Learn to Learn in 46 Minutes

==🎓 학습의 비밀: 효과적으로 배우는 방법과 진단법==

1. 📘 학습의 의미와 오해

1.1. 학습의 구조와 과정

– 감각을 통해 정보가 입력되고(brain으로 전달)– ‘학습’은 뇌 안에서 주로 일어남– 정보를 문제 해결, 글쓰기, 토론 등에 적용하는 것 포함

1.2. 학습과 공부의 차이

– 공부는 ‘스터디’ 즉, 노트 작성, 읽기, 앱 활용 등 기술적 활동– 학습은 뇌 내부의 ==처리(Processing) 과정으로, 기술보다 사고 패턴이 핵심임==

1.3. 기술보다 사고 방식이 중요

– 같은 기술을 써도 사고 방식 차이로 학습 효과가 달라짐– 기술 그 자체보다 뇌 내부에서 어떤 패턴으로 사고하는지가 핵심

2. 🔍 학습 핵심 5 차원

2.1. 딥 프로세싱(Deep Processing)

– ==연결망(구조화) 형성하는 사고 방법– 표면적 학습(단순 암기)은 의미 없고, 지식을 넓게 연결하는 것이 중요– 딥 프로세스 부족 시, 기억력 저하, 적용 어려움 발생==

2.2. 자기조절(Self-Regulation)

– 학습 기법의 ==적용과 조절 능력==– ==Q, 모니터링, 조정==의 세 단계로 구성– 실제 적용 방법: 인지, 검증, 수정 과정 지속적 실행

2.3. 마인드셋(Mindset)

– ==변화와 실패에 대한 태도==– 고정적 사고(Fixed) 때는 실패 두려움이 성장 방해– 성장형 사고(Growth)를 갖출수록 학습 속도 20배 빨라짐

2.4. 검색력(Retrieval)

– 기억에서 정보 재생산하는 능력– 반복과 다양하게 연습하며 기억력 강화– “어떻게 복습하느냐?”가 핵심, 다양한 방식 활용 필요

2.5. 자기관리(Self-Management)

– 시간, 집중, 우선순위 조절 능력– 산만함, 미루기, 시간 관리 실패가 학습 방해요인– 행동 단위로 구체적 체계 수립 및 실천 중요

3. 📈 자신의 학습 장애 진단법

3.1. 핵심 방해 요인 파악하기

– ‘즉각적 성과’ 또는 ‘반복 부족’을 통해 진단– ==자가진단 퀴즈 활용 추천 (무료)==

3.2. 예시: 딥 프로세싱 부족 시,

– 기억이 빨리 사라지고, 이해도 어려움– 개선 포인트: 학습 시 연결 중심 사고 연습

3.3. 자기조절 부족 시,

– 계획, 모니터링, 조정 미흡– 개선 포인트: 인지하고 조절하는 습관 형성

3.4. 마인드셋 문제 시,

– 실패 두려움, 회피 성향– 개선 포인트: 성장 마인드셋으로 태도 전환

4. ⚙️ 바로 적용하는 향상 전략

4.1. 딥 프로세싱 향상법

– 자기대화로 “이 정보는 얼마나 연결되어 있나?” 질문– 정보의 의미를 비교·대조·연상하며 통합

4.2. 자기조절 습관화

– ‘Q, 모니터링, 조정’ 반복적 연습– 실습 예: 학습 중 ‘지금 나는 연결할까 아니면 암기할까?’ 자문

4.3. 마인드셋 변화하기

– 실수에 대한 인식 전환: 실패는 성장의 기회– ‘무엇을 두려워하는가’를 구체적 행동으로 전환

4.4. 검색과 복습 최적화

– 다양한 방법으로 정보를 회수하는 연습 (외우기, 연결하기, 문제 해결)– 공간 반복법(Space Repetition) 활용하여 장기 기억력 유지

4.5. 자기관리 강화

– 구체적 행동 계획 세우기 (예: 시간표, 방해 요인 제거)– ‘구체적 행동’에 집중하고, 체계적 체크리스트 활용

5. 🧠 마인드셋의 강력한 힘

5.1. 성장형 사고의 효과

– 학습 속도 20배 이상 증가 가능– 변화와 실패를 기회로 인식하면 6개월 단축 효과

5.2. 마인드셋 개선 방법

– 실패와 실수에 대해 ‘긍정적 태도’ 갖기– 구체적 행동으로 ‘실패 용인’과 ‘시도’ 강제

5.3. 가장 중요한 핵심

==– ‘마인드셋’은 모든 차원 향상의 문을 열어줌
– 먼저 마음가짐을 바꾸고 실천 습관 확립 필요==

6. 🔍 자기학습 평가와 프로그램 안내

6.1. 무료 자가진단 퀴즈

– 간단한 질문으로 ‘가장 큰 저해요인’ 진단 가능– 링크는 아래 설명 참고

6.2. 체계적 학습 가이드 프로그램

– 차원별 깊이 있는 학습 방법, 예제, 실습 제공– 빠르고 확실한 성장 원한다면 추천

※ 이 구조를 통해 ‘학습하는 법’을 통찰하고, 자신만의 강점과 약점을 진단하여 체계적으로 향상시킬 수 있습니다.

대본

Learning to learn is absurdly important and absurdly complicated. Most people go their entire lives without ever learning to learn properly. For the past 13 years, I've dedicated my life to understanding learning research and coaching people on how to learn efficiently. From doctors to software engineers to CEOs and everything in between. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I've been able to help thousands of learners dramatically improve their retention, their ability to understand new and complex concepts, and how quickly they can develop deep expertise. And the key is that it's not about understanding all the research. My secret weapon is that I've developed the skill to diagnose why someone struggles with learning and precisely what they need to do to improve. And giving you this skill is potentially the most valuable thing that I can teach you. By the end of this video, I want you to be able to see your own learning as if I were coaching you directly. So, here's what we're going to cover today. Number one, what learning to learn actually means and why most people misunderstand it. Number two, the five core dimensions of learning that actually dictate your ability to learn and improve. Number three, how to diagnose your biggest rate limiter. And number four, how to start improving on that area right away using the same process that I use with my clients. So let's start with the first one, which is what learning to learn actually means. I call this the anatomy of learning. Now, we can break up learning into a few different phases. Let's say that we are reading from this document or we're watching a video. That information is going to enter in through our eyes and our ears and then that is going to be sent to our brain where the learning is meant to happen and then we need to then apply it in some kind of way like to solve problems or write an essay or have a discussion or something. And usually in this part here we do this thing that's called studying. This is where we're writing different types of notes or we're reading in a certain way. We're using different types of apps. And the idea here is that by studying in a certain way, it allows us to have better memory and it will allow us to therefore apply the information. But this is not really how learning works. Learning happens in the brain primarily, which means that when we study and we do things, the purpose of studying is to trigger certain types of processes to happen inside the brain. So this is processing. We take the sensory signals that our eyes and our ears detect and then we process it in a certain way. And depending on how we process it, this leads to those outcomes like having good retention or being able to apply the knowledge in the way that you need to. And this distinction between studying and processing and learning is actually really important because you can have someone that's using the exact same studying or learning technique or not even using much of a technique. You can have someone that's just listening sitting there in a lecture or a workshop just listening not really doing any particular technique and the level of knowledge that they're able to generate may be much higher than someone else. The difference here is not in terms of their technique. The difference is in the way that they are actually thinking about the information. And just because you use the same technique as someone else doesn't mean you're thinking in the same way. And this is essentially why learning to learn is so ridiculously complicated. Because the part that matters the most in terms of your memory and your attention and your ability to use that knowledge and how deeply you can understand information has very little to do with the actual technique that you're using. So the technique not very important. The most important stuff is all inside the brain in terms of the patterns and habits of thinking. And this stuff is invisible. So it is really hard to know whether you are doing it correctly or to give yourself feedback or to check yourself. And so if I think back to the early years of coaching people on how to learn, I was really focused on developing these effective techniques and they worked really well for me and they worked well for some of the students that I coached. But the more people that I coached, the more I realized it doesn't really work for everyone. And there's a very high level of variance. And what I know now after those years of experience is that you have to focus much more on the first principles of learning. If you understand the first principles, you can make your own technique. You can take a technique you're used to using and you can make it more effective. You can upgrade it yourself. This is what I do for people as a coach. And the best part is that these principles stay the same for basically any type of subject or discipline. The principles I use to help a doctor pass their final fellowship exams is exactly the same as the principles that I will use for a senior software engineer trying to do a mast's while working full-time. Now, if you did what I did and try to go through all of this research to figure out what these principles are, after about an hour or two of reading, you're going to realize it is very confusing. There are hundreds if not thousands of different variables that people are researching on. And what I've arrived at is a simple way of thinking about those variables that is comprehensive enough and intuitive to understand and has been very effective within my own coaching practice is to divide it into these five core dimensions of learning. Once you can see your learning process and you can break down your learning methods instead of being just like a big jumble of different patterns and thoughts and techniques into these five dimensions, it becomes very clear where your rate limiter is and therefore what you need to start working on. So let's start with the first dimension which is deep processing. Processing, if you remember, was the thinking that your brain is doing when you get new information and the way you think about it. We call that processing. And there are a lot of different ways that you can process information. One way you can do that is deep processing. Now to keep things simple, the way that you can think about what deep processing is and what it means for you is that deep processing is any type of thinking process that leads to you forming a good knowledge schema which is essentially a fancy way of saying that you're building a network of knowledge. And this is basically how your memory functions. Your memory functions as this interconnected web of information. Now when you learn something through shallow or superficial processing then you are not building this schema. You're not connecting information inside a network. And so your knowledge ends up looking very much like this. You have your let's say book that you're reading. You read the words. Let's just say that this is the information that you have read. It goes into your brain and it just sits there isolated and by itself. Maybe it's connected to a couple other points. This is not a very well-connected network. It's not really forming like a web. So over time, what's going to happen actually very quickly is that you're going to forget this. That's going to be forgotten. And this process can actually be like literally in under a minute. This is why you can read a page and by the time you get to the bottom of the page, you've already forgotten half of what you've read. your brain is very very efficient at forgetting information that's not connected because otherwise it's just a waste of energy to keep it. On the other hand, if you're processing things deeply, this piece of information ends up integrating with a much larger, more dense network. You get the idea? And so from your brain's perspective, it doesn't want to lose this because it seems like it's really valuable information to hold on to because it's connected to so many other things. This phenomenon is what happens when we build memory. People who can do deep processing very effectively and at a habitual level tend to be statistically the top achievers. So people that are in school, in uni, at work that just get things. They're able to understand those concepts more quickly. Their memory seems to be better. They can get better grades without studying as much as other people. Why are they able to do that? They're able to do that because their deep processing ability is already high. And so the words we give to people like this, this is people who are like a genius or just that typical high achiever. Now the good news is because of this great phenomenon in the brain called neuro plasticity which is a technical term for your brain's ability to break and make new connections and essentially just grow and adapt. You can train your deep processing even if you didn't have the genetics or the the early childhood experiences that were necessary to make you a habitual deep processor which is a minority of people. You can actually just train it by mimicking the way that a deep processor thinks and eventually just getting used to it. It just becomes a new habit. And so this is kind of like the holy grail of improving your ability to learn. This is where a lot of my uh experience and my attention and coaching has been. This is what I teach in the program. This is the thing that I'm really proud of having figured out a way to to teach and train. But it's not easy to do because you are thinking in a way that you haven't thought of before. This method of thinking, if it's not a habit, is going to be very uncomfortable. So there's a high level of discomfort and it requires a very high level of effort to force this neuroplasticity. It's kind of like working out trying to build your muscles. If you go to the gym one time to a 15-minute workout, you're not going to be jacked for the rest of your life. It takes that time and consistency and that level of intensity. And so most people, even though it's possible to train your deep processing, most people just never get there because they give up because it's too uncomfortable. It takes too much effort. So, how can you tell if deep processing is your rate limiter and therefore the one that you need to focus on improving? The main thing here is going to be that you have to spend a high amount of time to understand new concepts and complex concepts, you will suffer from all these symptoms of not having good deep processing. Like you will find that if we look back to this anatomy of learning, you can see if your processing level is low, you're going to struggle with your retention. You're going to struggle to apply that knowledge in deeper ways. is you're going to find that you are forgetting things more quickly and you're going to have to spend a lot of time like relearning the same thing over and over again. If deep processing is your biggest rate limiter, then what's one thing that you can do to start improving on this straight away? The most important thing that you can do is to start building a radar for deep versus shallow processing. Like I mentioned before, this processing happens inside the brain. It's invisible. So the only way you can really tell whether you are getting better and deeper with your processing or if you're getting more shallow is if you can detect it mentally like if you become self-aware enough of the way that you think and you can label it saying this is deep processing and this is shallow processing. And the easiest way that you can start building this radar is to ask yourself just this one question as often as you can which is is my learning right now isolated or is it integrated? If you've um heard my TEDex talk this is this was like the whole topic of it. Isolated means that when you're learning information you are thinking of it like this. You are focusing on memorizing. You're trying to go over it again and again. You're trying to just understand what it means. You're not really thinking about what it means compared to something else. Most of your time, most of your energy and attention is based on just trying to understand the single thing and remember it. And that is also your win condition. That's how you measure success. You will read something and you will think, "Yep, I have learned it." If you feel that you have understood it and you can remember it and if that is how you feel and where your thoughts and attention is on when you're learning, you are almost certainly isolated and therefore this is shallow processing. So this is shallow bad. On the other hand, if it's integrated, it's the opposite. You're comparing things. You're very actively not just understanding it to understand but you're understanding something trying to wrap your head around it so that you can put it into the big picture so that you can compare it to something else so that you can create an analogy. The information is being processed for the purpose of integrating it with other pieces of information. This is comparing and contrasting and thinking why is this important compared to something else. This is actively thinking about a big picture. If you spend most of your time thinking about this and this is where your attention is and this is your success criteria. When you're studying, you feel like you've learned it only when you've been able to make sense of it relative to something else and it belongs somewhere in a schema. This means that your priority is on integration, which is a good thing. That means you're doing deep processing. Do a round of studying. Figure out where you sit. you know, you're going to probably flip between these two, you know, back and forth, but see where you are mostly and just try to get a little bit closer towards being more and more integrated. When I coach people through my learning program, the just going from this to this and just slowly taking that step by step is a process that often takes weeks. So, expect you're not going to be able to solve this overnight, but once you can build that radar, you are on your way towards learning success. This is the first dimension the processing uh but it is actually not the most rate limiting for most people. The second dimension is something called self-regulation. Self-regulation is how you use the different techniques. So if we go back to the anatomy, it's how you're using the techniques to drive the processing. So we understand this part now the processing. This is basically like we want to have deep processing. That's our goal. Self-regulation is what do you do in the physical world with the techniques that you use, the way that you listen and the way that you read, the way that you revise, or the methods of learning that you use. How does that help you do the right type of processing and therefore achieve your learning outcomes? For most people, self-regulation is pretty low. And it's not their fault. It's because self-regulation, like just learning how to learn, is not something that's widely taught, uh, at least not taught very well. And so, for most people, their their self-regulation ability is is kind of limited to just like, I did badly in an exam. I'm going to study more. Uh, maybe do more practice questions. And if you're like really really onto it, you're using flashcards as well. That is all really just scratching the surface. Here's how you need to think about self-regulation to actually get good at it. The first part is the Q. The second part is monitoring and the third part is adjusting. When you can do all three of these well, you are doing self-regulation well. And it's worthwhile to develop the skill because let's say that your deep processing is not like really really really good which again is most people. You don't have to develop your deep processing to the top level to get top results. You can develop your deep processing to a reasonable level. And again like it takes a long time. So sometimes you can't wait to like rewire the way that your entire brain thinks to to get those results. The faster way is to just change your methods so that you're compensating for your lower deep processing with just really really good methods. And I'll give you a a simple um but you know kind of an extreme example to to make the point. Let's say I've got this book right here um learning theories and educational perspective a riveting read. If I'm going through this and I'm learning about the the neuroscience of learning, a really, you know, inactive poor reading technique is going to be just like if I cast my eyes on it and like just kind of randomly look around the page and you know, let's say I do this for 5 seconds and then I'm like, "Okay, cool. Time to flip the page." And I'm randomly reading around the page again. You can see that I'm not really going to achieve any real learning from doing this. Now, if I decide to cast my eyes from left to right, it might make it slightly better. And now, if I cast my eyes from left to right while looking for bolded words, might be a little bit better. Now, if I write those bolded words down, it might anchor the ideas a little bit more. If after every five words, I go back and do a Google search or, you know, ask CHBT about what it means and how they're connected to each other, you know, it's going to help to build even more of a schema. If I try to build a mindm map with the words I've collected as I'm reading it, it's going to, you know, you can see that each iteration of this technique helps us to create that schema and connection and to do the deep processing a little bit more easily. If I use that first technique where I'm just kind of randomly looking at the page, it takes a lot more uh mental work to stimulate the deep processing. it's still possible but your like your technique is certainly not helping you. That's basically what it means to train your self-regulation. You're saying what are the adjustments that I can make with my current method to just squeeze out more of an edge. So coming back to these three parts Q, monitoring and adjusting. The Q is the thing that you are paying attention to. So linking this back to what I was talking about before with the whole deep processing thing. When you build your radar between isolated and integrated, you can now start paying attention to the way that you think when you're studying. So that allows you to have this cue. You're paying attention to whether you're doing isolated or integrated learning. Now that Q is there. The next part is the monitoring. This is your ability to actually pay attention to the queue and to do something about it. So the idea is that you don't necessarily always notice every time the queue happens. So for example, you have been doing isolated or integrated learning, you know, your your whole life and until I just taught you about it like a few minutes ago, you may never have really even noticed those cues were always there. You just didn't recognize it. This is the reason why it's actually important to learn about the principles and the theory of learning because it shows you what to look at and notice. Once you know that, you can start paying attention. You're monitoring it and that puts you in a position where you can actually do something about it. So, this final part is where you're actually taking action and making the adjustments that you need to make. So, for example, let's say that you're doing really shallow processing. All you do is like read things over and over again. and you just write notes mindlessly and then you just like smash through a thousand flash cards. So you might realize that your learning strategy is very isolated here. Um so you notice those those mental cues, right? You monitor those, you become aware of them and now you realize, okay, well the way I need to go is instead of continuing making it more isolated, what I need to do is I need to adjust my technique to try to make it more integrated. And now you think, okay, in my technique, what small change could I make that would take it one step closer to my target adjustment, which in this case is getting it more integrated. And this process of just paying attention to the queue, actively trying to monitor it and then thinking about how I can make adjustments and making those adjustments and then again seeing how that feels, monitoring it again, making another adjustment and continuing that over and over again. This is basically what it means to learn to learn. Here's the uh really unfortunate counterproductive thing that happens with most people that try to learn to learn uh which is that you remember how here in the deep processing part I talked about how changing your habits is like really uncomfortable and it takes a lot of effort. So what ends up happening is that people will start recognizing it. They'll pay attention to the fact that it's isolated. They'll try to make it more integrated. And then what they'll realize when they do that is that this requires more effort. This is harder than it was before. And because it's harder, they interpret this not as okay, I'm therefore doing it better, but if it's harder, it must be worse. And so they actually make an adjustment back to being isolated instead. And this leads to them not improving. This is called the misinterpreted effort hypothesis and it's been seen across uh students and professionals of all ages and all levels. It's this really common misunderstanding that effective learning is meant to be easy and if I'm making a change in my learning that makes it feel harder, it must not be working. So just be careful of this. How do you know if self-regulation is your biggest rate limiter and the thing that you need to work on first? First of all, you probably do not have a lot of different learning methods and you're probably never engaged in this cycle of kind of monitoring your learning effectiveness and trying to make things work and adjust it. You probably use the same methods that you are just used to using that you use by habit. Uh you know the same thing maybe all of your friends are doing. And so when you get good results it's like yay and then sometimes you get bad results and you just don't understand why that's happening. So, if you feel like you don't really know how you learn and you don't have a lot of control over your learning ability and your results, then it means that you probably don't have a great level of insight into your learning process. And that means that your self-regulation is going to be really low. Statistically speaking, this is honestly most people. When I first started on this whole learning tolearn journey like over a decade ago, my self-regulation was just like completely abysmal. If you're in the same boat, don't worry. There's there's hope for you. You know, I managed to figure it out myself. At this point, uh, if you're feeling like this is really useful and you would like an easier way of figuring out where your biggest limiters are and you're not quite sure, then I have a quiz that I've created that assesses you on the three most commonly rate limiting dimensions of the five that I'm going to go through in today's video. This is a free quiz. uh it takes you a few minutes to finish and at the end it will just tell you this is probably the dimension that's holding you back the most and therefore the thing that you need to work on. It explains the impact it's going to have on you. Um some recommendations on how you can actually start working on it. It's the type of thing that if I had back when I was trying to figure this out for the first time, it would have saved me probably years of trial and error. So, if that's you and you're interested in saving years of trial and error, uh, I'll leave a link in the description for you for you to check out. Now, on to the third dimension, which is a little different, but actually the most commonly limiting dimension of all the students that I work with. Uh, of the thousands of students, I would say around 60 to 70% of all students and professionals will be limited by this dimension. And this dimension is called mindset, which sounds really like fluffy and you're like, I'm in a video about learning to learn. Why am I hearing about mindset? But hear me out. This is actually really important. Mindset in the shortest possible way is how you respond to discomfort, difficulty, and the idea of making mistakes on the journey of learning to learn. Learning to learn is basically changing your habits. So it's habit transformation. And any habit transformation by necessity, it's completely unavoidable. Involves you making certain mistakes which are really valuable because it it teaches you about yourself and it helps you to improve. The mistakes are the learning opportunity. But you have to make these mistakes and there's a lot of discomfort. As I've mentioned before, if you don't have what's called a growth mindset and instead you've got what's called a fixed mindset, you will look at these mistakes and this discomfort and you will feel a sense of insecurity and fear. If you, you know, are learning a new technique and you're thinking, "Wow, this is really different to how I've been studying before and I can see why it makes sense and I feel like I need it." But then when you think about actually trying it and applying it, all you can think of is, well, what if it doesn't work? What if I screw up this part? What if I use a technique here and then this part goes, what am I meant to do? This is paralyzing. And that paralysis from just having so many what if questions essentially causes skill stasis. It means that you do not gain any skills. You do not grow. You spend so long thinking about how to avoid making any mistakes that you just like don't do anything. And it's, you know, can be crippling because you can realize that your decision to not make mistakes is basically causing you to continue to struggle every day with the issues that you have now. And if you've done badly in the past, it's almost guaranteeing you are going to continue to do badly moving into the future. And despite knowing that it completely sabotages your ability to grow, the fear and insecurity and the emotional aspect of it can be so hard to overcome that we stay paralyzed. And actually it it makes it even worse because now we've got two problems to deal with. The first thing is that we have insecurity and fear. And the second thing is that we are aware of how damaging that is for us and we still can't do it. So we feel even worse about it. Now the opposite of this is as I mentioned a growth mindset and a growth mindset means that when you see these mistakes and this discomfort you don't feel the insecurity and fear you feel either nothing because you know you just accept that it's it's necessary or actually if you really have a growth mindset and again this mindset can be trained you can go from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset the way that you react instead is that you actually start becoming excited. You become excited to try it out and make some mistakes. you become excited and really comfortable with being uncomfortable because you know how much growth is going to come from that. And the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset is astronomical and how long it takes for you to learn to learn because we measure this in our program. We actually measure the mindset scores and we can track the improvement of someone and how long it takes. People with a growth mindset improve their learning ability 20 times faster than someone who has a fixed mindset. And that literally means that in a single week, someone with a growth mindset might improve the same as what would normally take a fixed mindset person 6 months. And amazingly, among all five dimensions, improving your mindset increases your learning ability than increasing any other dimension. makes sense because it's essentially the door to any other type of growth. Once you open that door, you just grow and you just improve. How do you know if this is a rate limiter? Fairly obvious. If you resonated a lot with what I was talking about here in terms of this feeling of insecurity and fear and this paralysis and the stasis, if you resonate with that and you know that you're averse to making mistakes, then mindset is the dimension that you 100% should prioritize as number one. It's actually almost pointless to work on developing anything else unless you work on your mindset first. Now, how do you actually do that? Like I said, if you just tell someone that mindset is a problem, but you just don't give them any tools on improving it, it actually makes things worse. So, here's what you need to do. The first thing is, and this is going to sound a little hippie, but is to be open-minded to the idea that mindset is the thing you need to work on first. So, number one is just to be openminded. When people join our program and they're, you know, really excited to learn all these new techniques, they, you know, because we teach them about this mindset stuff and they'll look at these lessons, they'll think like, "Oh, yeah, but not important for me." Like for me, what I really need is I just need to learn this new technique. And they are so wired to thinking about the shortcut and the fastest way to improve that having this call out is is just ignored. And so what ends up happening is that they'll spend like three, four, five, six months really struggling to learn and then realize, oh, the reason I can't learn is because I've been blocking my progress. I haven't been practicing for 6 months. I spent 6 months thinking about how to practice, which again is stasis. So the first thing is just to be open-minded. The second thing is to limit your information. So there's this U-shaped distribution of how useful more information is for you. Inverted U. So this is the amount of information that you have and this is how useful that information is for you. When you have very little information on something, so let's say you're learning a new technique. When you don't know how to do the technique at all, you don't know what to do. But as soon as you start learning about the technique, that information is very very useful because you're understanding how you can do that technique. And at a certain point, you reach a level of information where getting more information actually makes it less useful. And this is the point here where you are ready to make your first mistake. this point. Everything along here, this is you getting information to try to avoid mistakes. At a certain point, you will realize, I know enough about this new technique or this new method to just go out there and try to make my first mistake to give it a go. And at that point, you're ready. Like, that's good. No more what ifs, no more, you know, if this happens and questioning. Just do it. Try it. see what happens. That's the best point of information. The issue with again with someone with a fixed mindset is that because there's so much fear about making these mistakes, they're constantly thinking about what mistakes they might make and trying to get more information to avoid those mistakes. And all of this time here is spent not practicing, not getting real world experience, not getting personalized feedback on your own habits and tendencies. Start building a sense for how much information you tend to need before taking action. See where you are on this graph and try to limit the amount of information that you take actively until you're ready to make your first mistake and just build that habit of just trying it, making the mistake. Ironically, I can promise that in the comments of this video, there will be people that are like, "But what if I try to do that and then blah blah, you know, all of this stuff happens." And you know that should be a reflective moment for you if you think about writing that comment. So this is mindset. This is the one that very few people talk about. It's like the most important thing that for most people you need to focus on. Uh and if you don't work on this, it's going to be very hard to develop your deep processing or your self-regulation. On to the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is the one that people think about the most. It's probably the one of all the five dimensions that you are probably pretty good at and that is called retrieval. When you have uh information that's been stored into your long-term memory and then you recall information from your memory. Okay? So, you're recalling information from memory. This could be to uh solve problems. This could be to write an essay. It could be to you know you know answer a quiz question. It could be just you know discussing it or teaching it to someone else. Any form of recall from your memory. This is called retrieval. That's what retrieval is. I just say RT retrieval. Retrieval is really important because retrieval influences your knowledge retention and your fluency. So as soon as you learn anything new and that information goes into your long-term memory, it starts doing this thing called decay, which is basically the amount of information you have and you're able to remember, it starts going down over time, right? This process is called decay. So if your decay is very very fast, it means that you might learn something and then the next day you've already forgotten most of what you learned. And so obviously this is a massive waste of time because then you have to spend all of that time just like constantly relearning the things that you forget. And if you're already studying and learning a lot daytoday, you're going to get overwhelmed and you're just not going to have any time for anything other than just like constantly relearning. So the thing that influences decay is primarily how well you processed it. Right? That's the first thing. Really good deep processing means that your decay is lower. The other thing that you can do probably while you're training your deep processing and so that you you know again because that takes time is that you can top up your memory and the way that you top up your memory is using retrieval right so retrieval allows you to take fading memory top it up freshen it and then once you do the retrieval it decays more slowly so the more times you do this repetition the slower and slower it starts to decay and this is the reason why something like spaced retrieval practice is very effective. Uh it basically means you take something that you've learned and then you test yourself on it. You try to recall it let's say a day or two later and then you try it again uh you know a week later and then a month later or something like that. This is called spaced retrieval and any of you have that have used something like flash cards are very familiar with this. But there is actually much more to retrieval than just recalling it. And that is that the way you recall it and the way that you try to do your retrieval has a really big impact on how effective it is at slowing that decay and how much fluency it builds in terms of your knowledge. So let's say that you are a doctor and you have to learn about this particular type of condition or case or this new cutting edge treatment. Now, if you read all these journal articles and your primary method of remembering that and uh topping up your memory is through just doing flashcards like what's the definition of this word? What was the dosage for this? Then your ability to use that knowledge is going to reflect the way that you practiced retrieving it which was very isolated. So that stuff we were talking about before with deep processing in terms of the isolated integrated thing applies here too. If you consistently keep retrieving information in a way that's isolated, it's going to mean that your ability to retrieve isolated information gets better. But if that's not the way you need to have your expertise, it's not really going to serve you. So you should generally speaking, uh what I say is practice how you play. So think about how you need to actually recall that information in the real world setting for work or for exams and then try to practice recalling it in those different levels going from isolated if you need it to the integrated and you know experimenting with different ways of retrieving this information and hitting it from different angles. Really challenge yourself to see that information and connect it in ways that you didn't before. This process of looking at things from different angles and mixing up the strategies that you use to revise and retrieve that information is a form of what's called interle and it is a uh incredibly effective very evidenced way of optimizing your retrieval and optimizing your mastery and your memory. Now just as a little side note here there are actually uh multiple different types of interle and the way that most people talk about interle is actually not the way that I described it. If you look enough at the research you will find that interle is basically just anytime you hit the knowledge in a different way to simplify it. So how do you know if retrieval is your rate limiter and this is the thing that you really need to work on. The biggest thing is that you are like the first sign is that you're not doing any retrieval. So what this would look like is you learn something for the first time and then that's it. Like you just you never go back to it. You never use it. You never apply that knowledge. It's kind of like a one and done. So in that situation, your knowledge is almost certainly going to decay. You're not going to have retention of it. You're not going to be able to apply that knowledge. So why did you even learn it? That's one example. The next level of this is that you are kind of doing the retrieval, but the quality of the retrieval is very low. How do you know if this is the issue for you? The first thing is that you actually might spend a lot of time on retrieval. This can be problematic because it might mean that the way you are doing the retrieval practice is setting you up for really fast knowledge decay. So this is the phenomenon where you're just constantly relearning things again and again and again. If you're not thinking about the quality of your retrieval and the way that you are trying to use that knowledge and and reintegrate it, then you will require a lot of repetition to get the retention and the fluency that you want. And what you'll probably also find is that you are not able to get the level of fluency or mastery that you need even though you spend all of this time in that you can spend hours and hours and hours doing hundreds or thousands of flashcards but you still struggle with the difficult questions solving the complex problems and using the knowledge in an integrated way. Your retention on factory call might be good but that's it. spending unnecessary time on retrieval and struggling with that deep mastery are both indicators that you are not doing retrieval in an optimized way. And by improving this uh you should be able to save a lot of time on a weekly and monthly basis and you get a lot more bang for buck out of the retrieval that you do do. Now onto the fifth and final dimension. This is called selfmanagement. And self-management is actually nothing to do with learning at all. It is the understanding that learning never happens in isolation. In order to be an effective learner and to do good learning, there are some prerequisites that you need to hit. You need to be able to manage your time. You need to be able to prioritize your tasks. You need to be able to manage your focus and attention and not get distracted every 30 seconds. These are prerequisites. If you don't have these, these become rate limiters. It doesn't matter how good your learning skills are. It doesn't matter how good your retrieval is or your deep processing and how well you self-regulate. If you can't just sit down to do the studying and the learning that you need to do at the time you need to do it at the level of focus and concentration that's required, none of it matters. And because it has such a significant impact on your overall learning ability, that's why this is the fifth core dimension of learning. even though technically it's not actually learning at all. So, what are the red flags? Uh, if self-management is the biggest issue for you, some of the most common ones is that you often feel like you're really busy, but you're not actually still able to get like your important tasks done. Like you are always busy yet still always behind. These indicate that there are issues with your task prioritization or your time management. If you are consistently not able to follow your schedule or you always overchedu and you're having to like reschedu and and manage your tasks and like rearrange things all the time, that's also a red flag. The other thing is obviously if you procrastinate a lot to a level of significance that it's actually stopping you from doing what you need to do. Tied in with that is the high level of distractability. Now, if you have something like ADHD or ASD, uh then self-management often ends up being a really important dimension for you to work on. Even if it's not the most limiting, it ends up being like the second most important. So, how do you improve your self-management? Now, this is uh complicated because it depends on what's holding you back. Like the solution for bad task prioritization is not going to be be the same thing as the solution for, you know, bad focus and and procrastinating. And so, as a coach, when I look at someone that has an overall self-management issue, the first thing that I do, and this is the actionable takeaway for you, is to actually isolate the issue. Be really, really clear about what the issue actually is and nail it down to the specific chain of events or behaviors. The reason that this is the most important thing that you can do to improve your self-management is that once we start labeling entire sets of behaviors with a label like I just get distracted or I just can't focus or I just procrastinate. It doesn't actually help us because it doesn't tell us why it happens. So by isolating it, we're stripping that terminology away. Instead of saying, "I procrastinate all the time," you would say, "When I go to sit down and study, I pick up my phone and then I see the Instagram icon and then I get sucked into doom scrolling for the next hour and then I procrastinate." So, we've isolated the specific behavior and now that gives us something actionable to work on. And we can look at that chain of events and figure out, okay, maybe if I remove the phone, maybe if I use an app blocker, maybe if I, you know, do whatever other type of strategy, maybe if I use some kind of mindfulness meditation so that I'm less likely to be distracted. Uh, we can see that when we apply a certain type of intervention, it's going to have a desired effect. And once you've done that, the second thing that you can do, this is your second key action we'll take away, is to commit to the change. The reason I say commit is because it's technically really easy to solve a lot of these issues. All you need to do is just like go to everyone that you know and say, "Hey, I'm going to like I'm fixing this issue." Like if I if you procrastinate a lot, you're you're going to everyone you're saying, "Hey, I'm quitting procrastinating. I'm not going to procrastinate again." You know, you tell everyone this is it. And then you just commit to it. You say, "Hey, take my phone. I'm going to uninstall all these apps. I'm going to do whatever it Most of us realize that there is a nuclear option that we can take that would allow us to just eradicate the problem if not immediately fairly quickly. And most people are very uncomfortable with taking that approach and really committing to that change. Part of this is because we are addicted to the problem itself. If you're constantly not following your schedule, you're addicted to overpiling your plate. If you're constantly not prioritizing the right tasks, you're addicted to saying yes to everything instead of saying no. Uh if you're constantly getting procrastinated, you're addicted to the procrastination and running away from the discomfort of doing hard work. And it's that mentality that I think ultimately ends up stopping people from making a change with their self-management. It's not that there's no solution, it's that we don't really want the solution. And this is something that I've struggled with myself personally. So I can speak from both professional and personal experience that the hard part is not actually solving issues with self-management. The hard part is actually just committing to make the change. So this all of these were the five dimensions of learning. Um, and if you at this point are feeling like a little overwhelmed, um, and you're not really sure what to do about it, then remember there is that quiz that you can take that will ask you the questions and make it a little bit easier for you. The link to that is in the description. And you probably realize that the videos I upload are about these different dimensions. Or if you are looking for a faster, easier, more guided approach to this where you figure out what's holding you back the most and you systematically work on upgrading each of these dimensions, then I do have a program uh which is a step-by-step curriculum teaching you everything that you need to know about the theory and the principles and the techniques with examples and walkthroughs. Again, I will be posting on YouTube for free about these topics. Uh, but if you are interested in a faster, more guided path, then you might want to check out my program. I'll leave a link to that in the description as well. As always, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.