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How to Learn Anything FASTER

2021-06-24 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 14:42 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Evidence-based framing, Lesson from a book, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali gives nine evidence-based tips for learning anything faster: sharpen the axe, use crutches to focus, find immersion, drill your weak links, test yourself, get intense feedback, overlearn, space your practice and teach what you are learning.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Learning how to learn as a meta-skill; nine evidence-based tips

  • ★★ Ali calls learning how to learn a meta-skill that no one really teaches but that can have an enormous impact on almost everything we do. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Learning how to learn at medical school let Ali study more efficiently, which freed up time to set up a business and his YouTube channel. — 00:00:00

00:00:39 — Tip one: sharpen the axe

  • ★★ Ali's first tip for learning anything faster is to sharpen the axe, after a saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln about spending four of six hours sharpening it: the power of preparation. — 00:00:39
  • ★★★ Before learning a skill such as the guitar or chess, Ali advises spending a decent amount of time on meta-learning: working out how you are going to learn it. — 00:01:08
  • ★★ Learning to play the piano by ear, Ali spent time on the Learn Piano subreddit, and this preparation before he sat down to learn really accelerated his learning. — 00:01:08

00:01:36 — Tip two: use crutches to optimise your focus

  • ★★★ Ali's second tip is to learn with full focus rather than in the background, such as practising the guitar while watching TV, because the brain learns much better when fully focused. — 00:01:43
  • ★★ Under the five-minute rule, Ali tells himself he will do a thing for just five minutes and may then stop; after five minutes of guitar or piano he usually wants to carry on. — 00:02:12
  • ★★ To focus on what he is learning without distraction, Ali tosses his phone away onto the sofa or the floor. — 00:02:12

00:02:33 — Tip three: find opportunities for immersion

  • ★★★ Ali's third tip is to find opportunities for immersion, because we learn best in the environment where we will actually use the skill. — 00:02:42
  • ★★ Scott Young (quoted): In his book Ultralearning, Scott Young tells of becoming fluent in languages three months at a time; the key, as all language learners say, is immersion. — 00:02:42
  • ★★ Learning close-up magic, Ali made a point of performing for real people as much as possible, carrying cards at school, and once he was okay with friends and family he took paid gigs before he felt good enough. — 00:03:11

00:03:42 — Tip four: figure out your weak links and drill them

  • ★★ Studying for exams, Ali asked himself every day which topic he would be least happy about if the exam were tomorrow, and studied that topic. — 00:04:09
  • ★★ Weak in neurology at medical school, Ali spent eight to 12 hours in one day on that subject alone, which plugged it as an area of weakness. — 00:04:09
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip is to find your weak links and drill them: learning only happens when you fix weaknesses at a decent level of difficulty, and if something is too easy you learn nothing. — 00:04:38

00:05:04 — Tip five: test yourself, and desirable difficulty

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth tip is to test yourself, called active recall in studying: counterintuitively, we learn not by putting things into our brains but by taking them out. — 00:05:08 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says that thinking of testing yourself as a strategy for learning, rather than as being graded and judged, makes everything much easier. — 00:05:37
  • ★★ Ali says there is no point in studying for exams by reading the textbook and summarising what is in it. — 00:05:37
  • ★★ Ali explains desirable difficulty with tennis: playing Roger Federer would be too hard and playing a ten-year-old beginner too easy, and at either extreme he would learn nothing. — 00:06:06

  • ★★★ To learn efficiently, Ali says, make learning a little more difficult: learning is supposed to be hard, and if it is hard, we are doing something right. — 00:06:35

    “Learning is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be hard.”

00:07:00 — Tip six: get intense feedback often

  • ★★★ Ali's sixth tip is about feedback: at the start of learning most people need praise and encouragement, but once you take a skill seriously, skip the praise and focus on critical, constructive feedback. — 00:07:41
  • ★★ Ali calls having a coach really helpful for learning: since he got a personal trainer, everything in the gym has improved, because someone gives him feedback there and then. — 00:07:41

00:08:21 — Tip seven: overlearning

  • ★★ Tight feedback loops encourage learning, Ali says, unlike filming himself and waiting days for a friend's reply. — 00:08:21
  • ★★★ Ali's seventh tip is overlearning: understand or learn a thing in more depth than you need, continually asking why it works the way it does. — 00:08:21
  • ★★ Ali finds it hard to say that doctors who look for the evidence behind guidelines are objectively better than those who memorise them, but he wants to be a doctor who understands medicine from first principles. — 00:08:47
  • ★★ On the guitar, Ali says, the goal is an understanding of music theory rather than just the finger positions a tutorial teaches, something John Mayer talks about a lot on his Instagram. — 00:09:33

00:10:02 — Tip eight: spacing, the forgetting curve and Anki

  • ★★ Ali explains the forgetting curve, discovered by Ebbinghaus in the 1800s: whatever we learn, fact or skill, our memory of it decays over time. — 00:10:02 · forgetting curve
  • ★★★ Ali's eighth tip is spacing: he might learn a guitar song on day one, repeat it the next day, and test himself again a week, a month and six months later, until it is in long-term memory. — 00:11:17 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ For spacing out the learning of specific facts, Ali's favourite app is Anki, which is free. — 00:11:17 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali calls Anki an incredible app that completely revolutionised his experience of medical school, though it has a bit of a learning curve. — 00:11:46 · Anki

00:11:50 — Skillshare sponsor read

00:12:44 — Tip nine: teach what you're trying to learn

  • ★★★ Ali's ninth tip is to teach what you are trying to learn, even though we often feel we are not allowed to teach something until we are experts at it. — 00:12:44
  • ★★ Because of the curse of knowledge, a concept C. S. Lewis talks about, Ali says we often learn best from people just one step ahead of us on the same journey rather than from experts. — 00:13:08

  • ★★ Ali would rather learn from a guide than from a guru, and would rather be a guide than try to be a guru. — 00:13:08

    “I would rather learn from a guide than learn from a guru, guide versus guru.”

  • ★★ At medical school Ali's favourite revision sessions and lectures were given by students in the year above, rather than by world-class, Nobel-prize-winning professors far removed from what he knew. — 00:13:08

  • ★★ Teaching medical students, guitar, piano and YouTube, the last through his Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Ali found that teaching anything solidifies his own knowledge of it. — 00:13:37 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's general policy is to document his process whenever he is learning anything, which helps him learn because he may teach it months or years later. — 00:13:37

00:14:06 — Two books about learning and his active recall video

  • ★★ Ali recommends two books about learning: Make It Stick and Ultralearning. — 00:14:06 · Make It Stick
  • ★ Ali calls his video of a few years ago on the science of active recall one of his favourite videos he has ever made. — 00:14:06 · active recall

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: active recall

Also: People: Abraham Lincoln · C. S. Lewis · Hermann Ebbinghaus · John Mayer · Roger Federer · Scott Young

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Make It Stick · Ultralearning

Organizations: Gymshark · Reddit

Concepts: desirable difficulty · five-minute rule · forgetting curve · guide, not guru · overlearning · spaced repetition

Products: Anki · Shortform

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