hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and the author of Feelgood productivity which is a book about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's enjoyable and meaningful and sustainable now it's been a few years since I've graduated from medical school but I still get tons of emails and Instagram DMS from students all the time asking for advice and so in this video I thought I would talk through seven of the top mistakes that I see students making absolutely every year and my goal for this video is that if even one student watching this video manages to avoid any one of these seven mistakes then this video will have been worth making let's start with mistake number one not learning how to learn and this is the thing that I've been trying to hammer home literally on this YouTube channel for the last 6 years that there are very well documented science-backed evidence-based ways of studying or learning or understanding or revising for your exams and if you haven't yet taken the time to learn how to learn you are profoundly shooting yourself in the foot I wish this was something that they taught us in school and college at University but generally they tend not to We tend not to have a class on how to study or how to learn it's the sort of thing you either have to learn yourself or more likely you just do what you see other people doing and you think that that's the only way of doing it so things like rereading and highlighting and underlining and even making notes with the textbook open a lot of these things are actually suboptimal ways of studying for exams and the things that actually work are things like active recall and spaced repetition and interleaving and categorizing and I've made a bunch of videos about these over the years that I will link down below I promise that if you just learn a few of the strategies you will save absolutely gallons and gallons of time and instead of then being stressed by your exams or thinking like oh my God I don't have any time in the evenings you'll be thinking whoa I've got too much time I don't know what to do with my time I'm twiddling my thumbs and then whatever your experience of school or college or university is it's going to be better because now you have way more time to give to other important things in your life other than just your studies all right mistake number two is thinking of studying as a single player game now I've had so many emails from students over the years who feel absolutely miserable when they are studying they either hate their subject or they like the subject but they don't like studying or they like the subject but they do like studying and they can't focus or any combination of all these things and generally if I dig in a little bit more or if I I chat to students when I do talks and things like that generally what I find is that the people who absolutely hate studying are the ones who are doing it on their own for some reason there is this myth that the ideal way to focus is to lock yourself in your in your bedroom or in a library by yourself and just like focus on the thing now there are some people in the world for whom that is really fun and really enjoyable and really energizing and they don't struggle with focus and they don't struggle with discipline and they don't procrastinate if you are that sort of person you can ignore this advice but if you have ever found studying on your own to be boring or draining or de-energizing or just a freaking nightmare then you are falling into the Trap of thinking of studying as a single player game and what I wish more students knew is that basically everything becomes more fun when you do it with friends you can profoundly transform your experience of school or college or university by treating studying as a multiplayer game where you and your friends are working together to tackle the final boss which is the exam or whatever the thing might be your friends don't even have to be doing the same subject as you back when I was at University I set up a group where you know me and like eight of my friends we would all go to different libraries together and each day maybe like 5 to seven people would show up and we would use the Pomodoro Technique together so someone would set a timer for 25 minutes and then we'd all study for 25 minutes and then there would be a 5-minute break and initially before organizing this group I was making the mistake of doing a lot of studying on my own and finding it quite draining and thinking like ah there must be a better way and then because I'm a weirdo I read a bunch of studies that showed around this thing called relational energy and how actually we get energy from the people around us and so I thought you know what let me just try this and literally on day one we were all like oh my God we've all been studying on our own for the last like year but why don't we just do it together and as is the thesis of my book Feelgood productivity when stuff feels good we become more productive that's why it's called Feelgood productivity if there's anything you can learn from my own experience and from the studies that have been done on this if you are struggling with learning or studying or revising or whatever the thing is and you are treating it like a single player game consider organizing a study group getting some people together and you'll almost certainly find that it's way more fun and way more energizing if you just study with friends rather than on your own all right mistake number three the students make all the time is cramming cramming is absolutely shafting yourself across all of the different domains of life and often students have this weird thing be like oh you know I didn't do any work and I just like studied like a day before the exam and then I got good grades it's like bro if if you think that the goal of kind of schooling is to get the grades you're kind of missing the point the goal is to understand to learn to have knowledge about the world to like I don't know expand your horizons and all that crap and you don't get that from cramming for an exam as if it's a box that you have to take it's like what's the point if you're just going to take a box like okay maybe you have to go to school and stuff but having that kind of have to attitude is just I don't know it's not a very uh again it's it's it's not a very enjoyable or energizing way of thinking about it we tend not to enjoy the things that we feel we have to do and if you feel like you have to cram for an exam just because you're going to take a box or get some grade that's basing your entire student career on this idea of extrinsic motivation you're not doing the thing because you actually want to do the thing you're doing the thing because someone else is telling you to do the thing and even if that is the case even if you're studying a subject that you don't enjoy even if your parents or your counselor or your boss or whatever the thing is is telling you to do something the way that you approach it makes an enormous difference to your own happiness and fulfillment and also to your productivity ity and efficiency when it comes to studying so if there's one thing I would go back and tell my past self it's that a little bit of studying every day is way more efficient and way more effective than trying to cram before the exam a because it helps memory and understanding and therefore I'm more likely to get better grades in the exam but B that stuff is more likely to stick in my memory over the long term and that benefits my entire life rather than it just being a thing that I do for the exam having said that it is of course never too late to start uh you know the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago the second best time is now and so if you have an exam coming up imminently cramming is still better than nothing but for next time it's generally way less stressful to actually do a little bit of revision every day so that you can have a more chill and more relaxed and more pleasant experience of student life rather than it being this kind of sort of chasing your tail all the time that you get with cramming and if you're looking to level up how you study and prepare for your exams then you might like to check out my completely free ultimate studying bundle this has revision Tim taes it's got a bunch of evidence-based space repetition strategies and a bunch of other resources that I found super helpful in my student life and that I have then shared with students and they have found super helpful as well it's completely free there's a link down below that's the ultimate studying bundle that you can just download all right so mistake number four that students make is to often narrow their choices of career based on what their degree is or what subjects that they've studied now I actually got this from Professor Cal newport's blog that I used to read when I was in medical school and reading that really changed the way that I think about this because what he says is that often when students are thinking about what job they want to do in the future they'll sort of narrow their options based on their degree so if for example you do a degree in I don't know economics you'll think okay I've got a degree in economics therefore I need to either be a banker or a h fund person or a private Equity person or a consultant or I don't know accountant or something like that but actually what calup argues and what I fully believe now that I've been a few years since graduation is that instead of thinking what job can I do with my degree you instead think what's the sort of life that I want to have and then you reverse engineer what kind of career you want to have based on the life that you think you want so ask yourself what does your dream life look like what does your ideal week look like what does your ideal Tuesday look like what what would you like to be doing on a normal Tuesday it's probably a work day you're probably not able to retire Tire just yet like what sort of work would you like to be doing when would you like to come home where would you like to live how long how long do you want your commute to be what sort of people would you like to work with and then based on that you can start making more intelligent choices about okay cool what are the careers that match that kind of Life aspiration I have rather than limiting yourself based on your degree and a medical degree is a perfect example of this because you do a medical degree and you think great obviously I need to become a doctor but actually there are zillions of careers within medicine and outside of medicine that a medical degree can really help with so action point if you take nothing else from this video other than learning how to study for your exams it is worth considering however young you are or however old you are what is the life that I think I want and then once you've done that you can figure out what are the career choices that might Vibe with that life that you think you want and you're probably going to change your mind but that's okay either way it's much easier to steer a moving ship than a stationary ship all right mistake number five is squandering the absolutely insane amount of free time that you have right now whether you're at school or at college or university you probably think that you're pretty busy but just you wait until you get a real job and you suddenly have to spend 40 50 60 70 80 hours a week forced to turn up to a place lest you'll get fired and then all the extra time on top of that commuting to the place and preparing for the stuff all of the time suck that like a day job is and you'll look back on your time at school college and university and you will say oh my freaking God I cannot believe I wasted so much time and if you currently think that you don't have much time this is why learning about time management and in fact learning about productivity is super helpful because when you learn simple strategies when it comes to managing your time and prioritizing and beinga procrastination and being a bit more disciplined a bit more motivated when you learn those fairly simple things and start applying them to your life it's the same thing I talked about in mistake number one like when you learn how to study more effectively you're getting more bang for your buck out of every hour that you put in and therefore you have way more spare time and an absolutely amazing thing you can do in that spare time is yes you can enjoy yourself but B you can learn skills you can learn skills and you can level up your own abilities in a way that will gel with anything that you want to do in the future so for example when I was in school I taught myself web design and web development and those skills came in super handy even in my medical career which you wouldn't think they would but those skills were ultimately what allowed me to create a business while I was a university that business funded my entire medical degree and then those skills morphed into this YouTube channel which then allowed me to quit my job several years later and even then I still wasted absolutely tons of time when I was in school I was watching like tons of TV shows I was addicted to World of Warcraft that I would play for 3 hours a day and I don't regret that time but I do think if I had just known a little bit more about productivity back when I was younger I would not have squandered so much free time and so if you care about building a life that you truly love and you care about potentially having the autonomy and freedom to do your own thing someday and maybe not just have a traditional job a lot of that stems from the skills that you have learned and you tend not to learn those skills in school or university you tend to learn them on your own and so if you can learn those sorts of skills in your spare time things like I don't know public speaking or video editing or web design or graphic design or data analysis or coding like there's a lot of skills that can interface nicely with almost any career that you can think of these days if it were me I would learn a lot about AI I'd learn about no code automation tools I'd probably still learn how to code because if if I was doing those things then almost any job that I do I can apply those skills to but I won't be able to do any of that if I spent all of my free time as a student I don't know watching TV or playing video games not that there's anything wrong with that I used to play a lot of World World of Warcraft I play a lot of balers gate these days but it's good to have a little bit of a balance and to be leveling up your own skills as you're going along and if you're looking for a great resource for learning new skills then you might like to check out skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video if you haven't heard by now skillshare is a fantastic online platform with classes on all sorts of subjects from video editing and graphic design to interior design and cooking and I've actually been personally teaching on skillshare since 2019 so I've got about a dozen classes that you can take to your heart's content if you're interested in maybe learning how to videoed I've got an amazing class on how to use Final Cut Pro and if you're interested in just generally leveling up your productivity then you should firstly check out my book uh and you should also check out my free classes that are on skillshare as well and if you're interested in the AI thing that I talked about there's also a fantastic skillshare original by smites mystery and that's called make AI work for you and it's a class all about how to break creative blocks skillshare can also help you level up in your career with loads of classes around marketing and social media and UI and ux and being a freelancer and some side hustle ideas as well so if you happen to be one of the first 500 people to use my link to sign up then you'll get a a 30-day free trial and you'll get 50% off the annual skillshare premium subscription so if you're interested in checking out any of these classes that are onun skillshare or any of my classes then check out the link in the video description and that will let you join skillshare with a completely free trial where you can check out any of the classes to your heart's content so thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video all right so mistake number six is that when you're a student you often don't realize how valuable your health is and the thing is when you're a student is when you start laying the foundation for the healthy habits that are going to take you forward for the rest of your life and in my kind of time as an entrepreneur and as a YouTuber I've spoken to a bunch of stupidly successful and like ridiculously Rich entrepreneurs some of them are like 100 millionaires some of them are billionaires and I often like to ask them for Life advice and one of the things they all say is I wish I had taken my health more seriously when I was younger cuz to be honest you can have all the money in the world but if you have all the money in the world and your health is absolutely crap you cannot actually enjoy the money that you've got and so one thing that I wish I had done more of when I was a student is to just take a little bit better care of my health like to not be a slouchy kind of World of Warcraft playing basement dweller and if I was going to do that I don't know do a bit of stretches do a bit like understand a bit about posture and about stretching and stuff kind of wish I'd eaten healthier when I was University I did a Dexter scan recently and realized I've got a ton of visceral adapost tissue which is probably built up over time a because of my Asian genetics and B because I used to live off of french fries and Don kebabs when I was at University which is pretty bad in hindsight and generally I also wish that I'd embodied the identity when I was a student of someone who takes my health Ser seriously instead for some reason the identity I had I was like oh I'm a bit of a slob LOL I just I just live off takeaways LOL I just sit on the computer I don't know why I chose to have and embody that identity for myself it was just dumb and if I if I had my time again as a student I would say you know what devoting half an hour a day to your health is going to be a habit that pays off forever so start doing that when you're young rather than having to then build that habit when you have a full-time job where it's way harder then mistake number seven that I see students make quite a lot is generally having too fixed an approach when it comes to their life and their career and if if you're the sort of student who's watching this channel you're probably quite conscientious and you're probably I don't know pretty good at studying or whatever usually there's this you know you a lot of students will have this very kind of linear thinking I just need to focus on my GCS and then I just need to focus on my a levels or whatever your exam is and then I just need to focus on getting into University and and it's almost like you're sort of thinking of life as this kind of one step after the other but what you realize fairly quickly especially after graduating University is that oh my God there's actually this whole world of possibilities out there and actually there was this whole world of possibilities even when I was in school and University and I just didn't take advantage of those because I just followed one specific linear path and the cure to this I think is to have a bit of an experimental mindset when it comes to your career and your life like instead of taking things so seriously and thinking oh my God if I don't do well in this exam I'm not going to be able to do or you know just the the seriousness and the over importance with which we approach our student lives just taking a step back and approaching it with a bit more lightness and ease and a bit more of an experimental attitude so instead of thinking for example that I will only do this thing this experience if it gives me more CB points instead thinking you know what let me just try this out because I'm intrigued by it I'm going to follow my curiosity maybe it's not going to give me any CB points maybe it won't look good on my resume but either way this is going to be a valuable life experience it's going to teach me something and every experiment that you run on yourself gives you data about where you really want to go like it's so common for students and actually for adults to not really know what they want to do with their lives it's like a thing that I hear all the time in emails and DMS and stuff and if you don't yet know what you want to do with your career it's probably because you haven't sampled enough things it's probably because you've just got this like limited range of things that you've tried you haven't maybe enjoyed any of them and now you're like well want to do with my career like often the answer there is to expand your scope of the things that you're actually getting up to and I think having an experimental mindset and thinking of trying new things as an experiment rather than as like the serious thing that if you fail it's going to look bad on your CV and this can often be a hard thing to do depending on what your parents are like because parents and teachers are often way more risk averse than they need to be like my mom would often say like what's the point of learning to design websites is that going to look good on your CV and I was like well I think it will because it makes me more more well-rounded but it's also not the point the point of learning how to make websites is not so that it looks on my CV it's an experiment to see if I enjoy the thing and is a good skill to have generally for life and I would attribute a lot of My Success later in life to the fact that I learned how to design websites when I was in school so broadly consider taking an experimental approach to your career in your life and this is something I talk more about in my book feel good productivity which you can check out if you're interested in learning how to make the most of your time as a student and if you're a student and you haven't yet checked it out I have a three-hour long master class on how to study for exams which will be linked right over there it's completely for free here on YouTube and you can check that out and then that will teach you how to study for your exams in a more effective way so thank you so much for watching have a lovely day and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye