit i want you to think about the ideas that you might have and i'm gonna tell you what i think is a good idea and it's probably not the same thing as what you're thinking here's a suggestion what we're going to do is in order to get to year 9 biology we're going to start from something more advanced than union biology and we're going to work our way down what we're going to do instead is we're going to find ourselves three phd thesis okay phd thesis times three and we're gonna find three of these and we're gonna read these first we're gonna try to completely understand it as much as we can and in understanding it we're gonna be able to figure out what the core principles are within this phd and then we'll be able to track our way back to you know maybe like a you know just a university level and then we'll be able to track our way back to just the high school level and then we'll be able to bring it all the way back down to a year nine level and because we worked from this really advanced version first and we spent all of that time to learn that to a good level when we come down to the year nine stuff we should have a very solid understanding of it so when we read through a year 9 textbook for example it should be pretty easy does it make sense to do it this way hopefully if you were listening to me talk about this you would think that does not make any sense and you're right doesn't make any sense this is the point we know intuitively that if you were to take someone that doesn't even know year 9 biology and we were to give them three phd thesis it would take so long to understand it like this person will probably never get to the point where they actually fully understand even one thesis let alone three in terms of the time efficiency of doing this thing where we're you know tracking down all the way from a phd level down to united valley that's not time efficient whatsoever we instinctively realize that when we start with information that is too advanced for us it's not efficient we lack the foundational knowledge to make sense of it and because we're not able to make sense of it it's going to be harder so for example if someone has a masters in biology and then they read a phd thesis you would expect they will have an easier time to understand it because they have a lot more foundational knowledge so here's the thing here's the real strategy that i that i'm talking about this was just an exercise to get you to realize that this doesn't make sense we are doing the exact same thing as this but on a smaller scale when we study see when you open up a textbook a year 9 biology textbook or again whatever subject you're studying not all the information in it is the same you could have a single page and on that page you may have let's say three different paragraphs right even within that single paragraph that first sentence sentence number one might be something that you read and you're like oh yeah that makes sense sentence number two you might read that and think hmm this idea is a little shaky when we move to paragraph number two we may say sentence number three that makes sense but then sentence number four that's something that i struggled to process and make sense of information the foundational knowledge to process it and even in a single page in a single chapter of a textbook even within the category of year 9 biology there are still some pieces of information that are more advanced and then there are some pieces of information that are less advanced i want you to imagine that instead of dividing it into year 9 biology and then year 10 biology year 11 biology so on and so forth imagine we divided it like this you go into year 9 but year 9 is split into multiple different levels so let's say that there's year nine a then year nine b year nine c year nine d and each level is a little bit more advanced and more challenging than the next so let's say that there is all the way through to year nine a from year nine to year nine zed and year nine z is the most advanced stuff that you can learn within the year nine level if we said we're gonna start with year nine z and then move backwards from year nine zero to year nine a that doesn't that doesn't make sense it's the same reason it doesn't make sense starting at a phd level now it's not going to be as dramatic but it is still probably going to be slower we're going to struggle more than we need to and we're going to feel like it just takes us a long time to wrap our head around some of these ideas but if you started at a and worked to z you would be building the foundational knowledge along the way so when you did get to z it would actually make sense it's not split up that way no no curriculum is splitting it that way for you however it doesn't change the fact the objective reality that some information is more advanced requires different types of prior knowledge and here's the thing if someone were to write a textbook knowing exactly what you know they know all the prior knowledge that you have inside your brain and they would create a textbook just for you they would arrange it in the order in which you need to learn it to make the most sense of the next thing that follows they wouldn't put a concept earlier on that you're going to really struggle to understand because you actually needed to understand the next thing first right that order doesn't make sense but this author of the textbook even your teacher they don't know everything that you know they don't know the intricate nature of how your brain works and even small differences can have significant effects it's up to us as a learner take responsibility and we take responsibility by reordering the way in which we study we are gonna change the order in which we consume information and this is the one thing that i think if you started to take control of almost regardless of every other study technique that you're using you would find benefit now obviously if the rest of your study techniques are absolute trash you're still not going to be like ultra amazing but it will be better than where you were before here's how we do this we take the textbook or the lecture slides or the whatever we're learning from and the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go through the material and just learn it but anything that takes longer than one or two minutes for you to wrap your head around you're gonna take note off and you're gonna skip it okay so we've got essentially sort of like three different sets of notes one is the source material that we're learning from two is kind of this sheet of things that we are skipping and then three is the notes that we are making as we are studying now i'm not going to go into how to write your notes i'm not going to go into any other techniques involved in this i talk about that in other videos i talk about that in my course it's really quite complicated to go through the entire system but i'm just focusing on this particular strategy so any other techniques that you're comfortable with using any of the other techniques that you'll learn in my course you can apply this you can stack it together well if you're in my course you probably already know this concept anyway but you can combine it with whatever you're already using okay we're going through this information we're going through and we're saying okay so i understand that that makes sense to me i get that and we can you know shunt that across into our notes that we're creating and then we're saying hmm this particular part though this sentence here i can't really understand that it seems a little bit random it seems a little irrelevant i don't really see how that works i feel like i need to really start just rote learning and memorizing it and that's the cue when you feel like the only way for you to make sense of it is just to like repeat it in your head again and again and just try to smash it in and encode it through brute force that's a sign that your brain doesn't know what to think about it it's just saying i don't know why it's relevant i don't know where it fits i'm having difficulty in coding it man you can't just repeatedly smash it in and just assume that it's gonna stay there and it's not that's not how learning works your brain is telling you that it doesn't make sense it's kind of like if you were to take that phd thesis you'd read it and you'd think i have no idea what this means but if you know you're getting tested on it you're probably just going to try to learn the thing line by line that's the cue when you feel like hmm this piece of information i feel like i'm starting to just repeat this i'm trying to just rote learn this through just repetitive memorization what you're going to do is you're gonna stop that you're gonna cut that off and you'll just make a note of that okay you can write the page that it's on and you can write a couple key words about what the concept was just to keep track of what it was that you skipped but you're just gonna move on you're just gonna move on to the next thing and you might say okay well this part also i don't really doesn't make sense and you're gonna skip that too and you're gonna end up skipping heaps of information you're gonna be skipping constantly and that's okay because the purpose is to go through this text and pick out the things that make sense already the things that are easy for us to make sense of and what that's going to do is over time when we continue to look through this we are slowly going to build up a stronger and stronger network of prior knowledge and then when we go back through the notes and look at the things that we skipped when we go back through them now we have more prior knowledge right we know now more than we did 20 or 30 minutes ago and so you'll find that from this list there are maybe a few things that initially you couldn't wrap your head around but now when you read it you think oh that does make sense because that's related to this thing and that thing and this thing or oh of course it has to be this way because otherwise that wouldn't happen but the thing is unless you knew what that was you wouldn't know why this is relevant what we're doing here is we are reordering the way in which we are going to consume information so whatever makes sense we absorb whatever doesn't make sense we leave it till later up until a point where it will make sense for us and we'll go through this once and we're not going to be able to pick out absolutely everything from here we'll see that hey we can add a few more things onto this our notes start getting a little bit more and more and more detailed but we still may have lots and lots of things that we have left once you've done that go through it again start from the top what did you miss again and now you'll see that there's even more things that you're able to pick up because each time we sweep through this we have more and more prior knowledge we're actually going to end up covering the same amount of material it's going to be the same amount of detail it's going to be a lot more time efficient because something that would normally have taken us 20 or 30 minutes to memorize through repetitions through maybe flash cards over the course of a week we may not need to do that at all we could potentially just skip that entire step and we may be able to learn it in just 15 20 seconds and the reason that it's important to do it in this order rather than just copying it all linearly from start to finish and then trying to process it afterwards is because of the fact that our working memory capacity is very short our working memory is only seconds long and if you're interested check out my video on how the memory works issues with space retrieval when you take information and it's sitting in your working memory capacity because we've only got really seconds to work with that information and try to put into our long-term memory if we don't frame it in a way that makes it really well organized to begin with you're going to end up forgetting that anyway and then when you try to put it back in we are now going to be hit with something called framing bias which is that the way that the information is framed and is presented to us influences the way that we actually think about it and we're also going to be influenced by another thing called anchoring bias which is that the first time we learn information the first time we're exposed to something that also influences the way in which we understand things as well so for example if we learn something in a certain way the first time around in a certain order that order starts influencing the way that we start thinking about that afterwards so it's actually harder to make sense of it later because we have to then relearn the thing that we forgot which is also frustrating and pretty demotivating but it also is cognitively more difficult because we're sort of working against what our brain sort of did to begin with we have this tangled thing we have to untangle it first it would have been better just to not have it tangled to begin with this is the thing is what we're trying to do here is we're optimizing the system we're saying these are the areas where we're wasting time and we're removing those time waste parts and we're replacing them with strategies and techniques that actually work more efficiently instead now you will get to a point where you're going through this list uh and you may have certain pieces of information that even though you've gone through this maybe you know two or three times you still don't know how to make sense of it and that is the stuff that you want to put into your flash cards or you want to just rote memorize because it probably means that that piece of information is a little bit more isolated and you're going to have to resort to just memorizing that through repetition but hopefully there's a lot less of this type of information than there normally would have been and i know i've used biology in this initial example but like i said before it's applicable for really any topic uh you could be using this for chemistry you could be using this for physics languages even coding if you jump onto my discord the links below in the description you can see that there are thousands of people on the discord who are you know using this technique and other techniques as well but they're using this right this is something that i teach in my courses called order control and you've probably heard me talk about in my other videos as well if you've seen my other videos there are thousands of people that use this technique for a huge range of subjects and it's very very effective people that don't use it you will start noticing that they tend to have very similar issues they struggle with trying to process information they find it really difficult to retain things and they find that they're spending a really long time just reading and rereading things trying to just understand it the issue is that they are making themselves understand something that they're in no position to start understanding yet what they need to do first is gain more prior knowledge beforehand in order to make that easier and this thing this thing that i call order control i think and it's a close one because there's so many other techniques that are like just as good but maybe not as good this is the thing that i think if people started doing even if your note-taking technique is terrible even if your pre-study technique is terrible even if your revision strategy is terrible if you have no interleaving if you have no you know sense of time management if you procrastinate like crazy if all of these things were working against you if you had only one thing that you could change i think this would be the one because it's easy-ish to pull off and there's more advanced versions that are more difficult to do but at least the one that i've taught you right now is pretty easy to do it's straight away pretty effective it doesn't require you to change a lot of your other habits the only thing is just getting used to the fact that you're not covering things in a linear order and tuning in more to where your brain is telling you that you should go and moving away from just the concept of repetitive memorization i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you really learned something from this i really think that this can be a game changer so leave a comment down below if you've used a technique like this if you've sort of figured out something very similar on your own and you're already using something like this or if you're not give it a go come back to this video and just leave a comment about how you think about it and if you are interested in learning some of the other techniques that i've got to teach then i've got a course where i go through all of this stuff from start to finish you can check that out in the description below as well if you're interested to learn more about the course you can either check out the website or you can just talk to students that are literally going through the course right now by joining the discord there are lots of public channels that you can look through and see what it's all about thanks for listening i'll catch you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Justin Sung

Views: 456,409

Keywords: dr justin sung, justin sung, medical school, productivity, productivity hacks, productivity tips, stress management, study faster, studying

Id: UY2GO1ML-Bo

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022