Mastering Fast Learning: Three Principles to Accelerate Your Learning Process

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can learn anything faster than everyone else. I do this by sharing

three powerful learning principles that helped me graduate from my masters program at the top of my class while

studying less than 10% of the time as my peers. These principles have worked not only for me, but also for the over

30,000 learners that I've coached over the past 13 years, which means they will work for you, too. And these principles

are number one the effort time exchange number two the omniarner principle and number three the iteration

effect. So let's start with number one the effort time exchange. So if you imagine becoming a faster learner than

anyone else it probably means that for you learning is much easier. It's much more comfortable. You can do it without

even thinking. What most people do to try to become a faster learner is that they find ways to reduce the amount of

effort that they need to spend on learning. And the idea is if I can make learning easier and require less effort,

this should mean that I can then also spend less time and therefore I'm faster. Except when it comes to

learning, this is almost always wrong. The learning happens in the brain and your brain has to actively think about

and process the information that you're learning to gain learning and memory out of it. When you avoid the hard difficult

thinking associated with learning, you are avoiding the learning itself. And this can actually be really confusing

because when we're learning something, we're also using some kind of technique. For example, we might be writing notes.

And the process of writing really good notes might take time and it might take a lot of effort. And so we say, well, if

I use some kind of AI, it might be able to do it for me faster. And now I don't have to put in any effort and the notes

are made for me. And what's happened is that we've actually confused the goal. The purpose of writing the notes was to

achieve the learning which happens in our brain, not to just have notes. And so the sneaky trap that you need to be

careful about is that when we reduce the amount of effort to do a task, it makes it faster to achieve the task. for

example, writing a set of notes. We can achieve that faster in less time, but we're actually

delaying and increasing the amount of time it would take for us to achieve the learning. And so, as effort goes down,

we pay for that effort with more and more time later on. And so, the way to really become a faster learner is to put

that effort up front. buy back more time for yourself using effort. So actively find ways to increase the amount of

effort while you're learning something which makes the learning process also more effective which means that your

memory is going to be stronger. Your understanding is going to be deeper and you're achieving that earlier on. And so

you don't have to spend more time later to try to hit that goal cuz you already hit it. And ultimately this is what

saves you time. In the research, this concept of thinking harder and doing more active thinking to generate more

effective learning is called the generation effect. And the research consistently shows that people that use

this generation effect are able to achieve a better retention on what they learn and a deeper understanding in a

shorter period of time. So, here's a key takeaway to check that you are using the effort time exchange the right way and

that you're activating the generation effect to become a faster learner. I call this the level of struggle. And

this is basically a check that we do for ourselves while we're studying. You ask yourself, am I reaching the right level

of struggle? For example, let's say I'm reading a textbook and I'm not really thinking about it very actively. I'm

just scanning my eyes over the page. I'm just kind of taking in the words and at the end of it, I haven't really learned

very much. My mind is passive during this process. There isn't any struggle going on here. So if I ask myself, am I

reaching the level of struggle for reading? In other words, am I activating the generation effect? The answer to

that is going to be no. And so instead, we can think about a little bit more actively as we're reading. Try to

deliberately pick out which ideas seem to be more important than the other ideas. How do those ideas fit together

into a bigger picture? When you start thinking about that consciously, then your struggle increases. Your brain goes

into a higher gear. It's activated more. The generation effect is activated more. And now we're using the effort time

exchange by spending more effort to save us time later. Same thing with writing notes. If I'm just writing notes

mindlessly, as many notes as I can, essentially a human photocopier, that's not reaching the level of struggle.

Whereas if I'm thinking about what to write, how to write it, how to express it, which things are more important,

these things all increase the effort, increase the effectiveness of the learning, drive up that memory and that

depth of understanding, and again, therefore save you time, making you a faster learner. And one of the most

common ways that I see people not reaching the right level of struggle is when they're testing themselves. It

could be with a practice question, or it could be using flashcards. Something as simple as just trying your best to try

to recall something before checking the answer makes a difference to how that knowledge is going to stick into your

memory. So once you flip that switch from not trying to make learning easier but actually deliberately trying to

reach the right level of struggle to activate the generation effect and use this effort time exchange. That's really

the secret that unlocks becoming a faster learner. Now, one of the biggest struggles that people have, which isn't

helpful, is when they're learning through a learning style that they're not used to. And this brings me to the

second principle, which is the omniarner principle. You've probably heard that everyone has a certain learning style

that they're better at and they're more suited to. And you should find that style and do more of that because that's

where you're going to thrive. And if you've heard that before, I wouldn't blame you because it's enormously

prevalent. Unfortunately, it's completely a myth. Research over decades has clearly shown that there is no such

thing as a learning style. You do not have a unique style of learning that you need to find and just become really good

at. So for example, the common framework that people throw around all the time is VA. V A R K. This is a learning styles

acronym which stands for visual auditory read and write kinesthetic. So here's the truth about learning styles and why

surprisingly even though learning styles don't exist, it's still matters and you should know about it. Pretty much every

single human brain is much better at processing visual information than any other kind of information unless you

have a severe neurological condition. Studies show that you can process visual information tens of thousands of times

faster than something like written information. Obvious thing, look at a painting versus read a description of

that painting. Which one can you interpret faster? We also know that in modern

education, a lot of emphasis is placed from a very young age on reading and writing skills as part of studying. Most

people have very strong habits of learning that rely on reading and writing. And so visual learning is

something we are biologically very good at. And reading and writing is something that we have

trained habits of. Some of us may also have figured out some habits on learning from listening because again that's a

big part of modern education. But here's the thing. Let's say you feel like you are a strongly read and write style

learner. That's the way that you can learn every other style. It's harder for you to learn through. Like this is your

bread and butter. If that's the case, you are going to be substantially limited in life. You are making the

decision to handicap your learning efficiency. And this is really obvious if we think through a common scenario,

for example, going through something like university. So let's say there are some pre-ereading that we need to do

before a lecture followed by a lecture of two hours and then we do some kind of practical lab assessment to help us

learn it and then we do some self-study using textbooks uh and then we do that over and over and over again. If the

only way that you can learn is through reading and writing, then it means that part of this and this is effective for

you and then all of this time in the middle is basically a waste of time. You don't know how to be effective in that

time. And this gets worse as you get older. In the professional world, you cannot control how you need to learn

things. Information will just come at you from all different angles of every different style. The difference is can

you manage that or not? And so there is an advantage undeniably at being good at learning through every single style even

if you don't prefer that style, even if you currently feel that it's more difficult learning through that style.

This is what it means to be an omnier. And the reason this saves you time is because it means 100% of the time that

you are engaged in a learning experience. You know how to extract meaningful learning from that instead of

saying I don't know how to deal with this information. I'm getting overwhelmed. I need the future version

of me to deal with this. And guess what? That takes more time. So the key takeaway to becoming an omnilearner is

to ask yourself the question, how can I organize this? This is a magical question which is going to transform

your learning efficiency. And you ask this to yourself every time you're learning something, whether you're

reading something or listening to something. And this is not the same question as do I understand this. It's

not the same as do I remember this? Because organizing is a very specific cognitive process. To organize

something, you actively have to understand each component, see how it fits together, make sense of it, and

understand how you could rearrange it in a way that would still make sense. You can understand something while not being

able to organize it. And that is an example of having very superficial knowledge. You'll probably also have a

pretty weak memory. If that's all you're able to achieve when you're learning, you will struggle with learning more

efficiently. And this also can be a huge trap because when you understand something, it feels like you've learned

it. It feels like you will remember this and then you will hold on to it. Let me tell you, the research says and your own

personal experience probably also tells you that's not true. You can understand something perfectly fine and still

forget it a week later and still not be able to solve problems using it. An easy way to think about this is like a messy

room. You can understand a messy room. You can look at it and see all the stuff scattered on the floor and you can

understand. You might even be able to remember what you're seeing, but it doesn't mean that it has now become

organized. And so when you go into that room to use things and actually put things together and quickly call things

out, it's going to be difficult because it's not organized. And as more things come into that room, it's going to get

more and more disorganized. It's going to get messier and messier. And that for learning is when you start feeling

overwhelmed. That's when you can feel it's slipping out of your brain as it's coming in. How long it takes you to

organize it is how long it takes you to learn it. Here's a few easy examples. You're reading something. I ask myself,

how can I organize what I'm reading? This is easy. Instead of just reading mindlessly, look at it more actively.

Reorganize the things that you're reading. Don't just read it from the beginning to the end. Pick what you

think is more important. Take that knowledge and make a decision where you want to place that. what more

information you want to then read. Maybe you read the next paragraph and it's not giving you the answer that you need that

you're really now curious about. Don't read that paragraph. You can come back to that later. Search. Use the textbook

as just a raw source of information and interrogate it and extract the information that you want to help you

organize. That is what active reading really is. Same thing with something visual. could be a diagram or a

flowchart. Don't just take it for what it is. Construct it in your mind. Rearrange things. Simplify it more.

Group things more. Do not be content with just accepting that this is how it must be. Challenge it. Critique it.

Judge it. Ask questions about it. It doesn't matter that someone else has organized it for you. The learning

hasn't happened until you organize it yourself. And people that can do that and flip that switch quickly can learn

quickly. But what about when you're listening? You don't have anything to read. People the information just coming

at you at a pace that you cannot control. This is more difficult. This is where you need to use things like

notetaking to just offload pieces of information to help you keep track and then you organize it. Being able to do

this kind of thinking when someone is speaking to you is a higher level of skill than being able to do this when

you're reading or or looking at an image. This is also the reason why I recommend to tell my students to learn

to do this with reading first and then you can naturally start to apply it even when you're listening. And so ultimately

when you become this omniarner, you're actually gaining the skills to reach the right level of struggle in any learning

style that's presented to you. Now, if you've been watching my videos for a while, you might know that sometimes I

also talk about something called learner types. Not learning style, but learner type. A learner type is your existing

habits and strengths and weaknesses and processes. It's a snapshot of how you currently learn. And for most people,

that's a combination of things that are working well for them and then things that are holding them back and making

them waste time. And so, one of the fastest ways to become a learner who is faster than everyone else is to figure

out what those time waster techniques are versus the ones that are truly working for you. and to make that very

explicit so you can see okay I've been using this technique for years but actually only half of it was producing

the benefit and this other half is unnecessary and then that's how we can start replacing and upgrading our

learning system this is a process that I went through thousands of times for years to refine my own learning system

now you might be thinking Justin that seems like a lot of work to do trial and error thousands of times for years to

figure this out is Is there really no better way? Well, what a great question you've asked because the answer is that

there is. And in fact, I took those years of my trial and error and the research that I read and I put it into a

free quiz that you can do to figure out your learner type. And so instead of spending years to figure out your

strengths and your habits and your processes, you can do this quiz which takes a few minutes and you can get a

report at the end that says these are probably the things that are holding you back and wasting your time. So if you're

interested in that, again, it's completely free. I'll leave a link for you in the description. Now, speaking of

spending years to figure something out, this next and final principle is one that definitely will not take you that

long. This is the easiest principle to utilize of the ones that we've covered so far, and it is just as powerful. This

is to maximize the iteration effect. So, here is an incredibly accurate depiction of how most people go about their

learning. Learn stuff, study, keep doing that for a long time. Oh no, the test or exam is coming up. I better test myself.

do practice questions as much as I can until I run out of time. Uh, and hopefully I will be okay for the exam. I

think this probably describes 99% of my entire study strategy for all of high school. And this is also an example of

almost no iteration effect. But here's why studying in this way is a massive waste of time. Effective learning is a

constant process of thinking of a hypothesis and then seeing if that hypothesis is right or wrong. What you

should be doing is that you get a new piece of information. You get another piece of information and you have a

hypothesis about how these two pieces of information relate to each other and fit into the big picture of the topic that

you're trying to learn. This is what gives information meaning and context and this is what helps your brain

actually use that information correctly. When more information comes in, you again make that same comparison. How

does it connect to and how does it fit in with the other things that you've learned? And so as more and more

information comes in, we develop more and more hypotheses around how we think it's all connected together. But when

we're first learning a topic, we don't know for sure. Like I said, it's a hypothesis. So, we might think that

these two pieces of information are connected like this, but this could be wrong. And if it is wrong, we want to

know that it's wrong early on because otherwise this misunderstanding is going to carry through for the way that we

form every hypothesis after it. And so when you get that light bulb moment, when everything suddenly clicks and you

just get it and it just makes sense, what that means is that you had a hypothesis and it was confirmed. It was

locked in. The uncertainty has gone down. It suddenly made sense because you see this is how it connects. This is the

big picture. You've seen the picture for the first time. That's the light bulb moment. And in order to get to that

light bulb moment quickly without spending weeks of studying, we have to generate these hypotheses, we then have

to get feedback on whether that hypothesis is correct or not. And then we use that information to refine our

hypothesis. And so this cycle is an iteration. And so when you repeat these iterations over and over again, your

learning gets stronger and deeper, your memory gets stronger, and your understanding becomes more complete and

accurate. That's what it means to maximize the iteration effect. It means generate lots of hypotheses very

quickly, very early on, and then get feedback on it by testing yourself very early on and very frequently to find

gaps in knowledge and then fix them. If we don't do this and we do what we were doing before and we're only testing

ourselves here near the end, then if we find one of these mistakes and the way that we've understood how things connect

together, then we now have to spend the work to relearn and re bigize everything that that was related

to. That is a huge unnecessary waste of time. So the key takeaway here is to test to the max. For example, schedule

time at the end of every week to test yourself on the stuff that you learned during that week. And remember, you're

looking for mistakes and gaps. The purpose of testing is not to give yourself a pat on the back and feel good

about it. It is to find the mistakes. So test yourself in a way that is challenging. A good test is a difficult

test. Don't test yourself on the things that you know you already know that you're not going to forget. Think about

how you really need to use that information at what level of complexity. Test yourself in that way. You can even

use something like micro retrieval which is testing yourself immediately after you have learned it. Reading something

and then just as you write your notes on it straight away you're not looking back at your notes. You're trying to test

whether you've understood it and organized it properly. And if you have reached the right level of struggle and

then you are reading and organizing it actively, you should find that when you test yourself, you understand it well

and you can remember it. And if you can't, that probably indicates that there was some issue with the way that

you were organizing it or that you didn't reach the level of struggle. That's immediate feedback. You can also

use micro retrieval in applying your knowledge straight away. So straight after learning something if there's some

procedural aspect of it use that knowledge to solve a problem to build something to develop a software this is

one reason why a lot of professionals find that suddenly learning is more efficient for them when they're learning

on the job because immediately after learning something they are applying it and they're getting feedback and data on

whether they have understood it correctly or not. But you don't need to get a job to do that. You you can just

do that. You can just choose to do that and then your learning will be faster. When you apply these three learning

principles, you will be able to learn faster than most people you encounter. And if you want to figure out what else

might be holding you back, remember to take that learner type quiz. The links in the description to that. Thank you so

much for watching and I'll see you next time.