Avoiding the Learning Trap: Strategies for Effective Learning

I've taught almost 30,000 people how to learn more efficiently. And one of the most common things they tell me is that

they regret leaving it so late. Whether you have been struggling to get better grades or to get that job promotion or

to learn that new skill, learning to learn is the thing that makes this all easier. Learning to learn helps you get

better results with less time and stress. Most people know this, but what most people don't know is that by the

time you realize you need to start learning to learn, it's already too late. And there are three reasons this

happens. In this video, I'll share what those reasons are and some surprisingly simple strategies to help you avoid that

common regret. The first reason is something I call the readiness trap. Back in my second year of medical

school, we were studying for this exam. And the night before the exam, one of my friends messages me and he says, "Hey,

I'm feeling really unprepared for this exam. I don't think I'm going to do very well. What can I do?" And I gave him the

same advice that I had given to myself that night, which was lower your expectations. And even though I was

joking, there is some truth to that. At some point, it's going to be too late to change the outcome. So if we leave

learning to learn until the night before the exam, that's obviously too late. But at what point does it become too late?

And the problem that I've realized as a learning coach after so many years is that that point comes much earlier than

most people realize. So here's how most people think about when it is time to start learning to learn. So let's say

that this red line here, this is when you need a skill. This could be for an exam or something to do with work. Well,

then usually you're going to feel that you need this sometime before you actually need it. So let's say here is

where you feel the need. But the thing is that there is a time that it takes to develop a skill. And so for learning to

learn, this time may actually be longer than you realize. You're not only spending time to build new habits, and

you're not only spending time to unlearn old habits, which can often take longer. There's also time to even realize what

your current habits are to start unlearning or replacing them. And so actually the time it takes to learn this

skill maybe this long which means in reality the best time to start learning is

here. This is the ideal time to start. And all of this time from here to here is too late. So you can see that by the

time you feel the need to develop the skill, it is way too late. And this is because the way the human brain works is

that things that are more urgent and more short-term feel emotionally more important. The human brain is very bad

at assessing the importance of long-term things. And most complex skills are a long-term investment. So if your cue to

start working on something is that you feel emotionally that you are ready and that there is a need and there is a

sense of urgency, it is almost certainly already too late. This is why I call this the readiness trap. It is a trap to

start working on something only when you feel ready to start working on it. So what do you do instead? Instead of

deciding when to start working on something based on how much time you think you have left, which falls into

this trap, make that decision based on whether you see symptoms of problems. For example, let's say that your

learning skills aren't quite up to scratch. And so, a symptom that you see is that your memory and your retention

is pretty low. After a week, you're forgetting 50 70% of what you've learned. and you're spending a lot of

time relearning. So that could be another symptom. The time that you're needing to spend is very high and you

can tell that the time you're spending is relearning. Sometimes what you might find is that you're doing a lot of

things to try to deepen your understanding but not very effectively. So you struggle with achieving a certain

level of depth. So these are all symptoms of the underlying root problem which is that your learning skill is not

adequate. You can test your memory after a week and you can see after just one or two

weeks how good your memory and your depth is. You can assess objectively how much time you're spending and whether

that time is being spent on relearning stuff, just plugging in holes in your memory. And this usually precedes that

feeling of urgency by weeks or even months. So you start treating it when you first notice the symptoms, not when

you are hospitalized or ready for the disease. And so there are really two things that you need to do here to avoid

the readiness trap. The first thing is to start treating the symptoms when you see the symptoms. And the second thing

is to start paying attention to the symptoms. Assess actively how effective your current strategies are. Don't just

do things and then wait for an exam result to tell you that something's going wrong. Now, if you've watched my

other videos, you'll know that learning to learn is actually surprisingly quite complicated. And it can be very

confusing to know where you actually start to improve your learning skills. And a great place to start is by taking

the free quiz that I've created for you. This asks you a bunch of questions and it maps out your current learning system

and it tells you if there are any glaring holes or red flags that are holding you back. At the end of the

quiz, you get a personalized report that tells you where you should start working on it points out your weak areas. And

so, if you're already feeling some of these symptoms of ineffective learning, but you're not sure how you actually

start fixing those things, then this quiz is a great place to start. Again, it's free. I'll leave a link in the

description for you. Now, one general rule that I always recommend is a great place to start on is anything that

creates learning debt. And this is actually also the second reason a lot of people leave learning to learn way too

late. So reason number two, learning debt. So a year later in my third year of medical school, I was deep in the

trenches of trying to learn more effectively and still figuring out a lot of stuff. And I remember the first

semester of my third year really trying to lock in to my learning skills. And every single day I had this list of

stuff that I needed to takeick off to make sure that I was on top of my learning. And the funny thing is that at

the end of the first semester exams, I realized that I had actually completely forgotten about an entire paper. I

seriously only realized that there was an entire paper that I had never attended any lectures for and never

studied until 72 hours before the actual exam. And so I woke up at like 8:00 a.m. and I started studying. I studied

through the night and then like an entire day of studying to do a 60hour non-stop stretch of studying for this

paper to sit the exam. And I I got like a C or a C plus or something. It was the only C that I had gotten in university.

And this was a really important experience for me because I realized that my methods were still not enough.

And I'd been seeing studying as just ticking this box and hitting this number. like I have so many flash cards

to do, like 400 flash cards to do today. I have to make sure I do all of those flash cards a day. And if I tick that

number off, then I feel good, like I'm making progress. I was on this hamster wheel of studying, and I tricked myself

into thinking that as long as I'm on the hamster wheel, I must be progressing. And this is exactly how learning debt

accumulates. Learning debt is basically when you study something a certain way today which actually gives you more work

to do in the future. So for me, one of my biggest pieces of learning debt was making flashcards. I would make flash

cards, let's say, on a Monday and I'd make this huge batch of flashards and then so I'm not really learning anything

by making the flash cards and spending that time. I'm just giving the learning to my future self to deal with. And so

my future self is constantly bombarded with more and more things for it to do. And it builds this big long checklist of

stuff to complete in order for me to learn. And this debt compounds over time. The inefficiency of not being able

to learn something properly today means that every single day I give more and more work to the future me. Which means

future me has less and less time available and is more and more overwhelmed. And on any given day, I'm

already today pretty overwhelmed. So by giving even a little bit to my future self, that's already too much. So how is

this concept of accumulating learning debt related to leaving learning to learn too late? It's because it creates

this double burden. Here's the reason why learning debt is so dangerous. The issue with the double burden is that

every single day you have too much work you need to do because you have to clear this learning debt that your past self

gave to you. Now, in order to remove this work, you have to actually accumulate less learning debt, which

means you have to start learning to learn more effectively. The more you can learn effectively today, the less work

there is for your future self. But like we've just talked about with the readiness trap, it takes time to learn

this skill. And so by giving ourselves so much work to do every single day, it also reduces the amount of time we have

available to basically sharpen the axe. So learning to learn time goes down. And because we're not learning to learn,

we're just constantly accumulating more and more learning debt, which means that we've got more and more work to do,

which means we've got less and less time. So this spiral just goes out of control until every single day we can't

do anything other than just clear the log of stuff we need to get through knowing that it's probably not good

enough. Knowing we need to improve our methods but not having any time left to actually fix it. This is a situation

where you've left the hole in your boat for so long that so much water has come into the boat. you do not have time to

patch the hole because you have to keep bucketing the water out otherwise you're going to drown inside the boat. And when

that happens, either you magically become much faster at bucketing, which doesn't happen, or you have to abandon

ship. And this is what I see all the time. People who start learning to learn too late only when they feel like they

need it. And then they at the same time have so much learning debt they've accumulated. They don't actually have

time to learn to learn because they're too busy. Even though the reason they're busy is because their methods are

ineffective in the first place and now they're not going to do well for their upcoming exam. They don't have time to

improve on it. So you have to just abandon ship and forget about that exam. You just accept this exam is forfeit. I

will try again next time. I'll try again next year. I'm going to reset it. And the sadder part is that a lot of the

time people still don't realize that they fell into these traps. And so they just repeat the exact same mistake all

over again. They say, "The reason I didn't do well before is I just didn't study hard enough." And they just spend

more time and more effort into studying hard. And then they just make the exact same mistakes. And they only start

thinking about learning to learn when it is again too late. Because ironically, by leaving it so late that you fail an

exam and forcing yourself to reset it, suddenly it's not urgent anymore because the exam is another year away. Sorry, I

need to calm down. But this is very frustrating as a learning coach. This is why I want to make this video. So, how

do you solve this learning debt issue? The first thing is you have to be honest with yourself. You have to understand

and accept that what you are doing right now is accumulating learning debt and you have to make a change. So step one

is be honest. A lot of people just deny the problem and they just focus on doing

more hard work because doing more hard work is actually easy. But if you want to see whether there are places where

you're accumulating learning debt, then try to just write down your learning flow.

Write down step by step in as much detail as you can how you are learning and how effective you think those

methods are. And look at which steps, which processes and methods are actually effective and which are just creating

more work for yourself and spending time when you actually don't think they're helpful or you don't even know why you

do it. And if you try to make this learning flow and you struggle to even write down what you're doing and

articulate what your learning methods and processes are, there is almost a 100% chance that something there is

creating learning debt because you don't even know what you're doing because what are the chances that you are doing

something that you cannot even articulate that is also optimally efficient. And again, if you need some

help to figure out and map your learning system and you're not sure exactly where to start, that quiz will also help you

with that. So again, that's in the description. Now, once you've done that and you've been honest and you've

realized that there are places that you might be accumulating learning debt, the next thing is to just patch the

holes. It's a gradual process. I talk about it in a lot of my other videos, how you can patch different types of

holes. But here's the thing. You might have just listened to me explain to you about learning debt and this readiness

trap, and you understand that you need to start working on it now. But the reason you can't is because you already

have so much learning debt. you're already in that position. You already feel like you're too busy. You don't

have enough time to invest in this. That is actually the third reason. And I call this one the Mount Fuji trap. There's

this uh common proverb that says the the man who moves Mount Fuji starts with a single stone. And it's a proverb about

how you can achieve massive things just by doing it step by step. The Mount Fuji trap is when you think that you'll only

solve your problems with learning by moving the entire mountain. And because it seems like it's going to take too

long, it feels overwhelming, you don't even start. You don't even try. But in reality, the person who starts moving

stones is making more progress than the person who doesn't. And the key is understand that your success isn't based

on whether you move the mountain or not. It's based on how many stones you moved. With learning to learn, I'll be honest,

getting to the best you can be will take years. And getting to a point where your learning system is so good that you've

eliminated learning debt could take a very long time. But any improvement you make relative to you right now is an

improvement. You have less problems to deal with than you did yesterday. What matters is not how good you are compared

to your potential. What matters is how good you are compared to how you were before. And in reality, let's say you

think that your biggest bottleneck right now is your focus and your concentration. And you think that that's

only a two out of 10. Getting this to a 10 out of 10, yeah, this is going to take you months or years. However, if

you just get to a four out of 10, which you might be able to do in 1 to two weeks, you have doubled your focus and

concentration. And if there's this really difficult exam or this ambitious job promotion you're aiming for, you

probably don't need to be 10 out of 10 for everything. For all you know, all you need to be is just 10 to 20% better

than you are now. And you will feel that in your quality of life through more free time, more confidence, less stress,

less volatility in your results, better sleep, more time for hobbies. Every stone you move makes your life better.

So, how do you avoid the Mount Fuji trap? Step one, recognize that there's only two paths. You can

either choose to start incrementally improving with the risk that it might not be good enough by the time you need

to. You may have already left it too late or you cannot start improving and it will definitely be too late. On one

hand there is definite failure and on the other hand there is possibility of success. And once you recognize that, we

move on to step two, which is to really just start. And how I recommend you just start is to pick something that you

think is holding you back. Think about one thing that you're doing right now that you think you could do better.

Write that down. You can write it down literally right now. And all you need to do is just think about one small change,

one small idea or experiment that might make that better. and commit to doing that today. And I want you to actually

do this right now because I want this video to actually impact your actions, not just how you think about it. I don't

want you to get to it being too late and then realize, "Oh yeah, Justin was right in that video I watched 2 months ago."

You don't need to know how to solve the problem. You don't need to know what the perfect action is or to know how to make

the perfect change, but you do have to take an action and you have to make some change and give yourself the best chance

at success by making it specific. Make it realistic and make it achievable. Don't just say my action to commit to

today is get better at learning. That's too vague. Be specific. Be detailed. Take the time to think about this. Pick

your action and then commit to it. And remember, big changes come from tiny actions done often. So, these are the

three reasons why most people leave it too late. And if you want some ideas on something to commit to and get started

with, then you can check out this video right here. I recently found out that the

cards can be placed anywhere on the video. I I thought it only appeared in like one of the corners or anything. So,

I've decided that today it's just going to be straight over my