hey everyone welcome back to another video one of the biggest misconceptions I had when I came to University was the idea that learning and notetaking was simply a process of efficiently capturing the information that was being taught to me and then effectively finding a way to memorize it and then regurgitate it in a test and I look at it now and I'm like that is a really limited view of what learning truly is and so in today's video I would like to share with you five tips or pieces of advice that I wish I was told when I started University in the hope that it could help you too tip number one get the big picture Abraham Lincoln once said give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe it's a quote that's often used to emphasize the importance of preparation before going into a task and when it com comes to learning and notet taking preparation is so important specifically getting the big picture and you don't need to spend 4 hours doing it just 30 minutes can make a difference you know I used to be the sort of person who' show up and watch a lecture or an online video without spending any time trying to understand what the course was covering or what the teacher was trying to teach and as a result often I would get overwhelmed by the small details interesting fact that blew my mind every piece of curriculum that you consume whether it be a piece of content or an assessment you are doing was designed by someone who had an intention in mind and that intention or purpose has been articulated in these things called learning outcomes and if you just spend a little bit of time going through them it gives you the big picture of what you're getting into and then if you spend a bit of time looking through your textbook subheadings or the course outline for that specific week you can get a big picture of what's being taught on a week to we basis here's a quick example from from a subject I did called Enterprise law from the business half of my degree and I spent a bit of time looking at the course structure and I realized that in weeks 1 to 3 we covered constitutional law in weeks 4 to7 we covered contract law in weeks 8 to 9 we covered negligence law and then in weeks 10 to 12 we covered consumer law so I had a really big picture of what was being covered in the semester and so then I went in and had a look at all the subtopics that fit within each of the topics so I had a better more well-defined picture of what was going on and so having this in mind when I showed up to a lecture or a piece of content in a particular week and I was thrown complex definitions I didn't feel overwhelmed by the details because I could see how that fit into the bigger picture of things another way of doing this is by just drawing a mind map and that is something I did a lot of particularly when I was studying science so for example if I was studying tissues or hystology I would make a mind map that outlined the four kinds of tissues and then the subcategories underneath that and so when I was dealing with detail again the tree diagram served as a way of helping me situate that content inside the big picture moving on tip number two and this may sound counterintuitive but the questions are more important than the answers I used to see this so many times in my science degree where we'd be sitting in a lecture and students would be hyper fixated on writing down every single word that the lecturer said that wasn't on the lecture slide and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about I used to be one of those students who'd rais my hand and asked the teacher to repeat what they said because I was too busy writing down the statement they said a couple of seconds ago and it's this hyper fixation on being correct and having the right answer all of the time which means that we don't leave space for us to embrace what we don't know and be curious and realize that knowing what we don't know is actually the first step to learning you know your textbook has all the answers that you need your teacher knows all the answers that you need in fact with the Internet available at our fingertips you have all the information in the world accessible to you right now and with chat GPT you have an even more refined tool that can go and do that work for you all you need is the questions and it's why I genuinely believe that someone who can ask good questions has something more valuable than someone who has all the answers you know curiosity is the bridge that takes us from what we do know to what we don't know and so a really practical way of fostering curiosity is next time you go into a lecture or watch a video try and focus on making a list of the questions that come to mind I remember going to one of my first biology lectures after not doing biology in school and I was completely overwhelmed but I remember just making a list of all the questions that came to mind what is photosynthesis what is cellular respiration what is glucose what what is glycolysis what is the creb cycle what is the electron transport chain what do these have to do with each other why are they important what is the mitochondria basic set of questions and some would say you haven't really learned anything but when I left the lecture I had a list of things that I didn't know and I had a direction to go into and so when I got home and opened up my textbook again or went to Google I knew what I was looking for you know often we're so quick to rush to an answer that not willing to sit with the uncertainty of not knowing and and there's something really special about leaving that room for yourself to be curious to allow your questions to lead the way and all of a sudden learning becomes an adventure a process of discovery as opposed to a linear path that you just followed that's been laid out from someone else and this is also something I practically applied in my Enterprise law subject where I took all the questions that I had and ended up turning them into toggles in notion and then then I put the answers to those questions within the toggles a really efficient and effective way of capturing that information tip number three teaching other people actually teaches you the most this idea was at the core of all my learning throughout my degree and one of the things I'd always do in the pre-co era in my science degree was I'd go up to my friends and I'd throw out the idea of hey later this week why don't we show up in the library and attempt to teach each other the content that we would just taught in the lecture and we'd split up the lecture into three parts and each of us would take a section to teach each other and let me just cover up this when I say teach I'm not talking about the kind of teaching you do to impress other people by demonstrating your knowledge and signaling intellectual prowess I'm talking about the teaching that you do out of generosity that although you are not an expert in the topic you have a goal at explaining it to someone and you see what happens and here's the catch the way we taught had to be directed by the questions of the people that we were teaching to one of the really interesting things about this process and one of the great gifts of teaching in this way is you get to benefit from the Curiosity of others and so my friends would just ask me whatever question that popped into their mind you know Samuel why are the walls of the left ventricle in the heart thicker than the walls of the right ventricle you know what is an equity Court in law and a lot of the times you are just standing there not knowing the answer to the question and I call it a gift because once again you've identified what you don't know you realize the gaps in your knowledge and you are able to incorporate that into your learning and then reiterate your understanding and so I genuinely recommend taking the time to find other students you can study with and a group where you can teach each other you know when I look back at the subjects that I did well in in University the Common Thread seemed to be that study group and it also makes it incredibly motivating to learn when you have to show up for other people and and as I said earlier learning becomes an adventure and when you allow your curiosity to lead the way it isn't just about memorization you have these moments where things click where you understand something for the first time it's like those light bulb moments and for me in those moments one of the things I love to do and this is tip number four is create something that is yours take the knowledge you are learning take the understanding that you are cultivating and then create your own representation of it you know I often speak about learning as a process of two parts on this channel it's a process of breaking down the information you are learning sort of like digestion when you eat food and you do this through asking questions and basically everything covered in the first two tips and then it's about taking that information that you've broken down and then creating your own thing out of it it's it's the idea of earning your learning of taking taking that knowledge and making it yours this made me fall in love with learning when I realized that it wasn't just about regurgitating information that it was actually a creative and dynamic process I loved it and there are so many ways to do this but I think it's really important to find the right tool that suits the thing that you are learning and so for example when I was covering physiology biology and chemistry in my first year of University these were subjects that really lent themselves to visual representations and drawing and I actually found it really natural to take the bits and pieces that I was learning and create these beautifully curated visual summaries that were made on the iPad um that captured my understanding of the topic yes they took a significant amount of time but I was immersed in the process of making them and after IID made it I didn't really need to go back and revise the topic because I had made something and the process of making it taught me the content interestingly when I moved to second year I spent less time making detailed notes and more time teaching and so the thing that captured my understanding were these visual summaries that I made on one page of the iPad per part of the lecture in my law subject that I was talking about earlier I realized that there was so much technical content cases legislation and we were even allowed to take a couple printed notes into the exam and I realized that handwriting all this stuff on the iPad wasn't the right tool for the job so I tried to find another way and so what I ended up doing was taking those notes that I had made in notion into keynote and so I spent a bit of time formatting the information in a way that was easier to look at and color coding it so that it was a helpful resource going into the exam and then even Beyond this when you think about a presentation for example should follow the same process when you present a topic you have taken that knowledge and then resynthesized it into something that is your own thing when you write an essay you are following the same process for yourself as well in fact any good assessment that you do gets you to take your learning your knowledge your understanding and gets you to synthesize it in a new way and it's one of the reasons I never really enjoyed the process of doing multiple choice tests all I'm trying to say is find a way to take the knowledge your learning and Own It own your learning when you speak about a topic you have actually learned it shouldn't just sound like a chat GPT summary it shouldn't sound like you are regurgitating a text it it should sound like something that is the product of your curiosity and you connecting what is new to what you already know and that leads me to my final tip tip number five make it a practice to reflect and find ways you can improve and ultimately develop a process of learning that works for you this is just about learning how to learn and I think you do this by constantly showing up with curiosity about the thing you're learning how you're learning it the discipline in general and also about how you feel in that process you know there isn't a magical 10-step process to learning that works in every single context it's about having a way of learning that adapts to the context and the content and the problem you are addressing and I think so much of what I did in my time in University was just experiment and understand how I want to learn understand how I solve a problem and that that is the most important thing because it teaches you how to learn that's the skill that translates into work Beyond University and the things you're going to be doing then you know I look back at what learning was to me when I was in school and for me it was just a game it was a game about how do I put in the least amount of effort to get the best marks as possible how do I avoid being wrong and to be honest you know it's a game you can get pretty good at you know and I think about it now and I'm like you know I don't think that's the game I want to play I actually love the challenge of immersing myself into something difficult a challenge a problem A New Concept and I love breaking it down and and then creating something that is my own out of that process and I hope today's video has given you a way of approaching your own learning in a similar way too and I hope it helps so yeah that's it for today everyone if you have any questions please leave them down in the comments below if you have things you want me to teach or cover in future videos please let me know as well but apart from that thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video I want to take you where do you want to go imagine the way it could be if life was an Open Road come on and take it easy see the whole world get