[0:00]I've been a learning coach for over a decade and in this video I'm going to give you a 12-month blueprint to become a genius. So let's start with month number one.
[0:08]The first month is called discovery. So we can divide the first month into two phases.
[0:15]The first phase which can take one to two weeks, this is about understanding where our goal post even is.
[0:20]You can't become a genius if you don't even know what a genius means. And the difference between just a hard worker and a genius is that a hard worker is able to work hard.
[0:30]They can study more, they're able to do long hours. The genius doesn't need to do that.
[0:37]They don't need to study more because they're fine with the workload. Their method for tackling this workload is effective and efficient enough that they don't need to compensate with more time.
[0:46]They're not struggling with their focus and their concentration, so they don't need to study for longer hours.
[0:51]The reason that a genius feels like hard to relate to is because a genius is thinking and studying and doing things in a very different way.
[1:03]For the same amount of time and effort that an average person puts in, they seem to be able to transform that into a result that is untouchable by an average person.
[1:10]And so the way that we become a genius ourselves is not to just put in more time and effort, it is to think about what can we do that converts that time and effort and amplifies it much more than what we're doing now.
[1:24]So in this first phase of the first month, we need to spend a bit of time to learn about what the processes are that a genius uses.
[1:31]These become our goals. And to help you with this, I'll tell you there are three things that a genius is able to do that average people really struggle with.
[1:39]The first one is having a high retention of new information that they learn. The second thing is having a high mastery of what they learn.
[1:52]So for example, you can have a really high retention, great memory on something, but if you can only regurgitate facts, that's a very low level of mastery compared to being able to solve really complex problems.
[1:59]A genius can do both, high retention and high mastery. And the third thing is they can do that with time efficiency.
[2:06]And so now that we've got our goal in this first phase, it completely reshapes the way that we think about improving.
[2:10]It's no longer about how can I study more, how can I study longer. We're saying, we're already studying enough.
[2:17]The question is how do we keep the time and effort the same, but increase our retention, our mastery and our time efficiency.
[2:23]And then once you have that, we can move into the second phase of the first month, which takes another two weeks.
[2:29]And here we want to figure out our current status. The purpose of this stage is to figure out our current position relative to the goal.
[2:37]So, how good are we in terms of our retention, how good is our current level of mastery, how good is our current level of time efficiency.
[2:45]We know the goal. We need to see how far away we are from hitting that goal. So let's say we think our retention and our mastery and our time efficiency are terrible.
[2:52]Justin, why does it take two weeks to do this instead of like two seconds? Well, it's because if you're bad at it, just knowing that you're bad is not enough.
[3:01]You have to also know why you are bad at it. One of my favorite questions to ask when I do workshops is I tell everyone to draw their current learning flow.
[3:12]The way you do this is you just trace the path of a single piece of information.
[3:15]So let's say you learned something new on a Monday. What are you doing? Did you do anything before? What are you thinking about? How are you writing your notes as you learn? What are you doing immediately after? What are you doing the day after? What are you doing the week after? And why, why, why for every single step.
[3:30]When I ask this question, the reason I like it is that most people have never consciously thought about what they do with new information.
[3:39]Their learning flow is just like information comes in, I just like think about it and then I just study and that's it.
[3:46]And so the reason it takes two weeks is that it takes time to start building awareness about what your own processes and your own thinking habits are.
[3:57]What I consistently see with the students I coach is that the hardest part by far of improving your learning ability and becoming this genius is not learning new techniques.
[4:06]Instead, it is becoming aware of and then unlearning old habits. In learning science, this whole concept I'm talking about now of becoming aware of your own process and why you do things and how effective they are, this is called metacognition.
[4:24]And the research strongly shows it is one of the most crucial ingredients to improve your learning. So how do you actually develop metacognition and develop this awareness so that you can start upgrading?
[4:34]Well, there's two ways you can do this. There's a fast way and a long way and you should actually do both.
[4:40]The long way is to reflect and reflect often. If you want to become a better learner, you have to get comfortable with reflecting.
[4:51]Trying to improve without reflecting is like trying to look better without a mirror.
[5:00]It's why a reflection technique is actually one of the first techniques I teach in my program.
[5:04]And I'm going to give you a simplified version of that technique that you can use straight away.
[5:08]I call it the what, how, why, now what? The first what is you write down what you actually did.
[5:17]So let's say that you're reflecting on a study session where you wrote a bunch of notes. So the what you did is writing notes on a certain subject.
[5:23]The two is how. How did you write these notes? Be very, very specific with the technique that you use.
[5:30]Almost think about creating like an instruction manual that someone could just follow it exactly and do exactly the same thing you did. The third is why.
[5:38]This is the meaty part. Here's where the value starts coming in. Think about why you did the technique in the way that you did it.
[5:46]What was your rationale? And when you do this, often you realize you didn't even have a rationale.
[5:52]You just did it because it's what you're used to. Sometimes, the reason you do things is in response to a difficulty or a challenge you face while studying.
[5:59]So, note that down. How do you tend to respond to certain types of difficulties and challenges? This is how you discover your current habits.
[6:08]The fourth thing is now what? We look at the what and the how we did. We evaluate the why we did it and ask ourselves, is there a way that I could potentially make this better for next time?
[6:22]You come up with just one or two changes that you could make and then you run that as an experiment.
[6:26]After you run that experiment, you go back from the beginning and reflect on it. What did you do? How did you do it? Why did you do it? And then you create the next experiment.
[6:37]It's an infinite cycle of improvement. I kid you not, between the ages of 18 to 22, I did this process for my own learning thousands of times.
[6:47]It is without a doubt one of the biggest reasons I was able to improve my learning efficiency as much as I did and go from studying 20 hours a day to less than 20 hours a week.
[6:59]In fact, you guys have it really easy because this first month of discovery, this took me like three years to do.
[7:06]But it's about to get even easier because this is the long way and then the fast way which you should start with is taking my free quiz.
[7:14]So I've created a quiz that assesses you on your current learning system and points out certain things that may be critical habits.
[7:23]The quiz is free to do and then at the end you get a personalized report on the things that it notices based on the questions it asks you.
[7:30]So if you start off by doing this quiz, then not only do you get a great list of things to start working on, but also teaches you how to think about your learning, which means when you do your reflection, you can be a lot more targeted, have better ideas, and you know what to pay attention to.
[7:44]The quiz is free to do. It's called a learning system diagnostic and you can check out the description for a link.
[7:51]And I want to say that by the end of your first month, you will probably already feel so much more confident and in control of your learning.
[8:00]I've had people do this for just even just one week and then DM me saying that they have a huge list of things that they have realized that they need to improve on because they've just learned so much about how they learn.
[8:13]And once you get to that point, at the end of your first month, where you know what you need to work on and you know what you're currently doing, you're ready for month number two.
[8:21]Month number two is all about making high-yield changes. One thing you'll realize after doing the first month is that there are so many things that you could do better.
[8:31]There are so many things that you can optimize, where do you even start? And once you feel that, I want you to remember this. The fastest path to improvement is by picking the fastest path.
[8:42]And this is important because when it comes to learning to learn, the thing you should start working on first is usually not the thing that's going to make the biggest overall difference.
[8:54]One of my students recently made this mistake, so I want to explain this properly. As you go through your first month of discovery and you're learning about the processes that create good retention and deeper mastery and more time efficiency.
[9:08]One of the things you'll realize, and I talk about this a lot, the way that you process and think about information the first time you learn it has a strong influence on how sticky that memory becomes and how deeply you understand it.
[9:20]When you think about it deeply and you process it deeply, that memory becomes stickier.
[9:26]This is the process called encoding. It's the act of taking new information and putting it into our long-term memory.
[9:33]That's called encoding. If you can do encoding really, really well, your retention is better.
[9:37]Your mastery is deeper and because you're not wasting time on relearning things, your time efficiency goes up by a lot.
[9:44]So if we could point to just one thing to be amazingly good at, it would be encoding. That is the thing that is going to make the biggest difference to your overall learning ability.
[9:55]And in fact, when we look at a genius, that is the thing that they have that we notice.
[10:00]They can just learn something the first time, hold on to it, understand it really, really deeply and they do it in little to no time. And encoding is not the first thing that you should work on improving.
[10:13]Because it is not the fastest path to improvement. The reason is because to become a really good encoder and to train your processing ability to get all those benefits, it takes time.
[10:29]These are habits that we have to unlearn and relearn. And so in my experience coaching, I've realized that there are four things that make something a good high-yield change to work on in month number two.
[10:41]The first thing is rate limiters. A rate limiter is basically the thing that holds you back the most.
[10:48]So if you imagine like a wooden barrel made of wooden planks and one of these planks is broken in half.
[10:53]You try to fill this barrel up with water, all the water is just going to leak out through that broken plank.
[10:58]It doesn't matter how nice all the other planks around this barrel are. If that one is broken, water is going to come out there.
[11:04]That's the rate limiter. And anything you identify during your first month of discovery that you see as a rate limiter is going to be a high-yield change.
[11:14]Because it means as soon as you improve it, everything else that it has been holding back gets better as well.
[11:22]For most students that I work with, this rate limiter is procrastination.
[11:29]It does not matter how well you can study and how good you can encode information or whatever you're doing, if you procrastinate so much that you can never really sit down to follow a schedule and get stuff done in the first place, doesn't matter.
[11:40]For some people, it's stress or mental health. I've had a lot of students who are really, really focused on improving their learning skills, but they're so nervous and anxious about it, and the act of studying creates so much mental distress that they can never really concentrate.
[11:57]In this case, the mental health becomes the rate limiter. Working on the rate limiter is the tide that lifts all boats.
[12:03]And it's not actually worth working on other things until that rate limiter is solved.
[12:09]The second criteria for something that makes a great high-yield change is things that have a low lead time.
[12:17]Lead time is basically a term for how long it takes for something to manifest.
[12:24]So in something like medicine, cancer often has a long lead time because you can have cancer for very, very long time before you even start to notice any signs or symptoms.
[12:34]By the time it's diagnosed, it may have already been months. As opposed to, for example, getting hit in the face with a baseball bat, where the lead time is like zero.
[12:46]As soon as it makes contact with your face, you know something is wrong. For learning to learn, there are certain techniques and strategies that have a very low lead time in terms of providing you benefit.
[12:55]So encoding has a very long lead time. You have to spend weeks, maybe months unlearning habits and learning new habits for your encoding skills to be high enough for it to really solve your problems.
[13:08]On the other hand, retrieval strategies, things that use active recall, using flash cards if you're not using flash cards, doing interleaving if you're not doing interleaving, doing something like pre-study, these things produce an immediate benefit because the skill requirement is not very high.
[13:26]You could start using it tomorrow and gain a benefit from it tomorrow. You want to work on these quick wins first so that you have a little bit more time and space to work on the really high-impact things like encoding that take time.
[13:42]The third type of high-yield change is an incremental change. An incremental change is taking something that might normally have a long lead time.
[13:51]I.e. it takes a long time for you to get benefit from it, and you break that up into smaller components so you can start getting value from it earlier on.
[14:00]One example is with note taking. If you want to get to great encoding, you need to know how to think relationally, create schemas, group, evaluate, and categorize, create flows, and you have to be able to do this quickly.
[14:17]That's very difficult to do off the bat. So in a lot of my videos, I teach people to go from just linear note-taking like they normally do and just start making tiny little mind maps within their notes.
[14:30]It's not giving you the full benefit of the perfect version of the technique, but allows you to familiarize yourself with the technique and break up this huge process into smaller chunks.
[14:43]In my program, one of the early major techniques that I teach is interleaved retrieval.
[14:50]The reason is that when you teach someone to test themselves at a higher level, which is what you should do in interleaved retrieval, then you actually familiarize that person with the type of thinking pattern that they one day need to generate themselves.
[15:05]It is easier to test someone at a high level and force their brain to think at a higher level than it is to tell someone to just think at that level to begin with.
[15:16]So if someone's used to testing themselves at this higher level and therefore they're used to thinking at this higher level, then one day when they try to encode at that level, it's much easier.
[15:27]And the fourth and final high-yield type of change is a priority change.
[15:33]One of the most common reasons people will never make it past month one or month two is because they don't have enough time to commit to improvement.
[15:42]And sometimes we're just so busy trying to stay on top of the problems we have, that we don't have enough time to actually fix the problems in the first place.
[15:52]But if we don't fix the problem, we are dooming ourselves to repeat that problem.
[15:58]And that situation usually means we have to re-evaluate our priorities. Now, if you've been following along, you probably realize that there's a lot of stuff to do in month number two.
[16:09]And you're right, which is why it's not just month number two. This is month two and three.
[16:14]At the beginning of month two, you will have an awareness of what you are doing and what you can improve on.
[16:21]And then towards the end of month number three, you have a foundation of high-yield changes, your rate limits have been addressed.
[16:32]You not only have an awareness of what you're doing and what can be fixed, you also have experience actively trying to fix them.
[16:39]And frankly, for most people, even just at this point, it's enough for them to reach their current learning goal.
[16:48]The problems that they've been struggling with maybe for years can be fixed by this point. But if it's not enough, or if our goal requires even more than that, then we move on to the next few months, which is months four, five, and six.
[17:04]These months are called cognitive growth. You remember how I said that the thing that makes the biggest difference isn't the thing that you should work on first.
[17:13]Now it's time to work on those things. This is the path of becoming the genius.
[17:18]These are also the months where most people are likely to give up because cognitive growth is not comfortable.
[17:26]In fact, it's impossible for cognitive growth to be comfortable because the primary activity that creates growth during these months, what we are focusing on is pushing our comfort zone.
[17:41]Here's what I mean. Let's say we've got our existing current habits of learning.
[17:47]These are the ways of learning that we're used to. These are things that feel easy and comfortable for us.
[17:52]Our current habits form our current comfort zone. Now, obviously, if we want to become a genius, we need a different set of habits.
[18:00]We need a set of habits that are going to help us to lock in a greater retention, mastery, and time efficiency than we're able to achieve right now.
[18:10]And so, by definition, these new habits that we need to form are going to be new and different to what we are used to.
[18:19]So we can say that the things that exist out here, outside of our comfort zone, this is the learning zone, we're learning something new. So why does this make people give up?
[18:29]Because as we go into the learning zone, we also pass through something in the middle called the fear zone.
[18:39]And the further we get from comfort, the greater the fear becomes. The reason is because there is a higher level of uncertainty.
[18:49]As things become less familiar, the level of uncertainty goes up. If I sat you down and then I just laid out like an entire learning system of every single technique that you need to do in exactly the right way, first of all, it would be sitting for very long time.
[19:08]Secondly, unless you've had a lot of training, that's going to be very difficult for you to perform because it's you're just not used to it.
[19:15]In other words, the uncertainty is very high. What if I do this and it doesn't work? What if I make this mistake or that mistake?
[19:21]So there is an innate risk and uncertainty with trying something that is new because anything that is new carries with it the risk of failure.
[19:32]And so the journey through months four, five and six, you may think that this is where you're learning like all these new different techniques and every single week you're trying a new technique, but it's not like that at all.
[19:46]What it really is is that you can learn all the techniques you need to get good at in like 45 minutes.
[19:54]And for the entire three months, all you're doing is just getting more and more used to reaching the higher levels of that technique.
[20:04]I can give you an example right now. Let's say that you have a list of 20 words you need to learn and understand.
[20:10]Level one technique might be to just try to memorize and understand it. Level two is look for similarities between those words.
[20:19]Level three is group the words based on those similarities. Level four is rate those words out of ten based on how important you think they are in the context of the topic.
[20:33]Level five is try to find different types of similarities to group them and then rate the types of groups based on which grouping method you think is the most accurate or most important.
[20:47]Level six is decide on a grouping pattern that you feel is the most important and then connect the groups together.
[20:54]Level seven is think of a different way to group them and connect them together and compare how accurate and important your first grouping pattern is compared to your second.
[21:05]Level eight is to try to simplify that, group the groups and then connect the mega groups to each other. So you can see that if you're used to thinking at level one and everything you learn is just try to remember it, try to remember it, try to understand it.
[21:20]And you're suddenly now starting to go to, okay, not only am I just trying to understand it, but I'm simultaneously comparing it with everything else that I've learned and the information that I already have, creating groupings, thinking about alternative groupings, connecting the groupings together, creating a flow out of those groupings and then comparing that with a different type of flow and then simplifying it.
[21:38]That's a lot more activity that goes on mentally. And that could be like eight levels of essentially one processing technique.
[21:48]And so every few days, every week during these months, four, five and six, you are constantly pushing your current habits through this fear zone into a more uncertain new method of processing.
[22:03]Eventually getting to, in that example, like a level eight and being able to do that more comfortably until that becomes a habit and forms your new bigger comfort zone.
[22:14]And so during these months, there are two indicators that you are progressing. At the beginning of month four, you're just starting to probe the edges of the comfort zone.
[22:25]You're trying new things that a little uncertain and you're trying to get your brain to process information in a way that you're not used to.
[22:33]And by month six, the progress you've made is that you're not just probing towards the edge of your comfort zone, you are able to thrive in uncertainty.
[22:43]You have no problem with making mistakes. You have no problem with trying a new technique.
[22:48]You're so used to trying new things and expanding your comfort zone that the fear zone has evaporated.
[22:56]There is only comfort versus learning. And as a result of that learning, the other progress you make by the end of month six is that your natural processing speed should be noticeably higher than it was before.
[23:10]And what this means is that for the same amount of time and effort, you're able to create a much higher level of retention and mastery with information that you're learning for the first time.
[23:20]You are seeing the light of what it means to have become the genius. And if you've made it through to the end of month six, then the rest of the months become honestly much easier.
[23:32]Month seven, eight and nine become about unlocking speed. And here's the secret to being a really fast learner is that learning slow is learning fast.
[23:47]There's no point being a fast learner if your quality is terrible, if you're making mistakes and errors all over the place.
[23:54]You can't just be fast, you also have to be accurate and effective. And so to become a meaningfully fast learner, you first actually need to have accuracy.
[24:07]For most learners, the high level of mastery or retention is not something they can reach even by doubling or tripling the amount of time they spend.
[24:18]It's like expecting a poor quality machine to produce a really high-quality product just by running the machine for longer.
[24:29]The quality of the output is determined by the quality of the process. And so for most people that are in month number one or month zero, the quality of the process is usually all over the place.
[24:43]So even if they spend more time studying and learning, the quality and the mastery, the depth of understanding doesn't grow significantly.
[24:52]This is why you can have some people that spend hours and hours and hours trying to learn something, and then someone else can spend a tenth of that time and gain a deeper understanding of the topic.
[25:03]By month six, the beginning of month seven, what we're aiming to do is unlock accuracy. We are now able to hit that top level.
[25:12]The genius level that seemed unreachable, yeah, by this point, we can hit that. We're not fast at it. It's not graceful, but we can get there.
[25:25]And once we've unlocked accuracy, we can then unlock consistency. So it's not just that we can hit it for one topic, sometimes.
[25:35]It means now we can hit it for every topic and every subject, even when we're busy, even when we're tired, we can still hit that standard.
[25:44]And what naturally happens once we have consistency unlocked is that this technique that we have been training so hard for so long, becomes a new habit.
[25:58]And when it becomes a new habit, our brain is able to do it much more easily and much more quickly. The speed comes automatically.
[26:09]This is why slow learning is fast. When you focus on doing it slowly and properly, the speed comes without you even trying to be faster.
[26:20]And I see students make this mistake all the time. They're so focused on just trying to get faster without having the accuracy and the consistency.
[26:28]But what's the point of going faster if you're just creating more work for yourself later through all the gaps that you're leaving behind.
[26:37]That's not getting faster, that's called rushing. The only way to learn faster is for your brain to find it easier to do the learning.
[26:50]And that happens by creating new habits. By the end of month number nine, you've uh given birth to a bunch of new habits.
[26:58]And you're ready for the true genius levels of months 10, 11 and 12.
[27:07]These months are about adaptability. When I was going through medical school, I went from studying 20 hours a day to 10 hours a week.
[27:16]And then entering into hospitals as a fourth year medical student, failing my first run, because I realized the way that I was studying was geared too much for exams and not real life practice.
[27:27]Reworking my entire learning system, having to then go back to studying like six, seven hours a day on top of clinical placements, and then dropping back down to like three, four hours a week and then working full-time while going through medical school.
[27:43]So my journey of becoming a better learner has just been constantly up and down. And it's only in the last like five years that it's been very stable and there are not many optimizations I need to make anymore.
[27:57]So even though at the end of month number nine, you got these habits of being able to hit that high retention, high mastery and time efficiency, like you, you achieved it, like you became the genius. What else is left for you?
[28:11]What's left is that you now need to be able to do that and have these habits carry you forward even when the challenges get harder.
[28:17]How you can perform on a good day needs to become your baseline on a bad day. So how do you do this? You actually just go back to month number one.
[28:26]You've now got a whole new set of habits. You, you're a different person at this point.
[28:33]So go through, figure out what's your next set of goals. What does it mean for you, now, your new self to be even better?
[28:41]What is your current status? And then if you go through this exact flow all over again, what are the new high-yield changes?
[28:49]You'll realize there are different rate limiters. There are different high-yield changes you can make. Your foundation can get even stronger and a whole new set of habits can be built.
[29:00]And by continuing this cycle, this is how you not only just become a genius, but you stay a genius. You create a gap between you and who you used to be and that gap continually widens.
[29:12]And if you're looking for an easier way to do this, my program at I can study dot com is actually built around this very structure.
[29:28]It's a blueprint that I've used for myself and for thousands of students that I've coached and I'm sharing it with you. I hope it can help you too.
[29:39]Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
