Imagine if you could get through all of your work in just a few hours instead of being like everyone else, spending all day studying and never making any progress. I'm Salim, I'm a med student and I've had to learn thousands of topics across med school, my undergrad and my postgraduate degree. And I never wanted to spend all day thinking and studying as most people did because I had other things I wanted to spend time on too.
So I'll go through the six levels of thinking from beginner to genius using a modified Bloom sexonomy with actionable steps at each stage so that you can massively increase how fast you think and learn. and most people are stuck at level 3 so stick around until the end to see how you can get to level 6 which is how the top 0.1% think. So at the bottom of the pyramid is something we've spent a lot of time on so I think it's safe to keep it short and that's knowing how to recall facts and basic concepts so knowing how to remember things.
I've had to learn thousands of random facts at med school so this is something I've had to master and the best way to remember is by using active recall and spaced repetition. Skip ahead if you already know what they are, but for those that don't know, active recall is when you take a topic, make questions on that topic, and test yourself on those questions. So you force your brain to actively retrieve information instead of just passively reading things. And spaced repetition is just doing these questions at increasing intervals over time.
The best way I've found to do this is by using flashcard software like Anki. I have a brief guide linked below so check it after the video. But the problem is, just being able to memorize or remember isn't enough for exams or higher levels of education.
So to get a deeper level of thinking, you need to know how to understand what you learn. And this is what the second stage of Bloom's Taxonomy is about. And there's a few ways to improve how well you can understand something you're learning so that you can think faster. And the first is to create deeper descriptions. When you're thinking about something you're trying to understand, write down exactly what you know about the topic.
For each part of what you wrote down, create a deeper description of it to assess your understanding by asking why. Doing this successfully about two or three times is usually enough to show that you fully understand something and as you do this you'll get faster at thinking when it comes to learning new things. The second way to understand better so that you think faster is by creating explanations.
There's a saying that if you can't explain it to a six-year-old you don't understand it yourself. So if you can teach someone you know about something you've learned in simple terms then it means you have a good understanding. But I'm not going to tell you to find a six-year-old because instead you should use a friend. Have your friend learn one topic and you learn another, and teach each other the topics and see if you've both done a good job at explaining by repeating it back to each other.
So after you practice understanding, you'll grasp new concepts quicker too. But the problem a lot of people have is that even though they can understand things, they find it difficult to answer questions which have different scenarios. And thinking to apply is what the third stage is about.
This is being able to use the information you've gathered and apply it to new situations which is necessary for getting a higher grade at university or even for improving general productivity, such as thinking of ways to manage your time better. And there's a few ways to improve your ability to apply your knowledge with the second way being the best thing to do. But the first thing everybody should do to improve their thinking, to effectively apply what they learn, is to have a diverse practical component to what you're learning.
So if you're learning a subject, that's doing practice questions that increase in difficulty so that you get used to applying the concepts you learn into different scenarios. People fall into the trap of staying comfortable and stick with doing the same simple questions because it makes them feel good. But that won't help you get the higher grade or help you think faster, you need to practice applying knowledge into a range of scenarios.
But an even better thing to do to reach the top of level 3 is to create a system to streamline how you apply knowledge, so that you can think fast, faster. And this involves using a 1 to 2 to 1 ratio. For every hour you spend learning something, spend two times as much time applying what you've learned. And after you apply what you learn, go over the specific parts where you struggled and spend an equivalent amount of time going deeper into that topic.
Usually this involves working on your levels one and two more before going more into the practical application of the knowledge. So for example, if I spent an hour on neurology, I'd then spend two hours going through questions and then for anything I found difficult, I'd go into that topic for another hour. Then repeat the two hours of going through questions again until I'm fully confident in them. This system makes you think faster because you go through gaps in your knowledge and cement your understanding through a systematic approach.
And that casts out the problem people have of being unsure of what to do next or how to improve. Helping you go from level 1 to 3 of thinking for any topic in a fraction of the time. So level 3 is where most people end up but the next two levels pair up well together and is where it begins to get more advanced.
And these are known as the analyze and evaluate stages. These levels are harder because it's not just about extracting what you know and applying it to a given scenario. It's about making connections and critiquing different ideas which you might commonly see in essay based questions where you compare and contrast topics or information. But on a wider scale these levels of thinking can improve your general productivity too because you can think about how to personalise certain methods or systems for your own workflow.
But first I'll start with the academic application of this stage. A very simple way to practice developing these levels of thinking is to use AI software like ChatGPT, using it to generate essay style questions on topics you want to have higher levels of thinking for. For example, if you're learning about neurology and specifically strokes, you can put this into chat GPT and ask it to make an essay question based on levels 4 and 5 of Bloom's taxonomy and have it mark your answer after. You can also be quite vague with what you want by copying this prompt and it'll give you different topics that require you to critically think and build connections.
This This works well to deepen your knowledge of a topic and by repeating this over time, you'll adapt and see yourself thinking faster even for complex topics. And that's because you become better at connecting multiple concepts. And it's the top learners that master this to get the highest grades. And I said that these levels of thinking are good for improving general productivity too. For example, if you're trying to improve your time management and saw my video on time management, but also other people's videos, you can analyse and evaluate which methods work best for your specific workflow.
And that could be by starting at level 3 and applying those methods, then thinking through levels 4 and 5 where you reflect on how each method improved your productivity based on how much you got done with each one. Then picking the one that worked best for you. And now, to have the highest level of thinking, you need to do something that's not been done before, which is why this is the create stage of Bloom's Taxonomy.
But there's also a wider stage for this which I'll get to later. But first as an example, this could be at university where you're aiming to work on a publication. This isn't easy to do and needs you to think faster because there's a lot more moving parts involved. from carrying out primary research, doing secondary research, analysing the results and more. But there are ways to maximise how fast you get to the stage which also means how fast you climb all six stages.
And the best way to do this is by having a mentor to guide you. There's a reason why people who are highly successful still have coaches. They effectively have a second brain that's a step ahead and has more experience that they can learn from because they learn to avoid common mistakes and know the most efficient methods to reach the top.
So for you this could be having a teacher or professor give you guidance. on how to go about working on research so that you have a good starting point, and someone you can go to for direction when you feel lost. And I said that there's a wider stage for this, and to me this is what people including myself are for.
Using me as a mentor based on what I advise and show in my videos is a way for you to create a life where you reach your potential not just in your academic life but also in your personal life. And if you can adopt the way of thinking that I've applied in my life to reach my goals, then that's going to help you reach this higher level of thinking too. But even if you have what it takes to get through all six levels of thinking, you might find it difficult to take action and it's not because you're lazy or that you're a procrastinator.
A more common problem people have that they don't even realize is that they have a fear of taking action which stops them from reaching their potential. So in this video here, I talk about how I overcame my fear of taking action which helped me get to where I am today and you can overcome this fear by watching the video to take the right steps.