⚠️Warning⚠️

No attention-grabbing headlines here, just summarized YouTube videos that deliver value. Perfect for those with longer attention spans and people thriving to improve.

I watched it, so you don't have to. You decide its relevance.👍

4 Ways to Learn Nothing While Studying

Way #1 Always Waste Time

One great way to waste lots of hours is to make sure that you learn the wrong thing, in the wrong way.

The human brain builds knowledge by connecting new information to our existing understanding, shaped by prior learning and life experiences.

When new information enters the brain, our brain tries to see how it’s related to what we already know. When that new information is related to our existing knowledge, then our brain knows how to think about it; it’s easily integrated and consolidated, which is what forms a stronger and more robust memory.

Because it is connected to lots of other things, we can use that knowledge in many different ways. It’s kind of like a town that is connected by lots of different highways.

In real-world learning, we often can't control the relevance of the information we encounter, especially in formal education with a predetermined curriculum.

This could be reading a book or someone lecturing you, but this leads to scattered new information all around. The information might not be what your brain finds relevant.

To make sure we have the highest quality memory and understanding:

• Scan the material for relevance.

• Focus on information related to what you already know.

By starting this way, we’re able to extract relevant parts that may not be in the same order as what’s given to us. This helps extract new information, expand our knowledge, and create more reference points as we learn.

It’s like a jigsaw puzzle; you can’t start from the middle because you don’t know which piece goes in the middle. But the edge pieces are easy to recognize because of the flat sides, and you can fill in from the edges towards the middle.

As you progress, it gets easier because you’re building a bigger picture. More stuff is consolidated, which results in fewer pieces for you to search through and make sense of.

Control the order of what you’re learning based on relevance; this could result in really great depths of understanding and high-quality memory after a single study session.

Way #2 Make Sure The Way You Study Is Totally Irrelevant

There’s different types of knowledge, like in the workplace, where we might have problems that we’re trying to solve, like what’s the process for cleaning a data set again.

Versus using your knowledge in a really interconnected way, if the data set is this small, are there still some relevant analyses that I can do that give me an insight into businesses recent performance?

As you can see, the latter requires a lot more of that high-level synthesis, drawing on your understanding of lots of different concepts.

If you make sure that the methods that you’re using are aligned with the different types of ways that you need to retrieve that knowledge, if you need to retrieve knowledge in an interconnected way using a Non-linear Relational Methods of study that allow you to see the big picture and the connections and figure out the influence and relationship between them.

And then you can pad up and supplement that with Direct Factor Recall Isolated Methods like flashcards; if you do that, then you’d have a robust and comprehensive study system. This means that when you’re studying, the type of knowledge that you’re developing is going to be of high quality.

But if you do this, you’re running into the risk that you might actually spend a lot of time studying / learning, and then you'd actually also learn a lot.😉

Way #3 We Have To Make Sure We Never Improve

Life's challenges get tougher each year. Imagine improving your skills by just 1% every week. It may not seem like much now, but it adds up to significant growth over time, making you more capable of handling future challenges.

Key components to growth, self-development, self-awareness, and critical reflection:

• Know what you are doing.

• Why you are doing it.

• Whether you think it’s working or not.

People often stick to learning habits learned from friends or long-standing routines, even if they aren't efficient. They hesitate to change, prioritizing comfort over potential improvement.

Quick Story: One of my students is finishing their second year of medical school, and they started off studying for five hours a day, but we found that a lot of the time spent was wasted; there were a lot of inefficient methods being used.

She was relearning a lot of what she’d forgotten; in fact, 4 to 5 hours a day of studying were spent relearning what she had already covered before, and the methods she was using were not really aligned.

Even though she was studying it, she wasn’t really able to use the knowledge very well for her needs either. So she ended up joining my program, and after a year, she sent me this big, long email saying “The techniques aren’t working; I’m not getting any better; results aren’t any better ”.

She was really stressed out because she was about to enter her second year, which is even harder. I jumped on a call with her to see what was going on, and it turns out that for the whole year she had been so afraid of making any real meaningful changes to her methods; she had never even tried practicing the techniques for more than a few hours.

She had effectively spent her whole year just dipping her toes in and out rather than starting with dipping her toes and submerging herself more and more. The comfort of holding on to and keeping her current methods and habits was worth it compared to the discomfort associated with making a change.

To Improve, You should ask yourself:

• Are you really challenging yourself?

• Is this method working?

• Am I forcing myself to believe that it’s working to prevent the uncertainty and discomfort associated with change?

By choosing comfort instead of making changes, we can guarantee that nothing will change, and so we’ll never improve.👎

Way #4 Measure Your Success Using Metrics That Mean Nothing

Metrics Really matters because they tell us what we care about and it gives us insight into the problem.

How many notes we write, how many lectures we cover, or how many papers we do doesn’t tell us about the quality of the knowledge that’s in our brain to hold on to or use in the way we need it.

For example, even if we are happy to cover five lectures in a day, we wouldn’t consider the fact that we will be forgetting half of it a week later anyway. The total amount it would take to reach the level of knowledge that we actually need will be way longer than just a single study session.

If we don’t measure anything, we won’t know or see the problem, and we can’t fix what we don’t know.

Regarding learning, to know if our metric makes a difference, ask yourself:

• Is it possible that someone could study and cover fewer lectures than me but still perform better?

• Will the metric that I’m using necessarily lead to success?

The video I summarized is by Justin Sung. You can check the full video on his YouTube channel.