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How To Remember Everything You Learn

2023-08-18 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 12:11 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Books and reading) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Family, Sponsor segment present

Ali gives seven tips for remembering what you learn: discover the map of a topic first, learn just in time rather than just in case, follow your curiosity, share what you learn with people around you, share it online, resurface highlights with low friction through Readwise, and test yourself with active recall.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Intro: forgetting what you learn, seven tips

00:00:23 — Tip 1: discover the map

  • ★★★ Ali's first tip for remembering what you learn is to discover the map: before diving into one area of a new topic, find out what all its areas are, like uncovering the map of a video game. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Learning marketing as an entrepreneur, Ali says, someone who dives deep into email marketing alone misses paid ads, organic, referrals and affiliates, and may not even know they exist. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Keeping a zoomed-out view of a whole topic, Ali says, makes any specific part of it far easier to understand and to retain. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Ali's second tip is just-in-time learning, learning a thing at the moment it becomes useful and necessary, as opposed to just-in-case learning of things that may be useful later. — 00:01:27

00:01:41 — Tip 2: just-in-time learning

  • ★★★ Rather than memorising a textbook just in case and then matching it to patients on the wards, Ali suggests medical students flip it: encounter things first and learn about them later. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ After seeing someone have a heart attack, Ali says, reading about the advanced life support algorithm, the drugs and the crash team becomes 10 or 100 times more useful. (overstated) — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Someone thinking of starting a business who has never sold anything, Ali says, should put action before theory: make a random product and try to sell it to friends and family, then read about sales and marketing. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ People who read many books on sales and marketing without ever trying to sell anything do not remember them, Ali says, because they have no practical experience to hang the knowledge on. — 00:02:55

00:03:36 — Tip 3: follow your curiosity

  • ★★ Ali cites a study, also in his book Feel-Good Productivity, that found people more curious about a piece of information were far more likely to remember it. — 00:03:53 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali's third tip is to follow your curiosity, a natural compass for memory: what you learn at the moment you are genuinely curious about it you are far more likely to remember. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ After watching the film Oppenheimer, which he calls great, Ali wondered how a nuclear bomb works and watched a Veritasium video about it, and says that, having looked it up when he was curious, he is now far more likely to remember it. — 00:04:22

00:04:58 — Brilliant sponsor read

00:06:19 — Tip 4: share what you learn with people around you; the team's level up looms

  • ★★ Ali's fourth tip is to share what you learn with people around you: studies show, he says, that teaching, explaining or sharing something makes you far more likely to remember it, the protégé effect. — 00:06:19
  • ★★ On a trip to Turkey with his family, Ali learned things on his phone in the mosques and museums and told his family about them on the walk to the next place, such as something about the Blue Mosque. — 00:06:49
  • ★ Ali says the word "turquoise" comes from "Turkish": the French who saw the Blue Mosque called its colour the Turkish blue. (hedged) — 00:06:49
  • ★★ At medical school, whenever Ali was learning something, he kept in mind that he would want to teach it to younger medical students. — 00:07:18
  • ★★ Ali finds "teach" too grand and high-pressure a word for the classic advice to learn something by teaching it: he thinks of it as just sharing the thing with other people. — 00:07:18
  • ★★★ Every month each person on Ali's team makes a "level up loom", a Loom screen recording presenting what they learned that month. — 00:07:18
  • ★★ For the last few months Ali's team has been encouraged to spend Wednesday afternoons on professional development, learning something relevant to their job, and to present it at the end of each month. — 00:07:47
  • ★★ Ali sees three benefits in the level up looms: knowing you must present makes you do the work, the whole team learns from everyone, and having to teach makes the learner engage more deeply. — 00:07:47

00:08:16 — Tip 5: share what you learn online

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth tip is to share what you learn online, which is why he has written his free weekly email newsletter Sunday Snippets since 2018, five years. — 00:08:16 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★ Ali's latest Sunday Snippets issue was on emotional blockers in procrastination, and the one before on ten things he learned from writing and publishing his book. — 00:08:16 · Sunday Snippets, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Writing his newsletter every week and sharing it with his audience, even when he had hardly any audience, makes Ali far more likely to remember what he learns. — 00:08:45 · Sunday Snippets

00:09:15 — Tip 6: low-friction resurfacing with Readwise

  • ★★ To share what you learn online you need not be an expert, Ali says: you are a fellow traveller who has just learned something, sharing it with people on a similar journey. — 00:09:15
  • ★★★ Ali's sixth tip is low-friction resurfacing, for which he uses the app Readwise. — 00:09:15 · Readwise
  • ★★ Ali says Readwise links to your Kindle, Pocket or Instapaper account and has its own read-it-later app, Reader. — 00:09:15 · Readwise, Kindle
  • ★★ Every day Readwise emails Ali five random highlights from the reading he has highlighted on the internet for over ten years. — 00:09:44 · Readwise
  • ★★ Ali puts his good recall of quotes from books, which podcast hosts ask about, down to the tips of this video and to the daily Readwise email. — 00:10:13 · Readwise
  • ★★ Ali recommends Readwise to anyone who reads on Kindle or the internet or saves tweet threads; it has an affiliate link but is not a sponsor, and he says he really loves it. — 00:10:13 · Readwise, Kindle

00:10:42 — Tip 7: active recall; sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali's seventh tip is active recall: almost every study of how to learn, he says, finds that testing yourself and dredging information up from memory strengthens it far more than rereading or taking notes. — 00:10:42 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says many studies show that reading something once and then testing yourself on it beats reading it four times, or reading it and then taking notes. — 00:11:12 · active recall
  • ★★★ To remember more of what you read, Ali advises asking how you can test yourself on it: practice tests, online quizzes, sharing it with friends and family or online, or making a video about it. — 00:11:12 · active recall

  • ★★★ Ali's main point: remembering is not about cramming more into your brain but, counterintuitively, about getting things out of it, which strengthens the memory. — 00:11:41 · active recall

    “It's instead somewhat counterintuitively about trying to get stuff out of your brain.”

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): The channel says a level up loom on Ali's team runs anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, with no time limit. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · just-in-time learning · Readwise

Also: Projects: Sunday Snippets

Works: Advanced Life Support · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Oppenheimer

Organizations: Brilliant · Veritasium

Concepts: level up loom · protégé effect

Places: France · Turkey

Products: Instapaper · Kindle · Loom · Pocket · Readwise Reader

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