Learning: How to Improve your Learning Abilities

1. Introduction: hello and welcome in this class. You're going to learn how to study and learn effectively in order to reduce the amount of time you have to study while increasing your results. Learning out to learn is one of the most important skills in life because it allows you to learn anything in a much shorter period of time. No matter in what field you're currently working on. Learning how to learn will give you a great advantage because you can learn any skill you can advance your career engine. Prove your life. You probably associate studying with something very unpleasant. Every time you have to study, you know that a long and boring period of time will follow. You expect that it will take you dozens of hours to learn anything. I felt the same way to you for a long time. I had no idea how to properly study, so I kept reading the same material over and over and over again. There was no scheming phase, and I wasn't taking notes effectively. Thankfully, I learned with top performers how to properly study, such as Tim Ferries, call Newport, Barbara Oakley, Johnny Robbins and Jim Quick. If you take this class, you have the opportunity to learn everything you need in order to make your study in learning process much easier and quicker to go through. You're going to learn how to create a proper said environment as well as focusing on that same environment, which is essential to make any study session productive Onley. Then the proper framework will be presented from getting the best sources to scheming, reading, memorizing, reviewing in other things that I'm going to cover, such as how to read faster and how to take notes effectively, you will have access to the best learning strategies that you can fight. If you always thought that studying means sitting down and doing all types of messy and disorganized desks, I'm going to show you that splitting the studying process into different phases is much more effective to study things in a much shorter period of time. Reading the material from a lot of different sources is one of the most time consuming tasks, but I'm going to show you how you can do it much more efficiently. So no more reading the same thing over and over and over again. Commit yourself to watch this class till the end, and you will be able to save a lot more time while learning a lot of incredible things that will help you to achieve your own goals. Make sure to take some notes alongside the course to increase your attention, So see you inside. 2. Why Should you Study?: unless you are in college or school, you might be thinking, Why do I need to take a class about stunning? Why do I really need to study efficiently? If I'm not in college? I probably don't need this. If you work for someone else, you're probably thinking I don't have nothing to study, but think about this. If you usually deliver presentations in a weekly meeting, you can always improve the craft off presentation in public speaking. So watch an excellent presentation and take notes on it. Is the speaker moving? How what he's doing with his hands? How is he talking? What is he saying? And see how you can actually improve those aspects by yourself. So create a new presentation to deliver in that meeting, using the same principles that caught your attention in the presentation you watched. As you can see, you can study presentations, relationships, history, business, finance, the education system, the production of cars, anything. It doesn't matter in which field you're currently working on. You can always study more and learn more to improve the way you work, the way you perform and actually improve your life for better. As you can see studying is not merely for college students who have to go through their next exam. Studying and learning is a skill that we all use throughout life. Learning more about the things that you are currently working on will also give you a great advantage over most people. The opportunities that will emerge from you taking the time to study are kind of uncertain , but they are surely great. Knowledge is power, and it is a requirement for all top performers to learn more about their fields they are currently working on and also about other things. You can also go back to the fundamentals. You congrats old textbooks and review the things that you started a long time ago. And I'm sure you will find a lot of things that you forgot and that that might be very useful for you at the moment. So Brendan were charred. Have been reading a book a week for the past 15 years. He does this to a paid himself about the field he currently works on. So if you want to become a net expert and master in your own field of interest, you have to constantly keep updating and keep learning about it. Tony Robbins also explains much of his success to all the things that he learned he started here at. He listened Teoh for him. It's very simple. If you want a better relationship, study relationships, find someone who is in a great relationship and study what they are doing to make it so great. If you want to be happy, study happiness. If you want to have a better business study business that management in finance and leadership find books, articles off videos, presentations in the field that you want to learn about if you want to increase your sales , learn what the best companies are doing to do that. So stop hoping for things to get better. Study them. As Jim Rohn said, Things get better when you get better so you can study Steve jobs and see how you can implement innovation in your own organization. You can study Zappos to see how you can improve your own costumer service. Then take all of your ideas of the things you want to study and start learning them. Start studying them. The possibilities are limitless, but if you want to really mastered the craft of studying you should continue to watch this class. Unfortunately, school doesn't teach us how we should study effectively. That's why I felt the need to learn more about it. I wanted to learn how I could learn new subjects in a much shorter period of time without sacrificing the quality of the knowledge. I've always been a good student, which, for me meant having good grades well, actually enjoying school but Onley in my last two years of high school that I decided that I really wanted to learn how to learn properly. So I've been experimenting with a lot of things that made me reduce the amount of time I have to study while actually increasing my results. Some tips that I learned were kind of dump and useless. So in this class, I'm Onley covering strategies that really work. It's sad because we go through 15 years of school and learning in public education. We don't really understanding in being taught how to properly learn and master anything. When I started looking for answers, I discovered that there were there were people that were really trying to master the craft of learning, and I learned so many incredible things with them. So I found it was possible to learn faster and better in a much shorter period of time. After learning and putting all of those things into practice, I suddenly had much more time left to do other things that I really enjoyed. And so I created my block. I started reading even Mawr. I started exercising, meditating in every time. For other things. It wasn't profound experience for me to understand that I could learn anything much faster than I ever did before. And so I'm very passionate about this topic of learning how to learn in trying to improve the way we learn things, because I think that it should be something that we are, uh, teaching in our schools so I can definitely grow into you that learning how to learn can dramatically change an impact to your life. Doesn't matter, including high school college working for yourself or someone else. Learning how to learn is one of these skills that we really need the most. When you learn faster, you can master any skill faster, which can bring your results that you weren't even thinking about. There are a lot of people who hate their jobs. But because they dedicated time to study and learn things on the side that they enjoyed the most, they were able in the long term to switch careers and do what we really enjoyed doing. You might be working on a bank, and you never really enjoy that job. You have always loved science, but unfortunately you didn't follow your guts. Well, you can study science right now. Start by reading a few articles, books, presentations or even going to seminars. And later you might consider taking a degree. And suddenly you find yourself working in the area that you've always enjoyed science or biology or any other thing. If you think studying has to be something boring and time consuming in use less, you are rock. I have the same opinion for years. But learning how to learn really talked to me that learning new things is just one of the best things that I could ever ever do with my time. Think of studying like a strategy game. How can I learn this into shorted amount of time while also enjoying the process? So I want to challenge your thoughts and opinions about study. Do you think it takes countless hours to learn anything. Do you think that learning all he consists on reading the same thing over and over again? Do you find yourself forgetting? Watch you read all the time. The process of studying should be divided into different faces because that's how we can make it more efficient. Because if you turn the studying process into Onley, one Massey step, it will be much time consuming in boring for you. So when this class I divided a stunning process into different faces, the 1st 1 is to pick the great sources that you're going to study from. The 2nd 1 is skimming and selecting the most important things to read. So notice that I didn't say that you're going to read everything in the sources that you pick. The 3rd 1 means reading the really important information that you selected previously. The fourth is taking notes while reading the things that are very important. The fifth is about summarizing de accountants, the sick, organizing to material and finally memorizing in reviewing the things that you just learned . It might seem very overwhelming to go through all of these steps, but in fact, when he used the proper framework. You can reduce the amount of time to study anything when you don't separate the phases and you don't go through them in the proper order, you end up in a terrible loop of reading your sources over and over again, trying to memorize and recall the information. So I'm very excited to teach you and help you out in this anything you need, please use the discussion off the class to ask me any questions. So big something that you are really excited to learn now and use this framework that I'll be teaching in this class Teoh study that properly. 3. Study Environment: when you are studying, it's very important that you do it in a proper environment. This environment plays a huge role on the effectiveness of your study sessions. If you're studying in a room full of your friends answering messages, watching television, you'll probably guess how how effective your study sessions will be. All those and people like to study with some white noise on the background. It doesn't mean having a lot of people talking to you to make a study session really effective. You have to focus first, so the first thing you have to do is to choose the place where you are going to study. You can do it alone in your own room or office to avoid all possible distractions, which is basically my favorite away. If studying going into a library or a coffee shop is also a great idea, especially people around, you are also working for me. Watching people work or writing or doing something inspires me to do it myself and not just , you know, sitting in the coffee shop, looking at other people and doing nothing. Coffee shops are also great because of the white noise there is inside, but You can also replicate those noises by listening to some YouTube playlists that replicate sounds off a coffee shop. The second tip to having a proper study environment. He's having it clean. So if you decided to study in your office or room, it's important that it looks clean in organized seriously. When things are a mess, your brain also feels like a mess. Studies have been done that showed that when things are messy and disorganized, we reduce willpower. So I try to organize my workspace every single night before going to sleep. So when I wake up, everything is more or less clean and organized, and the best way to do it is to put things into proper place after finishing your study sessions. The third way to have a proper study environment is to use music while you study. A few years ago, I remember to study biology while listening to my favorite vans in songs. But really, what happened? It was I was just singing while I was thank for me and most people studying with music with lyrics is not effective and should be avoided. I do listen to music when I'm studying, but it's music that was specially made to focus and to help you concentrate in what you are doing for this purpose. I use focus at will, and I highly encourage you to try it so they have a quiz that you answer, and they will suggest to you, Ah, playlist that probably will be the most effective for you to listen while you are staying. So it's incredible, and it's very effective any way you can also use YouTube to search for study music. Ah, playlists or focus playlist in a lot of thongs will appear that are kind of grates due to start with. You can also experiment while listening to a coffee shop or the rain Dropping. The fourth way to create a proper study environment is to decorate that environment. I really believe that having a study environment that ah fits your needs and taste is really helpful. And having a study space doesn't mean that you have to have the whole room dedicated for your studies. You can basically select a desk in your room or an office to dedicate to study. You can put your favorite stationery items, inspiring quotes, images and put your favorite books around, too. It's much more appealing to study in a place where you feel comfortable and that you really enjoy the way it is decorated. But make sure you don't decorated with things that mind distract you, such as your phone. 4. How to Focus Intensively: focusing is something that requires practice. A few years ago, I couldn't focus properly, anything for more than 10 minutes. I was also not trying to focus because I was always jacking my film. For me. The biggest step I took to increase my focus was to simply stop checking my phone every five minutes. So I place my phone in another room so I don't have the temptation to always checking it. It's not enough to have your phone near you that with the screen facing down, really put it away from you and see how much more efficient your study sessions will be. The more effort you put into focus the last time you have to study the same things. Remember what Tony Robbins said? Where focus goes energy floats each time you check your phone while you are studying, learning or even working your brain switches its context. And the more your brain switches its contacts. The more tired you feel. The more tired you feel, the less ability you have to focus. And so the less ability you have to focus, the more difficult it will be to learn anything. So how many times do you find yourself checking your INSTAGRAM accounts while you are working, learning or studying Jason Khalipa Any leads Athlete says that the best way to focus intensively is to focus like you're trying to pull one last push up before you fall into the grounds. Remember what Gary Keller said. You can do two things at once, but you can't focus effectively on two things at once. So here are a few tips on how you can focus more intensively. The first thing you should do is to select the place where you're going to study in the amount of time that you want to focus on. If you have a lot of trouble focusing, you might start with trying to focus for 25 minutes and then having a five minute break. Also called the Pomodoro Technique, you can progressively increase the amount of time to focus and also increase the amount of time of your brakes. I usually set a timer for 45 minutes, and then I give myself a 10 minutes break. It's also important to pick the location where you're going to study. The second tip to focus more intensively is to decide previously what you are going to study or watch you are going to focus on. And why don't having clarity is one of the most important parts of focusing intensively. Having clarity is one of the great advantage. If you want to focus deeply if you don't know exactly what you are going to focus on, you can't really focus, so the side previously the task that you are going to execute for the next 25 or 45 minutes . Make sure you have everything you need in the place where you're going to study in, avoid distractions and don't do two things at the same time in the same focused session. So if you have to study maths and biology, dedicate 45 minutes or 25 minutes first for maths and then another 25 or 45 for biology. So don't study do different things at the same focusing session. Deciding the tasks that you want to focus on is very important, but why do you really want to focus on those things every time that I decided to focus on something without really thinking why I want to do those things? My study sessions aren't much worse because When you have the reasons why you're doing that , your brain will collaborate with you, and it will help you to focus a lot more intensively. Remember, you can always deal with those concerns and things that are, you know, distracting you later. Write them down and deal with those later, because right now it's time to focus. Keep your phone away in block distracting websites if needed. After the focus session ends, go for a walk, take a break and going to another room into a different place, maybe outside, so you can relax a little bit. Now let's proceed to the proper framework to study more effectively, but never neglect the power of focusing your attention in a place that it's properly organized and decorated for your own study sessions. 5. Select the Best Sources: before starting to starting any subject or topic, it's important to know from which sources you're going to get the information. This might seem a little bit obvious, but most people don't really take the time to select great sources to study from, and those sources can make your work much easier. You can use textbooks, books, articles of videos, talks anything, but it's important that they are from a trusted source. The better the material you are using, the better your life will be while studying that subject or topic. If you have access to someone who mastered the things that you want to learn, suggest a professor. You can always ask for articles or books or textbooks recommendations, and you can also look for recommendations on the Web. The first tip I have is to first focus on more general sources, and those general sort sources should provide you an overall picture of the subject or the topic that you want to learn instead and Onley. Then you should focus on specific sources that provides you more detail and specific things related with the topic. General sources are much easier to find because they are usually more talked about, and you can find other references to other general sources in the Bible. Geography off those sources, right? So if you go to the end of the book, it also says other things. That other resource is that they used to write that book that you can later check. Although the sources you're choosing are a very important part of studying, make sure you don't spend endless amounts of hours choosing the sources in trying to find everything that you think you might need. Having more sources does not always mean having a clear understanding off the topic at hands. It actually might lead to more confusion, procrastination, boredom and more time spent. There is no exact number of sources that you should have. That's totally depends on the topic itself in your priorities. Goals on your previous and also on your previous knowledge off the subject. If you're writing a thesis, you might need dozens of sources. But if you just want to learn a few things from a very simple topic, you might only need one. The index off a textbook is very important because there you can find if the topics that you really want to learn are covered on that text book. You can see how many pages the text book covers on that specifics topic, and you can see if that's too much for you or too little, so it totally depends on your priorities and goals. In the process of picking your sources, make sure you mark up the pages where the textbook contains the information that you really want to study and learn. This mind means making a circle on the index or even writing in the paper the pages that really interests you. Depending on your own goals, the process of picking sources might take you 15 minutes or even know minutes at all if you have someone recommending you good sources or it can take you a few days. But remember to not become obsessed with finding one last resource or one last source to make your work better. So here's a summary. If the idea is covered on this video, first thing you should do is take some time to find good general sources, because those sources are the ones that will help you to study from where you'll be taking notes and read and skim in. Select the second step is to move to more specific sources. But of course this is optional. This depends on your goals. Their tip is, do not become obsessed with finding one more last source, and fourth tip is to keep track of the pages where the information that you really want to learn and study from its so it will save you time when you start reading and skimming and doing all of the other steps. If you are in college or high school and your professor provides you all the materials you need, you can skip this fates depending on your situation, a power points or a presentation that the professor gives you might be the only material that you have to go through. Another thing that I really like to do is to search for Ted talks on topics that I'm studying in learning, because those give me another perspective on the theme and usually the people who deliver that set talks are very engaging and to provide very a meaningful point of view 6. Facebook Group: Hi. Just a quick video to tell that I recently created a Facebook group that you can now join to be part of a community of people who are interested in personal development in constant growth. See you there. 7. Skimming: we are now in the second step of the process of study, which is scheming didn't material. Now that you've done your research, it's time to read the material, but actually, we are not going to read it now. The first thing to do before really focusing on the material is skimming through that material. So I opened the index. I already know where the things that I want to study our because I marked them up in the previous phase. I go to those pages and I skim through the content. Skimming is the act of going through the material without really reading it, but just paying attention to keywords and even bullet list. If it has images and things that catch your attention sometimes make you words are actually involved. So you don't have that many trouble finding where the most important information is contained. You should also pay close attention to headlines and sub headlines, as well as summaries of the whole paragraph or the whole chapter by first scheming through the contents before reading it, you make a selection of what really matters to you and so scheming by be the best tip to reduce the amount of time you have to study because you are selecting what really matters. Instead of reading everything, remember to always check the end of the chapter because usually some authors provide the whole explained summary of the whole chapter. So we just go through the summary and see if that contains the information that you were really looking for. If it did, then it might be important to read the chapter. If it doesn't have what you really wanted. Teoh, you can skip entirely the chapter, or only read a few paragraphs now and then. You can scheme Cem introductions or even some examples that don't really provide you knowledge again. Scheming should always come before reading. This phase allows you to select the material first before reading it so you don't have to read everything that you just think might seem important in a textbook. Especially because sometimes we do have ah lot of sources. A lot of text books and reading all of them is not effective if you're not used to skimming . It might seem strange in the beginning, but it becomes easier with practice, and it surely helps to make them the studying process much more efficient, and when you are scheming, you have to be smart. So you have to understand what are the paragraphs that are really valuable and scheme the ones and skip the ones that really don't provide you much value nor information. So to summarize this video, the first thing you should dio is to check if there's any summary in the end of the chapter and see if the information in the summary really provides you value and is important for your own goals. So the second tip is to look for keywords or bold words. They are inserted in the text. You can and should underline the important ideas in select the paragraphs that you really want to read later. So you should mark the paragraphs that contained the most valuable information for you. And the fourth dip is to be okay with ignoring some of the information contained in the textbooks, because sometimes it is difficult to ignore stuff because you're always thinking, What if I need that? What if that's important, so you have to be okay with ignoring some of the introductions and examples that might be contained in the text 8. How to Read Faster: after selecting the most important material by skimming through textbooks in books, it's important to pay close attention to the paragraph that you selected because you're already selected the most important paragraphs and information you have already what you need to start focusing on that. Remember, you're reading to find good arguments, explanation in crucial points that will help you to get your general knowledge up. Formed in buildup. Studying is a skill that you can't improve when you use the right methods in the proper framework, and it is far more effective to read a few sections, a few very important sections and take good notes on them. Then to read dozens of pages while you feel bored and tired, the whole process I'm teaching will make you study anything which wicker and faster and better, which is basically what we all are looking for. And so it's very important that you separate the scheming face from the reading phase. And because this class is about being effective, you have to focus very intensively on both of those phases, both in the scheming face and on the reading Face off course reading will take you much more time and focus. But it's also important that you previously select the most important to material and paragraphs so into reading phase. You basically read the material and you have to take you notes on it, so make sure you're not constantly being interrupted. Keep the biggest source of distraction away from you. Your phone, of course. Put some classical music on in start reading and taking good notes, because reading is a very important phase of studying and learning anything. I decided to include here a bonus video on how you can read faster. But before teaching you anything about faster reading, I want to say that reading is a skill, and so if you want to read faster, it's important that you actually spend some time reading. It's also important that you have a good range of vocabulary, so you won't lose much time thinking about what does this word mean or how it connects with the other sentences. But be aware that you will be able to read some sections faster than others because some contain much more detail and mawr difficulty the cavalry to understand also scheming to material before reading. It is a very important step on making the reading process faster. So you read faster when you skim the material first, because your brain will be already primed for the topics that you now want to read. So it will be much easier to understand those topics. Nonetheless, it doesn't matter if you can read three pages in 20 seconds if you didn't take anything from it. Remember, you are reading because you want to truly understand and learned the concepts and not just go through them very quickly without understanding nothing. And so reading speed doesn't really matter if you're not understanding the material anyway . There are three tips that I consider to be the most important ones. When comes to reading Speak. The 1st 1 is to use a pacer like your finger or a pen. So basically run your pacer or your finger from the beginning of the line till the yen's while you move your eyes injuried. Of course, this technique of using a pacer such as your finger immediately increases the speed of your reading, and the best thing is that this technique doesn't make you lose any comprehension at all. Our eyes move in jumps, so if you close and I and you try to move your other eye in a straight line, your I will jump and not following the straight line so it will jump. And so when you use a pacer, you are preventing your eyes from jumping to align to another, which will make you read slower. The second tip is to read when you're focused, energized and productive. This step might seem off and useless, but it's very important during the days that are times when you feel very productive and focused. And there are other periods of the day where you just want to lay down and check social media. This is basically our intern clock working, and when you understand your internal schedule, you can start to schedule different activities of your study sessions in different times of the day. In my case, I always feel more focused and energized in the morning, so I like to read during that time. So what we are doing here is scheduling different phases of the studying process into different times and our periods of the day because we are basically optimizing our days to our study sessions, which is a great way to make them more efficient. If you look at my finger, you can still see my hand right here and right here. But when we read, we read from the beginning to the end of the sentence. And so we lose our peripheral vision. What you can do to improve that is to trace lines in the book. So what you do is you draw a line, leaving a little bit of space in the rights and doing the same thing on the left. And basically, what you do is you on Leigh read between the lines. So it's like you ignore these two parts, but actually, because we have a peripheral vision, we can steal, understand and read what is in the luck in the right and in the left side. This is a great way to increase your reading speed. But I admit that it's something that I only dio with some books, especially from having a physical copy of the book. And I don't do it with all books. Like I told you, it's a little bit more time consuming, especially if you decide to draw the two lines in every page of the book. What you can do is try to ignore the first word on the left and on the right side of the sentences and steal. You're going to read them and to understand what it says because we have a peripheral vision, I can tell you that most of the reading speeds techniques that I've learned don't work in the Ark time consuming, and they make me lose a lot of comprehension. And so I'm not going to cover them here. The ones that I suggested using a Pacer reading in the optimal time of your day and also drawing two lines and basically focusing on the center or on the middle of those lines are my favorite techniques to read faster without losing any comprehension. Which is very important, of course. 9. How to Take Notes Effectively: like I've said before. The process of reading consists on reading the information that you previously selected and taking notes on that. There are a lot of ways to take notes, but I want to cover on Lee the most important and effective ones. When you are taking notes, you make the process of reading active rather than passive, and this will help you to understand and memorise the concepts much easier by favorite method of taking notes consists on using different methods together, such as the outline method, dicker nail method and the mind map method. I like to use different methods because they work very well together and also because different subjects require different things. And there might be a subject or a topic where I just use a mind map in other when I just use a not line. So it should be something that you will be familiar with, and you will understand if you should use one method on another. But in doubt, you can always use the three combined, which is basically what I do most of the times as calling reports, said a study system. It's on Lee, as useful as your ability to adapt to your unique situation. So for some topics and subjects, I used the outline method, which consists on writing a lot of bullet points off the main ideas off the text off the paragraph or off the chapter. Basically, you just list the most important information of watching just rest. Just be careful to not write everything in detail and not to inscribe the sentences that you just read. I also like to use the Cornell method, especially if I'm going to be tested on that material. So this is great if you are in college or high school and you have tests and exams. This method was invented by Walter Park, who wanted to make the study sessions more efficient for him and for his students, And it consists on three steps did not taking the formulation of questions and the answer to those questions. So basically, first you take notes on the information you just read, and you use the dissenter off the page. To do that, you can use the outline method alongside the Cornell method, so while you take notes, you can use the bullet points to do it. Next, you formulate questions about that part of the material and you answer them, you should write just a short paragraph that contains the most important information. And that answers specifically the question you formulate. Most people divide a page into three sections to use the Cornel method, so the left column contains the question. The middle one contains the notes, which you can use the outline method to do them. And then the right section contains the answer to the question, or just a short paragraph that contains the most important information. And finally, I also like to create mind maps to help me to retain the information and to take notes on what I just read. This is especially useful when the topic that you are studying can things, a lot of stuff, topics associated with it, and so creating a mind map will help you to understand and see the main picture of the subjects. Also, don't be afraid to underline, to draw, to make circles and to scribble into right and very big capital letters. Because your notes are supposed to be your notes and they don't have to look perfect nor very, very pretty. It's important to make your notes visual, but don't focus you much on trying to make them look insanely beautiful. Because I see a lot of people trying to make their notes perfect. And although it might be a priority for them, they might be wasting a little bit too much time trying to make their notes beautiful. Instead of focusing on the material alongside the main ideas, you can actually capture some examples if they are really important to make you understand the concepts. The goal is not to capture everything you read, but to rights, short and certain topics and ideas that will help you to understand the main topics. So if you see a very good example, you don't have to transcribe the whole example into your notes. You can just had a quick reference that you that will make you remember that example. You can also reference your own experiences, right? The shorts opinion of the author arguments for even point to other sources that relate with that paragraph. These air just quick ways to take notes that are also very effective because they help you to relate all the information that you just study it. In the end of the reading and no taking. You should have a decent understanding of the concepts. This is great to help you to make your final summaries, and also to make the review sessions much shorter and quicker, using all of these notes taking methods. My seem kind of complicated and overwhelming. But in reality, what really matters is doing something with the information you read. You can summarize the information using bullet points or mind mats mind maps. You should formulate questions and answer to those questions, using short paragraphs, writing references and examples that might help you to understand the material. The notes you are taking don't have to be the final summary, especially if the topics you are studying are quite complex and dense. But taking notes is quite important to recall the material you are reading because you are actively engaging with the contents. But I also want to point out that sometimes your notes can be your final summary, especially if the topics that you are studying is quite short and and that are not too many sources to check. So this is something you should evaluate by yourself. But creating a summary never hurt. So in doubt, do it 10. How to Read Actively: recall the experience of reading a magazine. You grab it, you start reading it, you check the images, the text, and that's it. If that's how you are reading your text books, you're doing it wrong. The previous lesson we talk about taking notes after reading the material and taking those notes is one of the best strategies to turn studying into something active rather than passive. When you take notes using the colonel method by coming up with questions and then answering them with a short summary, you are making the whole process active by adding notes, comments your opinion to the things read. You are also adding up to what you just learned, which basically helps with the retention of the material. So when you deliberately make your study sessions more active, you turn them into much more effective study sessions. Active reading reduces the amount of time you have to put into recalling and memorizing the information, because you can remember the information you just read much more when you actively work with it. As Virginia Voakes said. How often you read something is the material. How you read it is crucial. Skimming is also a great way to active reading to material because you're consciously selecting what is really important for your own studies, and you are also prime in your brain about the content that it will later be exposed. Another great way to make your study sessions more active and effective is to create summaries, and so we are going to cover that in the next lesson. 11. How to create Summaries: creating summaries is one of the most time consuming steps off the whole process. But when you focus on mastering the previous steps, summarizing can be quite enjoyable and not take you so much time. After all, most people spend hours summarizing the material because they don't know how to properly create summaries or because they didn't spend enough time reading or they didn't selected the most important material to read or they just didn't take notes. I see a lot of mistakes been done on this face. The summary face of the mistake number one that you should avoid is co peeing exactly what you just rest. So I see a lot of people copying verbatim the information they rab into their summaries. I did this mistake in the past, and it costed me a lot of time. Energy focus. And it basically doesn't help me at all. Another reason for not coping verbatim. What your sources have is because when you copy verbatim the information that there is in your sources, you're not to using your own four cavalry. You're using another person's vocabulary, and so because you are not familiar with it, it will do no good for you. It won't help you to retain the information nor even memorize it. The second mistake I see a lot of people do is to write the same thing over and over and over again. So some people read over and over and over again, which I did in the past and others right to the same things over and over and over again. I'll dough. This will help you to memorize the material because you're doing it like non stop. It's one of the least important in productive ways to actually memorize and retain the material. It's very time consuming. It will take you a lot of time. It won't help you in the long term. And, yes, you should be able to memorize a lot of things if you repeat them and you write them a lot of times. But it's not productive, it's time consuming and it should be avoided. So for me, a summary is an explanation off the concepts that I have learned before, So depending on my own goals, my summaries can be quite short or quite bake, but they should never be a copy of the sources that I read again. I can't really tell you how many pages yourself your summary should have, because it totally depends on your goals in on the material itself. You should spend a few minutes thinking of how in depth you want to cover the material. And so if you want to go very in depth, you should take more time and more pages to summarize the content. But never copy that information that you previously rep writing a summary want to take your crazy amount of hours because you already skimmed the content. You read the most important information, and you have already good notes staked on the material, and so the process will be very effective in quick to go through. So you might be asking, Why should you create summaries if you already have notes and you read the material, so the first reason is your summaries will be much, much shorter than the sources that you read from. The second reason is your summaries will be written down with your own words in your own full cavalry, which will increase the retention of the material. And the third reason is because summaries will help you to review everything faster because your summaries contain on Lee the most important information. So summaries help a lot on memorizing, retaining, understanding the concepts and making everything more digestible and organized. So let's dive in to learn how you can create your own summaries to create your summaries. You might be asking, Should I use a physical notebook, or should I use my computer or iPad? There is a huge debate on this topic to to write your summaries on a digital format or on a physical notebook. When you use a computer, it's match faster to take your notes. It's also easier to go back and edit things, have more stuff and format, the taxed at headlines and things like that. You can also sink your files in different devices and organize many different sources on the same documents. When you use a physical notebook, it's easier to draw things the way you want to. It's better if you're studying maths, and the feeling of writing and paper might be a little bit more pleasant and enjoyable for most people, according to some research, people who take notes on paper are more capable to recall information half an hour later. This happens because when people right in their computers. They have the tendency to rights more than they should, which means they have more information that's not that valuable. And so they my end up coping the sources without really paying attention to what they are writing. On the other hand, it might take you much more time to write summaries on the paper notebook on a physical notebook because it just takes a lot more time to write on paper to finish. My advice is, choose the method that you feel most comfortable with. Don't be afraid to try different methods and see which one works best with you. But make sure your main goal is retention and understanding of the material. You should consider both options depending on your goals. So maybe if your site mats it might make much more sense for you to use a physical notebook . I usually create my summaries in paper notebooks when I'm having like technical subjects like maths and accounting. But I prefer to use my computer and non technical stuff in subjects that have a lot more theory and sources to check. The worst method right in your summaries is not using any method at all and not creating the summaries. So pick one or try with different ones. See which method works best toe works better with you, and don't waste too much time thinking about it and pondering if it's better or if it's not better. Now, the first thing to have in your summary is the main topic. I used the top of my page to write the main topic of the thing that I'm staying, and I immediately follow it with a sub topic below the topic. Sometimes I write a short description or a short explanation of the topic, and right above the sub topic, it's important to break each main topic into multiple sip topics. To make the content more digestible and easy to learn. Because you already skimmed the material Reddit and Duke notes on it, you can't basically divide a topic into multiple sip topics. You can use your sources to check which some topics might be useful to cover on your summaries. Next thing you should do is to write a very short explanation of each sub topic. This can take you only a short paragraph, but maybe can also take you multiple. One is depending on the complexity off the sub topic. There's no right or wrong lens, but each paragraph should only contain one main idea. So if you have more ideas to cover, use another paragraph to do it. So start by writing what you remember about that Sepp topics. Using your head your brain and not checking anything. Try to remember ideas, facts, examples and things that you previously rev intake in took notes on. I can write this information in a bullet point formats. If you are using a physical notebook, make sure you leave some blank spaces between the lines, so you can then add more information on Lee. After trying to recall the information by yourself, you should then check your notes. Check the sources if it's necessary to complement the information you wrote. But remember to use your own full cavalry to maximize retention. Using words that are not familiar to us is probably not a good option. If there's any sub topic that you already know very well, there's no need to waste time Writing in in your summaries doesn't make sense to write things that already obvious and that are already a part of your knowledge as an example. If you're studying and learning the capitals of the countries of the world, it doesn't make sense to have your country in the capital of your country or other countries that you already know the answer again. Some symptom picks contain more sub topics inside it, which we can call subsidy topics, is the same framework. So right, the subsidy topic and then an explanation off its. I usually use a raft pen for the same topic and then a green one for the subsidy topic. But you can choose, of course, your own color code. So in the previous framework to create your summaries, you basically wrote the main topic that an explanation than DISIP topic an explanation and the process continues. There's another approach that I like to use depending on Michael's, which is the question, the answer and the conclusion or the summary. Basically, you come up with a lot of questions related with the topics that you are staying, and you search for answers to those questions in your mind you think you can then check your sources and your notes to see if the art okay and you end up writing a short conclusion or a short summary that answers to the question. But make sure you write that conclusion using your own words. The conclusion should not be something very big. It should be an answer to the question in a very simple way. And so after this method, you will end up with a lot of questions and the answer to those questions very simplified and compact. So basically, after creating those summaries, you can use the questions and the answers to create your note card system to remember and recall the information later by trying to associate the information into a question answer framework. You are summarising to material in a very efficient way, and it's especially important if you're going to be tested on the material you are learning . This is very similar to the colonel method when taking notes, but it's usually done with more accuracy and precision because you have now a clearer picture of the subject because you already skimmed the material rabbit and took notes on it . As you can see, all phases of the studying process are important and they are all related with each other. And so for me in my opinion would really differentiates. A good study process from an incredible study process is that each face in the incredible study process is then separately, to make every aspect of its very effective. When you don't go through the reading phase, you end up reading a lot of information that it's useless when you don't take notes after reading, you don't make the concept stick in your mind. And when you don't take the time to create proper summaries, the process of memorizing and recalling the information will be much more difficult to go through more boring and time consuming. 12. Organize your Resources: at this time you have your notes in summaries done, so it's time to start studying them. But first you should organize all of your materials. Call the airport. In his book How to Became a Straight A Student talks about creating study guides. You can print out all of your notes in summaries and organize them by topics. You can deconstruct your notebooks, your notes and the information you collected to make sure everything is it, since proper place labeled the piles by writing the main topic with the sticky notes and joined the pages together. If you're studying more technical subjects such as maths or accounting, make sure you collect problems exercises in the resolution of those two. You can also add questions and your own notes to help you then understand more the problem itself. Now that everything is in its proper place, we can now start to memorize all the material 13. Memorize with Cards: For some reason, I've never really enjoyed the words memorization because it seems like I'm just memorizing , so I can then forget. Although that was the case in some of my tests, I don't really like to focus on that approach or on that perspective. I prefer the word learning because that's what I'm actually looking for that had a lot of short texts to make the learning or the memorizing phase more effective. But I really want to focus on the most important ones that will give you a great advantage . But first I want to deconstruct some misconceptions related with memorization. The best way to memorize anything is to actively engage with the material. And we've been doing that during all this study process by skimming, reading, actively taking notes in creating summaries. So at this time, there are a lot of information that you already have in your head. Reading the material over and over and over again is not effective to memorize things because you are reading it as the passive activity and as we saw before, learning and studying should be active. I see a lot of people who try to study by reading the lectures or the presentations like three or four times. And yes, sometimes they do memorize the things, but that's not the most effective strategy. I know that reading might be easy to do than taking the time to take notes and to actively pay attention to the information you are reading. But if it's not the most effective way to do it, then we should avoid it. It's takes far more time to read the same information dozens of times, then to go through a few of recalling sessions to make sure you remember the material and that it sticks within you for a long time. Also, when you use active learning to memorize information, your brain strengthens up the narrow pathways that exist in your brain, which will help you to memorize and recall things for a much longer period of time. So basically, our brains learn better when we actively use the information we are learning, and we can do it by recalling taking knows or trying to solve problems. As Ryan said, simply reading it over doesn't work. You have to make the extra efforts to get it into your head. One of the best waste, memorize and recall information is to use flash cards. You can buy some index cards or some note cards, and you right the question in front of the card, and on the back of it, you ride the answer. It might take you a while to create the flash cards, but I reassure you. That's one of the best ways to recall and memorize new information. You can create a stack of cards for each topic, or each subject the questions you right in front of your card. You probably already created them because when we took notes and we created summaries, we focused on creating questions, so there's no extra work here. You can also break each question in more specific questions. If you feel like it's better for you on the other side of the card, you should write the answer or like a short paragraph. That explains the question. Just make sure the answer covers the main idea. It doesn't have to be super specific, because for that you have your summaries. After creating the flash cards, you should test yourself on them. So read the question and state the answer out loud without reading it. Of course, and then in the end, make sure you check the answer to see if you got it correctly. The best thing is you can do this while you are in any place while exercising, walking, listening to music while waiting for the bus. Anything you should say the answer out loud, but if you can't make sure you write it down in this process, you will see that you know the answer to some questions with no problem at all. Mark them up with little check marks, so you know that those flash cars are already in your mind, and so you separate them from the other ones that are still causing you trouble. So have a break, do other things and then come back to your note cards and repeat the process. But at this time, you Onley are going to pick up the note cars that you have trouble recalling them. This process can go for one day, more days or even weeks totally depends on the amount of the things you have to remember. You should review all the cards now and then to see if they are still in your memory, but it's not necessary to repeat this process every day, especially. Most of the cars are already in your memory. This is called spaced repetition, and it's one of the best methods to keep information in your long term memory because it consists on studying more the things you don't know and study unless the things you already know. So you are focusing your attention and energy on the things that you still have to improve on, instead of spending the same amount of time in the things that are already familiar to you . When you separate the cards from the ones you already memorized and the ones you didn't, you are using space repetition because you are dedicating more time to the things that you have trouble with. By spacing out the repetition through several days, you're basically gaining the ability to transfer the content that you are studying from your short to long term memory, and you will remember the information much more than if you just creme de everything in one day. The process of creating flashcards is a little bit time consuming. There is a software that I do enjoy called Anke, where you can create your own flashcards in your computer. And the best thing is that Yankee, as inside integrator, does a spaced repetition method. So after creating or flashcards inside Anke, you can test yourself on them. The ones you have trouble remembering will be the ones that appear the most, and the ones who can perfectly recall Onley appear now and then, so make sure you start creating your flashcards early on. So here's a summary of what you have to do to create your own flashcards. So the 1st 1 is to actually create the flash card, like writing the question in the front and the answer on the back. The second step is to answer the question without looking at it. The third step is to separate the cards that you already know from the ones you don't. The fourth step is to review the ones that you didn't know a few hours later or a day later , and repeat the process until you know basically all the answers to your questions. If you're going to be tested on the material on a test, make sure a day before the test that you review all the cards again and really enjoy having knowledge in your long term memory. Without those painful cramming sessions 14. Memorize with Stories: another very useful method to memorize and remember the content is to create stories. Some subjects and content are easy to memorize by using flashcards, but certain facts in lists don't go very well with quizzes. Most people use rote repetition as a mean, but it's just not the most effective way to memorize those. For that reason, I always try to create a story with words that I must remember. Creating a visual story with the words that I must remember helps me to remember those words for a long, long time while making the process fun and enjoyable. So I had to remember the principles of Taylor is, and they were planning, preparation, control, separation and simplification to remember these words. For a long time. I created a story with those words, the more fun and weird. The story is, the better for you to memorize it. For the first word I had to memorize planning, I imagine the manager of I keep writing on a white ward. The materials needed to start building a new store he is planning, and I associate the board to plan new things. The second word is preparation. The manager talked with his employees, and they start packing the materials to build the new store. They are preparing everything to start building. The third word is control. A different team comes to see if all the necessary materials are currently packed and labelled. They inspect and analyze everything to make sure the process run smoothly before the word is separation. Now the employees are separating the different materials into different trucks, and the fifth word is simplification. As the trucks arrived to the building, a new manager looks into the trucks and see how everything is well organized. He screams. You guys are good on simplifying things. If you paid attention to the story, you probably memorize the five words without having to repeat them 10 times. Because your rain love stories and visual images you might be able to remember this story in this principles for a long time. I wish I knew this method since I was younger because it would help me out with a lot of things. Imagine if teachers started helping kids to memorize things while using this type of methods. After a few days, kids would be able to create by themselves their own stories with the things that they just learned, and they wouldn't think that school was so boring after all. The more you apply in used this technique, the better you will become on creating stories. And these stories will be very useful for you to memorize new information, especially lists and different types of words. So try it by yourself to memorize things that you always wanted, Teoh. 15. Memorize with the Memory Palace: Another technique to memorize things is the memory palace in memory. Palace is used by memory championships all the time because it works, and you should use it to learn new things to basically consists on placing a list of words into a place that you are familiar with, like your house, your office, your school or even a video game location. Then you close your eyes and you imagine yourself walking into the place you chose mentally placing the things you have to remember in those places. So the key is to create images that are fun and weird in your hat, just like we did in the previous method. So let's say you have to remember a list of five healthy foods because you are studying nutrition. We're going to start with five, but you can use it with, no matter the amount of words you have. You just have to make sure that you have different places in your house or in your office to place those items. So let's say you have to remember broccoli, avocado, walnuts, spinach in Berries. You can create a story with this five foods, but in this case, we're going to try the memory Palace, so I'm using my home as my place. And so I have to pick five different places inside my house to place those five items. As I walk into the door, there's a metal sculpture on the left. The first item will be placed there. Then I continue to walk. I enter my leaving room, and the first thing I see is my white sofa. My second item will be placed there. I get into my kitchen and I placed the third item in the sink. The fourth item will be placed in my own. Beth in the fifth will be in my bookshelf. So the more items you have to memorize, the more places you have to choose inside your house. Now close your eyes and imagine a big broccoli as the head off the metals culture. The walk towards the leaving room in my sofa instead of being white, is painted with an avocado pattern. Family is sitting there, and they seem to like it in my kitchen sink. I can see a bunch of walnuts going down the drain. I try to grab them, but it's too late. Next in my bag that are. A lot of spinach is placed under my pillow and finally I can see that my books are no longer there. I just can't see a bunch of Berries in my bookshelf. They occupy it the whole shelf out to remember these five items. You close your eyes and you imagine yourself going through those places, and you probably are going to see the items in the exaggerations that you made with those items, but to make sure you make the images very weird and fun, because that's a great way for your brain to memorize things you want. 16. BONUS - Memorize the Presidents of the USA: to practice a little bit more. The Memory Palace technique. We're going to memorize the 1st 5 presidents of the United States of America. Remember to use the memory Palace, you have to pick five in this case, five places of a place that you are familiar with this figure. We're going to learn the five presidents Washington Adams, Jefferson Medicine in one row. But you can extend the process to all of the president's if you want to remember them. So the first thing we're going to do is turn each president into a picture. So here are my associations. Washington I associated with the washing machine Adams associated with Evan, the first men created by God Jefferson. I associated with the chef Cook Madison I associated with medicine with bills in one row, I associated with Marilyn Monroe. Now the next thing you have to do is to imagine those five things washing machine Adam, chef medicine or pills and Marilyn Monroe in the 1st 5 places of the location you chose create funny images in your mind. So tomorrow review your memory palace. See if you can steal, remember the images, then do the same thing next week and next month. And you will probably remember the 1st 5 presidents of the United States of America for the rest of your life, and you can extend this to all presidents with no problem whatsoever. This is called Space Repetition, and we are also using Memory Palace, and you can use this to learn anything that you would just want to work. 17. BONUS - Memorize a Speech: having to deliver a presentation without any notes is kind of nerve wracking, but we all have to do it, even in school. For me, trying to remember a presentation always meant reading it over and over and over again. I can tell you that it works, but it works because I repeated it so many times that it just sticked into my mind. But it's very time consuming. So I've learned this technique to memorize speeches and presentations much easier. And it works much better than trying to repeat the same thing over and over again when trying to deliver a presentation. I don't want to memorize every single word in the sentence. I want to remember key idea, so I can later remember to refer those and to talk about them. So the first thing you should actually do is to write the speech or the things you want to say. You don't have to write it word for word, as you won't be memorizing words forward. Next, you have to find the key ideas or topics that are contained in your speech. If you are delivering your presentation about the brain, you might have certain topics a chance structure, research, development, history in facts. To memorize those main ideas, you can use the memory palace for me memory. Powell's works very well with specific key ideas in words, but you can also create a story with those key ideas to make it memorable, too. Remember to exaggerate the pictures to make it more vivid in your mind. For example, I can imagine the structure of a house project and the way it's going to look like in the end. Next, a team of five people come with the white coat in a magnifying glass to investigate. If it's okay to build the building or not, they are researching the area. Next, the construction team arrives, and they immediately start toe work, placing the blocks in top of each other. They are already developing the house as the place where the house is going to be built is very old. There are a lot of stories around it, and so some of those interesting facts and stories about the house are being redid on the walls. After crafting the story, you can practice it in front of a mirror to see if you can remember the key words And if you can deliver the speech by using visual images to remain the main keywords, it's pretty much impossible that you will forget the main ideas. And remember that you can have as many ideas and many Q words as you want, so let's try another example. So let's say you have to deliver a presentation on time management, and you have to cover these five topics. Planning your day, using focusing sessions throughout the day, taking breaks, saying no and sleep well. So we're going to use the memory palace technique to memorize these five keywords. So start by picking five locations of familiar place to you. The door, the sofa, the kitchen table, the sink and the bath. Now visualize in your own mind the first word of your speech in the first location that you chose. So imagine yourself planning your whole day in the big calendar that is attached to your door. Next, imagine yourself focusing in your work while sitting in your sofa. How are you ceding? How are you feeling? It's important to really feel and visualized the images. The kitchen table is the place where you take a break. You are eating and relaxing. The fourth idea is saying no, and for it in the fourth location is the sink, so you can imagine yourself saying no while your commitments are going down the sink and finally imagine yourself sleeping in your back. This one was quite easy. Now just go through your speech while you visualize your memory palace technique, and so you will be able to remember the keywords, and you can also deliver your speech with no problem whatsoever. Remember that you can pick bar locations to have more ideas in your presentation. I really hope it helps. 18. BONUS - Memorize the Periodic Table: have you ever studied chemistry? And there you were trying to remember all of those names to get a better grade on the test , repeating the names of the elements dozens of times while still getting them wrong. I relate to that. So here's how you can memorize the 1st 10 elements of the periodic table in a few minutes, so the elements are idly gene, ilium, lithium, beryllium, Boren, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen flooring and neon. As you're learning the previous lessons, you know you have to drench from the words you want to remember into pictures that are vivid and easy to memorize. So here are my associations Idol Jean Water Bottle, Helium Balloon, lithium batteries, beryllium Bear Boren Board, Carven Diamonds Natural Gene Night Oxygen, Oxygen Mask, flurry Brushing teeth. Finally, me on me Own lights Again. You can create a story with this 10 words, or you can place thesis 10 words in different places in your home or in a novel, a location. But let's create a story. You can close your eyes and imagine this scene. Imagine someone throwing a water bottle into the river. The bottle lends on top of a balloon that starts to take off the balloon as big batteries that allow it to fly so high inside a balloon, you see something kind of weird. It's a bear. But even stranger, you see the bear surfing in the board. It's aboard, made of diamonds and because it is so precious and night appears and tries to steal, it is flying so high that he has an oxygen mask to breathe. But suddenly he takes the mask off, starts brushing his teeth, he smiles, and key Steve are shining like neon lights. Now pause the video and see if you can still build this story in your mind. Because it was a story that I created. It won't be so easy for you to memorize, but when you create your own stories, it's much easier, and you probably can do it very quickly. So basically, you have just memorized 10 elements. The 1st 10 elements of the periodic table Argentine water bottle, helium balloon, lithium batteries, brilliant bear, Boren board, carbon diamonds, nitrogen night oxygen, oxygen mask, flooring, brushing teeth and finally, neon neon lights. And that's how you do it. I really hope you try this at home 19. Conclusion: studying is a skill that can be learned and improved every day. This was something that I discovered on Lee a few years ago because before that I was definitely not studying effectively. After looking for new methods and techniques to improve my learning skill, I start having much more free time in today. I found that I could still have excellent grades while enjoying what I've learned while learning mawr and still having plenty of time. Learning how to learn is a skill that everyone should take the time to master and learn. It can bring you incredible opportunities in your career or any other personal project that you are currently working on. It will also increase your self esteem because you are now able to learn things in a much sure period of time. If you implement the right strategies, you can decrease the time that it takes you to learn anything. But remember, don't study while you check social media. I reassure you that the moment I stopped using my phone while learning my study sessions became immediately more effective and shorter. All the phases covered in this class are very important. They make the whole learning process much more efficient to go through. Don't forget the importance of scheming to material before reading it. And don't forget to read with close attention to take some time to create good notes, to summarize the content and to use some incredible techniques to memorize the material. Thank you very much for watching this class. I really hope it can help you to learn how to learn much more efficiently. I challenge you to apply this principles and to start learning something you something that you always wanted to learn. Please can see. They're leaving a review with your thoughts on this course. Reading your feedback motivates me and inspires me to get better. And remember that you can re watch this class whenever you want to review some concepts or to motivate yourself to continue studying every day. Sharing the discussion of this class something that you are really excited about learning can be photography, Spanish anatomy, history or anything you want. Let's create a community of people interested in learning and becoming better if you need any help. Also used a discussion and that will help you out. Thank you very much for watching and I see you in other classes. Bye bye