Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, My name's Phil Jones. Welcome to my course, reading more effectively with mind maps, how to retain and learned better from what you read. The reason why I created this course is because I love to read, and I keep track of a lot of the books that I read, and a lot of them are non fiction. And I was looking back on my list on good reads, showing all the books that I had read in the last three years, and I realized that some of the books from two or three years ago I could not remember very much about the middle. And so some time ago I started the process of trying to figure out a more effective strategy for not just reading but remembering and applying what I read. Now my biggest passion is metal learning, learning how to learn more effectively. So this fit right into that process. And so I looked at a lot of different ways to apply skills that I was already using elsewhere and different tools that others had shared as a way to improve the speed at which I read increased the amount that I learned from reading and also try to make the process more active and engaging all around. And so this course is meant to share what I have done as a result, and the process that I use to remember Mawr learn better and make the whole reading process just more effective for me. He uses my maps a tool that I'm very fond of, is you might have seen in some of my previous courses. But it also applies some basic principles about how we've learned and how we look at knowledge. I thought this might be a helpful course for people on skill share, because most of you tend to be really interested in knowledge and learning and how to learn better. So I wanted to share this with you in hopes that you might gain something that helps you remember more of what you read and have a more fulfilling experience while you're learning through reading. Overall, I hope that you stick with me in this course and that you find something very helpful for you, and I look forward to seeing you inside
2. Project Description: I very much believe that the best way to learn is to apply the new knowledge you're acquiring as you're learning. So I'm going to encourage you to take a book that you're interested in that you feel is going to provide you with some useful skills and read along with that while you complete the course and you can complete the entire course and then apply it to the book afterwards . But I do encourage you to try to use the tactics in here if they seem like they'll be helpful to you on an actual book. So maybe a short nonfiction book or how to would be useful. I'm going to do that as an example within this course, and I chose the book when by Daniel Pink, mostly because the book just came out. I'm interested in reading it, and his books tend to have a lot of actionable insights, and they tend to be pretty interesting. I also thought that it would be interesting for you as viewers of this course and something that you might also get something good out of. So maybe we could get a little bit of double effort off our course here because they're nonfiction and they cover interesting topics. I thought it would be a good exploration, but I encourage you to find anything that you think is going to help you grow and develop and include that in this course is a project, because I'd love to see what you come up with an answer, any questions you have about how you might learn more from the material, and I think that's a good way to learn by trying it and seeing if you got anything out of it. And if you didn't let me know and we can see if there's a way to workshop that together, I'd also love to see the summaries of some of the books that you're reading. It's always interesting to see what other people take away from really interesting books. So I look forward to seeing your projects, and I hope you enjoy falling along with mine.
3. Enhanced Reading Process Overview: okay, We talked about the skim, which is effective no matter what you're reading, except for fiction. And now let's get into a review of the overall process that we're going to cover in this course. There's five major components to this process of reading. The first is that you should be consuming smart. That means that you're using your time effectively when you read. So you're reading in a way that is memorable, that you're reading things that you want to read and that you have intention for, in other words, that you have an expectation that you're going to get something out of material you're reading that has many benefits in that you look for the right things and you don't waste your time on things that don't match your goals. The second is to engage in active learning. It's one thing to passively consume information and hope that some of it sticks, and then we can apply it later. It's a completely different thing to do active learning. So part of the reason that skill share encourages students to engage in projects is because that is active learning. You're doing something with the information that's being presented to you by these teachers in the hope that you will be able to learn how to use that skill. Simply watching the videos and not participating doesn't really give you the same level of learning and knowledge because you're not active. And if you're not an active participant, you're just not as engaged in your mind, isn't 100% with it and able to retain what you are being exposed to Number three is to build a map and to build connections. The beauty of a map and particularly a mind map for what we're going to be doing in this course is that it connects ideas that you're being exposed to now. New ideas with existing ideas. And those connections helped anchor that knowledge. The MAWR that your neurons connect with existing pathways, the more likely it is to stick something that's completely out there and unrelated to anything else. You know, like a random string of numbers is hard to remember. But if you see a random string of numbers that contains your cell phone number, it's a lot easier to remember because that piece is already wired in your memory. So we want to do that kind of process by connecting ideas that you already have and knowledge that you already have with what you're learning. The added benefit is you get to see how that information is useful to you, which is part of the whole reason why you're reading in the first place. The next is to keep an artifact when you have something that is a token of what you've read , something that serves as evidence that you've read, and it contains some tangible expression of the knowledge gained. It's a lot easier to remind yourself of what you already learned, so there's a big difference between active and passive memory. Active memory is something that you can call to mind at any time. It's something that you just remember, like your address or your phone number, or things that you do on a daily basis for your job. Passive memory is something you knew, but you didn't realize you knew it until something reminded you of it. So this comes up playing something like Trivial Pursuit or trying to remember the name of an actor or actress in a movie. That's knowledge that you have somewhere in your brain. But until there's a reason to call attention to it. It's not there for the purposes of you trying to do things more effectively. If you're trying to read toe, learn to improve your skill set. That passive knowledge isn't very helpful because it doesn't come up to solve a problem on artifact changes. That an artifact is something that you can look back to that tells you what you already knew, and chances are once you see that it will remind you of everything that you took in when you were consuming that book. So these air notes essentially, or it could be even a picture, anything that serves as a reminder of what you already knew. Unfortunately, the map that we're going to be using to build connections can also serve as an artifact, and I'll show you some other options. When we get to this part of the course, the final step is referring and remembering to the work that you've done. This is where the artifact and the map of connections comes in. By referring back to what you've already learned, you build in that repetition that's neccessary for something to move from short term memory , toe long term memory. It's very easy to forget what you read. If all you do is passively engage with it once and then never look at it again. But if you connected to knowledge, you already have and have notes that you can drawn to refer back to and keep looking at that information and connecting it to things you're doing eventually it'll become part of your active knowledge in your long term memory, something that isn't going to just disappear in time. And isn't that what you want for the time that you're investing in learning? Those are the major five components we're going to talk about In this course. We're going to learn about how we can apply each of them. So now let's get into the basics of how to start your reading process.
4. Facing the Challenges of Reading: before we set out on our journey to become more effective readers, I think it's important to start by talking about some of the challenges that you might face on that journey. There's three main things that we're trying to overcome when we improve our reading. The first is passivity many of us are taught to read in a passive way. We are experiencing someone else's words rather than being an active participant in those words, meaning isn't made by the author. It's made in a cooperation between the author and the reader. You have to make sense of those words. You have to connect them with knowledge and make the meaningful. So if you don't engage with the material actively and instead are simply a spectator looking upon the words impassively, you are not going to get the kind of learning that we aspire to a lot of times, especially when you've been reading for a while and your mind starts to wander, it can feel like the words are simply bouncing off your eyeballs, and that's not a great way to learn. So we want to overcome that in order to become better readers and better learners. The other challenge is the fragmented way in which we read. And what I mean by that is that we take in little bits of information at a time piece by piece, and it's hard for us to string together the entire meaning in a sensible way. So if you're reading an argument laid out by someone, chances are they start with introducing their position and then backing that up with points that build on each other. To them, it makes sense because they know what they're communicating. But to you, you're learning it all for the first time. As you read, very skilled writers know how to break things down in a way that slowly introduces you into a topic so that you don't lose yourself. But chances are, somewhere along the line you're going to have questions, and you're going to have a hard time contextualizing one piece of that reading into the overall point or argument that's being made. So think of it is if you were an ant trying to make sense of a jigsaw puzzle and you were sitting on top of one piece, you may be able to sense what's on that specific piece, but seeing the bigger picture of the puzzle is not as easy. So finding the one piece that's missing is going to be next to impossible. When you're reading, you're taking him once word at a time, then trying to make sense of the entire meaning and then trying to make sense of the paragraph, and then the entire argument of the chapter and then the book. So all those pieces need to fit together in unison, and you're sort of leaping forward, hoping to reach the next sort of safe landing spot as you go. So that's another challenge that we face when reading. With that in mind, it could be hard to put each of the pieces that were taking into the appropriate context. It's hard to tell what is important when you don't know the overall picture. When you do, it's easier to say this one piece. This one argument really pulls the whole book together. But if you don't know if you don't know what the entire argument is and you can't at the beginning of the book, you don't know what to hold on to. And as I like to point out, when you highlight everything in a book. You're really not highlighting anything there, certain ideas that are worth remembering. But if you can't figure out what those are when your first reading is going to be hard for you to remember them, so these are a few of the challenges that we're going to deal with is we work on our reading. They're not the only challenges in retaining what you read and reading more effectively, but they are big ones, and there are some that we can easily fix with the techniques that we're gonna learn in this course.
5. How to Boost Retention: one quick side note before we get to the process. Overall, one of the most important goals of reading more effectively, a simply retention remembering what you read. That's kind of what drove me to develop this process. In the beginning, I mentioned in the intro video I wanted to remember more of what I read, especially since almost everything I read was very interesting to me. So I want to talk about the keys to retention very quickly. The first is applying what you read. If you can connect what you read to something that you're doing, then it becomes ingrained in the memory of doing that thing and the knowledge already have of whatever thing you're doing. So if you're reading about drawing and then you apply that knowledge while you're drawing, you're going to remember that process a little more because it ties to your existing experiences of drawing, the drawing that you completed and the memory of doing that thing versus If you just read the book. All you have is the memory of having read the book. The next step is connection. The more associated your knowledge is, the more connected it is, the more likely you are to remember it. So it's sort of like when you do something like, for instance, drawing and you can connect drawing with your knowledge of perspective, or you can connect it with lighting. That may be something that you acquired elsewhere, but those skills air associate ID. So now every time you go to draw, you call upon that knowledge. And if you do drawing more often than you say, rig up a lighting system, your knowledge of lighting is going to be more finally developed because it's being practiced in different situations. So connecting existing knowledge with new knowledge is a great way to retain it. The final process for retention is one that we all know well, and that's repetition, the more often you access knowledge the mawr likely you are to keep that knowledge close at hand. So think of it like walking a trail and people leaving a pathway through a grassland. That happens because people keep walking the same trails over and over again. They become pathways. The same thing happens in your memory. The more often you go to a memory, the more easy it is to recall. So that's the three tools for retention that we're going to leverage throughout this process. And it's important to think about that when you're reading. How am I applying these three steps to reading more effectively? Am I connecting it? Am I applying it and is there enough repetition? If all you care about is retention, then this is something to be looking for in the way that you read.
6. The Power of the Skim for Rapid Learning: before we get too much further into understanding the system of learning. I want to give you one of the most important tools for being a more effective reader. So if you only watch the first few videos, you've at least taken away this and that is the skim. Now when we talk about some of the challenges that we face when reading a lot of thumb came from the fact that we either letter minds wander and so we start to lose a hook into what we're reading, and the other is that it's hard for us toe make sense of everything that we're reading, at least in the intended the author had. So one way to overcome that is to skim the entire book before we actually read line by line . Now this has a few benefits. The first is that we understand exactly the arguments that the author is making. We may not have all the details, but we do know what they're trying to accomplish. The major ideas and the major themes. Second, we get to understand what we need to understand in order to better make sense of what's happening and what we can use from the book. So after you've skimmed through the book, you probably have a lot of questions. That means that when you go in to read the book and more detail, you're going to be looking for those answers, which means you're probably gonna find them. That's way more effective than reading the entire book, having questions and then not going back to look at it because you've already read it in its entirety. So the skin primes you by sitting out what questions you're going tohave and looking for the answers when you actually go into your full read. The next is that you find most of the major ideas and the organization of the book that makes it a lot easier to process. But it also gives you a lot of the knowledge for the book. You may not have your 80% mastery of it, but you can get the major ideas and be able to summarize them. There may be books that you end up looking at that you realize you don't need to read because it doesn't answer any substantial questions that you have, and it didn't capture interest. If that's the case, you saved a considerable amount of time, and you may still have grabbed the major ideas from the book. Obviously, some books lend themselves to this more than others. I find that a lot of popular business books are much more beneficial to skim that maybe a science book. I recently completed a book called The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and that book is so dense and so wonderfully written that I can't imagine being able to skim it and get the major details from it. That book covers the expanse of human study of jeans and heredity, which is such a large topic, and he studies it with so many individual details. It makes it hard to do it that way. But a lot of business books that present one theory have the basic skeleton of that theory and then many case studies to support it, so you may not need to capture all of those details. So how do we skim? The process is simple. You first start with the table of contents. You look at the chapter headings and try to understand what is the layout of the book, what comes where and when and what is the logical progression of ideas. Next, you look at the introduction, try to figure out if the author has laid out their main pieces or summarized their argument . Another good place to look for this is the book jacket or the summary that's included as a blurb. Now, chances are you've already looked at this, and that's why you picked up the book. So you should hopefully know the elevator speech for the book. That's something that you can use to contextualize everything that you read. Looking at the table of contents. The next step is to think through what questions you have after reading the table of contents and the introduction. What things do you want to see from the book? In order for it to answer some doubts or concerns you might have about the topic? Does something seem like it doesn't make sense? Is something really interesting? What do you want to know more about? Finally, ask yourself what you want to learn for your experience with this book to be a success. Now we'll talk about this in more detail later in the course, but I suggest you think about it in terms of a skill that you hope tohave so not just knowledge, but something that you can apply. Even if this is something that you're reading for fun, what do you hope to be able to talk about when you're done with the book? That knowledge is super helpful because it helps you sort through your reading in a way that targets those goals that you have instead of just passively letting the book hits your eyeballs. So that's the basics of the skin. Now it will go on to some more detail about how you can build a thorough process for reading that's more engaging, entertaining and memorable.
7. How to Build Your Template Map/Scaffold: in this video, I'm going to walk you through, creating a sample scaffold or basic template you can use to start building your mind map as you read Now, you can design anyway you want, but this kind of shows you some of the ideas that I bring when I start to build my mind, Man, the first is to start with a context, and this is the information that is important surrounding the book, like information about the author or the motivation that I have going into it. So we start with some information about the author's background, some information about their previous work, maybe the motivation behind writing the book, perhaps the thesis, our main argument that the authors making any related works that I have read or that I know are connected to whatever the author wrote. The next step is to really look at some other context that supports the work in this case goals. What was the author intending to accomplish when they wrote the book? Now you don't have to use all of these ideas, but they give you a starting point so that when you are looking at your map, you have ideas to think about so you might look at the reception that the book received both from supporters and critics. And this is a way for you to have a more full picture of the arguments that are being made both positive and negative. I think it's also important for you to think about the context of your own goals. What do you hope to learn from reading the book so you can have your eyes open as you're going through the work? Why does the book interest you to begin with? What are you hoping to accomplish? What questions do you bring to the reading so you can try to answer them as you read all this critical attention to why you're interacting with the book is a great way for you to learn because you consider all of those elements. You also want to know how you're going to judge the book because I think it's important not to be passive when you're reading and we talk about that active reading elsewhere in the course. You want to make sure that your attention is on the ideas, and being critical in this way helps you do that. Some other basic concepts that you might consider capturing in your mind Map is the main thesis of the book. So what is the primary argument? And what are the supporting ideas that the author uses to maintain that argument? So capturing those main supporting ideas in this format as they relate to the main thesis is a good way for you to really examine the work. It's also helpful to look at the main examples and stories because most most authors use those examples and stories to illustrate their point, and they'll help you remember when you look back on your map later, I think it's also helpful toe look and break down your first skim through the book. We talked about the skim earlier, and if you can capture some of the main ideas you learned as you went through the skin, the things that you already knew that the author presented to you the things that you need to look at further so you can validate, thumb or maybe learn more than what the author presented any ideas that you disagreed with . So you can call attention to those and perhaps explore further ideas that you agreed with because That's something that you can also connect to existing ideas that you had identifying the main points just so that you have a reference later when you're reviewing your notes and you can break down those ideas however you like. And again, this structure isn't necessarily the best structure. This is just the kind of things that you might want to use. The ideas that you're really thinking actively about the book. You could look to some of the connections to other ideas that you have. This is really one of the valuable parts of reading. A book is finding how it connects to which you already know, and that makes it memorable. So once you've got a temple that you can be happy with, I suggest you copy it so that you can start to edit that template when you're reading your book. And so I'm going to do that with When by Daniel Pink. And in the next video, I'm gonna show you my filled out mind map and we can start proceeding from there
8. Deconstructing the Book's Ideas : okay. In the previous video, we built out the template that we're going to use to examine the book. And in this case, the book is when by Daniel Pink and I have taken the template over here that we created in the last one and already populated it with some of the elements from the book to save you the trouble of seeing me type. So I want to go through each in terms of how we're going to use our building of the map as a learning tool to remember things. So the first step is to talk about major learning efforts, which include the deconstruction and reconstruction of what we learned. So I want to start by looking at the basics and what I pulled from my first skim. So you see the category areas we built in the last example. I want to go to the main thesis because that's the starting point. And these air some main points that Daniel Pink brought up in his book, and it talked about the way that people's energies differ throughout the day and how we perform better a certain tasks at some points of the day than we do in others so I can go through here and say, What are some of the additional elements of those arguments that I need to keep track of? So when you talked about the way that people are worn down in the afternoon and perform worse, he had examples of studies that were done on tweets that were captured against the time of day to see how positive or negative they were. He talked about the curve of feeling that most people experience where their mood starts high than dips in the middle of the day and rises again. So these were some of the main themes, and I started to deconstruct. What are the ideas? The main ideas that support those major arguments throughout the book, which may appears chapters. Or they may simply be areas where the author spends their time. So I broke these out here. I also went into this area for my skin and broke out. What are the major items that caught my attention? So I have the new idea ideas I learned, which was the importance of fresh starts and how people perform better after fresh starts than they do in the middle the importance of interim goals for the same reason and the importance of endings and how it shapes our behavior. There were also some ideas that I had already heard before, such as the importance of checklists towards improving performance. Three idea that your best time to perform a task really depends on what that task is and the importance of breaks. He also talked about goals being important and the importance of not breaking a streak of you performing a task over and over again. If you're trying to implement habits, here's some areas where I thought I might need to investigate further. He talked about Krone types, which is the difference between what time of day you perform best. And he had the example of Lark or early birds, night owls and third birds who are sort of a hybrid between the two. And he talked about how everyone has a colonel type, and it's helpful to figure that out. I realized I didn't really know what mine was, so I probably won't explore that further then. The area that I think is probably most important to your learning. It's looking at the ideas that you disagreed with and then ideas that you did agree with because thes air areas that you might want explore further, finding opposite points of view for each. So in the things that I disagreed with, I he had a large section on the importance of synchronization between people leading to benefits. And I thought I didn't quite understand the point of that, and I didn't see how it connected with his overarching arguments, and I just felt like I should explore it further so I could have a better stated position on it. And I could really understand what Dan Pink was trying to get at with this section on the other side. There were items about, uh, dealing with slumps. And I agreed with this that when you're facing a problem with productivity and you don't really feel like moving forward, just think of how can I help people? And in full disclosure, that's what's happening to me. A lot of times when I make these courses is I may not entirely feel like recording after a long day of work, but I think this might actually help someone learn a little bit more so that encourages me to keep working into focus less on perfectionism and mawr on helping others. Then there were the connections to other ideas. So I read another book by Chris Bailey called the Productivity Project. The importance of the Time audit to see where you're spending your time as a way to really improve your performance by figuring out when you should do what tasks building out the schedule of activities is another thing. Basically, what I've done in this process is look at these major components of ideas and how they fit with my reaction to them and deconstruct the arguments of the book. Now what I can do is reconstruct everything that I've learned in the book into a new narrative, a sort of summary that I can share with others because that active reconstruction will help me remember the material. So in the next video, we're going to take our deconstruction and we're going to build out another segment of this map that's going to reconstruct those ideas in our own terms so that we can basically come up with a plan to call the action on how we will apply this material. Doing so is where you take just the ideas and you make them into things that will actually be useful for you. So I look forward to talking to you more in the next video.
9. Reconstructing a Book's Ideas: in the previous video, we covered how to deconstruct the book and place the different ideas within the mind map. In this video, we're going to take on a very important step to learning more from the material you read in reconstructing the ideas through our mind map. Our goal here is to put our own interpretation on the ideas while also being able to think about them a little bit more critically. That's a step that we started in the previous lesson, where we were thinking about the ideas that were most interesting to us and the ones that we had a few questions about. Now, if you think back to one of the previous videos where we talked about active learning, active learning is more effective and it is a little bit like a conversation because you're looking at the ideas and you're thinking about how they relate to what you already know and what you want to know. And in doing so, you're being a little bit more mindful about the information you're taking your time to really process it. And when you take time to process it, it's like you're taking time to write clearly on a piece of paper. Your handwriting's more legible, so it's easier to understand. The more time you take processing what you're thinking about, the more likely you are to retain it, because the effort put into recording it is greater, and therefore the likelihood that something will stick in your memories is much higher. So one of the goals of reconstruction is for us to find new ideas and remix previous ones. We want to connect ideas and ask new questions, So I'm going to make a new node here to do some playing around with that. So I want to think about what are the main ideas that came out of this book and which ones do I want to work through? And one of the main questions for me that I want to explore on my own terms is how can I use this information to be more effective? What I want to do after I've identified the main area for me to explore after reading the book, which may or may not align with the author's thesis, is to take the ideas that I remember from the book and restate them in my own terms. Now I could really easily go up to the rest of my mind map and just copy and paste those ideas into this new node. But I don't want to do that because that's too easy. And despite how much we can appreciate things being easy, it's actually the challenge that makes things more memorable. So I want to take the time to really restate what I already know about the book in my own words from my own memory, because that not only challenges me a little bit more, but it also makes sure that I'm accessing those memories, which in turn reinforces them. So I'm going to take a little bit of time here to fill in what I remember from the book, just in terms of main ideas. One was certain tasks have ideal times. Another one was when things happen. We have that then and finally so there are some of the main ideas that I remember that I want to explore further and remix in my own way, using what I learned from the book and also what I already knew. Now I want to take a quick moment toe look back through the rest of my mind map to see if there's anything else that I'm missing. See, we saw something about school performance after breaks, the double Wallace and their synchronization. So the thing about tweets, curve of good feeling, micro breaks to me, this covers the main ideas that I at least captured from my first deconstruction of the book. Now I may if I feel that that doesn't really capture everything, that I thought I might go back to the book and just flip through really quickly, especially to the table of contents and the introduction to see if there's anything that I missed. But for now, I'm going to start with these. And so what we want to do is reconstruct these ideas in our own terms, and I want to use imagery and metaphor, And the reason why I want to do that is because not only is imagery on effective way of remembering something, but metaphor is an effective way of understanding something. A metaphor helps you connect concepts that you already have with new concepts by way of imagery, which is already powerful. The other thing is that when you try to develop your own metaphor, you have to think critically about what you're looking at and creatively, and that act again reinforces what you learn. So when I'm looking at these, how can I create a metaphor that captures them? So I'm going to try to think through some now.
10. Use Metaphor and Imagery to Boost Retention: Okay, So the first step was for me to try to think through some images or metaphors to cover each of those ideas. And part of that is the benefit of retelling it toe others if you want to share what you learned and also to retell it to yourself when you want to remind yourself what you learned . So this is actually pretty challenging to come up with these metaphors because you do have to think a little bit differently, and I definitely struggled a little bit, but it was a good exercise, and you should have a little bit of a challenge with a two. It shouldn't come too easily because that really is part of the process. So I was thinking about this idea of certain tasks have ideal times to be completed. And what came to mind was the idea of the golden hour when you're shooting photo and being able to capitalize on the perfect timing for the light. So that's something where you really have an ideal time to take a photo, and I think that applies to certain types of work. There's also the idea that there's certain times where it's appropriate to plant certain crops and certain times where there isn't things happening. When things happen, impacts our mindset. And I think about what happens when you have someone say something very positive to you when you're having a bad day and how that can turn things around. Or on the contrary, you can wake up in a good mood and get into traffic and then have someone cut you off, and all of a sudden your day isn't as positive and your mood happens. So this was a metaphor that I really had trouble with. But you get the idea. So I did this with all of the different ideas I had. I suggest you do the same thing now. The final step would be to really organize these ideas by going through and adding any additional ideas you think add value to that. What else do you know about that? So the unique patterns that can be defined and learned I also know that there are certain tasks that are easier than others, so you probably want to adjust your timing for those based on your inclination to do them. Ah, you could go look at previous things that you've read and apply them. So I mentioned earlier Chris Bailey's book The Productivity Project. He had a lot of specific feedback about different types of productivity tools, and they might fit in here. Ah, there's this piece about certain tasks having ideal times I might be able to apply. David Allen's getting things Done to that because he talked about contexts and being able to really focus on the task that you can accomplish when you can accomplish them, so that might be a natural fit there. Anyway, that's the process for reconstructing your book and what you learned. So go through, identify in your own words what you thought the major ideas were. These right here. Then add some metaphors for each to help you retell them and remember them in the future. Then go through an add additional ideas that might help you later. Any ideas that connect to those as you build out a better understanding. So that's the basics of reconstructing what you've learned, and I think the next step is going to be to talk about how you can make this money map into a useful artifact and reference for later. Thank you. See you in the next lesson.
11. Setting Up Your Map as Good Reference: in this video, we're going to talk about how you can make your mind map an effective artifact for future reference and reinforcing the learning that you've already done. All the work until now has been about capturing the ideas in the book that you read and making sure that you engage with the material while you're learning it. That helps you record more information while you're in the process of reading. But to reinforce the material later toe, actually make it stick in your long term memory, you're going to have to go back and review the notes that you took and maybe the book itself. This is when you're really trying to internalize and remember and retain the material that you're reading. So this video is really going to cover the steps that we can take to make the mind map that you created into an effective tool for a long term, learning that camp allies is on the work that you've already done while also making it easy for you to refer back to it. So there's a few things that we want to talk about. The first is that you want your reference material, the notes that you took to be something that you can easily understand later. So as we talked about in a previous course on mind mapping, one of the goals of you doing a mind map is to keep each of these nodes as concise as possible so that they are clear and easy to read. You want them each to contain only one idea. So go back through your mind map and find anywhere where you may have had more than one idea in a note and break those out. The next step will be making sure that you wrote things that you can easily understand later. Now, this is a problem I would run into in college when I was looking at the notes that I would take my hand, and I would realize that sometimes I put shorthand statements that I knew would make sense to me in that moment. But three weeks later, when studying for a test, I found that I had no clue what I was talking about. Since your time horizon on, looking at these notes is any possible point in the future where you think referring back to it will be helpful. You want to make sure that while your notes are concise, they're not so concise as to where they can't or don't make sense. So, for instance, I have this line get in sync with others. That might be something that I will be confused about if I don't remember that chapter in six months to a year. So it might make sense for me to put a little more detail into this node so I don't miss what I was trying to say. So I feel like deconstructing that note a little further with those two examples will help me remember. That's the goal of this process. You want the things that you read on the mind map to help remind you of the things that you read in the book. The next step is for us to really think about what we can do to make this map as effective as possible when we look at it later. So think about how you're going to search through this information later, I think the structure of having the main ideas here like this that we built in our last video, along with the headings that you have from your first skim might be a good way to sort this information, but if you find that the book is a little bit longer than maybe this book by Daniel Pink and you have a lot of different topics or categories, you may break it down by topic. Your goal is to think about how you will look for the information later. If you're referring back to it to find one particular theme or topic out of a book with many topics, it may make sense to organize it by category. If you think you have to appreciate the book in its totality. In other words, it's one argument with one theme. It may make sense to break it down in this structure, but your goal is to make it as easy as possible. Toe brows through these nodes later when it comes time to refer to them. So I had of this and I have the structure with basically my reaction to the book. But if it makes sense for you to make it based on the table of contents of the book, you could certainly do that as well because you're gonna have to keep navigating through these later to find the ideas that you're looking for
12. Tag Ideas for Future Review: your goal throughout this entire process of making this a good piece of reference material is to really think about what your future self is going to need. Another tool for that is actually using tags in free mind. So if I tag the major ideas, things have been in her mind set with, say, these icons. I can then go back and think, What are the other elements that follow these ideas? So if I go back and look, I tagged breaks and addressing task for addressing tasks makes us more effective so I can look for other things that cover that and tag them with the same icon. We had micro breaks. We had school performance. Let's see what else we had. Brakes, help. People weren't out during the day. Great. I think that's enough so I can go back into these nodes and say, You know what? I want to capture a little bit more information about each of these ideas, like the fact that breaks help. What are some examples? Maybe I can put some more information on the school performance, and I think those were studies, so then gives me some more information now if I go back later, I can look at this index and say All right, the brakes and structure for addressing task makes us more effective. I need to learn more about that so I can go to my filter tool up here and say, I would like to apply a filter and I'm going to do the icon contains the three. I'm going to add that and apply it. So now my mind map Onley distills the pieces that carry that idea. So if I'm really interested in learning more about that idea, I don't have to navigate through the entire mind move to find it. Because I've tagged with these icons, I can then find them with the click of a button, right, no filtering, and I've got this filter to switch back to. So when I do that, this piece here essentially becomes my legend for sorting through the map. You can also do the filtering with text if there's a particular key word you want to capture. If you like using hash tanks that give you a little bit more visible way of breaking things down, you can use that to, and I think that's a really great way of doing it, cause you can filter by the hashtag. But your goal here is to really find a way to sort and filter this later. Now, now that we have a good framework for figuring out how to make this more readable later, our next step is to think about how we can apply this mind map later to reinforce our learning. So we'll get into the practical applications of that in the next video.
13. Build a Knowledge Base with Multiple Books: all right, we've talked about how you can build your mind map. We've talked about structuring it to make it easier to review later. Now let's talk about how you can actually apply this as much as possible in your own learning. You don't need to go through a lot of work to build these mind maps. It doesn't have to take you a long time. You can build simple maps with just a few nodes where you can combine a lot of books into one mind map. That's something that I've done in the past, where you can have basically all of the books you read on a theme in one mind map so you could go back. In this case. I could take this template and copy it and paste it there, and this could become another book. So say and I could add that and then perhaps even another book after that. The advantage of having lots of books and one mind map is that these books may have related themes or topics, and I'm actually learning the theme rather than the content of one book. So having all the similar books in the same map allows me to browse them together. If we follow that step before where we tags certain concepts with same icon or hashtag, we could apply that through the entire mind map for similar books. That way we're seeing all of the knowledge that we acquired on that topic.
14. How to Use Spaced Repetition to Remember: But let's talk a little bit about how you can actually apply this now, Much like reading a book and trying to remember what you read, you're not going to be able to retain a whole lot from this course if you don't apply it. So I encourage you to build a mind map right now with some of the things that you have read recently. Even if you're not reading a book right now or you're not in the process of when you want to capture, think about books that have provided you with a lot of helpful information before, and maybe include that as the project that you're doing for this course and add a few similar books to it because what you're creating is a tool for you not just to read, but to remember and refer to later. So this video is really all about how you can remix what you've captured, like we have here into a tool for looking at later. Now, one of the most important tools for study and recall is called spaced repetition. Now spaced repetition is the process of you looking at information in increasing intervals of time. So for instance, when you're studying toe, learn something you can capture in your short term memory. But your brain tends to filter out some of those things when it deems they're not important . And the way that the brain tries to dictate whether something is important or not is whether or not you refer back to it frequently. So think about your ability to remember directions to a restaurant that you went to one time versus your ability to remember how to get home from work. One of them becomes so automatic because you do it so frequently. The repetition is so constant it's hard to forget. But if something happens infrequently, your brain convict deemed that it is not valuable. And it's not really Jermaine to your daily life so tends to get removed so you can make room for more important things. The same thing happens when we read or we get exposed to information. So your goal is really to come back to information that you're trying to learn at regular intervals. A good tool for that, a space repetition. So you increase the amount of time between exposure to the information, so you start it will very close exposure, maybe every day. And then you can spread that out tow weeks, then two months and then two. Maybe review periodically once a year. Now the mind map makes an excellent tool for that because instead of going back and flipping through the entire book a mind map, which you have accessible on your computer, which you may have on your phone if you have an appropriate app that you can basically have access to whenever which can contain all of the information from all the books you've read , you could put a time on each of these nodes for your books saying when you need to review that book. So one of the tools that you can use in free mind and in many other types of mind mapping tools to help you do your space repetition is to add a reminder for a specific date that you'll go back and look at this note. So it's helpful for you to do this and say, a map where you look at all of the books that you've read recently, or all of the books on a theme because free mind can accommodate so many nodes and you can collapse and even group your books. It makes sense to potentially put all your books in one sort of knowledge base. So here I can even create a category for my books called Productivity. And then I can move all three of these sample books down. So to do the space repetition, I can come in to this book itself and say in the tool section, Go to show calendar and say I need to revisit this book. It is currently April, so I will go back to April, so I want to revisit this in a week. So I set the date to April 22nd and then I create a reminder to remind me at that date. So now when I hover over this, I see that there's a reminder scheduled on April 22nd at 10 a.m. So when I opened this map , it's going to remind me that I should be looking at this node, which is essentially my notes for the book when by Daniel Pink. Now what I can do is actually change this every time I review the book, and I should be spreading it out a little further every time until I remember. So that's how you can use spaced repetition to really get a quick review that only take five minutes. I mean, this map is not that large, even though I try to put a lot of content in it so I can go over here, close this, I can expand out the entire map, and I can just start from the top and local all the way through and see, I really capture you know what? What else do I need to know about this book, that I want to go back and review it? Are there any lingering questions I have? If I find that there is anything else that I have learned in the time since I read the book that connects to what I have read, then I can add it. So over here I can say things that I agreed with new ideas I learned. Maybe there's connections to other ideas. This might be an excellent place for me to add new ideas that came up in the time since I've read the book. So that's the way that you can use spaced repetition when going back to your material. To make sure that you remember it. If you do that for a year, I promise that you're going to retain what you learn from that book.
15. Using the Map to Apply New Knowledge: So the next step is, I think, for you to build an application. So this is the actual steps that you're going to take to apply this information in your day to day life so that it's useful for you. When you read these books, you hope to apply them in some way, even if it's just being able to make conversation or gnome or about a field that you're interested in. But if it has some practical applications as well, you may want to list those out here. So going through the applications and saying we work so you can go through and identified a few goals for myself that I want to apply from the book. So I want to use my krone type in terms of whether I work better earlier, later as a schedule for my work for one month, I want to build breaks into my schedule. I'm going to use interim goals on some of my larger term goals, and I'm gonna look for clean breaks. So new starts as ways to sort of launch new projects. Now, these air kind of vague, so I would go in and add a little bit more details. I can make them actionable. All right, So for those last three, I thought they were a little vague, so I added a little bit more detail. So I said here that I'm gonna build a break in after my work. Every day, I'm gonna take a three PM walk for 10 minutes to sort of refresh. I'm gonna break down my big goals on a white board with interim goals for a clean breaks I'm gonna pick from Daniel Pinks. List of clean start days in the book and a sign new projects to eat. My goal is to use the momentum that Pink says is supported by science that gets you motivated on those new start days. And I'm gonna sign projects to each one, and then I'm going to document my results from all these experiments. So these air applications that I can take to use this information to use what I've learned . So what I'm going to do when I do my space repetition, I can come back and looked at this in a week and in two weeks and then in a month and say, How are these things working for me and I can take notes right in this map right in these notes. And that means that I'm applying it. I'm thinking about it intentionally every time I look back at the map, but hopefully I'm being able to apply it and get something positive from it. Those are the basics. We've outlined the book. We've broken down the ideas that are most interesting to us. We've reconstructed them. We've thought about how they apply to our lives. We've built a tool to make it easy to refer to later, and now we're set to apply it as much as possible. This gives you all the tools you need to not only read better, but also refer back to the information and apply it in a more complete way. If you do this with really useful books that you're trying to learn, you will not only be able to read more comprehensively and understand, but you'll also be able to refer to later when you need it. So I hope this has been helpful for you. And I look forward to seeing what you come up with in your projects.
16. Course Conclusion: thank you so much for taking the time for this course. I feel privileged that you spent this time with me, and I hope that you learned something that's going to help you. I really feel that learning how to be a better learner is one of the best investments of time that you make. And I hope this course helped you in that pursuit as well. If you're interested in learning more about reading or you want to share your own experiences or suggestions or just want to learn more, please get involved. Go ahead and leave messages in the discussion board. If you're interested. More courses like this go ahead and follow me. I'm going to be publishing a lot more in this type of realm because, as I mentioned, I love metal learning, and I think there is a lot more to cover in this area. Also, if you enjoyed the course, please take a moment to review it. It's very helpful for me, and it helps other people who might be interested in this kind, of course, find it more easily again. I really appreciate your time, and I hope to hear from you in the comments or see you again in a future course Goodbye