Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). Welcome to the first day of the free one-week learn faster bootcamp! Every day this week I‘ll send you a new email with a new tactic for learning faster. At the bottom of each email there will be a specific, short, exercise so you can start making the new learning strategies into habits. Today we‘re going to cover the most common problem you shared with me: improving your ability to focus and defeating procrastination. —Why is it so difficult to stay focused? Why do we procrastinate on the tasks we know are important? The research of Roy Baumeister provides an interesting clue. He has conducted experiments which show that willpower isn‘t just a character trait, meaning you‘re either lazy or diligent, but a resource that can be replenished and spent. In one experiment, Baumeister gave participants a task that required focus, such as solving a difficult puzzle. He found that those participants performed more poorly on tasks that immediately followed which required self-control. This suggests that focus draws on an internal resource that when depleted makes our willpower weaker. After this experiment, he added another twist. Before the self-control task, Baumeister gave participants some lemonade to drink. Given a sugary drink, the participants willpower shot up again in the self-control task. Those given, a nearly identical, sugarfree lemonade performed as poorly as before. This shows that willpower can also be replenished, even with something as simple as sugar. —Baumeister‘s experiments validate a new way of thinking about productivity, written about by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. (Their book, The Power of Full Engagement is the best book I‘ve ever read on the subject of productivity) Schwartz and Loehr argued that the way we think about productivity is broken. Because of this broken thinking, we suffer from chronic problems like inability to focus and procrastination that never seem to go away. We never stop procrastinating, and most attempts we make to fix it are only temporary. In their book, Schwartz and Loehr claim the broken thinking is time management. This is the idea that the number of hours in our day is the biggest constraint on our productivity. If we were only able to use those hours more efficiently, we‘d get more done. Not so fast, the authors state. Even if we could hypothetically create a schedule which fully utilized every hour in the day, it wouldn‘t be sustainable. It‘s our energy levels, not our time, that is most constrained. Any attempt to optimize time usage that neglects energy management will lead to disastrous results.
Now Baumeister‘s psychological research validates this hypothesis. There does, in fact, appear to be an important internal resource which gives us willpower and takes it away. —The first time I heard this idea it was a switch that flipped in my brain. Procrastination and inability to focus weren‘t because I was lazy, they were because I was poorly managing this internal resource. Now we know that energy, not time, is the proper bottleneck in your productivity, how do you fix it? Schwartz and Loehr turned to one segment of the population which deals with very similar constraints: elite athletes. Being an athlete requires managing your body‘s cycles of recovery and exertion very closely. Elite athletes know that the road to success isn‘t in non-stop training. If the training is not followed by rest, the body will be overstrained and performance will suffer. Learning is exactly the same way. Without sleep, exercise and regular eating habits, your mind suffers. All nighters and 4am cram sessions do not help you learn. That may be unsurprising, but researching athletes also turns up another strategy they use to achieve peak performance: intensity. When athletes train, they realize it‘s much better to push themselves to their limits and then relax, than it is to put themselves under mild strain for long periods of time. This is the principle myself and my students have used to learn faster, stop procrastinating and achieve focus: high-intensity learning. —High-intensity learning means that you learn deeply, with complete focus, for a small section of your day. After that, you relax and don‘t force yourself to study endlessly. When I did the MIT Challenge, many readers commented on the difficult studying schedule I maintained: 6 days per week, often as much as 10 hours per day. What they forget, however, is how much relaxation time I had. I never worked past 7pm. I never worked on Saturdays. I even managed to take almost a month of in vacations throughout the year. My work was intense. Maybe even too intense for someone who hasn‘t spent years training their energy management resources to top conditions. But it wasn‘t continuous. I worked in bursts and relaxed the rest of the time. One hour of high-intensity learning can be worth 4-5 hours of low-intensity studying. Doing the right activities, which promote deep focus and excruciating intensity, can drastically cut the amount of time you need to spend learning. Yes, those hours of intense studying are draining. But, because they are intense, you reduce the total amount of time you need to study, giving you more time to replenish your mental resources for the next round. —Now that you understand why energy management and intensity are critical to learning, I want to talk about how you can change your studying patterns to facilitate this shift. The first trick is switching passive tasks to active ones. Passive tasks are things like watching lectures and reading books. They just involve you processing the information you‘re receiving. You aren‘t manipulating it in any way, solving new problems or organizing it beyond the organization it is already given.
Passive tasks are low intensity, low-efficiency studying activities. Sometimes they‘re unavoidable–you can‘t learn without some first exposure and that may only be possible from lectures or a textbook. However, you can modify these tasks to make them more active, increasing the intensity and improving their efficiency. In Learning on Steroids we talk about these strategies in detail, but here are a few quick ideas: Watch lectures at higher speeds (download and use VLC player‘s speed-up feature) Make deliberate connections between ideas in your notes, not mentioned by the instructor. Paraphrase important information you read in a separate notebook. After each page you read, cover the page and force yourself to explain, in 10 seconds, the main ideas of that page to yourself out loud. Every time you hit a fact to be memorized, link it using a visual mnemonic (more on that later in the bootcamp) Retooling how you watch and read can make a huge impact. The next target to strike is how you review and study. Once again, this is where a lot of students waste time with low-intensity passive strategies. Re-reading notes is a waste of time, don‘t do it. If you‘re in a technical class, your review should be in the form of Feynman techniques or practice problems. If you‘re in a non-technical class, you should be generating questions to ask yourself and self-quizzing without looking at the source material. Self-quizzing is the best way to review. This involves asking yourself questions and answering without looking at the source material. Studies on learning efficiency show that this method can even be effective if you make up the questions yourself, in case you don‘t have any questions to follow. Another tool for ratcheting up intensity is to drive towards your frustration points. When you‘re watching lectures, reading books or self-quizzing, you should always be looking for which areas you understand the least or perform the worst. Once you locate those spots, follow up on them intensely with more self-quizzing, Feynman techniques, metaphors and linking. —Your First Homework Assignment This bootcamp isn‘t just about reading–it‘s about doing. I want you to take this advice and apply it immediately so you can see a permanent impact on your studies. Here‘s what you need to do: Take something you‘re trying to learn, and pick a specific activity you‘ve been doing to learn it. (Watching lectures, reviewing notes, etc.) Now do EITHER one of the following: Find a way to replace it with a learning activity that is more active and intense. OR Find a way you can adjust the same activity to make it more active and intense. Once you‘ve done that, hit REPLY and write in one sentence the change you‘ve made. The next time you‘re learning that subject, apply that advice and observe the results you get. Best, -Scott
P.S. – Some students dislike active and intense activities because they are more uncomfortable. Don‘t worry, they‘re supposed to be. The idea is that, over time, you can use the more intense activities to reduce your total studying time. Learning is a series of sprints, not a marathon! P.P.S – Don‘t forget to hit REPLY with your one sentence homework!
Day 2: How to remember huge quantities of information quickly and permanently This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). Today I‘m going to tackle a common problem–how do you remember everything, especially for subjects that appear to require a lot of memorization, such as languages, biology and law. —How would you remember 1500 new words in one month? What if you had only 30 minutes a day to learn them? This was the experiment I set for myself when we did the first edition of Learning on Steroids over three years ago. I wanted to see what was the best method for remembering French vocabulary words. I tested three distinct methods and a control. Two of the methods were a bust–they didn‘t help better than simply repeating the words to myself. But one was golden–it allowed me to remember twice as many words correctly without taking up more time. (35% to over 70% correct recall) Before I explain the technique, I‘m going to tell you why it works. First we‘ll do a brief tour into the world of competitive mnemonics. —You might think the world of memory competitions is dominated by savants. Rare geniuses who memorize information effortlessly because their brains are hardwired differently than yours and mine. And you‘d be wrong. In 2005, journalist Joshua Foer started researching the little known field of memory competitions. As documented in his book, Moonwalking with Einstein, he learned that having an incredible memory is mostly based on training specialized techniques, first discovered by the ancient civilizations to memorize information before the advent of writing systems. After a year of preparation, Foer managed to win the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship, even though he had only an average memory before his research began. —How did he do it? The key is realizing that all memories are not created equally.
The brain stores information differently depending on how it is packaged. Emotional, vivid and connected information is set in the brain much more deeply than abstract, boring or arbitrary facts. But many of the things we want to memorize are abstract or arbitrary (and maybe even boring). As a result, we are using the least efficient part of our brains memory to store information. The trick discovered by the ancient Greeks was that you could put hard-to-remember ideas into easy-to-remember packages. —In practice, there are many ways to achieve this hard-to-easy memory repackaging. I teach dozens of different methods in Learning on Steroids, but for the purpose of this bootcamp, I‘ll share a couple of the most common: 1. Visual Linking This was the method I used to double my French recall. It works by forcing a connection between two facts, words or ideas. In my case, that meant searing a link in my mind between the English word and its French translation. The method is simple: 1. Come up with a visual symbol for your first word, fact or idea. If I were memorizing the French word chavirer which means to capsize, I could use the ―sounds like‖ approach. To me, chavirer sounds like ―shave‖ + ―ear‖. So I imagine an ear with a big beard getting shaved. 2. Come up with a visual symbol for your second, word, fact or idea. Continuing our last example, I imagine a boat getting capsized for this part. 3. Combine the two visual symbols in an interesting, bizarre, perverse or disgusting way. Sometimes if the symbols are weird enough (like shaving a bearded ear) a simple combination is also memorable (a shaving, bearded ear getting flipped over in his canoe). But if the visual symbols are more mundane (clock + table, let‘s say) then you might need to spice it up (a giant clock replacing your dining table).
The first time you do this it may take a few minutes. But, with practice, you can reduce this down to 10-15 seconds. 2. Atomic Mnemonics Linking works well when there are only two ideas that need to be joined. Most of the time, however, you‘ll need to memorize a more complicated system of facts. If you‘re trying to memorize the properties of all twenty amino acids, you can‘t link them all pairwise or that would be horribly inefficient. The key to solving this memory puzzle is that each item you‘re trying to remember has a collection of properties (acidity, polar side chain, etc.). These properties are not singular, often multiple items will share a property and each item has multiple properties. Here we use a simple method to fix it: 1. Create a visual symbol for each property. When I had to memorize the amino acids, I visualized a lemon for acidity and a box of baking soda for alkaline. 2. Come up with a character to represent each item. Lucy from Charlie Brown for leucine, for example.
3. Visualize, in combination, the visual symbol for each property interacting with the character. If you have more than a couple items you need to link, organize them in a weird story so you don‘t miss any properties later (Lucy walks to the pool but is repelled from the water when she tries to jump, then she goes to the table with lemonade and baking soda, but doesn‘t feel like eating either).
This method also works well for remembering Chinese characters. Make visual symbols for the radicals (very easy since they often have easy-to-visualize meanings) and link them together when you need to remember a more complicated character. 3. The Memory Palace What if you need to remember dozens or even hundreds of items in a list? One way is to use the visual linking method–just form connections between the first and second idea, then second and third idea and so forth. The problem is that this quickly becomes tedious. Worse, the link method has no fallback. If you accidentally mess up one link later, the whole subsequent chain is forgotten. The fix here is to use a method called the Memory Palace: 1. Pick a place you can imagine very well. This could be a childhood home, a commute to work, a jog you take every day. Anything which you could imagine all the landmarks on the route easily in your mind. 2. Now, walk through that route in your mind. Make a note of all the major landmarks you walk by on your way. 3. Next, rewalk this route, but make a visual link between every landmark you walk by and the idea you want to remember. Use the same process as in the first technique. 4. When you need to remember the list of ideas, just walk the path in your mind and remember the link when you go by each landmark.
This was the main technique Joshua Foer used in his memory championship and it is a versatile one if you need to remember more than a few items. —These are just three specialized memory tools for particular jobs. There are many more you can use to remember all sorts of things easily. What‘s more important is developing the skill of experimenting and training these methods yourself. Building a memory system isn‘t necessary for all tasks (other, more general methods I‘ll share later in the bootcamp work well most of the time), but if you are facing a learning situation with tons of memorization, these can drastically cut your studying time. Whenever I face a new situation that requires a lot of memorization, I run some experiments to try out some variations of these methods until I get a method fine tuned for the job at hand. This requires a little prep work (maybe a day or two to test each variation), but it can pay of handily since a well-tuned approach can be an order of magnitude more efficient than simple rote repetition. As a side note, some repetition is usually a good idea–even if your system is well-tuned. I suggest getting the program Anki to help you with managing your review schedule, since it will automatically reduce the amount of review time you need when your system works well: Anki: https://ankiweb.net/ —-
Day Two Homework Assignment Now you‘ve learned three different mnemonic techniques to memorize information more quickly, here‘s your homework: 1. Choose ONE of the three techniques listed above. (If you‘ve never tried any of them before, I recommend Visual Linking as a starting point, because it is the easiest). 2. Pick something you‘re trying to learn right now. It should be a small set of facts to memorize (only a couple items) for practice. If you can‘t think of anything to practice on, try memorizing the French word gendarme -> police. 3. Go back, re-read the steps and try applying the technique on the set you want to memorize. If you‘re having trouble coming up with a visual symbol–look for ―sounds like‖, ―looks like‖ to help you come up with something.
Once you‘re done hit REPLY with one sentence describing the link you made. That‘s it for today. Tomorrow, I‘ll share a more general method that works on understanding and remembering bigger ideas which have more complicated features than can be covered with a simple mnemonic. Best, -Scott P.S. – Thanks for everyone who submitted their REPLY to the first exercise. If you still haven‘t done yours yet, you can still submit it! I‘m looking forward to reading everyone‘s results (and don‘t forget to hit REPLY to this one too).
Day 3: Develop the deep intuitions that allow you to “get” any subject This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). In yesterday‘s email, I talked about how you can memorize things. This works well if there are far too many facts and figures to understand deeply–or if the way you need to use the knowledge doesn‘t require an in-depth understanding. That won‘t work on most subjects. Why? Because remembering isn‘t the only problem you face–understanding matters even more. In today‘s email, I‘m going to tell you how to build those deep intuitions so that you can ―get‖ any subject. —Why would I share a technique with you yesterday that doesn‘t work for most subjects? The reason is that mnemonics can be incredibly powerful when specially designed for the subject at hand, doubling or tripling your recall. This method, in contrast, is the Swiss Army knife of learning methods. I use this in almost every subject I learn. Best of all, the more difficult the subject, the better the method works (because it gives you an intuition your peers often lack). Before I talk about the method, I want to briefly explain the principle behind it.
—Every day I get emails from students complaining about all the things they need to memorize. However, when I ask them to tell me what they‘re studying and how they‘re being tested, the majority of the time memorization isn‘t their problem. Students are quick to blame memorization, when really it‘s a poor intuition that‘s often to blame. Cognitive scientists call this inflexible knowledge. Inflexible knowledge is when you remember superficial details of a problem or subject, but not much else. It‘s inflexible, because you can only answer very narrowly prepared questions. You‘re not equipped to use the knowledge outside of a specific context. Take cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham‘s example: ―In his book Anguished English, Richard Lederer reports that one student provided this definition of ‗equator‘: ‗A managerie lion running around the Earth through Africa.‘ How has the student so grossly misunderstood the definition? And how fragmented and disjointed must the remainder of the student‘s knowledge of planetary science be if he or she doesn‘t notice that this ‗fact‘ doesn‘t seem to fit into the other material learned? ―All teachers occasionally see this sort of answer, and they are probably fairly confident that they know what has happened. The definition of ‗equator‘ has been memorized as rote knowledge. An informal definition of rote knowledge might be ‗memorizing form in the absence of meaning.‘ This student didn‘t even memorize words: The student took the memorization down to the level of sounds and so ‗imaginary line‘ became ‗managerie lion.‘‖ (Source) Willingham explains that such inflexible knowledge is an important step to later acquiring expertise. That is, all knowledge starts out inflexible, but it gets more flexible as we work with it. The problem is that when you have a lot of inflexible knowledge, ideas seem arbitrary. Definitions seem to be about managerie lions instead of useful concepts that you understand intuitively. So, when testing time comes, it seems to be full of very specific facts that you can‘t remember. The difference is that the smart students weren‘t memorizing superficial details. They were building deep intuitions about the ideas so that they didn‘t need to. When you have a deep intuition, what Willingham would call flexible knowledge, you don‘t need to memorize nearly as much. For every forgotten fact, the possibilities of what it could be are heavily constrained. As a result, you may forget many superficial details before a test and still perform well by reasoning them through on the exam. The first principle of my books and courses is: never memorize what needs to be understood. However, it could have easily been: understand things deeply so you don‘t need to memorize most things. —How can you develop a deep intuition, which allows you to avoid a lot of memorization? If deep intuitions are based on flexible knowledge, then to get that knowledge, you need to stretch out your inflexible knowledge so it can bend and adapt to other situations. I cover quite a few methods for doing this in Learning on Steroids, but here I just want to cover one: the QAT method. —-
The QAT Method This method has three parts: Question, Analogy and Test. Essentially, it is a method for flexing the brittle knowledge you have on particular topics, until you can build robust intuitions about the ideas that never require memorizing. Step One: Question The first step is to take the topic or idea you want to understand more deeply and ask a question about it. Even better if these are questions drawn from actual assignments, quizzes or past tests, since then you‘ll optimize your coverage for what will be tested later. If you can‘t get questions from a prior source (or the questions on future exams will be a different format) then make up your own question involving the topic. The question should be something you don‘t currently understand about the idea, or an example to apply it in a different context. The value of this step is that it‘s supposed to probe out weak points in you understanding. It should reveal some of the brittleness in your current knowledge by asking ―why?‖ and drawing blanks. Here are some example questions you could ask:
Why is there a negative sign in the Fourier analysis equation?
How is DNA copied during mitosis?
Why was Socrates executed?
What are the necessary parts of a contract in common law?
Why would the consequences of an act not be important for Kant‘s morality?
How can matrix operations give a least squares regression?
Why is a 2×3 cell structure necessary for the Cook-Levin theorem of NP-completeness of SAT?
Why does resistance go down when more resistors are added in parallel?
The questions should be more specific if you know more. That is, if a question is too easy, try asking a more specific one that you currently don‘t know. Flexibility is relative, so what might be flexible knowledge for an intro calculus class, could be very inflexible for a PhD student. Step Two: Analogy Once you‘ve come up with a question, now you need to answer it. But answering the question isn‘t really enough. Often we can answer a question, but never develop an intuition for why it is the case. I could solve a complicated set of math formulas, for example, and derive an answer to a question I have. But that process likely won‘t yield an intuition. It‘s buried beneath too much abstraction. The key is to answer your question (by looking at the textbook, asking a professor, derivation, Feynman technique, etc.) and then try to come up with an insight for explaining your answer in an easier way. Sometimes the best way to do this will be in the form of a picture or diagram. When I was trying to learn the different spaces associated with a set of linear equations, I tried to visualize what they were and what their counterparts were.
Other times, the best way to do this is to create an analogy. When I was learning about voltage, I asked myself the question of what it was analogous to in terms of gravity. The answer was height–higher voltage was like troughs of water being at a higher level, with resistors being pipes where water on higher levels flows to lower levels. If those methods don‘t work, you can always use multiplicity of examples to help you reason about deeper features of an idea. Walking through different possible cases helped me remember the elements of a contract when learning law. The end product of this step should be not only that you understand an idea, but that you can get an ―aha!‖ feeling that it appears somewhat obvious. Step Three: Test The final step is to test your analogy and see if it works beyond the small case that you derived it for. Is voltage really like height? Do the spaces in linear algebra really correspond to the mental image you‘ve created? How would you handle a new example of a possible contract? This final step helps you double check whether your insight is correct, and quite often, it allows you to generate a better, more exact insight. If your question was from a problem on a test, try finding a different, similar problem, to test your intuition against. If your question was self-generated, look for examples that are markedly different from your original one. Even if your analogy breaks down, it might not be a bad analogy. Some insights are imperfect, but the can still be useful. What matters more is knowing where your insights break down, so you don‘t get into conceptual traps later on. —Using the QAT method isn‘t terribly fast, which may make you wonder why I‘ve included it in a bootcamp on learning faster. The reason is that it is much faster than the alternative. By deeply understanding a few core ideas, you can easily associate hundreds of related facts. Spending an hour or two to understand a deep equation is much better than memorizing it and hoping nobody will give you any tricky questions on the exam. If you look at your learning over the course of your entire degree (or your entire life) then this method is lightning quick compared to the alternative. Because you‘ll have built deep intuitions about ideas, they will stay with you longer and provide a foundation for anything else you learn that builds off of them. —Day Three Homework Assignment Now it‘s your turn to use the QAT method to better understand something you‘re trying to learn. Follow these steps: 1. Pick an idea you‘re trying to learn. 2. Ask yourself a question about the idea (either from past exams or of your own creation). 3. Answer the question. 4. Explain why the answer is correct, using a simplifying analogy, visualization, diagram or example. 5. Test your simplifying insight on a different problem or question. Does it still hold?
Walk through these five steps and hit REPLY when you‘re done with a one-sentence answer sharing the idea you learned from step #1 and the insight you generated in step #4. Best, -Scott
Day 4: Why the 10,000 hour rule is broken (and how to learn skills faster) This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). Today I‘m going to tell you how to learn skills more quickly. In particular, I‘m going to attack a common misconception people have about the so-called ―10,000 hour rule‖, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. —So what‘s wrong with 10,000 hours? In Gladwell‘s book, he used the research of Anders Ericsson to observe a trend. Almost all of the world-class experts in fields ranging from athletics to entrepreneurship acquired over 10,000 hours of deliberate practice before their big successes. The misconception people fall into is believing that, because world-class experts tended to have 10,000 hours under their belt, that becoming really good at something is mostly a matter of putting in the time. Put in your 10,000 hours and you‘ll become great. Right? It turns out that Ericsson‘s research says no such thing. In fact, he argues the opposite. Many people will stall at ―plateaus‖ in their skill development that can persist forever. Far from an inevitability, it seems that most practice efforts snag on these plateaus, so the experts who break through them are the exception, not the rule. —Stagnation, not growth, is the default. Hitting plateaus and barely improving your skill level over years is what happens most of the time. Experts are world class, not simply because of their dedication to thousands of hours of practice, but also because they climbed past the plateaus on the way. There are a couple reasons your skill growth can plateau, and most are insidious in that they sneak up on you. The first is simply comfort. In the beginning, a skill is hard, frustrating and performance is difficult. Once an adequate level has been achieved, however, habits start to form and the drive to get better goes down. A second is that practice is not separated from performance. Performance is the concert, practice is the drills to get the chord sequences perfect. In music and athletics the division between performance and practice is well known and understood. But it other domains this important distinction is ignored. Consider programming as a job. You might write code 8 hours a day, but that doesn‘t mean you‘re getting 8 hours of practice. Even when you are productive, the time you
spend is mostly solving problems you can easily fix. Perhaps only a small percentage of your day is training new abilities from your work. A final cause of plateaus is lack of timely feedback. If your work doesn‘t give you immediate feedback on what you‘re doing well and what you‘re doing poorly, you may spend a lot of time practicing but still not improve greatly. Given all these obstacles, it‘s not surprising that most attempts at mastery stall at adequacy. Getting to a truly high level of skill attainment requires successfully dodging these traps along the way. —Ericsson found that deliberate practice was the key to avoiding plateaus. Deliberate practice isn‘t just any kind of practice, however. It has to have the following features to count: 1. Method, not results. This is the practice/performance distinction. Your practice efforts need to focus on correct execution, not merely whether they get the job done. 2. Targeted, not broad. Practice sessions should improve specific aspects of your performance, not just try to improve it broadly. 3. Guided feedback. Coaching is best, but measured feedback can also work to adjust your progress.
The problem I hear from people is that this idea sounds great, but it‘s hard to apply to skills outside of music or athletics. How do you use this to become a better programmer, writer, architect or entrepreneur? —The Breakdown Method The breakdown method is a way to achieve this. Formed from conversations with Cal Newport, many of the details of these ideas are his. The basic idea is simple: you break a skill down into parts, figure out how to measure those parts, then set aside practice sessions to build those parts. This achieves most of the ideals of Ericsson‘s deliberate practice, but it can be used on any complex skill without needing personalized coaching. Step One: Break a Skill Into Its Parts The first step is to decompose your skill into practiceable parts. What I mean by ‗practiceable‘ is that the subskill is narrow enough that if you focused solely on improving that in your practice session you could do it rather straightforwardly. Consider programming. There are thousands of microskills that programming can be broken down into. Syntactical fluency with a languages‘ core features. Understanding particular design patterns. Code organization and modularity. Algorithmic efficiency. Take writing as a different example: headlines, brevity, vocabulary, research, argument structure, tone, humor, grammar and spelling. All of these parts are components of what makes a writer good–different writers have mastered different aspects of the skill and the interplay of different factors gives a writer her distinctive voice. For the skill you want to learn, break it down into smaller skills until the small skill is something you could devise a way to practice directly. Step Two: Measure Your Ability on Subskills
Once you‘ve gotten a list of skills, you need to find a way to measure your ability. Sometimes this can be assessed directly, such as milliseconds to run a test code benchmarked against a competitor. In these cases, your job is easy. Other times, you may want to use a proxy. Headline writing isn‘t the only factor that influences email open rates, but it explains a lot of the variance in open rates for emails within a list, given a consistent writing schedule. Here, you might use open rates as a proxy measurement for your ability. If neither of those work, a benchmarking approach may also work. Here, pick people who are in your skill range, but are somewhat more proficient than you are at this particular subskill. Now work at the subskill until you can honestly tell yourself you‘re meeting their quality levels. Step Three: Set Aside Specific Practice Sessions Next set aside a specific practice session to improve a skill you‘ve found, measured and decided was important. If the subskill is small, you may only take a couple sessions to improve markedly. If the subskill is hard, you may take a couple months. If you‘re not sure how much work you need, I would recommend spending one hour practicing it. If you find the exercise fruitful, try doing a 30-day trial to work on that subskill for at least 20 minutes a day. If you didn‘t find the exercise useful, go back and reexamine your subskills. Perhaps they are poorly defined? Perhaps you need to establish a different measuring criteria? Another possible hiccup could simply be that you don‘t know more effective techniques for improving that subskill. In this case, I suggest reading a book or interviewing someone who does have that expertise. Often watching and reading other examples can highlight inefficiencies in your method that can be weeded out with successive practice. Example: Learning French Here‘s how I would apply this method to a skill I‘d like to get better at, speaking French. First, I‘d decompose the skill:
flexibility with different phrase patterns
pronunciation and accent
vocabulary
prosody and intonation
listening comprehension
reading comprehension
writing
etc.
Many of these are still too broad to be ideally practiceable, so I might narrow them down further. Vocabulary could be subdivided into slang, expressions, technical terms, cultural terms, synonyms for common words. Pronunciation could be broken down into specific vowel sounds I have difficulty with. Next I‘d find a way to measure this. If it were vocabulary, I could use Anki flashcards to assess performance. If it were accent, I could have French speakers compare my pronunciation to natives and point out words and phrases they thought stood out.
Finally I‘d implement a practice schedule. Reading comprehension could be as simple as picking up a book that‘s just above my current level. Writing could mean writing essays on randomly assigned topics and getting evaluated using a service like iTalki.com. —Day Four Homework Unlike the previous three days‘ methods, this one isn‘t something you can do in ten minutes. Doing a full skill decomposition, measurement analysis and generating improvement could take as much as a month. So, to get your ball rolling, I want to work on a simplified version of this method for the homework. If you do find it useful, I suggest going back and fully applying it: 1. Pick a skill you‘re trying to learn. 2. Break it down into 5 subskills that you think are important. Five is a good starting number because then you won‘t get distracted by the thousands of ways you can divide up a skill which often have considerable overlap. 3. Pick one skill and figure out how you would practice and measure it.
Once you‘ve done that, hit REPLY and tell me what skill you picked, which subskill you isolated and how you would improve it. Best, -Scott P.S. – Many of you have been asking me when Learning on Steroids will reopen. I‘ll be reopening it on August 14th, after the last day of the bootcamp. From there, we‘ll hold open registration for one week, until the 22nd, when I‘ll have to shut it down for another year. (Don‘t worry, I‘ll send out an email explaining all the details once we reopen)
Day 5: How to have total confidence in your knowledge This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). In today‘s lesson, I‘m going to talk about confidence. In particular, how you can have total confidence in your knowledge whenever you need to walk into an exam, interview or new project. —Confidence matters. Low confidence adds stress to your life. It makes it harder to enjoy what you‘re learning. Worse, it can even kill your productivity as many students avoid the pain of low confidence by not studying at all. Improving your confidence without improving your skill, however, is dangerous. Many students have felt the snap of hard exam that they thought was going to be easy. If confidence is good, overconfidence is definitely bad.
Instead, I want to focus on genuine confidence. This is the feeling you get when you know that you know a subject, and you‘ve proven to yourself that you know it. This kind of confidence transfers to being relaxed and focused during exams, interviews or projects. So how do you get it? —The answer is fairly simple: you test yourself. If you score high on your self tests, you can walk into exams with total confidence knowing you‘ve already passed a more rigorous assessment of your own devising. The problem with self-testing is that many students under-use this tactic, especially in classes where the professor doesn‘t provide them with material. (Or in real life situations, where there are no past exams). The best and most obvious source for practice are past versions of the test or exam you plan to write. If you‘re doing a standardized test (SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) and you aren‘t doing past exams with solutions, you‘re doing yourself a huge disservice. The best way to test yourself is to use a guide that will have the same format and difficulty as the test you‘re going to write. If supply of these is limited, I would ration them out over your studying time. Let‘s say you have access to two practice exams, I‘d do one a few weeks before your exam to inform your studying efforts and one a few days before to see if there‘s any last-minute touch-ups you need. If past exams are not available, or they are too limited to give you a large sampling of the course material (some exams may only cover a small portion of the course), or you‘re in a situation which doesn‘t have an exam, the Question Book Method works well. —The Question Book Method The self-quiz method is a confidence building strategy that works best when you start using it as soon as you start learning something. If you apply it from the very first day of your classes, you‘ll be far more relaxed, confident and unstressed in your entire semester. Here‘s how it works: make a question book when covering the class with solutions. Throughout the term, randomly test yourself from questions draw from that book. When you get to prepare for your final exam, go through and make sure you can correctly answer every question (or some representative sample, if the list of questions is too large). Step One: Make a Question Book The first step is to make a book that holds questions and answers for everything you covered in the course. Here‘s how to make one:
First, get a separate notebook (or a section of your existing notebook for a class).
When in lectures or watching videos, restate any important information as a question in the book (you may need to spend a few minutes writing these after a lecture if notetaking is too intensive).
When reading a textbook, rephrase major ideas, facts or problems as questions in your book.
If you‘re in a class with a significant problem solving portion (math, engineering, etc.) include problems from your assignments as well. You might want to change some of the trivial details of the problem so that it doesn‘t trigger your memory when you do it again.
Whenever you add a question, make a reference to your notes, textbook, videos or problem solutions for where you can find an answer to save time later.
Number the problems. This will be helpful in creating unbiased, random sampling of problems when you later conduct self-tests.
At the end, you should have everything that was important in the class, but rephrased as a question. If you were able to, before the exam, answer every question in this book correctly you should be able to score very well on the real exam. Two words of caution: one on problem solving and one on a problem we encountered in day 3, inflexible knowledge. The first caveat to this is that it won‘t cover the problem solving, by default. If you‘re in a class that involves solving novel problems, then you need to make sure the question book contains representative problems as well. I‘d recommend adding in every problem from your past assignments, labs, recitations or even from the textbook (if the textbook problems are similar to those tested in class). The second caveat is that questions may be phrased so as to not be too difficult. That is, because you know what section the question is in, and you‘ve written it in such a way that the answer is obvious, you may not be testing yourself well. Here, you could have inflexible knowledge, do well on the self-test, but when you‘re faced with a real exam, you‘d break down. The solution in both cases is to try to write questions to similar difficulty as they would be presented on an exam. —Step Two: Periodic Self-Testing The next step is to periodically test yourself on past knowledge throughout the year. This will build your confidence in the subject and also give you pointers as to which topics you‘re struggling with. Here‘s how to do it: 1. Set aside one hour per week, per class in your schedule. 2. Use a random number generator to pick a question randomly from your book. Random.org is a good website for this–just put 1 and the highest problem you‘ve written down so far in your book and hit randomize. 3. Keep doing questions until your hour is up. 4. Be honest to yourself whether you get the question right or wrong. If you got it wrong, put a star next to it. If you got it right, and there was a star next to the problem, remove the star (best done in pencil).
If you‘re in a problem solving class that has significant problem sets, this step may be unnecessary. However, keep in mind that problem sets are often section specific, so that may lead to weaknesses on comprehensive exams which will test you on information from past sections. What you‘re accomplishing with this is twofold: first, you‘re building your confidence in the subject so that you can take on any test or exam without issue; second, you‘re
building a list of weak points. Starred questions become your primary studying focus in the next step. Step Three: Final, Comprehensive Testing The final step is to go through and build yourself an ―exam‖ from your question book. If you‘re preparing for a job interview or a new project, the format can be modified to mimic your testing situation (job interviews are probably better done with a partner reading out your questions). First, take every starred question and put it in your exam. All of these must be answered correctly to move on. Next, add randomly sampled questions from the course. This should be a bulk of the questions if you didn‘t do much review work and therefore don‘t have many starred questions. If you have many starred questions, you might want to focus solely on those first. Once you‘ve put together your exam, write it and grade yourself. If you can score highly (90%+) you‘re ready to face any real exams you might have coming up. If you can‘t score highly, repeat the exercise with all randomly sampled questions until you can get at least 90-95%. —In a study of research done on various learning methods, practice problems and selftesting was unanimously found to be the most effective method. Therefore, this method is probably more important than all the others, since it gives a reliable way to self-test for any class, regardless of the material you have available. (Source) This method may sound slow, but it‘s not. The time it adds onto your classes is easily repaid in the significant reduction of studying time you need to do. In classes where I‘ve used a self-testing approach, I‘ve often gotten away with less than 3 hours of studying time on a final exam, while still scoring an A+. If you do the periodic review plan, you might be able to eliminate studying before an exam altogether, as I have on many of my university exams. —Day Five Homework Once again, this isn‘t a method you can apply in fifteen minutes. To work properly, you need to do it throughout an entire course (or spend several hours to build a question book out of past notes/textbook chapters). For this homework, I want you to focus on something simple: rephrasing a statement you‘ve learned as a question. Here‘s the steps: 1. Take something you‘ve learned from a video, lecture, website or textbook. 2. Rephrase it as a question to be answered or a problem to be solved. 3. Write the question in such a way that the answer isn‘t secretly embedded in the question or too easy.
Next hit REPLY and give me your fact/statement/problem and your question rephrased! Best, -Scott P.S. – You can use this method even if you don‘t have an exam. Next time you‘re reading a book you want to remember. Try making the notes as questions with references to
page numbers as the solutions. Then, when you‘ve finished, see how many you can answer successfully.
Day 6: The routine I used during the MIT Challenge to learn hard classes in under a week This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). In the previous emails, we‘ve mostly discussed tactics–smaller methods that help you solve a particular learning problem. Tools like these are important–the more you have, the more learning challenges you can overcome with confidence. Today, instead, I want to talk about strategy. In particular, the high-level approach I used when doing the MIT Challenge to learn classes in calculus, biology and engineering to pass exam just days after I first saw the material. This strategy applies whether you‘re unsure how to tackle a hard class you have coming up, or whether there‘s a subject you‘ve always wanted to learn but have been daunted by the prospect of tackling it. —I worked out this routine for tackling classes during the MIT Challenge, because I was acutely aware of the time constraints. With only a week or two to tackle each class, I needed to make sure every hour of time spent studying was the most efficient it could be. Too many hours wasted on less important tasks would have meant I failed the class. To implement this prioritization, I made a couple observations: 1. Coverage is generally inefficient. There are exceptions, but usually reading books and watching lectures is normally one of the most time consuming parts of learning anything. Therefore, any ways this could be whittled down would save me effort later. 2. Self-testing is essential. As I explained yesterday, self-testing is one of the few methods with near universal agreement in its effectiveness as a learning tool. Self-testing also allowed me to pinpoint weaknesses that went unnoticed during coverage. 3. A quick insight can save dozens of hours of reading and practice. Having the right mental picture to solve a problem can be worth more than hours of drills. Similarly, the right metaphor or mnemonic can drastically cut the time to remember a fact or idea.
These observations allowed me to build a routine that I could use to tackle any class and prioritize my time to focus on the most important studying goals first. —The MIT Routine This routine is fairly general, so I‘d say it could work for many different types of classes, with a few modifications. During the MIT Challenge, I used this same template on classes as diverse as biology, chemistry, economics and programming.
The basic strategy divides into three parts: 1. Coverage 2. Practice 3. Insight
Part One – Coverage When learning anything, you have to start by covering the material. This means reading the textbook, watching the lectures or getting tutoring. In order to learn anything, there must be a first introduction to the idea. The problem is that coverage is often inefficient. Many teachers are bad at explaining the topic or engaging with students. Textbooks are often boring or hard to connect to real examples. Even with good resources, listening and reading are passive learning strategies which are less efficient. Coverage, therefore, is a good candidate to eliminate possible waste:
Speed up lecture watching. I usually aim to increase the speed so that I can still follow the lecture, but that I‘m not getting bored. Sometimes a lecturer‘s speaking style doesn‘t permit comprehensible speed-ups, but sometimes it does.
Use flow-based notetaking. Another way to improve efficiency is to watch lectures normally, but take notes that facilitate increased comprehension. (We cover flow-based notetaking in Learning on Steroids)
Active reading and speed reading. Both of these strategy can be used depending on the density of the book and what you need to extract from it.
Don‘t bulk re-read notes. Many students spend countless hours ―reviewing‖ their notes. Unless you understood the material so badly that you‘re better off starting from scratch, this is probably a waste of time. Selective re-reading from weak spots identified in parts 2 and 3 is more efficient.
My goal during the MIT Challenge was to do coverage as quickly as I could still keep up with it. If it went fast enough that I no longer followed the professor‘s reasoning, I slowed it down. If it was still easy enough to follow, I sped it up. Don‘t do all your coverage in one burst. I did this for some classes in the MIT Challenge because I was doing them in such short time frames (< 2 weeks). If it were anything longer, I‘d mix practice in earlier which can give you feedback on whether you‘re tackling lectures/books too fast or too slow. This can be a hard balance to strike, but in many cases the savings can be worth it. For some classes I was able to cut my coverage time in half. A good rule of thumb was to try to minimize coverage to a third of my total studying time. Part Two – Practice The next part of your routine should be regular practice to test yourself on the ideas. See the question book method from yesterdays‘ bootcamp email for a comprehensive way of implementing this in your studies. Practice serves two purposes. First, it is an excellent method for learning, by itself. Just doing a lot of practice will make you better at problem solving and it will cause you to learn more. For many types of learning, practice is how you will end up mastering the majority of the content.
The second goal of practice is that it gives you feedback. Coverage generally doesn‘t give you good feedback. Many students go through many lectures claiming they ―understood‖ everything, but still bomb their final exams. Practice allows you to identify weak points and adjust ever other phase of learning. The type of practice you use will vary depending on what kind of subject you‘re studying. The simple rule to remember when setting up practice sessions is that the closer the practice resembles the situation where you‘ll actually use the idea, the better. Don‘t do flashcards if you‘re expected to solve problems. Don‘t list facts if you‘re expected to synthesize ideas in essay format. When I‘m doing practice, I look for two things: 1. My general ability with the course. 2. My specific ability with course topics.
If my general ability is quite low, meaning I‘m failing way too many of my practice problems or self-quizzes, then I need to make broad adjustments. Slowing down the pace of coverage is one possible strategy, but I only recommend this if you felt lost while taking notes or reading. Another strategy is simply to do more practice–hard classes necessitate more preparation. However, sometimes your weaknesses will be more specific. You‘ll do well in some areas, but struggle in others. For this, you should go back and specifically re-read the section you find difficult and use the methods I mentioned in days two and three of this bootcamp to seal those weak points. Part Three – Insight Coverage plus practice will end up forming the bulk of your time, for most subjects. I found technical classes often required about 80% time spent in those two parts. However, often this wasn‘t efficient enough. Simple coverage and repeated exposure to feedback can fix many weaknesses eventually, but for many it can take hours to solve a flaw in an approach that can be fixed more easily upstream. This is what the final part, insight, is for. Insight is a combination of three types of learning methods: mnemonics, general memory enhancers and deep explanations. In general, I don‘t use these methods on every single thing I need to learn. Why? Because that‘s often overkill. Many things can be remembered without needing something elaborate to remember them. Simply finding connections, making mental pictures and explaining ideas to yourself during the other two parts of the strategy is usually sufficient. However, when I do identify a stubborn weak point in practice, these methods can be invaluable in saving me time fixing the problem. Let‘s cover each: #1 – Mnemonics This is the set of tactics I briefly outlined on the second day. I cover many others in more detail in Learning on Steroids, but that email should give you a rough idea of some of the possibilities. Basically, mnemonics are excellent when you need to memorize without significant understanding. Here are some things I‘ve used, in actual classes, that benefited from such an approach:
Foreign language vocabulary words.
Steps in an arbitrary sequence (such as glycolysis in biology)
Dates, names and numbers (such as the signing dates of various treaties in legal classes)
Distinguishing large quantities of similar, yet related ideas (such as molecules in organic chemistry)
Don‘t use this when the weakness is understanding. Only when you can‘t seem to remember the details of something that doesn‘t need to be understood. Mnemonics can be quite fast, once you have a system in place, so it is the only insight strategy you could use on every fact, instead of just weak points (assuming, of course, that the information is the right format for the tool you‘re using). #2 – General Memory Enhancers This is the set of tactics I described on the third day. The QAT method works well, here, but there are others in Learning on Steroids that sometimes work better such as compare and contrast, diagramming and anthropomorphization. The idea with general memory enhancers is that they give some of the benefits of mnemonics, but they also aid with understanding the deep structure of ideas. It‘s safe to use metaphors, visceralization and other tactics like this on ideas you also need to understand, because you work to incorporate more than just the surface features. The downside of this generalization is that these methods are a little slower than mnemonics. That means I would focus on using them deliberately on the ideas that you‘re struggling with. By deliberate, I mean, setting aside a chunk of your day to do this task and nothing else. Of course, if you come up with insights during practice or reading spontaneously, all the better. But using this method on every idea you have to learn individually is likely too time consuming for most studying efforts. #3 – Deep Explanations This final set of tactics is the opposite extreme of mnemonics, when the problem is almost exclusively a poor understanding (as opposed to a poor memory). The Feynman technique is a great method for this, as it allows you to build up an understanding of something that might completely baffle you. See the Feynman technique in action, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrNqSLPaZLc Another way to get this kind of insight is simply to do more research. Ask questions on forums, read pages on Wikipedia, KhanAcademy, YouTube or your library. Often finding a new explanation can fix a misunderstanding caused by your original source. This is the most time consuming method of the three, but it can still be much faster than doing endless practice problems if an insight isn‘t forthcoming. I found it took me about an hour to do a Feynman technique really well, capturing the details of an understanding I lacked, but that hour would often give the benefits of dozens of practice problems. Implementing the Strategy It‘s important to not think of these parts as steps, in a sequence, but components to the studying you do every day. Although you could, in theory, proceed from coverage to practice to insight, it usually doesn‘t work best that way. A better implementation would be to do each of the three steps for small sections, as you move through the material. So
each chapter or lecture, you would cover -> practice and then do any insight steps if necessary. The added advantage of doing the three steps for small chunks is that you can quickly get feedback on your coverage strategy. I‘ve had classes where I didn‘t realize how the material would be tested, so I paid attention to the wrong things in the lecture or textbook, and didn‘t emphasize the parts that were important. —Day Six Homework For today, I want you to see how you can organize your studying time according to the coverage -> practice -> insight routine. Here‘s what I want you to do: 1. Take a chapter from one of your textbooks (or a single lecture video). If you don‘t have one available, check out a course on edx.org for practice. 2. Apply the coverage -> practice -> insight to the chapter. For practice, use the question book method if no problems are available. For insight, use the techniques we described in days 2, 3 or the video link I shared in this email on the Feynman technique.
Then hit REPLY and write down in one sentence, what you studied and which insight method you used to secure some of the ideas. Best, -Scott P.S. – Tomorrow will be the final day in the bootcamp, where I‘ll cover the most important step you can take to become a better learner. After, on Wednesday, I‘m going to reopen Learning on Steroids for everyone who wants to continue getting emails and strategies like these.
Day 7: The most important tool for learning better This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I‘ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it‘s completely free). Today I want to wrap up all the ideas we‘ve discussed and turn to a tool that is more important than all the others for learning better: Habits Habits are the most important tool for learning because unless your behavior makes lasting changes, you‘ll never become more efficient in your studies. You could read a hundred emails like these ones and never do any better if your studying habits don‘t change. —The original inspiration for creating Learning on Steroids was recognizing that habit formation is often the most difficult obstacle in getting results. I was selling an ebook, Learn More, Study Less, but many students would just read the book and not do anything about it. It was frustrating because I knew the ideas worked–the students who
had made changes got results–but that just reading and doing nothing was the easiest option. As a result, I changed my approach. I made a monthly membership community which combined content with implementation. The goal of Learning on Steroids was to get students to change one habit per month, drawn from the many ideas I teach for learning better. The result was excellent. I got many success stories and students who achieved big things not just because they were equipped with better studying tactics, but because they were actually able to change their habits using the new approach. In this email, I want to share the philosophy behind Learning on Steroids which allowed our participants to get results. —The Thirty Day Trial (30DT) The main tool we use in Learning on Steroids is to get students to focus on implementing one major habit change each month. That means they choose from all the tactics we cover and pick one studying habit they think will have a big impact. The idea of a 30DT is that you commit to practicing or using a habit every day, for an entire month. You could use any of the previous six days‘ worth of ideas as a starting point for practice. For first timers, I usually recommend implementing a productivity system like GTD, Weekly/Daily Goals or Fixed-Schedule Productivity as a starting habit (we cover the latter two in the first month of Learning on Steroids). Having a productivity system is great because it gives you the organization skills to execute many other habits more easily. Once a productivity system is implemented, I typically recommend branching out into a specialized learning technique that you want to get better at. Nayamot, one of our early students, practiced metaphors for an entire month and went from barely passing his chemistry class to scoring top marks. From there, you can move onto more specialized guides, honing your skills with a particular technique so that it can become very efficient. Often the holistic learning methods take a little practice to be able to do them quickly, so the 30DT approach provides that basic training. I also added forums where members can log their 30DT goals and maintain progress. This adds an extra layer of accountability for anyone who wants to make sure their new habits stick. Training in the Learning Arts The other aim of the program was to provide a resource base with a lot of content that students could choose from. I‘ve tried to give a sampling of what we teach in the program during this bootcamp. The point isn‘t to master every single idea you encounter. Rather, it‘s to be aware of different methods and their uses, so you can master them when you need them. Some mnemonic techniques such as the major method or the branch method, are highly specialized and are useful for very specific subjects. However, if you encounter one of those subjects, you‘ll know what to do.
Training one habit per month, the goal of Learning on Steroids, means that you pick whichever habit you think will have the biggest impact on your studies and work on that first. After you‘ve finished that, you move onto the next habit. Build 3-4 new habits over the course of a semester could completely change your life. Principles of Habit Formation Here are some principles of habit formation I‘ve found helpful for students who want to change their learning behavior. #1 – Consistency I advocate doing a small amount of practice on a technique every day. If you‘re trying to master metaphor generation–read the guides and watch the walkthrough videos and practice for twenty minutes per day, until you can do it automatically. If you‘re trying to learn speed reading, look through the guide and set up your practice reading sessions and comprehension drills. When I first learned speed reading, I only spent 15 minutes per day on it for the first month. #2 – Try Before You Commit Before you commit to a particular technique, try it out on your studies. See if it works for you. Some students get amazing results with a method that other students dislike. It all depends on the subject you‘re studying and your strengths and weaknesses as a learner. I try to share a lot of different methods in Learning on Steroids. Try them all out (as you‘ve been doing in this bootcamp) so you can see which ones look most promising. Then, when you‘ve found one you like, try to practice it deeply with a 30DT. #3 – Use the 80/20 Rule Focus on big habits first. These are the ones that will deliver most the results in the beginning, particularly if you‘re not used to using a productivity system or the holistic methods of the course. If I were to prioritize, I‘d use weekly/daily goals and the Question Book Method as my first two 30 day trials, unless I‘m already using some kind of productivity system and I have strong feedback mechanisms for my studying already. Once you‘ve learned the basics, you can fine tune with the assortment of more specialized tools. Mnemonics, metaphors, visceralization, Feynmans, active reading and flow-based notetaking can fix specific weaknesses in your studying patterns. —Ultimately, if your habits don‘t change, your results won‘t either. I‘ve tried to give you the best ideas for this bootcamp, but as it‘s only one week, it isn‘t enough time to really make any of these ideas habits. I hope some of you will join Learning on Steroids, and join the structured program I have for improving your studying habits. But even if you don‘t, I want this last homework assignment to give you the tools you need to start changing your first habit. —Day Seven Homework Here you‘re going to design your first thirty day trial. If you‘re planning to join Learning on Steroids when it reopens tomorrow, feel free to wait so you can see the other tactics and strategies we haven‘t discussed in the bootcamp.
1. Pick one of the ideas we discussed in the last six days. That could be learning intensity, visual mnemonics, the QAT method, skill breakdown, the Question Book method or the MIT Method (or any other tools you‘re aware of). 2. Formulate it as a habit you can do for an entire month. If you‘re practicing a method, I suggest setting aside a small amount of time every day. 3. Commit to following that habit for the next month.
Once you‘ve done that, hit REPLY and tell me what your 30DT is. If you join Learning on Steroids, you can also post your 30DT in the forums so that you can stay accountable. That‘s it for the one week bootcamp. Tomorrow I‘ll reopen Learning on Steroids and send an email fully explaining how to sign up, what you get and why there‘s no risk in trying it out. Learning on Steroids will be open until August 22nd. Best, -Scott P.S. – Even if you don‘t join Learning on Steroids, I want to thank you for reading all these bootcamp emails. My main hope as a writer is that students actually use the ideas I talk about to enjoy learning more and learn things that they previously didn‘t think were possible. I‘ve had a lot of fun writing these emails, so thanks for reading them!
