Give Me 18 Minutes, and You’ll Learn Faster Than 99.9% of People

So the topic of today is the simplest ways of learning faster. I'm going to give you two methods to anchor onto, and I call these the two simplest methods because there are many ways to learn faster, and there are lots of different learning strategies and lots of different learning techniques. Some of these techniques are very difficult to learn. Yes, it's very fast, but it takes a long time to get good enough to use it. Some of these techniques are so easy that you almost can't get it wrong, and you can pick it up pretty much instantly, and it gives you an immediate benefit. These are two of what I think are my favorites. Before I get into that, though, there are two ways of thinking about learning faster. One of them is much more common, and this is really if you're thinking about learning faster in this way, it's going to make it much harder for you to improve. And the other way is the more correct way, and so that's the first thing that I want to get into, and then I'll go through the actual methods. So let's say that you are here. This is your current level of ability, and you're trying to get to this point here, where you are able to learn faster. As I said, I'll give you two methods on how to do this in a bit. But what's important is to understand that most people waste most of their time here. The techniques exist. The techniques are not hard to use. Most people never get around to actually using these techniques. They waste most of their time just trying to find the right technique. And the reason they're not able to find it is because the criteria for what is a good technique for learning faster is incorrect. When I say the word faster, there are a couple ways that you can interpret this word. The first way you can interpret this is purely speed. This is how much material can I cover in a certain amount of time. If you have a technique that allows you to cover a lot of material in a very short amount of time, most people would say that's a fast learning method. That's the one that you want to learn. Whereas if I said, hey, it's going to take you twice as long to cover this material in the same amount of time, would you want to learn that one instead? And most people, intuitively, they're not going to want to use that technique that takes twice as long to cover the material. Some of you will know where I'm going with this, which is that there is another way of thinking about speed, which I like to call time to outcome. Time to outcome is vastly superior in terms of the speed that really matters for you, the real outcome that you're trying to achieve. Let's say that you have certain volume of material that you need to cover. That is this yellow box. This is the total volume that you need to learn. When you measure based on speed and your metric is how much can you cover, then what you're looking at is when I sit down to cover this volume of material, how long does that take? If this is fast, then we call this a fast technique. However, just because you've covered it doesn't mean that you've reached the outcome that you need to reach. So if you are studying for an exam, which is you know just the most easy frame for why you might be learning something, it doesn't mean that just because you've covered it, you're actually going to do well on the exam, right? Because obviously on top of this, there is this need for rehearsal. Rehearsal is you going over that material over and over again. It's you relearning the things that you forgot. It's finding the gaps. It's realizing that you didn't quite understand something in the right way and reaching a higher level of mastery. It's testing yourself and realizing that you're not thinking about it deeply enough. You don't know how two things relate to each other in the way that it needs to. Those of you that are learning not for an exam but for the workplace to upskill for your career, tackling a new project, a new set of responsibilities, this is primarily the gap that you're trying to reach. Covering the material is really just the the very very very first out of a hundred steps. And so most of the time that really matters is sunk in this part here, the rehearsal. And this is where time to outcome makes a difference. Time to outcome says what is the Total amount of time that you need to spend in order to reach the outcome that you need to reach, whether that's an exam or an upskilling for work or whatever it is. Whereas speed, often people think about it just percentage how much you cover, and the reason this is important is because most of the methods that allow you to reach the outcome in a shorter period of time have a slower coverage speed. So you're covering material a little bit slower, but you're saving time overall by needing less of the rehearsal and you're doing less repeating. You're able to reach higher levels of understanding more quickly. This is super important because I can teach you the technique and I can I can teach you what the right method is. And most people just want to know what's the method that's going to allow me to cover 100 pages as quickly as possible. And if that's the way you're thinking about it, I may as well not teach you at all because those methods are not really going to move the needle for you. I remember coaching one of my students who's a doctor actually, studying for the specialist training exams. And one week she comes on to this call and says, "I'm getting really worried because it's taking me twice as long to cover it. Like my schedule says that I'm meant to have covered all of this stuff by last week, but but right now like I'm only halfway through it. I'm really worried about it." So I said, "Okay, that sounds concerning. Let's break it down. What's your level of retention? What's the level of mastery that you're reaching?" And she said, "Okay, well I've spent 10 hours studying this. My retention at the moment is pretty good. It's like 80%, and the mastery of it is really high, but it's just so slow." I said, "Okay, let's compare this to before." And she was like, "Oh, my baseline was that I normally have around 80 to 90% retention as well, but the mastery was much lower. So there was 80 to 90% retention, but really just about fact recall. And when it came to really the the more complicated problems and the more complicated cases, she was meant to be be able to work through. She said that she was never really able to do that. She would spend weeks trying to figure that out and wrap her head around it, talking to her seniors and supervisors to to figure that out. I said, so right now, do you feel that your ability to do that is better than it was before?" And she was like, "Yes, like I've literally never felt that I was able to think at that level before." So this is the situation where you really have to be comparing apples with apples. If you're comparing a technique that was really fast, giving you good retention, but that retention is only at the low level, and it's taking you essentially like an infinite amount of time, no matter how long you spend, you're still not able to reach that top level. Then that is a method that is just not effective. It it doesn't actually matter how fast you're going because it's not even getting you the result that you need. The first thing is to use a method that gets you the result that you need, and then find a way to make that faster. And this is what I communicated to her. We worked on speeding that up. Eventually, the efficiency did come. She just got used to that process a bit more. The later half of the schedule was just on revision and testing, and we didn't need half of that time anymore because we're forgetting less and there were less gaps to cover. So that's the goal. That's the goal that you guys should have. If that's not the goal, I think it's going to be really difficult to really improve your improve your learning speed. So let's move on to the two methods. The first method is just to increase your frequency of prediction errors because this is super super important. And like I said, it's such a simple method. Literally anyone can do this. A prediction error is basically a signal that tells your brain that you need to learn it in a different way, uh, in a better way, in a more accurate way. And the prediction error that signal drives deep understanding and strengthens your memory. A prediction error occurs when you number one. Make a prediction about something, and number two, you realize you were wrong. So let's say that I am opening up and reading a book. The first thing that I will normally do is scan through, look at some of the keywords and headings. I now have a basic understanding about the main ideas that are going to be communicated in this in this book chapter or the next few pages. I don't have a deep understanding. I don't really know what the the main point is going to be, but I at least have an understanding about what the terminology is, what the keywords are, if there are learning objectives or reading the learning objectives, and I have a better idea about maybe the direction that we're going to take. At that point, I will pause. I will not just start reading. I will pause, and I will take those list of words or those learning objectives, and I will make predictions. I will ask myself, what do I predict the point is going to be about? What do I think it's going to teach me? Even if I have absolutely no idea what these words are or what they mean, even if the terminology is completely foreign, you can always make a guess. That's all you do, and then you go and just read it, and then you learn about it. And most likely, most of your predictions will be wrong. And therefore, you've created a prediction error. It's just the easiest thing to do, just predict, be wrong, automatically. By virtue of having tried your best to predict and being wrong, that signal goes back to your brain and it reinforces that memory. And in terms of why this happens, that gets a little bit complicated. But a lot of the benefit comes down to the way you do the prediction. So you do have to try your best to make the prediction as best as you can. Don't randomly make a prediction that you don't even think is remotely close to being right. You do want to think about being logical. Try your best to work through the ideas, drawing on whatever knowledge you have. This process forces you to draw on existing connections. It forms a network with the knowledge, and then that becomes the base template that your brain can build on as accurate information arrives. Hey there, I hope you're enjoying the video. I just wanted to point out that this process of making prediction errors is a continuous process. So as you're learning, you should be making a prediction error, realizing you're wrong, updating your understanding, and going to make your next round of prediction errors. So as you keep learning, each prediction you make gets more and more detailed because you are amassing more knowledge about the topic. It's not just that you make one big round of prediction at the beginning and then that's it for the rest of your study session. I also want to point out that this concept about making prediction errors is something that I go through in a little bit more detail and with some practical examples in my free weekly newsletter. The newsletters are pretty short emails that get sent into your inbox every week where I cover one particular insight or concept or perspective that I think is really transformative for either the way that you learn, the way that you think, or your ability to stay in flow. Every newsletter has something practical for you to take away and practice for the week. So you want to make sure that you're getting all of these insights and strategies. And not worry about missing some of my video uploads. Then make sure to join the newsletter. I'll leave a link for you in the description below. But anyway, let's continue on with the video. The second method ties in really well with the idea of making prediction errors, and this is multipass encoding. It sounds very fancy, but it is also extremely easy. Multipass encoding just means don't try and learn or even understand everything the first time you go through a passage, text, or video, or or any kind of material. Instead, go through and only spend time and attention on the things that feel easy enough to understand. This method is extremely easy because it literally defines by what you find easy. Here's what's happening inside your brain. Your brain has an existing set of networks. This network is essentially your existing knowledge. One of the most influential predictors of how quickly someone is able to learn something, how easily they can learn it, how long they will remember and retain something for, is how much prior knowledge they already have about it. So there's quite famous study that was done looking at baseball. They got a group of I think it was students. They got a group of students. Some of these students knew a lot about baseball, and some of them didn't know anything about baseball. They then assessed their reading ability, and they divided the students into those with high reading ability versus those with low reading ability. So high reading ability means that you can normally read faster and be a comprehension is better. When you're reading, you have more active reading skills. They gave a passage about baseball to the students, and what they found was that students already knew about baseball. Have the highest level of performance of all. You could have knowledge about baseball and have a low reading ability, and you will still outperform the person with high reading ability, but no knowledge about baseball. So compared to reading ability, knowledge about baseball was more important. The story here is that prior knowledge is incredibly powerful point of leverage. The thing is that most people don't think about prior knowledge as something that they can control. Prior knowledge is in your control. Prior knowledge is not like experience in the CV. You know this means words like looking for entry level role, new graduate must have thirty five years of experience and seven degrees. That's not what prior knowledge is about. Prior knowledge can be built on. You have to choose to build on it. So because we all have some body of existing knowledge, that means that there are certain things that are easier to connect to, that we recognize a little bit easier than other pieces of information. There could be some kind of concept that you've never heard before, you have absolutely no idea what it is, you have you haven't even heard of anything remotely similar to this. So that's going to be way out here. That's going to be really hard for you to connect to. So connect to it, skim through and find the parts that are easier to understand. The things that are closer to your existing body of knowledge. And what naturally happens is that eventually your knowledge expands. You now have more prior knowledge than you did before. That's your first pass. Your second pass, you just go through it again. And now the things that didn't make sense for you were really complicated, very technical, very overwhelming. Now you understand what it's talking about. It's easier to think about. In fact, you may even be curious about what it's talking about because you have more prior knowledge. And so the thing that was previously out of reach eventually, maybe on the second or third pass, becomes just as easy to understand as the first pass. Every step on a staircase is the same distance from the previous step. If you try to jump to the second story and one go, that's going to be very difficult. That's going to be very overwhelming to try and do. But as long as you're looking for the next step, you will eventually just get to that, and it will be no more difficult than the first thing. This is multi-pass encoding. It's actually deliberately ignoring information that doesn't make sense to you. When you go through for the first time, something that's very technical, most of the information you will skip because you don't, you just don't have enough prior knowledge to make sense of it easily. And that's totally fine. Go back to the beginning. Now maybe an additional ten or twenty percent starts becoming relevant. Then go back to the beginning, and you will find that suddenly a lot of stuff feels relevant because just having a little bit of prior knowledge does key anchor point gives you so many more possible ways to connect that new information. It becomes exponentially easier. And the great thing about this method actually is that it's actually potentially faster, or at least just as fast as the normal speed it would have taken you. Because even though you're doing it two or three times, going over the material, the time you spend on each pass is much shorter. Whereas in the normal way, where you kind of start at the beginning and you just slog your way through to the end, because you don't understand it, you're reading that paragraph again and again and again, and you're reading it very slowly, and you're trying to figure it out, and then you do that, and by the end of it, you still don't remember it, you still don't understand it, because it's just too much, it's just overwhelming. So your speed when you're trying to understand everything all at once in linear order is very slow, and it's just very ineffective. Your speed when you do multi-pass is much faster, and it's more effective. So that's multi-pass encoding. You can see how it fits into the prediction error really well because you just read a little bit, you make a prediction about it, then you learn whether you were right or wrong, then you find the next part that's sort of relevant. So every pass you're going through, you're making tiny little prediction errors along the way. These two methods are enough to really tangibly change your efficiency of learning, and you can apply that straight away. When I'm reading a book, I want to be able to learn and extract as much as I can as efficiently as I can, without like having to sit there and desk and read like study it. So in terms of like reading, but techniques that I use consistently every day, every week, this is seventy percent of my toolkit over the years become effective enough that I've stopped doing other things. It's just become unnecessary, and it allows me to have a really slim, flexible way of learning material where I know that I can pretty much learn anything pretty fast just by using these two methods alone. So I don't want to overwhelm you with too many other things. Obviously, I have like hundreds of other videos where I talk about other strategies which you can layer onto this. But if you take nothing else away, I'll just say focus on these two strategies first and get good at this.