What I Learned after 5000 Hours of Studying

so I only really seriously started studying when I was 17 trying to enter into medical school since then I have studied easily over 10 000 hours I've studied medicine I've studied education learning science Computing marketing business accounting all sorts of different things and for the first five or six years of studying I probably spent twice the amount of time that I needed to I have made more mistakes than most but I have learned from them in this video I want to share three of the most mind-blowing realizations that I had around studying each of these realizations resulted in me making massive improvements to my learning ability and make sure to stick around because the last realization alone probably accounted for at least 80 percent of all of the wasted time over the years and the changes I made because of it are what allowed me to eventually become a top scholar if you're new to the channel welcome I'm Dr Justin sung I'm a full-time learning coach and learning researcher I'm also the head of learning and I can study and a former medical doctor over the last decade I've worked with tens of thousands of people from around the world to help them learn more efficiently before we jump in I'd appreciate if you can give this video a like to help with the algorithm so one of my first major realizations was that you can kind of overdose on learning techniques let me explain in medicine there is this concept of a therapeutic index and it goes like this a therapeutic index is the dose range at which that medication is effective for example if you've got pain you can take painkillers if you take too little it's not going to be enough if you take too much it can be very dangerous you might even die so there's a range in which it's effective and it's doing good for you if you go outside of that range it becomes either unhelpful or it can become even harmful now when I was 17 I discovered flashcards for the first time and it was magical one of my friends was doing really well and they said hey this is a technique I use I tried it and I loved it and I went all in on it I had thousands of flash cards and honestly a lot of the results that I got in my first year of uni were because I was so heavily involved in my flashcards so it was working well what's the problem the problem was that it wasn't sustainable and when I got into medical school I had so many flashcards that I was getting overwhelmed I didn't have time to finish them all and it also wasn't enough I wasn't being able to think in the way that I needed to think yes I could recall the facts but I couldn't use the knowledge properly so how does this relate to overdosing well the thing is because I had so many flashcards and I was spending so much time just getting through them it was taking time away for me to invest in learning about other methods that I could use or experimenting I basically trapped myself I needed to change my methods but I was spending so much time with my current methods I didn't have time to change them so this is when I realized that a technique can be helpful but if you use it too much it can actually harm you in the long run so what did I do differently I started making tiny tiny adjustments to how I study every two or three days I would experiment with a small change where the consequence of getting it wrong was very very small and then I'd reflect on how it's been been going and how I felt about it across the next two or three days so that eventually I was able to rely on flashcards less and less I knew that what I was doing right now wasn't sustainable I knew I had to make some kind of change and I knew I wasn't going to be able to completely remove myself from the current system that I'd build straight away so I made sure to take very very very small steps and the benefit of this was number one obviously that I eventually I was able to escape that but number two is that I got really really in tune with the effect that my studying was having I'm always talking about how studying is not learning studying is what we do but learning is what happens in our brain you wouldn't say you learned unless that time spent studying helped the information become part of your knowledge and stay in your memory so that you can use it studying only leads to learning when number one the information is encoded into your memory and number two you can actually use that knowledge through retrieval if you're not able to do that then all you've done is spend time on doing this random thing called studying which hasn't led to learning and by doing this process of reviewing and making these very frequent adjustments to my process I was able to be much clearer in terms of what I'm spending my time doing and the impact that I was having on my memory and the quality of my learning Not only was I able to remove my dependence and over-reliance on flashcards but also I started seeing that a lot of other things that I was doing with my studying were problematic as well and that's a story for another video now I know a lot of students find this process very daunting they've got the system that they're really comfortable with and there's level of insecurity or uncertainty around changing this me personally I actually really enjoyed experimenting in the process of actually upgrading myself but the key is to change things gradually don't just take away all of your flash cards and leave a gaping void because otherwise you're going to have nothing to fill it for example I currently right now have a gaping void in my self-esteem that can only be filled by you liking and subscribing so let's fast forward I made all of these changes and eventually I became a super learner right no wrong I had some other issues which brings me to my second realization don't create learning debt yes learning debt and I'm not talking about a student loan here by the time I was on my fourth year of University I was entering into Hospital attachments and I was a pretty decent student I had already decided that a plus wasn't where I wanted to spend my time because I was getting really involved in teaching and education by that point so I was getting sort of A's and a minuses and feeling fairly confident to hit the wards and then I had my very first attachment which was General medicine or internal medicine for those of you in the states and then I failed I failed my first attachment and I know this because my boss told me directly I had the knowledge but I just did not know how to use it and the right way to work with real patients the way that I had stored and organized that information was set for my exams not the real world and what's even worse is that because I've been studying for these exams a lot of the times after the exams I would forget like most of what I had studied and so what ended up happening is that I would come home from the hospital during my placements and I'd spend my evening spending hours studying most of the time just relearning the stuff that I'd learned from you know going through med school I'd go through my old med school notes and just re-remember the stuff that I'd already studied and then try to make sense of it again in a more useful way and I remember thinking to myself why did I not just learn it the right way to begin with I would have saved so much time this is what I mean by learning debt the methods I'd used in the past were fine for my present needs but they created problems for my future self which meant that now I had to spend extra time to relearn things properly while also having to learn new material too I was hit with a double burden of work so one thing I've realized which I always tell to my students now is that the future version of you is probably going to be just as busy or busier than you are now don't give the future version of you more work to do it is worth it to do it right the first time and even outside of medicine I've seen this time and time again with the students that I work with students that have these great systems getting them good results in the short term but they're not preparing themselves for the challenges of next year or the year after that and they eventually just get more and more overwhelmed every year until one day it's just not good enough and something breaks and then at that point they're trapped like I was without any time to make any changes once I realize how bad learning debt was I had to do a complete reset of how I was studying luckily I was already used to experimenting with my Methods at the time so it wasn't too bad but these are the steps that I teach my students now when they're in the same position number one identify your retrieval needs what do you need to know how do you need to know and think about it and how long do you need to know it for how do you need to use that knowledge not just immediately but in the future number two map your current learning process what do you do when information comes in start there then what do you do with it what methods are you using how are you thinking about it if you've never really thought about how you learned before this step can be actually quite challenging you might have to spend a few days actually observing how you study to actually map it all out and that's actually a really good thing because it means that you're starting the first step to making some serious improvements number three challenge your reasoning why do you use the methods and processes that you use does the method and process you're using allow you to achieve the retrieval needs that you've identified do you even know do you even know why you're using the methods that you're using or is it just out of habit or because all of your friends are doing it ask yourself whether this process is going to help you to reach your goals in terms of what you need to know how you need to know it and how long you need to know it for and again you may not know you may do this step and find that you're drawing blanks and that's fine it's just about learning a little bit more but it's an important step to start mapping out whether you're actually spending your time in a productive way and watching some of my other videos is going to help you learn some of that fundamental Theory as well number four learn and experiment learn about how Learning Works experiment make some gradual changes like they talked about in my first realization take it slow and gradually try to upgrade your system before I realize this yes I was experimenting but I didn't have the right goal so a lot of that time that I spent on experimenting reflecting was sort of wasted now learning is seriously very complicated and I can't tell you exactly every single process that you need to use for your goals and in fact it's kind of impossible because it depends on what your strengths and weaknesses are and what your goals are and what your situation is the right process for you is going to be different for the right process from someone else but what does remain true through tend to be the principles of effective learning even if the flavor is a little bit different the principles usually in every single instance have to be adhered to and the videos that I upload on my channel generally are focused on the principles I want you to know what the principles are so you can go and craft your own learning process because it's just not possible for me to tell you everything that you need to do step by step it doesn't work that way and one of the most important principles which I realized embarrassingly late in my kind of learning life I guess was that you cannot get stronger without lifting the weight maybe because I was just a really busy person with medical school and running my non-profit and doing my teaching and all of that but I was pretty obsessed with efficiency you can probably tell I kind of still am but as a result of that I always looked for the faster and easier less effortful way of doing things like I was always tired I wanted to spend less effort on things if I could so I would look through all of these learning techniques makes and learning systems and I spent really many hours across years experimenting with methods that were meant to make learning easier and faster for me which seems perfectly logical but I realized that that was actually sabotaging me let me put it this way the best way to make learning easier for you in the long run is to actually just be an expert at the topic the more you know the more connections that you have to work with the more you can make sense of new information because you've got more things to connect it to and to do that you need to a know things about that subject and B know how to use what you know to make sense of new information which is a skill the thing about learning especially higher order learning which is the type of learning that builds these networks and connections is that it requires mental effort it's like trying to lift away just by staring at it it's not gonna work and by trying to make learning easier and less effortful what you're actually trying to do there is remove your brains need to process the information you're taking the brain out of the equation and you cannot build knowledge in your mind when you remove your mind building high quality knowledge takes effort it's actually called desirable difficulty and as you spend the right effort in the right way you're able to learn more build expertise and then as your expertise grows it becomes easier and easier to learn more new information is less new because there are so many more anchor points of prior knowledge that you can actually connect to and make sense out of it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle as you complete it it's easier to see how the remaining pieces fit in but if you avoid the effort and you're just trying to make it faster and easier and you're not thinking about how to spend the right effort in the right way and that makes you learn things in isolation or just memorize things superficially using whatever apps or software like I spent a lot of time trying to do then it makes it harder because it's harder to build those connections it's kind of like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle by just seeing all the pieces scattered on the floor and just like looking at it waiting for you to magically just see how it fits together so now I'm always making sure that I invest that effort in up front as early as I can to build that knowledge as quickly as I can to make the future version of myself have an easier time of handling that knowledge not only am I not creating learning debt I'm actually building myself a learning asset that continues to give myself rewards over time so if you want to learn a little bit more around the specific methods that you can use to try to build this high quality knowledge then a good place to start might be a big picture overview of how I structured my learning system for when I ranked first at Monash for my Masters or if you've got time there's this playlist you can check out which goes through the foundations of efficient learning it's a good place to start make sure to like this video comment and subscribe thanks for watching I'll see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Justin Sung

Views: 981,587

Keywords: justin sung, dr justin sung, studying

Id: u2Ogza-n3i0

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023