How to LEARN More in LESS Time (10 Minute Method)

I've coached over 20,000 students and learners from across the world, and I wanna share with you one technique that can boost your learning efficiency by up to 50% permanently. This learning technique is called schema priming. Now, most people either don't know about this technique or they use it incorrectly. So in this video, I'll explain what schema priming is, and I'll give you three steps to do this correctly and level up your learning forever. So what is schema priming and why does it help? Anytime information comes into your brain and you want to remember it and understand it so that you can use it for something, your brain is trying to do two things. First of all, understand what it is that's coming in. Secondly, understand how it fits. And for learning, the second part is the most important. One of the most important things that your brain does is that it prunes and filters out what information is worth keeping and what information to discard. Your brain's gonna make that decision based on how related it is to what it already knows, how related it seems to be to other things that you're learning. It's gonna see, if I get rid of this, what is the impact that it's going to have? And so it's very difficult for your brain when it's receiving lots of new information at the same time to, first of all, understand it and then figure out where it fits simultaneously. And this is basically what schema priming is. The schema is the big picture. It's how things fit together in some kind of order where one thing impacts another thing. It's a web of ideas and concepts. This is how your memory is structured. So something that's not in the web is just gonna fall away and be forgotten. So in order to have a memory that's not leaking and fading very quickly, you have to actively form that schema. Most people either form the schema much later or they think it happens automatically, but that doesn't really work. When you try to do it later, it's much harder, it's more overwhelming because there's just more things you need to organize at once. And also because your memory would have been poor up until that point where you organized it, you've forgotten half of what you learned anyway. So now you have to spend extra time sort of reconsuming that information. And also it doesn't just happen automatically. It doesn't matter how well you understand it. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat it or try to memorize it. If you're not actively trying to create a network, it doesn't happen very effectively. So schema priming is basically saying, let's form that schema upfront so that later when you're doing your study, you're in a lecture, when you're listening to more information come in, your brain just has to focus on what it is and understand it. And it already has an idea about where it fits. It's much easier for it to organize that information. And schema priming is something that can be done very, very quickly. You can do this entire process in 10 minutes. Step one, scope the topic. It's really hard to organize things if you don't know what you're organizing. It's kind of like me saying, hey, organize the books in this library, but you don't actually know what books are in the library. The idea with the scoping is that you're getting a lay of the land. You're going through the topic that you're about to learn. You're picking out the main ideas and you're just creating like basic main pillars of concepts and basic scaffolds of networks. And I recommend that you do three things as part of scoping the topic. The first is syntopical reading. Syntopical reading is a technique that involves not just reading, for example, one book at a time, but you look at all of the resources you need to consume and you read all of them widely simultaneously. That doesn't mean like opening all of them and like casting your eye like frantically across everything. It means that you're reading through multiple sources and getting the right information you need from the right source. So let's say you've got some lecture slides and a textbook. Syntopical reading means you'd go through the lecture slides, pick out the main ideas, and then you also go through the textbook to pick out main ideas from that and then combine them together. It's basically saying there are important things and perspectives from one source that might not be in another source and you don't wanna miss it. The second thing that helps with this is smart skimming. If you've got that textbook, it's an overwhelming amount of information. You can't read through a textbook in 10 minutes and scope the topic. Smart skimming means you're actively looking for the things that seem the most important. So these are the headings and the subheadings. If there's an important diagram, bolded words, you're being very selective about what information you're looking for and then you're ignoring the rest. You can come back to that later. And the final step, which a lot of people miss, is detail coding. Different pieces of information have different types of details at a different level of depth. So a really thick textbook might go into meticulous granular detail on a topic, whereas some lecture slides might be very superficial or a YouTube video might be somewhere in between. As you're going through these different sources as you scope the topic, have an idea about what type of detail and what type of answers you can find in different sources so that later when you're trying to figure out something, you know where to look for it. So this is the first step of schema priming. And while schema priming is powerful, I wanna mention before I go into the second step that schema priming is just one part of a full, complete learning system. So if you wanna learn how good you already are at schema priming and learn about the other things that you should do to build out your learning system, then I've got a free quiz that you can take. It asks you a bunch of questions about your current learning methods and it gives you a score out of 100 for each domain so that you know which areas are holding you back from success. The quiz is free and I'll leave a link in the description for you to check out. Now let's move on to the next step. Step two, make judgments and hypotheses. While you scope the topic, you're gonna collect all these different ideas. But just because you've collected ideas doesn't mean that you're forming that schema. That's an active step. And so in order to build a schema that's actually connected, we should start comparing and contrasting ideas with each other. If you know one concept influences or impacts another concept, make a judgment on how important that influence is. This forces you to think about ideas together and in the context of a bigger picture. Making hypotheses means that you don't have to be certain about how important something is or how things are related together. It's just a hypothesis. We've only spent a few minutes thinking about this. You're not gonna get it right first go. We're just trying to give our brain a head start on how to think about this topic and how it might be related together. So it's easier to do that type of thinking and processing later on when we do go in full of detail. So focus on how to think about this topic, not what to remember. And then step three, prep your future self. This is like a supercharged, actually useful version of highlighting. Because we're only spending a short amount of time exploring this topic and making some general hypotheses and judgments, you're gonna start thinking about a lot of unknowns. You think these two things are connected together, but you're not sure. And as you scope the topic, you're gonna get a sense for which parts of the topic feel more complicated. And instead of going through it right now, we're gonna set some flags. We're gonna note that this is an area which is really complicated. And we can do that just by creating a few questions where when we read that question in the future, it reminds us of, hey, there was this stuff that we thought was really complicated. And this helps your brain just keep within that schema perspective, even when you're getting down into the details later. In addition to setting these flags in the areas that are more unknown and potentially more complicated, you also want to actively find problems. Look for things in the topic that don't seem to really make sense. These become like mental targets for you to focus on when you're learning it later. You might've said, hey, this concept is meant to lead to this concept, but I don't see how that works. It doesn't make sense to me. Which means later when you learn it in more detail, you can think, oh, this didn't make sense before. And it helps your brain be more critical and think through that information in a more focused way. And so all of these things are just helping your brain to do more effective processing instead of it being overwhelmed by trying to do the what to think about and the how to think about it at the same time. Now, before I said that a lot of people don't do this correctly. So how do you know if you have done it correctly? Well, there's three key indicators you can keep in mind. The first one is just time. This is a fast process, five, 10 minutes, maximum you spend like 30 minutes. It should not take you longer than this. And if it does take you longer, it probably means you're going into too much detail or focusing too much on what to remember instead of just how to think about it. The second thing is how comfortable you feel with the topic. For a lot of people, they've never actively tried to form a schema. And so this process can feel uncomfortable at first, but after doing it correctly, you should feel that even though you don't know a lot about the topic, you still feel quite comfortable with learning about it because you already know how to think. It's that sensation of, I don't know what the puzzle piece I'm gonna pick up next will look like, but I know that I'll be able to look at it and put it somewhere that makes sense. And the third thing is the type of knowledge you have. If you've done it correctly, you should have a good big picture understanding. You should not have memorized definitions or be able to explain concepts in detail. If you are able to do that, it's not like you've done it better. You've actually done it wrong because you're focused on building knowledge and isolation and depth instead of widely and superficially, but more connected. Doing schema priming before you learn any new topic can significantly and immediately boost your retention and how much you remember, how comfortable you are with the topic, even how engaging the process of learning is. Now, if you wanna continue to refine your technique and you wanna take your learning skills to the next level, then I recommend checking out this video here. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.