Today We're talking about learning.

Now, learning has been probably one of my main superpowers

since I was very young.

And learning how to learn is one of those meta skills

that no one ever really teaches us,

but that can have an enormous impact on our life

in basically everything that we do.

For example, when I was in med school,

I learned how to learn,

and therefore I could study for everything that I was doing

more efficiently, and that freed up my own time to do things

like set up a business and set up this YouTube channel.

And these days,

even though I don't have many more exams to prepare for,

learning is still a huge part of my life.

Trying to get better at making these YouTube videos,

trying to get better at running a business.

All of this stuff involves learning.

And so in this video, I'm gonna share nine tips

that I found really helpful that are evidence-based

about how we can learn anything we want faster, let's go.

Tip number one is to sharpen the axe.

Now this is from a quote

that's attributed to Abraham Lincoln,

where he famously said that

if you gave me six hours to chop down a tree,

I would spend the first four sharpening the axe.

And he's really talking here about the power of preparation.

And this definitely applies to learning anything as well.

Let's say we are studying for an exam

and we wanna learn it a little bit better,

reading a great book called "Make It Stick"

would be a great way of learning how to learn

or checking out my Skillshare class

on evidence-based study techniques.

Equally, let's say we're trying to learn something

like the guitar or chess or anything like that.

Something that's not related to studying.

We should still spend a decent amount of time

figuring out the meta learning behind

what we're actually gonna learn

like how we are going to learn the thing.

For example,

when I was learning how to play the piano by ear,

I spent a decent amount of time on the learn piano subreddit

where people were explaining how to learn

how to play piano by ear

and just spending a little bit of time sharpening the axe

before I actually sat down to learn the thing

really helped accelerate my learning process.

Tip number two is to use crutches to optimise our focus.

Now, whenever we're learning anything

it's really tempting to kind of learn it in the background

like practising the guitar while watching TV

or something like that.

But obviously, when we're fully focused

on the thing that we're learning,

our brain learns the thing a lot better.

And so I found a few different crutches or hacks

that have been particularly helpful

in helping me focus on things.

One is the five minute rule

which is a general tip for productivity as well,

which is that if we wanna do something

and we're finding ourselves having difficulty

in starting out doing the thing,

like actually getting started,

overcoming the activation energy.

The five minute rule says that,

we just have to convince ourselves

that we're just gonna do the thing for five minutes.

And then after we've done it for five minutes

we're allowed to just not do it, but more often than not

I find that if I've been practising the guitar,

or playing the piano for five minutes,

I do then want to actually continue to practise.

The other thing that's really helpful

is to just chuck my phone away.

I literally take my phone and I toss it onto the sofa

or on the floor like a good tosser.

And then I'm ready to focus and not be distracted

with the thing that I'm trying to learn, all right?

Tip number three is to find opportunities for immersion.

So there's a great book called "Ultralearning"

by a chap called Scott Young

where he talks about his journey through learning languages

in like three months at a time

and becoming fluent in a language in three months.

And the key to that as all language learners say

is immersion.

Just being as immersed in the language as possible.

And the general principle here is that

we learn best when we're in the environment

where we're actually gonna be using the skill.

So for example, when I was learning how to do magic

to become a close-up magician,

yes I was doing some practise in front of my webcam

and in front of my mirror

just to get the slight of hand down.

But really my webcam or mirror is not the arena

in which I'm gonna be performing in.

And so I made it a point

to try and perform magic for real people,

as much as possible.

I would take a deck of cards to school

and I'd have cards in my room at all times,

and so friends would come over,

I'd kind of, hey, be like,

hey do you wanna see a magic trick?

And eventually once I got okay at performing

for friends and family,

I started then reaching out and doing paid gigs,

even though I was nowhere near good enough in my head

to get paid to do magic.

Eventually, I did end up getting paid to do magic.

And those walk around to gigs at balls and parties

helped improve my abilities

in a way that just doing it in front of the mirror

really wouldn't have done .

Tip number 4 is to figure out what are our weak links

and then use lots of drills and stuff to improve them.

So if we use med school as an example,

I had a few subjects that I was pretty weak in.

Neurology was one of them.

If you'd asked me what is Guillain-Barré syndrome

I'd have been like, oh God, I have absolutely no idea.

I didn't even have a mental module

for where it would fit into the subject of neurology.

And so when it came to studying efficiently for my exams,

I knew that,

okay, I have to drill the things that I'm weakest on.

And I spent just a whole day

basically creating a one-page syllabus of just neurology,

just focusing on that one subject.

And just because I spent like eight to 12 hours

that day they're doing it,

I basically plugged it as an area of weakness,

and that it was no longer an area of weakness.

And the question I would keep on asking myself

every day when I was sitting down to study was,

if the exam were tomorrow,

what topic would I be the least happy,

or the most pissed off about?

And then I would just study that topic.

And this is really good because whenever we're learning

or whenever we're studying or anything like that,

it's very tempting to just do the stuff

that seems familiar to us.

If we're studying for an exam,

it's very tempting to open up the book to page one

even though we already know what's on page one.

If we're learning the guitar,

it's very tempting to just play through songs

that we've already played before.

But really the learning only happens

when we're trying to fix our weaknesses

and we're trying to operate at a decent level of difficulty.

If something is too easy,

we're not gonna learn anything at all.

And so if we wanna maximise the learning

and learn anything faster,

we wanna really hone down

on what are these areas of weakness,

what are these weak links,

and how do we use drills

to improve those as quickly as we can?

Tip number five is to test ourselves.

Now, this is a thing that in the world of studying

is called active recall

but it also applies

to the world of learning anything in general.

I have a whole video about that,

that's linked in the card over there.

And if you wanna find out more,

you can definitely check out my Skillshare course

about how to study for exams,

also linked in the video description,

by the way Skillshare is sponsoring this video.

I'll tell you more about them a little bit later.

Anyway, the idea behind active recall or retrieval practise

is that we don't learn

by trying to put stuff into our brains,

we actually learn counter-intuitively

by trying to take stuff out of our brains.

And so if you've had that experience

where you've read something in a textbook or on a website

and someone asks you about it a few days later

and you've completely forgotten about it,

that's just because you haven't tested yourself

on that knowledge.

And the word testing has all these negative connotations

because we think of testing as like a school thing

and we get graded and we get judged.

But if we move towards thinking of testing ourselves

as being a strategy for learning,

everything becomes so much easier.

That's why when learning play the guitar

there's only so many tutorials you can watch

before you actually start having to put it into practise.

When you're studying for exams,

there's no point reading the textbook

and just summarising what's in the textbook,

the point is you have to test yourself

so that your brain has a chance to work

to retrieve the information.

And that is what really drives learning.

And in the field of learning,

there is this concept called

the desirable difficulty concept.

Which basically just means

some things shouldn't be too hard,

where for example if I were to try playing tennis

against Roger Federer, it would just be too hard.

I wouldn't really learn anything.

But equally, if I were to try playing tennis

against a 10 year old who doesn't know how to play,

it wouldn't be fun, I wouldn't learn anything

because the difficulty is at two different extremes.

I wanna be playing tennis against someone

who is at my level or a little bit better than me,

because that is the real arena

in which I'm gonna be learning.

And that's why having a coach for example, is really good

because a coach can moderate their play style

to be at my level and therefore I'm more likely to learn

as desirable difficulty.

And so whatever we wanna learn efficiently,

we wanna apply this concept

to try and make it a little bit more difficult.

Learning is not supposed to be easy,

it is supposed to be hard.

And if it's hard, then it means we're doing something right.

Tip number six is to get intense feedback

as often and as quickly as possible.

So feedback obviously is how we learn.

We do something, we see that we're doing it wrong

and then we improve the thing.

And again, feedback is one of those words that

can seem a little bit like dirty at times,

especially if we're starting something out

where we're not sure of our own abilities.

If we get constructive or critical feedback,

that can really be a blow to our ego.

If you're that sort of person that needs the ego massage