Tips to Learn Technical Things Faster

Do you read things over and over again? Do you spend most of your time taking notes? Do you actually read the textbooks? So what if I told you you could do that so much faster so you can watch more anime? Hey guys, how's it going? Welcome back to another video. In this video, I'm going to share with you guys my five best study hacks that have saved me so much time over the years. So without further ado, let's go. Study hack number one, active recall. So back in If you're in the library and you're talking to other people, then they will kick you out. But if you're in the library and you're talking to yourself, then they will probably leave you alone and kind of isolate themselves from you as well. Win-win situation. Like for example, if you see my friend Luke over here, would you really want to approach him? This is something I've been doing ever since high school. But then I learned that it's actually a scientifically backed method. It's called active recall, and it's one of the most powerful learning techniques out there. It's actually super simple. All it is is that you're testing yourself. You're forcing yourself to dredge up the information in your brain cells and say it in your own words. And this action, like just doing this activity, strengthens the neural connections in your brain, which results in increased understanding, faster understanding, and also better long-term retention of the information. There's actually a lot of different ways of doing active recall, because all it is is testing yourself, right? So you can be writing down questions and then answering them yourself. But my favorite method is talking to myself. So after I read through something where I learned something, I would talk to myself and summarize what I just learned in my own words. And the reason I do this is just because talking to myself I find is a lot faster than writing questions and testing myself. So yeah, active recall is one of my absolute favorite techniques for learning new content and new concepts. Also, it helps improve your ability to do things and not care what other people thought. Second study hack that has saved me so much time throughout the years is environment design. I have no self-control. Like if there is a cookie that is sitting there, I will 100% go and eat the cookie. And I have accepted that unfortunately, this is just who I am as a person, which is why I spend so much time designing my environment so that I can get myself to do things or like get myself to not do certain things. I first came across this concept of environment design in James Clear's amazing book, Atomic Habits, highly recommend it. The idea is that instead of relying on motivation or willpower, you can actually physically design your environment that incentivizes you, that makes it easier for you to do the good things and makes it harder for you to do the bad things. When I learned about this, I thought this was like the coolest concept ever because it essentially relies on the fact that humans are inherently lazy. So if things are easy to do, then they're more likely to do those things. And if things are hard to do, then they're going to be more likely to not do those things. In Atomic Habits, James Clear gives some examples of research that was done that supported how you can use environment design in order to change behavior. One of the most popular studies was a research study that was done on Google employees in the Google workspace. What they did is that throughout the Google like meal stations, because they have you know free food and free drinks, instead of putting unhealthy drinks like soft drinks in more prominent positions, they simply just switched that out for water. So they didn't advertise anything, they didn't even say anything about it, but they noticed that there was a substantial increase in people picking water over the unhealthy drinks. This is a study that has also been replicated in many many settings. They did this at a bunch of high schools, at different marketplaces, and they all found that by designing the environment so that healthier things are more prominent, people will naturally just choose the healthier thing simply because it's more prominent and it's easier for them to do so. So after I learned about environmental design, I thought this was absolutely amazing. So I started applying it to a lot of different aspects to help me study more effectively and to focus. Something I've mentioned quite a lot on this channel already is my study with Tina livestreams. It has been incredibly effective because I basically designed myself a system where I'm forced to do these study livestreams and to study, even if I don't feel like it, because the idea of disappointing people by not showing up is so strong. So I just you know end up end up going and just studying. Another example of environment design that I started using more recently is literally a timed lockbox. And exactly how it sounds, it's a box that locks and you can set the amount of time that it locks for. In order to focus better and not be distracted by stuff, I would put distracting things like primarily my phone into the lockbox and lock it for a certain period of time. And since I don't have anything to distract myself anymore, it's much easier for me to sit down and focus on study. I tried intermittent fasting for quite a few times like on and off throughout the years and sometimes I get it going for a couple weeks, maybe even a month, but then I kind of always fall off and I stop doing it. But after getting this lockbox, what I do is I lock away junk food and I also got a set of these fridge locks, which are literally locks that you put on your fridge. So usually to prevent your pets or your kids from getting to the fridge, but I get it for myself. So I got these fridge locks and I would lock away my fridge and put the keys of the locks into the lockbox and set it so that it doesn't open until 12pm, which is when my fast ends. And this has been incredibly helpful because I don't rely on motivation, I don't rely on willpower, since I have literally no food. And another environment design thing that I do that has been really helpful in my studying is I force myself to leave my house and go to a nearby library. And when I go to that library and there's nothing really distracting me, there's only like books and other people studying, that makes it a lot easier for me to also start studying and concentrate. So what I've noticed in the more recent years is that a lot of learning platforms and learning courses, like the best learning platforms, the best learning courses, have actually started incorporating these study hacks into their curriculum themselves. And I think that is absolutely Brilliant, who is also the sponsor of today's video. Thank you Brilliant! So Brilliant is a specialized STEM learning platform that is all about interactive hands-on learning. The top tip for learning and reviewing stats and math in order to pass data science interviews is actually to use Brilliant. And this is not just people recommending it on Reddit, like the companies themselves, actually a lot of them, recommend using Brilliant as well. And it's not surprising because it's just so effective for learning STEM subjects with interactive problem-based learning. Even now when I'm not doing interviews, I'm still using Brilliant to both learn new STEM subjects and to review them, especially math and stats, which I just have a tendency of forgetting. They have foundational timeless courses like math and stats, programming with Python, which you all know I highly highly recommend programming. It's like, I think it's like the best skill that you can possibly pick up. And on top of these foundational courses, they also have more advanced newer course topics like neural networks, cryptocurrency, and quantum computing. You can join the millions of people who are already learning at Brilliant today and head on over to this link over here, also linked in description, to start for free. If you go through my link, the first 200 people will get 20% off an annual membership. All right, back to the video. Study hack number three, rotating between the diffuse and the focused mindset. Have you ever been studying or like solving a problem and you're like super focused and you're just staring at it and like banging your head against the wall because you just can't figure it out? This happens to me all the time, especially when I'm coding. In these situations, what I do is like force myself to get off the desk and go for a walk around the block. And then when I come back again, it's like miraculously, I suddenly figure out how to solve the problem. This is actually a thing. It's like an evidence-based scientific phenomenon that has been shown over and over again in research studies. The idea of this diffuse and this focus mindset is something that was popularized by Barbara Oakley in her really famous book and course, Learning How to Learn. The focus mindset or focus thinking is very concentrated and it depends on established neural pathways and existing thought patterns. It's kind of like when you're really zoned into something, right? Like you're really concentrated and like focused on doing a single thing. This mindset is really good for familiar problems and really focused productive execution. This graph over here shows what focus thinking looks like. You can see how the thought is concentrated in specific areas that already have these established neural pathways, so they're all next to each other. On the other hand, diffuse thinking is the opposite of focus thinking and this is when you're allowing your imagination and your subconscious to just kind of run by itself and you're able to make these connections between different parts of your brain, like different concepts, different ideas, and that's how it comes together and you come up with these innovative solutions and innovative breakthroughs. Okay, now that we talked about what diffuse mindset and what focus mindset mean, let's go back to the example from earlier. What generally happens to me is like I'm really focused on executing some code, right? Like I'm solving that problem, I'm just coding away and then suddenly I run into this issue that I haven't seen before and I don't know how to solve it. So the best thing to do over here is to not like stare at it and try to solve that issue, but to go out for something like a walk. So when you're walking along, you're, you know, like smelling the flowers or like some ---- like that and your brain is still subconsciously processing, like in that diffuse thinking mode, and making all these connections which then will result in these innovative solutions, like innovative ways of solving that issue. And that's why when you come back from your walk, it almost feels like the solution magically appeared in your head, even though your subconscious brain was working on it without your conscious understanding to come up with that solution in the end. On a hardcore day of studying, which for me is maximum of four hours, like that's as long as I can concentrate for, I would be switching between a diffuse and a focused mindset like five to six times. Study hack number four, interleaving. Interleaving is when you're mixing together things that you're studying, like different topics and different subjects, instead of like focusing on one thing at a time. For example, when I was learning about personal finance during my study routine live streams, I would alternate different topics like budgeting or like investing. It may sound kind of counterintuitive, but there's actually a lot of research that shows that interleaving is a more effective study method than if you just focus on studying one thing and trying to like study all of that before moving on to the next thing. And that's for a couple different reasons. The first one is that it kind of forces you to differentiate between the different things that you're studying. It's called similarity and difference differentiation. Because you have to between what one topic is from the other, that kind of forces you to be more active in your learning. And the more active it is in your learning, the deeper your understanding is and the better your retention is. The second reason is related to what we talked about earlier, the act of recall. By interleaving different subjects and you go back to a certain subject, it forces you to retrieve that information from your brain, like you judge that information from your brain again. And that deepens the neural connections and allows you to retain the information better and also have deeper understanding. Research has shown that these benefits of interleaving is especially good for subjects that involve problem solving. I'll also link a couple resources below that go into more details about why interleaving works and how it actually works. But with interleaving though, I do want to give some caveats and some tips on how to use it properly because I do find that sometimes people think that they're using interleaving but they're actually not using it properly. The first one is that you shouldn't switch between topics too often. Then that becomes multitasking and multitasking is really really bad and really detrimental to your ability to study and to learn information. At least have like an hour or two between switching topics. For me, I generally prefer focusing on one subject per day and then interleaving with another subject the other day. The second tip is that you shouldn't be using interleaving at the very beginning when you're learning something. When you're first starting out, it's better for you to stick to one thing for a little bit so you do have some baseline before you start interleaving. The third tip is that if you want to take advantage the most of interleaving, you should be interleaving subjects that are relatively similar to each other. For example, when I was studying that personal finance, I was interleaving investment and budgeting. With that being said though, I do find that even if you interleave very different subjects, it still does benefit. It just doesn't benefit as much. Plus it kind of just helps if you're the kind of person that gets bored easily. Study hack number five, priming. This is one of my absolute favorite methods, especially these days when I'm learning things that are more problem-solving based. The definition of priming is to introduce new content before actually learning it. It's pretty interesting because priming is all about looking at something that you're going to be learning that you haven't actually learned yet. It's helpful for a few different reasons. The first reason is that by looking at the content ahead of time, you're able to understand the structure of the content and the way in which the content will be presented. And by having this in your head, when you're actually learning the information, you're able to kind of like organize that and put that in the correct places, which helps you understand that information better. The second reason is that by browsing through and looking at the content beforehand, you're able to see like the keywords or like the core themes that are jumping out at you, even if you don't know like what they mean at that point. So when you go back and start learning the information, you're able to focus especially on the things that stand out the most. And the third reason that matters a lot to me is when I do priming, I get more excited and more motivated because I see the information or like the end result I could be getting if I learn everything. For my current blockchain course, what I've done is I skim through all the content and actually started the capstone project, like the end project, the final project, before learning most of the material. I sort of do like reverse engineering and go in reverse order. So I start doing the project and obviously I run into issues because I don't actually know what it is that I'm doing at that point. So then I would go back to that section and then learn that section and then do that project. And I find that in this way, it's a lot more engaging. It also focuses on implementation because for technical stuff, implementation is really, really different from the concepts itself. Plus, I find that also helps me learn a lot faster because I don't get stuck on the details that are not relevant to the final implementation, which is what I care about the most. Alright, so that's all I have for you guys today. Let me know in the comments which of these you've tried before or what you're interested in trying now that you've learned more about it. And I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.