How CEOs Need to Learn

What I wanted to do today in the session was very interactive. My objective is to optimize whatever learning processes that any of you have based on your needs and it's a fully transferable skill. So even if you're learning different things or learning in a different setting, at the end of the day, all of that external stuff is going to come into your brain. It's just going to be data in and as soon as data comes into your brain, everything homogenizes. It's basically the same stuff that happens and so the structure that I want to take is first of all identifying what type of learning scenarios and needs do you have and then mapping that against what would you love learning to be like. So for example, maybe you don't say you've got a problem with learning per se, but maybe you would love if you could learn like this and then what we'll do is map out the existing sort of process that you're using and we've got limited time so in that time, I'll just focus in on what I would think would be the highest impact thing that you could make a change in that would immediately improve your efficiency of learning and just a little bit of the theory around it so that when you leave here, you've got some first principles to fall back on and start being the mechanic of your own brain. I think a lot of the time when we're learning, if there's a problem with the learning, we have no real way of tackling it per se because it's not very clear what part of it is producing the result. There's so many things going on in the learning process. All we have is this binary idea that sometimes it kind of works well and sometimes it doesn't work as well and then we can often have these ideas like I'm just not good at this type of thinking. I'm just not good at this type of topic or subject or you know I just struggle to think about that. I can never remember this type of thing, but actually those assumptions are most likely just a symptom of a method that was not correctly optimized and so the idea is not let's take you from like being absolutely terrible to being decent. It's going from being already pretty decent to absolutely weaponizing what works for you and just eliminating every fraction of something that does not work and just removing friction. So with your underlying question here, do you think that it's about optimizing for each person and each person's got a different learning style or is there an ideal path? The way that I like to explain this is with the example of a banana. A banana is like I don't know like 50% genetically identical to like a human being. All human beings have a brain that is 99.9999% pretty much the same. The individual variation happens in the very very small fraction. So there is individual variation that is important and optimizing that is important as well, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, the biggest high yield thing that can be improved is actually something that is fundamental that is basically the same for all people. Once the fundamentals are done, then we start fine-tuning and that's where it gets a little bit more complex and a lot of the individualization. The idea of people having different learning styles is not really something that is we don't really consider that scientific anymore. It's been sort of disproven for the last few decades, but there is definitely learning preferences and that you know people tend to like learning in a certain way, but those learning preferences are usually formed from prior experiences and what they feel comfortable and competent with, but research is also quite strong in saying that if you develop competencies with other learning styles, so your preferences are of a wider range. We just like to do what works for us. So it basically just equips you with more weapons. So for example, a common thing would be, I mean how many of you listen to like an audible or something? A lot of people really struggle with what they do with that new information that comes in because a lot of that information they're thinking about and think this is very useful and then it's like, well if I'm driving I can't like, do I pull over or do I like quickly like draw something out? I just try to like hold on to that or sometimes you can feel like, oh I don't need to write this down. I'm going to remember this. It's just, you know, it just clicks and it just stays there, but sometimes you think there's a chance that by the time I finish this drive, that particular point, I just don't have it locked in at that level that I want it to. Well sometimes, especially how many of you read like multiple things simultaneously? It's not just like necessarily one audio book, but it's like an audio book and maybe you've got a book about that topic on the side or an article that you read that's, you know, related to that topic. Yeah, it's pretty common, I think. So when we're doing that type of information consumption, a very common thought is, oh that like reminds me of this thing that I've read in this other book and it's like, it's obviously related together and there's this kind of comparison, but without the skill to take that and then fully consolidate that into your knowledge, there's a lot of kind of efficiency that's lost there. So the way that I like to say it is, if you imagine that everything that you learned, that you thought, oh I should hold on to this, you could just hold on to it and then what you held on to was at the level where it is fully integrated and connected, so you're able to use that information fluidly and omnidirectionally, not just like I held on to it because I thought about it every 20 seconds for this drive. That is sort of the ideal situation. It's not necessarily always possible to get to that ideal situation, but you can get pretty close. Does that answer your question in a very long way? Yeah. Okay, cool. So let's just start off with identifying some of the learning tasks that you tend to engage in. So it can really be anything. It doesn't have to be like the biggest, most important one, but just something that's relevant for your life. What are the things that you'd like to learn? What are the things that you want to learn? The learning challenges, potentially if you know that there are barriers or things, and just note a few of them down. What about the other way around? What if I'm, like I'm really interested in how to teach better, to apply some of these methodologies to my students? There is overlap. There's shared ground. And that if you really understand how knowledge works and how it interacts in the brain, that fundamentally changes how you think you should present it. I will talk about a few principles with regards to how you communicate information that is more likely to cognitively optimize it in someone else's brain without them doing the work. So even if they are not optimized in their ability to take information in, there are ways that you could present it that force them to think about it in a certain way that would sort of hijack their own pathways. I'll talk about that a little bit. It's a very deep topic, so I'm not going to cover it in depth, but I'll definitely touch on it. So the next part would be to start mapping out what the learning process kind of looks like. So we're really diving into something that we call metacognition right now, which is the thinking about thinking. Just like if you're sort of driving a car, and the analogy that I give is that if I'm driving along, and then I'm driving and I just think like something about the engine just does not sound right. Like it doesn't, you know, something feels a little bit off, and I'm listening to it, I'm thinking that's not how it should be, it's rattling a little bit, there's a little bit of like, I'm feeling a bit more vibration at the wheel, I'm going to pull over, I'm going to open up the hood, I'm going to look inside, and I'm going to think I actually don't know anything about cars. So I'm just going to close the lid, I'm going to ignore that, and I'm just going to say this is just how my car drives now. And I'll take it to a mechanic, but if that mechanic is hard to come by, then it's just you drive a car that rattles now, and that just becomes how it is. So becoming the mechanic of your own learning is something that I think is very, very important. When you open the hood, you know what you're looking at. So let's start mapping out what the learning process is, and try to be specific. So we take it in terms of this, information comes in, okay, that's going to interact with your brain, and then inside the brain, things are going to happen. And I want you to try to be specific about what is happening in your brain. So it could be things that you are observing, you notice, you tend to think about certain things, or it could be things that you are actively consciously trying to do when information comes in, and it'll be a combination of both. And then information is going to be outputted, and the term we use for this is that that information is going to be retrieved, and we also want to think about the types of retrieval. When I do this talk, and I talk to students, they have a lot of what we call lower order retrieval requirements, which is just what is the definition, what does the terminology mean, all this sort of stuff. For most of us in this room, that level of retrieval is almost completely obsolete in our lives now. You either just look it up, or it's someone else's job to know what that means, right? And that's just not a good investment of time, and that's not the learning that we really struggle with. So when we're thinking about retrieval, what we're also looking at is the order of retrieval, and specifically we're looking at higher order of retrieval. So a higher order of retrieval would mean that you're retrieving the information primarily, this is the hallmark of higher order retrieval, is that that information is almost never retrieved in isolation. That information is usually paired with something else, there's a comparison, there is an application, there's a context. So if you think about the way that you tend to use information that you learn, the question that I'll put out is, do you feel that the majority of that retrieval happens in a way that that information is never retrieved in isolation? Right? We would agree with that. There may be the odd exception to that would be what we call mid-order. So what mid-order retrieval would be is the application of a singular isolated piece of information for a very specific circumstance. So that is also what we would be considering as isolated information retrieval. So that would be, for example, if there's a very, very specific problem that you have to solve, so you learn a very specific thing about that problem directly, and then the way you retrieve it is purely within that context. So that's the odd exception to it. But again, it's fairly rare. So like higher order is going to be more like pattern recognition, this is similar to this other thing, whereas the mid-order is very specific, it's like, no, no, I've seen this exact thing before. I like that you bring up pattern recognition, because when we say something is a pattern, in order for us to recognize that something is a pattern, we need to be able to see how it, sort of the structure that it creates, it has to have that familiarity. So pattern recognition is kind of a different thing, because you can have pattern recognition for an isolated thing, you can have pattern recognition for a broader thing. What is going to determine whether it's pattern recognition or not is how familiar it is to you. So you can be isolated for something that's totally new or something that's familiar, and you can be broad and multi-connected and integrative in the thinking for something that is new or familiar. Pattern recognition is more of like an efficiency, time-saving tendency of the brain, it just uses less energy. Yeah, exactly. It's a heuristic, it's what we often call system one thinking. Okay, so let's use this, and let's just try to map out what are we doing at each of these processes, and we want to be metacognitive about this in terms of what are the thoughts that are going on in our head. So when information is coming in, what are we doing with that information in a variety of contexts, and be as specific as to when a new thought or a new concept enters your brain for the first time. For example, like right now, what is the thought process that is going on immediately? Start from the earliest possible moment that you have awareness of that thought. So the first thing I do whenever information comes in is I do a two-part filtering process. The first one is like, is this important? The second one is, how can I simplify this and distill it down to the only part that I'm going to need? Okay, good. I'm going to build off of that in a second. Let's look at a few more ideas. My first step is, a little bit before that actually, maybe a lot before that, is just asking myself, do I comprehend this information? Is this something I fully understand? I ask myself some questions like, how does this actually apply to my life or a situation that I can refer to? And then that confirms my comprehension of it. That's good. So that's actually the same underlying cognitive process that's happening with just different symptoms. And that's actually, I'm glad that these are the first two things that we heard because that's one of the most important things that we have to understand about learning, to start really hacking it. So I'm going to build on that as well. Also just think about, after you've learned something for the first time, what are you doing with that information and what's the time delay between that activity? Are you using it multiple times in a short period of time or is there a long delay? Does it vary? It probably varies. But in what situations would it vary? If you've never thought about this before, then that probably just means that you are a normal human being that lives in this society and that's really a societal issue that we're here to solve. Yeah, so as soon as I've done my filtering processes, I take notes and then I go and at the earliest opportunity, I go seek an opportunity to use the information. Whether that's in a basic way that's going to be ultimately useless for me, it's for the pure purpose of making it sink in. Okay, so you will engage in activities that are functionally useless purely for the purpose of helping to consolidate knowledge. Correct. Okay, yeah. Alright. And do you do that all of the time? So this is in the context of my most common way of learning, which is video courses or YouTube videos or normally learning by video or audio. Okay. I think there's probably a step in between though, between, for example, you said you take some notes on it? Yeah, so I take like, I get an Evernote and I actually, but if I'm doing one, say I'm doing a course that's got six modules, each module, I'll actually stop after that module and I'll go and try and implement it. So when we say take notes, I want you to imagine that I'm just like a robot. You need to program me to take these notes. Okay, so I take screenshots of what really matters. Okay. The most important. How do you know what matters? Because I run my, like, what's important and then how do I, if I was to simplify this and distill it down to the only part I'm going to need, it's also what parts am I going to need to remember from there, the screenshot is going to do a better job of illustrating that to me than written notes. If I can get viral written notes and short bullet points, then I'll do that. That's how I normally take notes. Right. So you're aiming for that conciseness and making sure that what you've got is like the minimal amount that serves the purpose of understanding the important information. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Good. Yeah. It's normally quite long form, the information I'm taking in. Yeah. It's not distilled down in any way. I've really got to weed through it. Correct. Yeah. And in fact, there's even research saying that the higher the word count of your notes, the lower your performance is likely to be. Makes sense. Yeah. Because it likely means that the information was processed to a lower level. Yeah. Okay. And that's probably a very similar process with different flavors around this room. Most people will probably do a similar sort of process of taking notes in a similar sort of way. Maybe the software is different and maybe the timing is a little bit different. Does anyone have a vastly different approach to processing and potentially documenting it? I'm going to explain that, but also you'll see where my problem is, right? So I've come from a background where, and my business is about putting director of operations into businesses. And so a lot of what we do is very process centric. And so my challenge is now I'm now doing sales and marketing for my business, and this is a foreign concept to someone who's not come from this background, right? So my challenge, which will relate to my learning technique, is now I'm doing podcasting, now I'm doing video marketing and trying to, I will have had some scripts of bullet points and then I'm going to have to play that back in front of the camera. And so the way I tend to learn that is, yeah, make it shorter form, some key bullet points. Then I do, I guess, a crude version of what you might have heard of as Roman room technique. Well, I'm associated that with images or something to really make it high level. But even so, that's still a challenge. Not many people, not many people call it that. That's the old name for that technique actually. Yeah, it's from ancient 2000s old. Do people call it memory palace now? Yeah, people normally call it memory palace or method of loci now. Yeah, that's the common term for it. Yeah, I have not heard that term used in 15 years, I think. Yeah, that's probably when I wrote the book on it. So my problem is just recall, really. It's just simple recall of something I'm going to be saying in front of the camera. And I still use imagery to relate that. So still link it to an application. But yeah, we'll just leave that there. Can I just ask you very quickly is that when you use that kind of method, do you feel that that is a sort of a limited process? Like, do you feel that that is quite a cumbersome process? And you're just subjectively? Yeah, I mean, it's cumbersome and it takes effort to put it into that format. You need to be able to play that back. It works for me. If I could find a less cumbersome method of that that works for me, then I would just leave that open to me. Okay, yeah. Let's dive into some of the like some very, very, very just basic theory around learning. Because we're going to see how all of these things are kind of similar. At a first principle level, why some things work and some things don't. And you can really take any way that someone learns and you can just adopt it and make it work better by doing this. So what we're talking about is the idea of like cognitive architecture. That's a term that we use for a cognitive architecture. It basically means that it's a school of thought that just says that your brain is structured in a way and like your memory and your thoughts and your beliefs and self-conceptions and all these other things that make up what you consider as your mind is made up of like a network of ideas that are connected to each other. And some of those connections are more important and some of them are less important. And some nodes have more connections and some have less. And this idea allows us to form these schemas of knowledge. These sort of models of thinking. So this is what allows you to have a how to think about something rather than the what to think about it. Colloquially, when you're able to see how it connects together in such a way that it starts to make sense. And when you form the schema, we colloquially call that a light bulb moment. You haven't learned anything new. You've learned the same thing, but you're not able to see it in a way that you previously were not able to see it. The time it takes to form a good mental model in a schema is one of the biggest delays where a lot of the time efficiency is actually lost. There's a lot of learning and thinking and there's a lot of effort and load placed on our mind in order to try to figure out what that schema is. And that's that period of learning where you're feeling kind of confused and you don't really know what's going on. You know there's something going on, but you haven't really quite figured it out yet. And sometimes that process is extended. Like months you could be learning about something and you know you're on the brink of something, but you haven't quite locked it in yet. So what we want to do is we want to expedite that. So how do we expedite the formation of a mental model? So there's a couple ingredients that we need here. Number one, we need the information that we're learning for it to be felt as being relevant. And it seems like the most obvious thing. When we say something is relevant, we're actually talking about something having connections with our existing cognitive architecture. That's what we assign relevance by. My favorite example for this is, can you tell me the third letter of the first license plate you saw today? That data came in to your brain. The same as any other data that comes into your brain. But your brain is eliminating that information from your memory at such a rate that you don't even realize that it was even entered into your brain to begin with. I can't remember the third letter of the car. It was an Uber, because it was E-B-H. 3-2 or something. Was that good? Yeah, I'm serious, because it was an Uber. Because you know what happened on Saturday? We got into an Uber, because it was a white Uber and he was driving for 10 minutes and someone cancelled. So this time when we got the Uber today, I definitely... Right. So that's a great, yeah, that's the perfect example of like the, you know, the same data, you know. Because maybe some of you saw that same Uber. Maybe you saw it driving, right? But you know, you wouldn't have picked up on that. When he said E-B-H or whatever it is, no one was like, that's the 50th license plate I saw today. Oh, I remember suddenly. It doesn't happen that way. That relevance that we're assigning something, that is actually a controllable process. Relevance doesn't have to be something that is inherent to the information, because relevance is dictated by us. We're the ones that assign something relevance. The information itself is just raw data. So once we understand how we can create relevance forcibly for information, it magical effects on your memory and ability to hold onto it, which then allows you to manipulate that information to form these models. So that's kind of that first ingredient. So always remember that your brain is pretty efficient at learning as an organ in itself. It does not compare to how efficient it is at forgetting information. The billions of information that enters your brain every second, you know, almost all of it is completely disregarded because learning is extremely energy consuming. We wanna limit that as much as possible. So your brain will aggressively get rid of any information that it does not deem as relevant. You know, when you're sort of learning something and you're thinking to yourself, I don't really get it. Like I'm not really sure how it fits. I feel like the only way for me to learn this is gonna be to like just repeat this like a few times. Maybe it's like a speech or a script that you've written or something. And you're just going over it again. And you just feel that without having that repetition, you're just, it's just gonna slip. That is your brain saying this is not relevant, right? That is the indicator of your brain saying this is not right. It does not fit with my existing schema of knowledge. And what you are doing is that you are trying to bypass that through force, through brute force. The analogy I give, you know those baby toys where you have like the square, like a cube, and then you have like the square and then you put it through the thing and then that's a circle and the circle, you know. It's like taking the square, the cube, and having like the circular hole and you're just like smashing it through that hole repeatedly until it fits. Like, yes, eventually it will fit, but it will be distorted and your hand will be bleeding and you've got like wood splinters in your eyeballs and, you know, and it takes like an entire hour to get it and everything is destroyed, you know. That's what the process looks like when you're trying to force something through when it doesn't feel that it's relevant. So step number one is start tuning into that feeling. At any point when you feel like it's not clicking because I don't really see how it fits, be aware of that sort of process. And if you feel that the only way to overcome that is through something that's repetitive, then use that as an indicator to flick up to a higher level of thinking, which I'm going to go over shortly. How can we create relevance? How can we force something to become relevant? Yeah, so Tony Robbins has a bit of a process on this. I've got him through all this stuff. Some of it was quite helpful. One of them was basically before I go and learn something, tell myself why I'm learning it. So actually defining clearly the reason I'm doing this is because of this reason and then I'm going into it and I'm forcing the relevance, I guess. I now know what he's doing. That's a very good sort of starting technique that you can use to just start priming your brain to receive information. It's just kind of prepping it. We can take that another three levels higher. So that's a good place to start with, but we can do more than that. Stakes are the other thing that do it for me. What is? Stakes. So yeah, does this matter in my whole life? On what level of my life does this matter? Is it about my income? Is it about whatever? If I've got to learn something. But the thing is that not all learning that you engage with necessarily have the stakes associated with it. And it doesn't. I create the stakes. I make myself go. If I don't learn this, I put myself through a bad scenario and then it forces me to learn it. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if it works, it's good. But I don't know if that's the best sustainable way to, you know, you don't want to think back on your life and just feel like, man, my life was torture because I just, everything I had to learn, I had to, you know, hold myself at gunpoint. So very easy way that we can force relevance to something is to actually start with relevance. So the normal way of approaching information is like this. Information comes in. We think about the information and then we retrieve that information. And this process in the middle, all we're trying to do here is think, well, why is this relevant? And how is it relevant? How can it fit? And how can it make sense of that? Right? So instead of doing that, what we're going to do is start here and we're going to go out and we're going to make that a step number one. So if you're learning something for the first time and you're learning it brand new, before actually going in to actually learn about it, get a big wide scope of everything that you know that you're going to learn in the span of this. So if it's a course, you know, get a course outline or, you know, make a list of all the keywords or all the terminologies or anything like that. If you're reading from, let's say that you've got a new book that you've read, get a book summary or flick through the book very quickly and just look for headings, bold words, diagrams, paragraphs that seem like it's talking about a certain idea. You can do an entire book. Let's say 200 pages. You can do that in 20 minutes, right? All you're doing is just making a list of all just the words, okay? What's important here is that that list is not ordered in any specific way. I don't want any hierarchy. I don't want anything bolded. I don't want anything indented, nothing like that. In fact, it's even better to make this list out of order of the order that you first did it. You maybe start the book back to front, start in the middle, move outwards. It's important that we start with an unordered list because it breaks the cognitive bias of tending to think about it in the same way it was presented to us. But the author of the book, I can guarantee you, was not thinking about you when they wrote that book. So by design, the way the information is presented is never really gonna be cognitively optimized for you and your knowledge schema. We don't wanna run into the trap of understanding it in the way the author thought about it because what's happening with learning and teaching is that we have this fluid, omnidirectional schema of knowledge and this is what we know. When we think about a topic that we're very specialized in, if you think about your area of specialization in your business, you know that you have a better knowledge about that than most people that you're gonna meet about that particular topic. And so that knowledge is not something that starts in any particular order. It's not linear. You can start at any point and go in any other direction very fluidly. But in order for you to teach someone about that, let's say you become the author of the book and you need to teach someone about this, you now need to linearize and order this information in a way that you think makes sense for the reader. So if the reader takes that information and learns it in that format, their knowledge is not going to be your knowledge because your knowledge was distilled and simplified and funneled through pen and paper or through the printing press, through the limitations of how that knowledge could be communicated. So what the learner's job is to take that and then repackage it in a way that most closely resembles that omnidirectional fluid structure, right? I think we all know this kind of intuitively. Well, some people don't know this intuitively, right? And they just take it as is. When we start with learning, we've got these, you know, maybe one book or a range of sources. We're gonna take that list of keywords and terminology and main ideas and we're gonna make this list and we're gonna do it out of order with no indentation, no bolding, nothing. It's just a list of words, plain as can be. And that's gonna help us to break away from seeing it in the author's mode of thinking. And then from that, you're just gonna scan through this list. If there is a word there that you look at and you just think, I have absolutely no idea what it means. I look at it and I literally do not have any idea what it means, which is uncommon. Then go and look it up a little bit more. Read about it a little bit more. Read a few sentences about it. You know, spend 30 seconds to just generally get your head around what that word means. And this might take you another, I don't know, five, 10 minutes. Now you're gonna take this list and you're gonna try to create that fluid mental model, that schema, that omnidirectional, that kind of network of thought purely based on what you understand about this list of words. So what we're doing is we're sort of skipping the process of trying to understand it and comprehending it fully and all of that sort of stuff. We're just gonna create a hypothesis that I think this information will be structured in this way. And that, because of the fact that we're working with almost nothing, it forces us to rely only on our prior existing knowledge set. And so we'll end up forming this model that could be, you know, 30% of it might need to be modified and changed because it was inaccurate or something like that. But we'll form this overarching structure about how the knowledge works. And then at that point, we have a schema. We have that how to think about, that mental model that normally takes months to develop. We have a hypothesis about what it might look like before we've even really started learning about it. So that model that we've created that was built fundamentally off the foundation of our prior knowledge, everything to do with anything in that model is now relevant because you generated this model. Everything is testing a hypothesis. New information comes in. Oh yeah, that fits in with how I thought about it previously. Oh, it's different to how I thought about it differently. But like, how is it different? Why is it different? Oh, and therefore the type of thinking that we can have about it is automatically at a higher level. So normally the process would be understand what we're learning first, you know, to a decent amount. And then as we're going through, we're processing and building models sort of as we go. But the problem with doing it that way is that information just becomes too disorganized, too scattered. It's kind of like a map of a city that has no highways. You can get from one point to another point, but the roads that you need to take is just everywhere. So you might start with saying, OK, here's one point. I'm not really sure what it means. You learn a little bit about it and then you have this point and then you might say, well, are they connected? No, they're not. And you learn about this point and these three are still not connected and you've got this point. And by that time, you're sort of semi-forgetting this point. And then you think, oh, this is related to this thing. And then you're going off and learning more things and you're creating these sorts of. So this is generally what learning ends up kind of looking like, is that you form these sort of structures as you kind of go. And what you can hopefully see is that there are relationships and connections that are forming, but it's very hard to see what is actually going on, right? There's not really even much on there and already it's starting to become difficult. If someone looks at that, they're not going to get a clear picture of it. And so if this is the state of organization of that knowledge in your mind, then that's the extent through which you're going to be able to retrieve it. Going from here to here is going to be like, I know that you can kind of do something there, but then there's this other part that comes in and so it's very disorganized, right? By starting with just the basics, we're saying that, okay, we understand that all these things are probably related in some way and I think it's probably going to be something that looks like this. And we're starting with just a very, very basic skeleton of it. We've got the big picture of it, the whole scope of it to begin with. When you learn the first piece of information, you're already thinking about the last piece of information, how it might relate. When you normally learn linearly from start to finish, you're not even aware about what you need to be thinking about later on to even have the thought to potentially connect it. So everything becomes kind of retrospective, whereas now when you learn that new information, you're thinking, okay, it could fit here, here or here. Well, I know it's going to be related to this thing, but I also know it's probably going to have a relationship over here. So now you're thinking, I'm not going to organize the information, you know, like way out over here because it has to connect with the stuff that's over here at some point, somehow. That already starts framing the context and the relevance and the purpose of the information differently. This is called integrative learning. And the idea is that we are trying to integrate the learning as quickly as possible. We're creating almost a mold that information can sit in as soon as it's there, rather than having each individual component and then going through it retrospectively to try to figure it all out and then cleaning it up and then going back to the resource and then looking at it again and then fixing this. We're saying, this is probably how it's going to be. I'll shift a few things around as I learn, but as I'm taking more information in, I will just be building and consolidating it as a big picture to begin with. So it's kind of like if you are sculpting something out of stone, you wouldn't take a stone block and then you wouldn't, you wouldn't sculpt like a perfect nose and like a perfect eyeball and then, you know, work your way through that. And everything's gonna be out of proportion and it's gonna be in the wrong place. You're gonna get the general shape of it first and then you're gonna go in progressively further detail. If you're painting a wall, you're gonna do that primer layer first and then you're gonna go over it again and again. We're working our knowledge in layers of mastery rather than order of information. The big thing about how this system is novel is that no one else really tells you to flip it because it's actually very counterintuitive. It's very counterintuitive to try to achieve essentially mastery over a topic before you even understand what the concepts individually are. But the idea is that no matter how you learn it, you're going to, you know, have questions and doubts and you're gonna reform that schema you're forming anyway at some point and no matter what you're learning, if it's not relevant, if it does not fit somewhere, you're cognitively, you're gonna struggle with it. So those are objective truths. So therefore, if we can increase the relevance and if we can make it so that the revisions of our knowledge that we're doing are just more productive since we're doing them anyway, then we're able to achieve a level of mastery of learning that's far beyond, sorry, not necessarily far beyond in terms of mastery, but much faster than you would normally be able to achieve, right? So if I was, I mean, I'm an audible listener, right? So if I now wanted to apply something like this, I might find the book summary, write down my list of words, research a bit around what those particular topics were, but then go from start to finish? No, no, no. After you do that, you then need to create some kind of schematic. And you could put this in this kind of format. You could have a paper where you jot it down. I personally really encourage people. So normally when we think about note-taking, we're thinking like learning at school or sitting in lectures or something. But the ideal way of using note-taking is to cognitively accelerate your learning. If you do note-taking correctly, what it does is it offloads unnecessary cognitive resources. Instead of having to hold on to all of it, you're just speeding up the process of it. So you would map it out on something. So I personally use an infinite canvas app on a tablet because it allows my knowledge to grow organically and in all directions. I'm not restricted by page size, which personally I believe is the stupidest possible reason for knowledge to be restricted is because of page size. You know, what if we were just born into a world that A1 is the norm, you know? Everyone would be a genius. So in this example, you would reorder the table of contents based on the same thing you created? The answer would be yes, but it's very important that you're trying not to see it in terms of a table of contents to begin with because even the idea of seeing it in terms of table of contents will influence the way you're likely to structure it. So if you shuffle it, if you just make a list, shuffle it, just move a random shuffler and then you try to create a schema and try to draw out how you think that's going to link together, that would be a great starting point. Yes, that would be a great starting point. And the important part here is there's two things that you should try to follow. Number one, try to do it relatively clean. Try to make it relatively simple to follow. Like we're working big picture. You don't need to have every single keyword planted on here, but you should have what you think are like, you know, basically all of the main and important ones. Because you might look at one thing and know already that is just simply one example of this other concept. It's not going to be important in itself. You don't need to have that one on your overall starting structure. But the main concept that it's tied to, that should be integrated somehow. So try to make it as simple as possible. And then number two, follow what I call the two-four rule, which is that information should be grouped together. You do not want 100 pieces of information with just like, you know, 700 arrows everywhere. This can be grouped together, this can be grouped together, this can be grouped together. The reason we do it out of order is because the order you group it needs to make sense for you, which is not necessarily the way that it's presented to you. In fact, in my experience, around 60 to 70% of all the groups you will form for knowledge across any domain end up being different to how it is initially presented to you. You know, you're going to look at all this information and think, well, how can I group this in a way that makes sense? And therefore, you're going to do a lot of this back and forth thinking, a lot of this kind of comparing and contrasting. And I want you to notice, even at this very early stage, before you've even really looked at it linearly, before you've started consuming information, already you are engaging in the type of back and forth thinking that you know you're going to need to start doing when you actually retrieve it at a high level. That's how you think about stuff that you are good at. Knowledge that you're confident in, that's the type of thinking you do. So we're engaging in that type of thinking before we even know what it is we're really thinking about. And this is a big cognitive hack. You know, it allows you to retain information much more easily and it allows you to build that mastery more quickly. And what do you call it? Playback, what do you call it? You call that like a schema? Yeah, so there's different ways that you can call it. You know, some people call it models, some people call it schemas. There's different terminology that I use in the program that I run that associate more things with it. It doesn't really matter what the label you associate with it is. So it really comes down to that pre-work. I've got my list, I'm now trying to create an order. I don't want to say order but create some rationale of how it's structured, of how it links together so that it's that more simple flow through. But then as you do eventually then, I'm assuming you then do take it in the book in the normal format. Well actually what you'll find is that once you do that you may not even want to take it in the normal format because you may find that already through just the pure process of doing this you are already achieving a level of knowledge on this that seems impossible where you feel more confident about this topic than you really should be given that you don't really know anything about it. But you already sort of see how it can come together and you are assigning more and more relevance to certain parts and you're starting to apply the knowledge before you even know what it is you're applying. So you may think, I actually want to start here, right? So you could just start there if you wanted to. In fact, a lot of the times what I'll do is I'll have like two or three or four books that I'm looking through and I'll make this as the keyword and then I'll go through it and then I'll just start going into where I want to start and I'll just use Google. And by the time I finish I don't actually even need the book. So what I do with the book is I just flick through it to see is there anything I missed and there's always something that I missed but it means that the learning is driven by me. I'm in control of every single process and I'm optimizing everything. Any information that comes in it's because I want it to come in. It's relevant because I wanted it to be there and it serves a purpose every time. There's no thinking about how does it serve a purpose and how can I make this relevant. It's relevant because it was relevant to begin with. Ah yes, so you'll be creating these groups. You always want each group to have only two things in it and a maximum of four. So you'll have groups and then subgroups within those groups. So if you've got like one big thing and then underneath that is like 20 other concepts break that into, if you can, two subgroups and a maximum of four. This is basically the type of schema that you might end up forming. There's a few things I want you to notice with this is that number one the information flows in multiple directions. It doesn't do what I call waterfalling. So this would be an example of waterfalling. Let's start with a conventional model. This is what waterfalling looks like. You can see why it's called waterfalling. What's the problem with this? Knowledge does not look like that. Not real expertise. This is exactly what it looks like for someone that has really done well at trying to learn the way that the textbook grouped it for them because that's fully linear. So we are avoiding this through that reordering process and it's very hard to avoid doing this without taking a deliberate step to break that because it's a cognitive bias that operates on autopilot. Before you're able to really react to it it's already been reframed a little bit. So we don't want waterfalling but waterfalling can look like this as well. It doesn't have to be necessarily down the page. This also is waterfalling and for most people this is what a mind map looks like but this is waterfall. You can see it's essentially just radially coming out but it's the same thing. So what this is lacking is laterality of thinking. So if you saw information like this and then you demonstrated it, expressed it like this and then now you're saying oh I want to add laterality to the information then it's going to look like this. That's what it'll end up looking like and now you can't follow that. There's too much going on and the reason is because laterality which is inherent to the knowledge was added retrospectively. The structure itself is fundamentally wrong and we're trying to make it work by just adding arrows into it. The problem is not that we're trying to think about that. The problem is that we're thinking about that after the fact. This is what happens when you also learn linearly is that you have a structure but the structure is not something that actually makes sense. It doesn't operate the way true knowledge operates. So this is what we want to avoid. So when you're looking at my thing notice that there is laterality but the laterality is not just going everywhere all over the page. There are no lines that cross each other. There are no arrows that cross each other. Everything is there is laterality and there's structure and then there is a flow and there's a simplicity but it's represented cleanly. And also there is no group on there that has more than four things coming out of it at any point. I call that a chunk map because what you're forming are these chunks. That chunk map obviously it looks like there's a decent amount of information on there. So this is over 500 pages of information distilled on that. That's journal articles that's textbook chapters that's my whole master's paper on that. I made that in one study session and then I was invited to be a lecturer for that topic before I even finished the paper. So the mastery that you're able to get through this is it allows you to achieve the mastery that is sort of unnatural to achieve. It allows you to have a problem or a certain field of learning that you're interested in and engage in that learning and then after a week you're talking to people that have been studying this for years and they will be you're not going to know more than them the value you can extract from interacting with that expertise that's going to be efficient level. You're going to get more value out of that. So it's reckoning surface level knowledge of the entire landscape first and then building up the mastery in different areas because they're all interconnected as you need. Yes, yeah and you could do it linearly if you wanted to. If you've done these first steps well if you do it linearly that's okay as well. It's not technically as optimum as it could be compared to just going into it as you want. I'm reflecting on times I've done it like this just naturally and I've picked stuff up way faster and at times when I've tried to go the other way where I'm trying to master the individual step before getting the whole picture like when I was learning salsa it was terrible. It was one thing that I just couldn't learn but the teacher was trying to get me to master this first step and now you're going to get that right before we move on. I would see other people who learned the whole picture and did it all poorly but put it together learn everything a lot faster. So the difference here is in terms of what we call lower or higher like orders of learning versus orders of thinking. So a high order of thinking allows you to achieve both high and low levels of actual mastery whereas a low order of thinking only allows you to achieve a low level and so if you're focusing on things in isolation and just learning one thing at a time it's true you need to know the basics to be able to navigate the higher levels that's unavoidable fact you cannot talk about a concept without knowing what the concept is but the method of how you understand that concept do you use a lower order method of thinking to achieve it or do you use a higher order method to achieve it? Higher order means integrated therefore it means more relevant so you're still learning the same thing but now it has context. Integrated you're boosting connections to other topics to increase its level of relevance. Correct and the important part is that what we're boosting is the connections that we're forming to prior knowledge we're starting with the prior knowledge because what you do if you're boosting connections purely just connections without first starting with a schema from what you already know then the difficulty with that is that you end up forming what I call an island which is a well-connected schema of knowledge that is actually separate from your main body of knowledge so a symptom of that would be that you have a good understanding of that but you will still struggle to apply that in nuanced ways or you will require cuing to be able to engage in that type of thinking. Most common way that you may have experienced is if you've worked with like very intelligent new grads that have a lot of knowledge but you really need to cue them to start thinking about it once you cue them they're like oh yeah and they can grow with it but being able to themselves apply it is separate because their knowledge schema is not actually connected with it. It kind of reminds me of Feynman who used to do the Christmas lectures and the Nobel Prize winner he was well known for being able to take a really complex topic like nuclear physics and explain it to kids because he could link it to prior knowledge. Yeah so a lot of his work is you know a lot of the stuff kind of builds on and extends some of his work yeah because the idea here is that if you're able to do the very simplified big picture schema then that's essentially what you need to be able to explain something to you know like a five-year-old because it's not just explaining to a five-year-old it's explaining comprehensively and accurately the main important points and the main important relationships in such a way that it's simple to understand right it's not just purely explaining something to a five-year-old right which you know you can do with anything just use simpler terms it's about the comprehensiveness and the accuracy of it so this level of mastery and building that is what we're aiming for the difference is that we're trying to build that before we even have a good understanding of the topic itself most people that are professionals that have some real world learning kind of experience you already will have many of the elements of thinking that we've talked about here and a lot of the things that you found work for you will be using certain elements of this and what we're doing is we're just creating a full system out of well it's not really a full system yet but like we're creating at least a comprehensive technique out of it and what you should feel is that sort of restrictions on your learning that you previously didn't even know were there start being lifted things just start becoming easier to understand like everything clicks that light bulb moment it should just be every concept is light bulb moment just constantly right to the point where it would be unusual for you to learn something and not have that light bulb moment at an extremely early stage that should become the norm and for most people that have this sort of learning experience if they apply this kind of thinking you'll probably be able to achieve something like that within just the first few attempts of it the very first time you do this you'll realize that it's a lot more complicated than I've just made it out to be because there's just so many thoughts going through your head in terms of like does it make sense to do this am I meant to do it this way like can I group it this way but then I could group it this way as well and do I form this structure or this structure or am I meant to read into this or not all those micro decisions and that's a much longer discussion but you just give it a go and you just see how it is and then you start optimizing and then after a few weeks it starts becoming easier and easier and after a few months that becomes a normal way that you start thinking about things and the great thing is that because of neuroplasticity the brain's ability to mold itself the more you think like this the more you're able to hold on to because information is consolidated much more rapidly and therefore you're able to learn from more sources simultaneously you're able to handle much larger volumes of information and you're able to ride over a lot of the external variability of learning whether you've got a good resource or a good teacher or whatever it is a lot of those external variations we'll be able to ride over it I like the fact that the extreme opposite of this is repetition if I've got to urgently learn something I'm inclined to just go all right I've got a couple of lines and I'm going to change my shooting angle and I'm going to say something else and that's like the enemy of this yes exactly I'm glad you shot that down from the get-go let me very quickly touch on the idea of when you're teaching someone else something so you know you can't just be like okay let's start a meeting and therefore let me teach you about all of this and then go practice it for the next few weeks and then it will come back and then I'll teach you some stuff right so one of the things that we want to do is we want to get them engaged in this process so usually most of the people here when you're in a meeting you actually have some authority in terms of what the other person can actually be doing in that meeting how they can be thinking about it so one of the ways I like to start off if I know that we're touching on something that's reasonably complex is to get them to create a structure in terms of what they think what we're talking about today is how they envision it and what the purpose is you know almost put them in the position of that owner and figure out what that big picture is I want you to map it out and get them thinking about it from their prior knowledge to build that schema to begin with and then from there we can start asking probing questions some good questions that we can start with are what part of what you've started there do you think is the most important one that we need to like nail in first or potentially which relationship which process is going to be the most important thing and the second thing when I say the word black swan just put your hand up if you're familiar with this term black swan great so the second question would be what are the black swans to your model right and that activates again that higher level of thinking because remember the first principle here all of this is activating their brain and that level of thinking and learning that is more reflective of true expertise rather than something that's lower level or more passive after they've done that process and they've refined that schema you'll probably find that the conversation that ensues when you just go through and start talking about it they're able to bring a lot more value to the table and they're able to engage with the content more organically they're more curious about things because now they have a hypothesis they have invested cognitive resource into building they want to know why it's wrong right and all of you are probably doing that while we were talking today you are building your own kind of model of how it works and that informs the types of questions you tend to ask this increases the value of what you teach correct massively because now it's the gift that keeps on giving you teach them this that's the starting point a lot of the time what we worry about is we taught them something and it's will they even remember what I just taught them right but what it should be is I just taught them this a week later they're coming back and now they know even more because there was a gap that they found you know from their model and they realized that it wasn't filled through your explanation and it wasn't filled in their own schema so I mean personality is dependent you have to have someone that's actually willing to look at it which you know can be hard to find but you know they will go and actually look at it a little bit more and they'll you know they'll come back and then it becomes a lot more of a you know like a real relationship rather than just like you know basically waterfall yeah it's like they're questioning and searching from the get-go yes and the amount of ownership that that places on them yeah that's a big thing and I don't need to explain that yeah that well you just that that's a great method because it actually makes them aware of their competency you know like the hierarchy of competency yes yeah it brings them into that yeah conscious and competency is a magical you know first step that's the hardest step though yeah and actually one other thing and this is the final thing that I'll mention here is that when you do engage with people in this way not only is it increasing the sort of ownership of it but it's also familiarizing themselves with not knowing and navigating the uncertainty of the topic so it's an incredibly important thing is that often especially if you're working with someone that's a little bit younger and less experienced they're going to be used to having certainty in things and they're going to be wanting that certainty but sometimes what's most important is what can you build out of the uncertainty and how long can you stay in that uncertainty to build something that makes sense to get to certainty a lot of people are too eager to get to that certainty and so they sacrifice building that structure so it'll be like this I need certainty here so they just build that and they lock it in and it's like oh this other thing comes in it's like oh but it doesn't it doesn't fit doesn't make sense they don't know how to navigate that starting in this method starts with uncertainty because there's no expectation they're going to get it right no one in their right mind would say hey build this mental model and then if it's wrong it's like you suck you know you well as long as you don't say that you know so it creates not only sort of the mutual understanding that that uncertainty is okay the familiarity for them to navigate that uncertainty by themselves so even when you're not there and if they take on a higher level of responsibility they have all the groundwork they know how to think about it all they are lacking now is the cue yeah okay thank you everyone for taking this time to come in you