hello my mappers and welcome to the video today we're going to be going over make it stick the science of successful learning if you're the type of person that reads a book watches a video listens to a podcast and there were a ton of great points in there but you just can't seem to remember or take action on those points this book is going to be perfect for you we're not only going to go over why that happens but we're going to go over a few different techniques to make that information stick and with that we're gonna dive directly into the introduction I pulled out a quote from the book that I think gives us a good overview of what we can expect to learn and it goes like this people generally are going about learning the wrong ways empirical research into how much we learn and remember shows that much of what we take for gospel about how we learn turns out to be largely wasted effort even college and medical students whose main job is learning rely on study techniques that are far from optimal at the same time this field of research which goes back 125 years but has been particularly fruitful in recent years has yielded a body of insights that constitute a growing signs of learning highly effective evidence-based strategies to replace less effective but widely accepted practices that are rooted in theory lower in intuition so how much of what we're doing while we're learning is actually just things that we learned when we were in childhood things that we picked up along the way but isn't actually science backed isn't actually evidence back probably a lot of it but here's the catch the most effective learning strategies are actually not intuitive this is a book about what people can do for themselves right now in order to learn better and remember longer while much remains to be known about learning in its neural underpinnings of large body of research has yielded principles and practical strategies that can be put to work immediately at no cost in to great effect and I think that's really what we're talking about here is using these techniques as a really great leverage point right you can make small changes in the way that you're learning and the way that you're studying in the way that you're reading listening watching and it's going to make a huge difference in your ability to remember and ultimately implement those pieces of information that you were trying to learn and so everyone wants to learn better and remember longer especially if you're watching these YouTube videos that's probably one of your number one aims in life now there is some thirst for knowledge in all the people that are watching this video some of you want to learn maybe or that will make your life better in some way or at least that's kind of what you think how much time are you actually spending learning if you're watching these YouTube videos reading books listening to books listening to podcasts most of us are probably spending at least a few hours a day and that adds up to quite a lot of our lives so what would it be like if you had the strategies that would help you learn more and remember longer so that you can actually get some benefit from some of those hours that you're spending over a lifetime you would probably save years of your life maybe even get the promotion succeed in a business or accomplish your life goals a heck of a lot faster the strategies in this book are proven not only by the scientists but I've tested them myself but they're not easy watching videos listening to audio books and simply reading for the joy of reading is easy but learning sometimes requires hard mental work that's what we're going to talk about today and I guess that's why I started with why this is important it's so important to learn these techniques to use these techniques because it's going to drastically cut your time to success down and with that we're gonna talk a little bit about mind mapping you can get the most out of these mind maps by actually following along find the process of how I my map plus all of the mind maps available on this YouTube channel including this one at the link down below following along with these mind maps is going to help you learn more remember better and apply these books to your life and our first big idea is about fluency learning is deeper and more durable when it's effortful remember we talked it's going to be a little difficult learning that's easy is like writing in it's here today and it's gone tomorrow we are poor judges of when we're learning and when were not when the going is harder and slower it doesn't feel productive we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary Reedy rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all different stripes but they're also among the least productive by massed practice we mean the single-minded rapid-fire repetition of something you're trying to burn into your memory the practice practice practice of conventional wisdom cramming for exams is an example rereading and mass practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery but true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time so this is really what we're mostly doing we're reading once we're reading twice we're kind of going over the points and trying to commit them to memory and it gives us this illusion of fluency so the question to ask is how fluent are you really on a certain topic turns out that we're not that good at estimating this when we reread something it gives us a feeling of familiarity that often masks as fluency but when it comes time to take action on a certain piece of information we need to be fluent and not familiar especially in the business world in the career world we need to be fluent and what we need to know in order to perform well at our job or at in our business we can't just be familiar with the information we need to know it off by heart so that's why fluency is important let's say your job is simply to make decisions and that's what most high paying jobs are actually doing is making a bunch of little decisions throughout the day often you'll need to make those decisions quickly with their time to reference materials that you once read being familiar with the topic can give you a false sense of security that you understand it and that leaves you open to making decisions on actually bad information or misremembering of the information that you once knew so how do we ensure that we're actually fluent well start by throwing away most of the common study practices that we're using nowadays and that's really where we're getting started we need to know that most of the things that we're doing are giving us this illusion of fluency this familiarity that feels like fluency it feels better than what we're doing a little bit later on in the mind map but it's not going to stick so rereading a particular text is not going to help cramming the night before a test is not the best way to go about it especially if you want to remember this stuff for a lifetime taking the same practice test over and over again is simply not helping you learn anything then we're gonna add of course some of the practices inside this book these practices end up being more energy and attention demanding they're more difficult but they lead to real brain changes versus temporary learning and I guess I want to talk about real brain changes versus this temporary learning real brain changes are what it takes in the real world of business of career of life in general you need to actually know something in the real world and often when we're in college and university we can feel like we just have to remember something for a day and in the real world that's simply not the truth our next big idea is called Cranberries a child stringing Cranberries on a thread goes to hang them on a tree only to find they've slipped off the other end without the knot there's no making a string with it the knot there's no necklace there's no beaded purse no magnificent tapestry retrieval ties the knot for memory retrieval ties the knot for memory repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast today we know from empirical research that practicing retrieval makes learning stick far better than re exposure to the original material does this is the testing effect also known as the retrieval practice effect to be most effective retrieval must be repeated again and again and spaced out sessions so that the recall rather than becoming a mindless recitation requires some effort repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural roots by which the knowledge can later be retrieved so what are we talking about here we're talking about essentially going back into your memory and trying to find that piece of information that you learned once upon a time and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second here but that's what retrieval means so if you're looking to learn something obviously you need to retrieve the information and ideally you need to do it again again at a spaced interval the first strategy that will employ when trying to learn a new subject is this retrieval strategy so retrieval or remembering what you've listened to watched or read with it reference this action syncs up the knot of learning I really like this analogy of The Cranberries on the string it's like if you don't have if you don't retrieve it then you've got all these cranberries which are the things that you've learned they just slide right off the end if you tie the one knot then you have a good necklace for of cranberries and then if you cinch it up time after time after time you can make it so that that cranberries will never fall off the other end so each time you retrieve something it gets just a little bit tighter and a little bit tighter so how might that work when you're reading a book close the book and try to actually remember what you just learned when you're watching a video pause the video and try to remember what the main points were for example what was the main point that we did right before cranberries what did we talk about right before the cranberries a lot of you are probably having trouble remembering just the last point and that's I guess one of the ideas here is that often when we know that we don't need to retrieve a piece of information we will just let it flow in and flow right back out but when we know we're going to be tested afterwards we know we're going to need to retrieve something then we are actually forced to pay deeper attention maybe you're learning from a mentor after the session you've spent $100 $200 $500 to talk to this mentor for an hour and what you do is you talk to them you don't prepare before you go in you talk to them for an hour and then you go away and you basically forget everything that they said what you should be doing is not only preparing which is not really what we're talking about but also you have to go over the conversation in your head pick out all of the small things that they said that you didn't notice in the moment but pull them out go over it in your head again anyways let's give it a try what are the three main points that we've learned so far in this video what does the introduction mean what does the fluency mean and what does The Cranberries mean if you have the mind map you can follow along with that of course but I would recommend even if you don't have the mind map to just go over in your head what does the introduction point that we talked about mean what does the fluency point mean and what does the main point of The Cranberries mean that's one of the reasons why mind mapping is so effective by the way is because you have to kind of recall everything that is in each one of these collapsed nodes here it's a really great way to go about it and you can just pull it up and open it and you can then figure out if you're right or not so our first gold point which is one of the ones that I think is the most effective in the entire book is about curveballs when the baseball players at Cal Poly practiced a curveball after curveball over 15 pitches it became easier for them to remember the perceptions and responses they needed for that type of pitch the look of the ball spin how the ball changed direction and how fast it Direction changed how long to wait for it to curve performance improved but the growing ease of recalling those perceptions in responses led to little thurible learning it is one skill to hit a curveball when you know a curveball will be thrown it is a different skill to hit a curveball when you don't know it's coming baseball players need to build the ladder skill and I would say that we need to build the ladder skill in life in business in our careers but they often practice the former which being a form of massed practice builds performance gains on short-term memory and you get much better much quicker but you're not really getting that lasting effective learning it was more challenging for the Cal Poly bad Cal Poly batters to retrieve the necessary skills when practice involves random meeting that challenge made the performance gains painfully slow but also long lasting short-term impediments make for stronger learning this is desirable difficulties in the book how to learn that we've done on this channel we talk a lot about creating desirable difficulties in your own learning process when we're learning something new we often want to make the process as easy as possible and that's just the way that the human mind is it doesn't want to spend very many calories if it doesn't have to today outside of school this looks like learning via YouTube or following a step-by-step process you do for me is an amazing tool of course I loved YouTube but just because we've been able to follow a video doesn't mean we know a thing and especially if this is kind of something in your day job you've done a particular you have a particular skill and you follow a video and you get that thing done it doesn't no mean you actually know how to get that thing done you will probably have to pull up the same video again when you do it again so this opens an interesting line of thinking when do we need to know something and when do we need to actually just get something done when do we need to practice curve balls because we need to get them done or when do we need to actually know how to distinguish between what type of pitch it's going to be I often think this is like think of this like a programmer would so if you have to do it twice it's better to write some code to do it so if you're just doing something once don't bother to take the time to learn it deeply or practice it in a more difficult less tutorial video type way it's just not a good investment in your time if you only plan to do something once don't take the time to learn it from scratch or to actually implement some of these tools and techniques that we're talking about here today but if you're planning to do it more than once it will be worth it to implement some of these techniques to learn the thing deeply and more long term perhaps by learning it deeply you'll spot something that you might not have actually spotted otherwise maybe there's in a more efficient way to do the task it could be a business opportunity maybe just straight up isn't necessary for you to do perhaps you could create a product or service from the task and add it to your offerings in your business so what does this look like actually in the real world instead of practicing something via repetition we want to make that thing more difficult often we'll watch a video of how to do something step-by-step just by following along with the video we're just shutting off the video and starting from scratch when I first started my advertising business I wanted to learn everything from scratch I learned graphic design copywriting paid advertising split testing landing page building offer creation and email marketing and many different variations of all the software that facilitates those things even if I wasn't going to be the best person to do it long term it gave me the most comprehensive look into everything we did at the company which is invaluable long term so now when I'm kind of at the batter's plate in a client or one of the people that I work with ask me a question it's not just a curveball that I know how to hit it could be it could be a completely different type of pitch I need to know the answer to all of those different types of pitch so we need to know all of these skills very deeply to be able to answer competently so for me that's an invaluable skill I learned each one of these things from scratch and I tested it over and over and over again and I did these things from memory I did them by myself I didn't pay someone else to do them I didn't automate the process for a lot of these things in the beginning simply because I knew that I needed to know how all of those things worked and I think that's something that we really can get into because I think with a lot of big companies we can find ourselves just following a process and not knowing the thing from scratch we've we kind of go step by step by step by step and we know what the steps are but we don't know why each one of those steps is important so that's something that you can think about when building your own company is you have to know why each one of these steps is important so that you can make changes to the process of the business long term so our next point is about full brain in a cartoon the farside cartoonist Gary Larson a bug-eyed school kid asks his teacher mrs. Osborne can I be excused my brain is full I've definitely felt like that myself if you're just engaging in mechanical repetition it's true you quickly hit the limit of what you can keep in mind however if you practice elaboration there is no known limit to how much you can learn elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know the more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge the stronger your grasp on the new learning will be and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later so if your brain is feeling full take some time to explain what you're learning to someone else this for me has been an absolute super power developing a practice of teaching what I learned is incredibly helpful my ability to make connections between content has skyrocketed my recall ability has also increased dramatically but these videos give me feedback on how clear my explanations are I believe that if you can't explain something in a basic way then you probably don't know it well enough reddit has this section called explain like I'm 5 where the expert takes complex topics and breaks them down into simple terms I sometimes visit that to get inspiration and of course to learn new things I think that this explain like I'm five concept is so good when we're learning something because we can explain it to a friend a family member to air we can explain it to a video and it really just increases our recall ability like Matt it really is one of the best techniques that I've ever learned is pretending like I'm teaching this information to someone else not only is it going to help you after you get the information but it's gonna help you while you take the information you're going to pull out only the information that you feel is important so that's very good as well I think it's best to teach in whatever medium you feel most comfortable with first there's no need to learn something new while you're trying to teach for me it was mind maps I was doing them anyways now I just turn on the microphone but for you it could be through note-taking it could be talking out loud it could be teaching it to a friend or creating a super in-depth Hollywood level documentary on it it's completely up to you there's so many different ways to teach the information not all of them have to be public you can just teach them to yourself again if you need to you can teach them to a friend or a family member if they would be interested in the topic but really I think this is one of the best ways teaching it to someone else or at least acting as if you have to teach it to someone else helps you pull it the only the most important information and explain it in a simple way that's going to make it much easier for you to remember and make your brain not get full next we're gonna talk about testing Sternberg concept of developing expertise holds with the continued experience in a field we are always moving from a lower state of competence to a higher one his concept also holds that standardized tests can't accurately rate our potential because what they reveal is actually limited to a static report of where we are in the learning continuum at the time the test is given in tandem with Sternberg's three-part model of intelligence he and Greg anko have proposed a shift away from static tests in replacing them with what's called dynamic testing determining the state of one's experience refocusing learning on areas of low performance follow-up testing to measure the improvement into refocused learning so as to keep raising expertise thus a test may assess a weakness but rather than assuming that weakness indicates a fixed inability you can interpret it as a lack of skill of knowledge or knowledge that can be remedied so this isn't something that I really want to dive into a ton during this mind map except for just the one thing people sometimes feel that they weren't good on tests or in a particular subject in school so that they aren't capable in that subject or on that test actually I wasn't even that good in school at least until the stakes were high enough when I was in when I was in college and I had to pay money to go to school I was very good in school then the stakes were high enough it made sense for me to put all my effort into it but as I pointed out here the test is more about where you are in a particular point in time it's not about your true ability your true innate ability and Carol Dweck's amazing book mindset dives more into this and I've done a review of that on the channel I recommend that you check it out I'll leave a link for it down below but I just wanted to stop and say this sometimes make us doubt our abilities and we shouldn't because they only show us one particular point in time they show us where we're at on the continuum of learning and we have nothing but the ability to continue to increase our ability our final point is about that book mindset by Carol Dweck let's return to the old saying if you can or you think you can't you're right it turns out that there's more truth here than wit so we've all heard it before if you think you can or you think you can't you're right attitude counts for a lot the study studies of psychologists Carol Dweck have gotten huge attention for showing just how big an impact one simple conviction can have on learning and performance this belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fixed but rests to a large degree in your own hands the wex research has been triggered by her curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort so there's really those two types of people there's the fixed mindset which is they become helpless or the growth mindset where they start trying new strategies in redoubling the effort she found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes their failure those who attribute their failure to their own ability I'm not intelligent become helpless those who interpret failure as a result of insufficient effort or ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches so if we want to increase our abilities first we should change our mind what are your thoughts about your own ability this is something important to keep in mind but so something that we often ignore most of us have this running track of self-talk in her mind and a lot of it is negative Cara pointed in her book just how much of that is hindering our ability so how might we overcome this negative self-talk well inside this book what you say when you talk to yourself what to say when you talk to yourself dr. shad Helmstetter gives us a great process and that book is also on this channel I'll leave a link for it down below but first you need to be aware of this negative self-talk you need to catch yourself in the act next you need to know that it's not inherently true because you quote-unquote are saying it finally you need to reprogram it through using self-talk to your advantage again check it that mind map that I did on that book if you want to learn a little bit more it's a really great mind map a great concept but there we have it do you want to know what I think is the number one factor and learning ability just the belief that you can do it yes a lot of my coaching clients come to me for help with procrastination mindset plays a huge part here too and I plan to do a whole video just on this but motivation is a function of wanting something and believing that you can achieve it and with that I'm gonna leave you with the make it stick book thanks for being with me here today and just for making it to the end of the video I want to offer you something that I'm not going to offer up to everyone I want to thank you for being with me all the way until the very end and if you're interested in a free coaching session there's a link down below I want you to click on it and book a time and what we're going to do is walk you through my process for keeping myself on track for setting goals discovering my purpose and keeping away procrastination I hope to see you there