9 Evidence-Based Tips to Learn Anything Faster

hey friends welcome back to the channel 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 like meta skills that no one ever

really teaches us but that can have like 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 this stuff involves

learning and so in this video i'm going to 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 want to 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 going to 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 optimize our focus now whenever we're learning anything it's really tempting

to kind of learn it in the background like practicing 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've 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 want to do something we're finding ourselves like 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 practicing the guitar or playing the

piano for five minutes i do then want to actually continue to practice another thing that's really helpful is to just

chuck my phone away i literally take my phone 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 um there's a great book called ultra learning 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 going to 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 practice in front of my webcam and in front of my mirror just to get the sleight of hand

down but really my webcam or mirror is not it's not the arena in which i'm going to be performing it 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 into 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 want to see 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 to do magic and those like walk around gigs and 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 four is to figure out what are

our weak links and then use lots of drills and stuff to improve them so if we use medical 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-barre syndrome i'd

have been like oh god i have absolutely no idea i didn't even have a mental model 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 doing it i basically

plugged it as an area of weakness and now 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 you know it's very tempting to open up the book to page one and just 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 want to maximize our learning and learn anything faster we want to 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 want to find out more you can definitely check out my skillshare class about how to study for

exams also linked in the video description by the way skillshare are sponsoring this video i'll tell you more

about them a little bit later anyway the idea behind active recall or retrieval practice is that we don't learn by

trying to put stuff into our brains we actually learn counterintuitively 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 to play the guitar there's only so many

tutorials you can watch before you actually start having to put it into practice when you're studying for exams

there's no point reading the textbook and just summarizing 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

something shouldn't be too hard where just like 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

ten-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 want to be playing tennis against someone who is like 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 that

is desirable difficulty and so whatever we want to learn efficiently we want to 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 the sort of person that needs the ego massage then

at the start of learning something what you need is praise and encouragement for example if i was just starting to learn

how to sing and people would just give me critical feedback immediately i'd probably feel a little bit like okay i

don't really want to sing i'm one of those people who just can't sing equally if i were to start drawing and people

would be like oh haha that's really crap you should do this instead i'd probably feel pretty bad about it and therefore

it wouldn't help me continue on the journey so i think at the start of a journey for most of us we need that like

injection of positivity and enthusiasm rather than necessarily critical feedback but if we

do decide to switch gears and to start taking learning something super seriously we want to kind of avoid the

praise and recognition aspect of it which is kind of unhelpful and instead focus on the critical constructive

feedback what can we do differently again this is why having a coach for stuff is actually really really helpful

ever since getting a personal trainer my everything in the gym has improved my biceps have gotten bigger i'm a one step

closer to becoming a gym shark athlete because now i have someone who is like there and then giving me feedback on the

things that i should do differently whereas before maybe once in a blue moon i'd film a video of myself send it to a

friend they'd reply a few days later it's not really a tight feedback loop and really it's the tight feedback loops

that encourage learning whether it's for exams or whether it's for anything else in life tip number seven is the concept

of over learning which is that when we're learning something we actually want to try and understand or learn it

in more depth than we necessarily need to and the idea here is to continuously be asking why a thing works the way that

it does so for example when i'm working as a doctor and i see senior doctors who you know

most of being a doctor admittedly is about following guidelines and following a prescribed set of rules and basically

a flowchart for everything that we do but and and so there are some doctors who

have that have that view of you know all i have to do is memorize the guidelines or look them up but then there are other

doctors who have a more first principles understanding approach to medicine which is that okay i know what the guidelines

are that i should prescribe this drug but i'm actually going to take a step to figure out why that's the guideline why

do they do that what's the paper what's the evidence around this and you know in in my experience it's

hard to say that you know camp 2 is objectively a better doctor than camp one but certainly the sort of doctor

that i want to be is the doctor who understands stuff from first principles and understands the rationale for doing

stuff rather than just memorizing the guidelines this applies to music theory in the guitar as well i had a guitar

lesson this morning and we were talking about how it's very easy to learn how to play anything by just following a

tutorial but when you follow a tutorial the thing that you're learning is you know my fingers are going in this

particular position whereas what we want to try and get to and john mayer talks about this a lot on his instagram

what we want to be getting to is just an understanding of music theory so that instead of i put my fingers in a b and c

positions we think okay i'm playing a c7 chord and the reason i'm playing a c7 chord is because of this and therefore

my fingers are going to go in a b and c position and so the end result is is the same we're still playing that chord and

we can still probably just play the song but when you have that deeper appreciation of the

the reasons behind why things are the way that they are it just makes learning anything else in that particular sphere

much easier and much more efficient tip number eight is all about spacing this is something in the world of studying we

call spaced repetition basically there's a concept called the forgetting curve that was discovered by a chap called

ebbinghaus in like the 1800s and the forgetting curve is that whenever we learn anything whether it's like a fact

or a skill or whatever we're just going to forget it and our memory for the thing is going to decay over time and so

we have to keep on practicing or testing ourselves on the thing to actually continue to have our brain kind of use

up space for that kind of thing because it's like with our muscles when we don't use our muscles our muscles are going to

atrophy and they're going to get smaller and we're going to get less hench equally with our brain if we learn let's

say a language when we were five years old and then we don't use it for the next 10 years we're actually going to

forget most of the language because our brain doesn't need to have that information in it anymore but thankfully

we can combat the forgetting curve by using this concept of spaced repetition this applies not just to exams but to

any other skill as well it's just that if we kind of repeat the thing at spaced intervals so let's say i might learn a

song on the guitar on day one and then i might repeat it again tomorrow and then i might test myself on it again next

week and then next month and then six months from now and if i've spaced my repetition of this thing enough

eventually playing that song is gonna go into my muscle memory it's gonna go into my long-term memory and i won't need to

practice it very much anymore to be able to play it whenever i want now if you're trying to learn something that has

specific facts there's all sorts of different apps that you can use to help with spacing the one that i personally

enjoy the most is free and it's called anki after the japanese of for ankishimas which i think is to memorize

and anki is just like an incredible app that completely revolutionized my experience of med school it does have a

bit of a learning curve and so did you know i have an entire skillshare class about how to use anki the basics along

with some advanced tips along with some guides on how to use anki to learn absolutely anything along with bonus

interviews from other students all around the world that are using anki for stuff very effectively if you want to

check that out and any of my other like 10 classes on skillshare you should hit the link in the video description

because skillshare i'm very kindly sponsoring this video so if you want to check out my class on anki or my class

on evidence-based study tips or any of my three classes about how to be more productive then hit the link in the

video description while i was filming this video skillshare had an offer of giving you 30 off the annual premium

subscription but they've actually changed up that offer so now if you're one of the first thousand people to hit

the link in the video description you will get a one month free trial completely free to skillshare premium

where you can check out my anki class and all the other 10 classes i've got skillshare so hit the link in the video

description be the first 1000 people to hit that link to get a one month free trial this is amazing it's a no-brainer

you can just watch all my classes so thank you skillshare for sponsoring this video and finally tip number nine is to

teach what you are trying to learn we all we often have this thing of like oh i'm not allowed to teach something until

i become an expert at it but there's this concept that c.s lewis talks about that i talk about a lot called the curse

of knowledge which is that when we when we're trying to learn something often we don't learn best from experts we

learn best from people who are just one step in front of us along that same journey so the way i think of it is that

i would rather learn from a guide than learn from a guru guide versus guru and i would rather be a guide than try and

be a guru and certainly for me i found that when i was going through medical school my favorite revision sessions or

lectures would be the ones that were given by medical students in the year above me rather than those given by

world class nobel prize winning professors because those guys were like old and like really far removed from the

things that i needed at the time whereas another medical student just one year above me was like really really helpful

and then when i started teaching medical students when i started teaching guitar when i started piano and youtube as well

with my part-time youtuber academy i found that anytime i try and teach something it really solidifies my own

knowledge and understanding and learning of the thing itself and so now i have a general policy that whenever i'm

learning anything i'm documenting my process while learning it and that helps me learn better because i know that i'm

possibly going to be teaching this thing a few months or years from now if you like this video you might like to check

out two specific books about learning one is called make it stick and the other one is called ultra learning and

you can actually find summaries for both of those on short form which is my favorite way of getting summaries of

books that'll be linked in the video description if you want to check it out and if you're interested in the science

of effective learning check out this video over here which is from a few years ago but it's still generally one

of my favorite videos of all time that i've ever made one of the best ones i think as well and it's all about the

power of active recall and why testing ourselves is the best thing ever and i talk about a lot of scientific evidence

around it and loads of people have said that that video alone has changed their life so thank you so much for watching

hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you in the next video bye