YouTube Video MMACQZBC860  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: YouTube Video MMACQZBC860 - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[action]] [[assessment]] [[audit]] - Summary: YouTube Video MMACQZBC860 - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMACQZBC860 I've taught almost 30,000 people how tolearn more efficiently. And one of themost common things they tell me is thatthey regret leaving it so late. Whetheryou have been struggling to get bettergrades or to get that job promotion orto learn that new skill, learning tolearn is the thing that makes this alleasier. Learning to learn helps you getbetter results with less time andstress. Most people know this, but whatmost people don't know is that by thetime you realize you need to startlearning to learn, it's already toolate. And there are three reasons thishappens. In this video, I'll share whatthose reasons are and some surprisinglysimple strategies to help you avoid thatcommon regret. The first reason issomething I call the readiness trap. Back in my second year of medicalschool, we were studying for this exam.And the night before the exam, one of myfriends messaged me and he says, "Hey,I'm feeling really unprepared for thisexam. I don't think I'm going to do verywell. What can I do?" And I gave him thesame advice that I had given to myselfthat night, which was lower yourJoking, there is some truth to that. Atsome point, it's going to be too late tochange the outcome. So if we leavelearning to learn until the night beforethe exam, that's obviously too late. Butat what point does it become too late? And the problem that I've realized as alearning coach after so many years isthat that point comes much earlier thanmost people realize. So here's how mostpeople think about when it is time tostart learning to learn. So let's saythat this red line here, this is whenyou need a skill. This could be for anexam or something to do with work. Well,then usually you're going to feel thatyou need this sometime before youactually need it. So let's say here iswhere you feel the need. But the thingis that there is a time that it takes todevelop a skill. And so for learning tolearn, this time may actually be longerthan you realize. You're not onlyspending time to build new habits, andyou're not only spending time to unlearnold habits, which can often take longer.There's also time to even realize whatyour current habits are to startunlearning or replacing them. And soactually the time it takes to learn this. Skill—maybe thislong, which means in reality the besttime to start learning ishere. This is the ideal time to start.And all of this time from here to hereis too late. So you can see that by thetime you feel the need to develop theskill, it is way too late. And this isbecause the way the human brain works isthat things that are more urgent andmore short-term feel emotionally moreimportant. The human brain is very badat assessing the importance of long-termthings. And most complex skills are along-term investment. So if your cue to start working on something is that youfeel emotionally that you are ready andthat there is a need and there is asense of urgency, it is almost certainlyalready too late. This is why I callthis the readiness trap. It is a trap tostart working on something only when youfeel ready to start working on it. Sowhat do you do instead? Instead ofdeciding when to start working onsomething based on how much time youthink you have left, which falls intothis trap, make that decision based onwhether you see symptoms of problems. For example, let's say that yourLearning skills aren’t quite up toscratch. And so, a symptom that you seeis that your memory and your retentionare pretty low. After a week, you’reforgetting 50 to 70% of what you’velearned, and you’re spending a lot oftime relearning. So that could beanother symptom. The time that you’reneeding to spend is very high, and youcan tell that the time you’re spendingis on relearning. Sometimes what you mightfind is that you’re doing a lot ofthings to try to deepen yourunderstanding, but not very effectively. So you struggle with achieving a certainlevel of depth. So these are allsymptoms of the underlying root problemwhich is that your learning skill is notadequate. You can test your memory after a weekand you can see after just one or twoweeks how good your memory and yourdepth are. You can assess objectively howmuch time you’re spending and whetherthat time is being spent on relearningstuff, just plugging in holes in yourmemory. And this usually precedes thatfeeling of urgency by weeks or evenmonths. So you start treating it whenyou first notice the symptoms, not whenYou are hospitalized or ready for thedisease. And so there are really two things that you need to do here to avoidthe readiness trap. The first thing isto start treating the symptoms when yousee the symptoms. And the second thingis to start paying attention to thesymptoms. Assess actively how effectiveyour current strategies are. Don't justdo things and then wait for an examresult to tell you that something'sgoing wrong. Now, if you've watched myother videos, you'll know that learningto learn is actually surprisingly quitecomplicated. And it can be veryconfusing to know where you actuallystart to improve your learning skills. And a great place to start is by takingthe free quiz that I've created for you.This asks you a bunch of questions andit maps out your current learning systemand it tells you if there are anyglaring holes or red flags that areholding you back. At the end of thequiz, you get a personalized report thattells you where you should start workingon it, points out your weak areas. Andso, if you're already feeling some ofthese symptoms of ineffective learning,but you're not sure how you actuallyStart fixing those things, then thisquiz is a great place to start. Again,it's free. I'll leave a link in thedescription for you. Now, one generalrule that I always recommend is a greatplace to start on is anything thatcreates learning debt. And this isactually also the second reason a lot ofpeople leave learning to learn way toolate. So reason number two, learningdebt. So, a year later in my third yearof medical school, I was deep in thetrenches of trying to learn moreeffectively and still figuring out a lotof stuff. And I remember the firstsemester of my third year really tryingto lock in to my learning skills. Andevery single day I had this list ofstuff that I needed to tick off tomake sure that I was on top of mylearning. And the funny thing is that atthe end of the first semester exams, Irealized that I had actually completelyforgotten about an entire paper. Iseriously only realized that there wasan entire paper that I had neverattended any lectures for and neverstudied until 72 hours before the actualexam. And so, I woke up at like 8:00 a.m.and I started studying. Through the night and then like anentire day of studying to do a 60-hournon-stop stretch of studying for thispaper to sit the exam. And I got likea C or a C plus or something. It was theonly C that I had gotten in university.And this was a really importantexperience for me because I realizedthat my methods were still not enough. And I'd been seeing studying as justticking this box and hitting thisnumber. Like I have so many flashcardsto do, like 400 flashcards to do today.I have to make sure I do all of thoseflashcards a day. And if I tick thatnumber off, then I feel good, like I'mmaking progress. I was on this hamsterwheel of studying, and I tricked myselfinto thinking that as long as I'm on thehamster wheel, I must be progressing. And this is exactly how learning debtaccumulates. Learning debt is basicallywhen you study something a certain waytoday, which actually gives you more workto do in the future. So for me, one ofmy biggest pieces of learning debt wasmaking flashcards. I would make flashcards, let's say, on a Monday, and I'dmake this huge batch of flashcards andthen so I'm not really learning anything. By making the flash cards and spendingthat time, I'm just giving the learningto my future self to deal with. And somy future self is constantly bombardedwith more and more things for it to do.And it builds this big long checklist ofstuff to complete in order for me tolearn. This debt compounds overtime. The inefficiency of not being ableto learn something properly today meansthat every single day I give more andmore work to the future me, which meansthat future me has less and less timeavailable and is more and moreoverwhelmed. And on any given day, I'malready pretty overwhelmed. So bygiving even a little bit to my futureself, that’s already too much. So how isthis concept of accumulating learningdebt related to leaving learning tolearn too late? It’s because it creates this double burden. Here’s the reasonwhy learning debt is so dangerous. Theissue with the double burden is thatevery single day you have too much workyou need to do because you have to clearthis learning debt that your past selfgave to you. Now, in order to removethis work, you have to actuallyaccumulate less learning debt, whichLearning means you have to start learning tolearn more effectively. The more you canlearn effectively today, the less workthere is for your future self. But likewe've just talked about with thereadiness trap, it takes time to learnthis skill. And so by giving ourselvesso much work to do every single day, italso reduces the amount of time we haveavailable to basically sharpen the axe. So, learning to learn time goes down. Andbecause we're not learning to learn,we're just constantly accumulating moreand more learning debt, which means thatwe've got more and more work to do,which means we've got less and lesstime. So this spiral just goes out ofcontrol until every single day we can'tdo anything other than just clear thelog of stuff we need to get through,knowing that it's probably not goodenough, knowing we need to improve ourmethods but not having any time left toactually fix it. This is a situationwhere you've left the hole in your boatfor so long that so much water has comeinto the boat. You do not have time topatch the hole because you have to keepbucketing the water out, otherwise you're going to drown inside the boat. And whenThat happens; either you magicallybecome much faster at bucketing, whichdoesn't happen, or you have to abandonship. And this is what I see all thetime. People who start learning to learntoo late only when they feel like theyneed it. And then they, at the same time,have so much learning debt they'veaccumulated. They don't actually havetime to learn to learn because they'retoo busy; even though the reason they'rebusy is because their methods areineffective in the first place, and nowthey're not going to do well for theirupcoming exam. They don't have time toimprove on it. So you have to justabandon ship and forget about that exam. You just accept this exam is forfeit. Iwill try again next time. I'll try againnext year. I'm going to reset it. Andthe sadder part is that a lot of thetime people still don't realize thatthey fell into these traps. And so theyjust repeat the exact same mistake allover again. They say, "The reason Ididn't do well before is I just didn'tstudy hard enough." And they just spendmore time and more effort into studyinghard. And then they just make the exactsame mistakes. Thinking about learning to learn when itis again too late. Because ironically,by leaving it so late that you fail anexam and forcing yourself to reset it,suddenly it's not urgent anymore becausethe exam is another year away. Sorry, Ineed to calm down. But this is veryfrustrating as a learning coach. This iswhy I want to make this video. So, howdo you solve this learning debt issue?The first thing is you have to be honestwith yourself. You have to understandand accept that what you are doing rightnow is accumulating learning debt andyou have to make a change. So step oneis behonest. A lot of people just deny theproblem and they just focus on doingmore hard work because doing more hardwork is actually easy. But if you wantto see whether there are places whereyou're accumulating learning debt, thentry to just write down your learningflow.Write down step by step in as muchdetail as you can how you are learningand how effective you think thosemethods are. And look at which steps,which processes and methods are actuallyeffective and which are just creatingMore work for yourself and spending time when you actually don't think they'rehelpful or you don't even know why youdo it. And if you try to make thislearning flow and you struggle to evenwrite down what you're doing andarticulate what your learning methodsand processes are, there is almost a100% chance that something there iscreating learning debt because you don'teven know what you're doing because whatare the chances that you are doingsomething that you cannot evenarticulate that is also optimallyefficient. And again, if you need somehelp to figure out and map your learningsystem and you're not sure exactly whereto start, that quiz will also help youwith that. So again, that's in thedescription. Now, once you've done thatand you've been honest and you'verealized that there are places that youmight be accumulating learning debt, thenext thing is to just patch theholes. It's a gradual process. I talkabout it in a lot of my other videos,how you can patch different types ofholes. But here's the thing. You mighthave just listened to me explain to youabout learning debt and this readiness. If you understand that you needto start working on it now, but thereason you can't is because you alreadyhave so much learning debt. You'realready in that position. You alreadyfeel like you're too busy. You don'thave enough time to invest in this. Thatis actually the third reason. And I callthis one the Mount Fuji trap. There'sthis common proverb that says, "The man who moves Mount Fuji starts with asingle stone." It's a proverb abouthow you can achieve massive things justby doing it step by step. The Mount Fujitrap is when you think that you'll onlysolve your problems with learning bymoving the entire mountain. And becauseit seems like it's going to take toolong and feels overwhelming, you don'teven start. You don't even try. But inreality, the person who starts movingstones is making more progress than theperson who doesn't. And the key isto understand that your success isn't basedon whether you move the mountain or not.It's based on how many stones you moved. With learning to learn, I'll be honest,getting to the best you can be will takeyears. And getting to a point where yourlearning system is so good that you'veEliminating learning debt could take avery long time. But any improvement youmake relative to yourself right now is animprovement. You have fewer problems todeal with than you did yesterday. Whatmatters is not how good you are comparedto your potential. What matters is howgood you are compared to how you werebefore. And in reality, let's say youthink that your biggest bottleneck rightnow is your focus and yourconcentration. And you think that that'sonly a two out of ten. Getting this to aten out of ten, yeah, this is going totake you months or years. However, ifyou just get to a four out of ten, whichyou might be able to do in one to twoweeks, you have doubled your focus andconcentration. And if there's thisreally difficult exam or this ambitiousjob promotion you're aiming for, youprobably don't need to be ten out of tenfor everything. For all you know, allyou need to be is just ten to twenty percentbetter than you are now. And you will feel thatin your quality of life through morefree time, more confidence, less stress,less volatility in your results, bettersleep, and more time for hobbies. Everystep you take makes your life better. So, how do you avoid the Mount Fujitrap? Step one, recognize that there'sonly two paths. You caneither choose to start incrementallyimproving with the risk that it mightnot be good enough by the time you needto. You may have already left it toolate or you cannot start improving andit will definitely be too late. On onehand, there is definite failure and onthe other hand, there is the possibility ofsuccess. And once you recognize that, wemove on to step two, which is to reallyjust start. And how I recommend you juststart is to pick something that youthink is holding you back. Think aboutone thing that you're doing right nowthat you think you could do better. Write that down. You can write it downliterally right now. And all you need todo is just think about one small change,one small idea or experiment that mightmake that better and commit to doingthat today. And I want you to actuallydo this right now because I want thisvideo to actually impact your actions,not just how you think about it. I don'twant you to get to it being too late andthen realize, "Oh yeah, Justin was rightin that video I watched 2 months ago."You don't need to know how to solve theproblem. You don't need to know what theperfect action is or how to makethe perfect change, but you do have totake an action and make somechange to give yourself the best chanceat success by making it specific. Makeit realistic and achievable. Don't just say, "My action to commit totoday is to get better at learning." That'stoo vague. Be specific. Be detailed.Take the time to think about this. Pickyour action and then commit to it. Andremember, big changes come from tinyactions done often. So, these are thethree reasons why most people leave ittoo late. And if you want some ideas onsomething to commit to and get startedwith, then you can check out this videorighthere. I recently found out that thecards can be placed anywhere on thevideo. I thought they only appeared inone of the corners or something. So,I've decided that today it's just goingto be straight over my, YouTube Video MMACQZBC860, YouTube, 01kac2yaebsrv6mw7e7ah2sa69.