tesla Einstein and especially Leonardo da Vinci i've been studying for years people who are the most successful self-taught geniuses and long ago I discovered one habit they all hold in common and the crazy part is that almost no one teaches it which helps explain why so many people are failing to reach their full potential and perhaps you're in that trap right now so if you feel like you've been constantly studying but never actually getting smarter never actually reaching a place where you could even imagine achieving your goals make sure to watch this entire video to the end especially if you read books watch tutorials take all kinds of notes only to find that minutes later or days later or weeks later it's all gone that problem of forgetting gets solved today because in addition to giving you access to my free self-education blueprint and another powerful resource that has a chance at least a chance of freeing you from the prison of failure you're about to discover how every self-taught genius I'm aware of really locked information into their brain processed it at insane speeds and most importantly never got hung up on useless objections about whether or not something is too abstract or impractical or well I don't know how to do this etc they understood that every second and every iota of energy is practical provided you have the one simple habit I'll show you today including examples of how to apply it in your learning life and your life at large but content is merely king and context is God so let's look at why people trying to educate themselves in a world filled with broken school systems fails us well a lot of people are binge watching educational content and then they go on to forget 90% of it or more maybe even 100% of it because they have either never taken notes they take notes ineffectively or they never use the notes that they jot down and some people even think that passive consumption equals intelligence i've seen this so many times i spend all my time watching the best channels and always spend all my time listening to the absolute best podcasts no no no no no no no no a self-taught genius thinks differently and operates differently by processing information actively and not just actively but in three different kinds of time and to do that they apply one habit that turns learning into mastery but before I reveal the habit let me tell you a quick story this is Dr anthony Metivier from magneticmarymethod.com get subscribed if you're new here hit that thumbs up and just understand that if you're watching this video chances are you've heard of some of the people that I talk about but chances are you've never heard of them in quite this way so be part of the community and help me help others find it with your engagement and your comments because we want to make as many people be as genius as possible and not in this arrogant snotty way but in the humble way like Da Vinci's way because this dude was very very humble very humble indeed so much so that he sometimes didn't mention that he was a painter until the end of his resume right and I teach those things too okay so with humility in mind Richard Fineman had something called the Fineman technique we're going to make it better today so if you already know it don't skip the details because we need the general review but also we're going to go a little deeper on it now Fineman in case you don't know him was one of the most brilliant physicists in history but he did something that a lot of people think is a little bit strange instead of just reading notes and taking notes like a lot of his classmates he forced himself to teach everything he learned even before he fully understood it please understand this it's worth repeating before he understood it and he did this all his life and this is where a lot of people get stuck they don't do things because they feel that they don't understand but understanding is a process right and Fineman gives this over and over and over again throughout his career and he has endless extraordinarily important lessons for people that are stuck in hesitation and one lecture he gave just sticks in my mind he said "It is my task to convince you not to turn away from physics because you don't understand it." You see my students don't understand it either that's because I don't understand it nobody does now that's not just humility it's a strategy and it's a strategy that does require an extra dose of intelligence because you have to admit the truth of things and this is a world where a lot of people do not like truth they like little fantasies and little boxes that they can tick right but understanding is a procedure and it requires continual vigilant awareness and acknowledgment of the procedural nature of self-education and we're always going to have ignorance to deal with and we're always going to be intimately involved in ignorance now you want to be able to enable yourself to deal with that constant ignorance and one way you can think about it and this is an ancient metaphor is that the truth the knowledge is a sun and ignorance is just the clouds well clouds come and go they're not going to stop coming and going but when you detect those clouds you blow them away right and the more you're willing to do that and the better you're going to be now what is the blowing away well it's the effort of teaching teaching teaching teaching teaching right and so you've got to just start explaining it as quickly as you possibly can in your life in order to be able to develop your personal genius and do it in a way where you don't get hung up on things i had somebody trying to convince me the other day oh I could never be a genius because of X Y and Z because because because because because because well that song belongs in the Wizard of Oz we're singing a different tune the foundational theory of learning is this if you've got genes in your body you've got the potential for genius and if you can't take my word for it read Lin Kelly's The Knowledge Gene amongst her other books you know my regular viewers regular listeners to the Magnetic Memory Method podcast know all about Lin Kelly's work get into it it's really really powerful but she's going to prove to you that you can be a genius and it's in your genetic makeup or at least for most of us it is there are certain situations conditions etc and that book The Knowledge Gene gives you one of those case studies with the most amazing scientific story that that I've ever read and you're going to enjoy it a great deal I'm sure now back to the Fineman technique it is not exactly the habit I have for you today but I'm mentioning it because you can stack it together with the sheer gold that I'm leading you towards in this video the Fineman technique is in case you don't know it a very it's not just oh just teach others it's also you know explain the concept in the simplest terms possible as if you were explaining it or trying to teach a 5-year-old now one of my first ways of changing this is to ask does it really have to be a 5-year-old like what if that's not a useful metaphor in a particular situation i'm not so orthodox on the point is what I'm saying and to show you what I mean I mean I went out of my way and have spent over a year now on the Memory Detective Junior books and I went I went for 10-year-olds right to explain it to 10 year olds and is that okay Richard Feman uh yes that's fine because you're using your own noodle and you know you're not getting caught up in someone else's dogma right so that's a very very important principle right is you want to explain it simply to just somebody at some level that is not ready for it right so don't turn it into oh well does this really check the 5-year-old box have I really simplified it enough no you just want to understand the meaning of the metaphor and if you struggle to simplify what you're learning the point is not the age group that you're simplifying it for it's that you have identified now at least one gap in your understanding because if you can't simplify it to a particular level you need to go back you need to study more you need to refine your comprehension through contemplation through writing and you repeat this process over and over and over again even after you have successfully mastered the concept now why do you do that because you want to maintain the knowledge right and so then when you do so you will no longer have failed to understand the nature of understanding because nature is a process so if you struggle to put advice like this into use if this is still too conceptual for you there might be a reason for that and I have high confidence that I can help you make a change so that you do finally start to get these concepts and then start to more importantly implement on their basis so as we move forward to the gold mine I have for you we want to ask why the Fineman technique and this form of teaching others at a simplified level works well part of the reason is just obvious right by breaking things down we're using reasoning and analysis to have various components and working through those various components enables us to see how all the parts fit but learning scientists also talk about active recall so when you're teaching what you're doing is you're causing memories to form and comprehension requires memory by bringing it up in your own words and verbally exercising your understanding as it is and you're literally starting to rewire your brain right this is neuroplastic change so if you struggle with this right just don't label yourself if you keep labeling yourself either negative or positive you're placing a premium on just the label itself not the process right so go for precision if you don't understand something then the process is you go back and you understand it better this is genius to go back is the genius because genes grow right now I know I'm playing around with language a little bit but the point is that this is what it is this is what these geniuses are doing they are literally in movement they are in the process they don't get stalled they don't get stuck so going back to check the record for your accuracy to hunt for further details you're improving the retention of the content and you'll not only eventually retain the information more accurately but you'll remember the gaps you'll remember what it was that you didn't correctly understand and so now you have a story that you can re use to remind yourself and others in the future of how essential it is to practice this technique in learning i hope that's clear right you want to remember when you failed because it's going to help you fail less in the future and it will help you remember the costs of failure but it will also help you help others not fail or at least share with them the story of why you failed and then eventually more people will get it they'll go aha that's why I failed and then all ships rise okay so what that means is that technically there never are any mistakes not as such just a process and that process will reveal itself to you and lead to pattern recognition that helps you assess the validity of future educational resources that you want to study it improves your critical thinking and ultimately puts you ahead of the curve in almost every domain of life now I should also give cognitive load theory a shout out hello cognitive load theory being willing to break things down to their smallest and simplest components also burns things into your memory much much better because you're reducing the cognitive load so I've memorized many words in so many different languages it's not even funny different terms some from physics like orchestrated objective reduction and I had to break that down i had to literally ask myself okay so what are we going to do for this orchestrated thing right or orc O I think is the the shortened version of that and I didn't let pride get in the way of working on just the orc part right and I had to think and I got Frank Zappa in there and you know blah blah blah blah blah and in Latin expatendorum well I'm sorry but not sorry that I had to break that down to one syllable X and then I had pet and then 10 and then door and then um x expendorum when I have learned the um symbols in a non-class logic that I studied I had to break it down one symbol at a time in order to read these syllogisms and if you let your pride get in the way of that you're not going to be able to reduce the cognitive load which means that you'll be stuck in overwhelm so these are kind of modifications to the Fineman technique I suppose but he's literally talking about breaking things down down down down down why because we know from learning science that this is one of the best things that we can do even if it seems fickle the smallest unit of learning could even just be one little curve in a new alphabet you're trying to learn all right so for completion's sake let me break this down into steps if you want to use the Fineman technique as we've discussed it so far the first step is to explain it out loud within 24 hours if you can't recall a certain aspect don't stress it the substep cuz sometimes you will recall it so you don't need this step is to you know just don't add a label to it don't say "Oh I failed." Or "Oh this sucks." Or "Oh this is hard." Oh no just go straight to fixing the issue right go back brush up study additional resources treat it just as all part of the process then you have the explain it to a 5-year-old or a 10-year-old rule or just explain it to yourself as if you were a simpleton and I sometimes do that to myself okay simpleton let's go and I don't put an age on it but the the target doesn't have to have a particular age it's not helpful now I just said don't label things and then I just immediately went to label things another little substep here is accept that you're human and accept that your teachers are just human too because sometimes we get hung up on their contradictions and you know that doesn't help either right so we want to basically just simplify it simplify it in the way that you think it will work in the context break the concept down into ridiculously simple terms and maybe that's where a label can help know that this is so ridiculously simple but I'm doing it for myself anyway that's what I did with expatendorum i don't know why that word was so difficult but it I just made it as ridiculously simple as possible and if I had to go from X down to E I would have okay so those are basically the steps of the Fineman technique classically speaking but here's another step that I'll add for you it's been implicit all along i've said okay so if you can't understand go back research refine find additional resources but if you get stuck even on that you can ask a question which is who is the person most likely to have the answer and how would I find that person now answering that question may already get you out of the rut because you'll go oh I know that the person who wrote the book probably has a bibliography at the end and I can look for additional resources there but you can also use search tools a little bit more intelligently now these days you can ask chat bots and so forth you have to do that with caution but that is a a decent thing to do but there is still old search functions that still work like in title and then a colon or in URL in text and file type PDF and you can search for syllabi from universities and this can help you so who is the person best able to help me answer this question you can refine your search terms down and that is a beautiful way to simplify things for yourself or the opposite is sometimes you need to make it more complicated you need to go to the experts and it's getting increasingly difficult to find those experts with traditional search tools and maybe it's getting better with the chat bots but I would be very very cautious either way and use them both and really get to an actual physical book if you can but find that expert the other thing is and this is something that Da Vinci did and it's a big lesson here a huge lesson is you go and ask people you interview people now this can seem like a stretch because you know it can be hard to get a response i know because I've emailed a lot of people and uh sometimes I just never hear back from them but at the end of the day you can still try or you can go to local community functions meetings and just start talking to people figure out what other people know other people's knowledge is a huge asset and you want to start to build the process of being in the habit of talking with other people that's not the gold mine yet but it's part of it because a lot of us just don't do that we've become so accustomed to well I can just look it up no you can't or at least if you leave yourself strictly to the habit of constantly looking things up and leaving page one or leaving what a chatbot tells you you're putting yourself behind the curve self-education requires more if you want it to be epic and I know you do okay so before I get to the gold mine thanks to everyone who smashes that thumbs up helps me project this message around the world so all of the ships can rise thanks for those who support my work by getting my books and the magnetic merry method masterass etc if you want to join the ranks of those who use what we're about to talk about now the one thing that separates the top learners from the rest don't stop at learning don't stop at the Fineman technique that we just discussed and that we add a little bit more nuance to the common denominator amongst all the people I've studied is very simple and it is this they turn their knowledge into a physical asset not digital although there are all kinds of personal knowledge management systems out there that involve a digital component and to a certain extent I suppose I use them by virtue of having a computer but if you want to learn faster than 99% of people and you want to start teaching yourself at scale through books through courses through videos you have to stop starving yourself of the spatial memory benefits that come from working with physical notebooks journals index cards mind mapping and other learning techniques that get your hands involved in space and I said going and talking to real people that's part of this too being physically engaged in real rooms with real people is going to be more and more essential especially as we're having a lot of artificially programmatic content fill every available space because the tech bros and all that they're going to move very very quickly in order to do that at least that's the way it seems right and so it's going to be more and more important that you have the skill of people in space not just oh well I got my index cards in space but you actually know where in your community people are in case things get wild online and it looks like that's the way it's going to be now why does spatial memory optimization and physicalization of content work so well well memory scientists don't exactly know i think part of the answer is in Koslin's the case for mental imagery i know that a lot of people don't agree with his thesis but I think actually it's not that I agree with it or disagree with it i think it's one piece of what he's talking about that gets to the core of it now I don't want to chew up time on memory science and stuff like that right now but even Klene was talking about the problem of digital dementia recently on the Lex Friedman podcast and so you know I've had all kinds of theories over the years and I've talked about them many times on the channel before it's just common sense that where something is in a book that you've read right is a lot easier to figure out if it's a physical one where is halfway through a Kindle book right a Kindle book that currently you no longer have the right to download and import on other devices at least that's the way things were as of last week maybe these uh corporations that are responsible for that changed their mind i don't know but this is the thing with digital it's not just that they're controlled by people uh that have nothing at all remotely related to your interests in mind it's that there is no middle of a Kindle book but here I can tell you that it's near the end that Lynn Kelly makes a particular point i remember that it was at the end even without using memory techniques because that's how spatial memory works right and it's a very very important part when I think of various notes in my memory palaces or in my index cards I know where they are in space and that additional physicality helps me find it without even having to go and get the physical thing that's how memory palaces work especially when they're based on real locations because those spaces have depth single screen devices do not either way the research and the commentary including people like Ezra Klein are on my side of this position in any case your mileage may differ i know that there are people who tell me "Oh but I'm just fine." Usually they have anonymous user accounts and they have no particular accomplishment to share but if you like the digital thing that's okay just keep this warning in mind for the day when you might wish that you had physical books a library that you built so that nobody can change it and that you have a library that you can think about spatially in order to help use the memory palace technique better because of things that I talk about in the magnetic memory method master class that let you turn every page in a book into a memory palace i'm not going to apologize for this point i have been able to learn and achieve so much more by being stubborn about it in my own practice even though it's more challenging i have tried digital devices and I've done it for quite a few years but I gave up digital learning almost entirely in 2017 because I saw how detrimental it had become to my memory and so when I got back into being more of a purist in applying the habit of learning to physical media everything changed back to strength upon strength upon strength so I've got one more tip for you but if you'd like a few exercises that go far beyond the Fineman technique for helping you teach yourself I've put together my free self-education blueprint that's going to help you turn what you learn into real world expertise so please don't miss it you can get it at magneticmary method.comb which is for selfeducation blueprint now if you find that the self-education blueprint and what I'm saying with you today is reasonable but it still doesn't help you change i would love for you to have an additional resource which you can watch just by sticking with me now on YouTube or if you're listening to the podcast look up my list of books on learning i've been locked in to patterns that refused to let me go in my past there's perfectly scientific explanations that help me understand why that that happened to myself and others and these books on learning will help release you from it if you are also stuck and you can't get yourself to move I think this is a list of books that everybody should read which is why I put it together for you and I do share more of my struggle and how that one idea in particular from one of the most powerful books in that list helped me stop beating myself up about how I wasn't getting anything done and allowed me to get on a path of action and it has continued ever since almost unabated even though life seems to get more and more challenging right isn't that weird but nonetheless power moves forward and that's because it's power not force all right so I got one last power tip for you today speaking about power I would suggest in addition to following up with the resources that I've offered for you today is that you get really involved in words words that you can wield like a shield and operate like a boomerang now it may be that you get a copy of Norman Lewis's Word Power Made Easy or maybe you get involved one day when I open it up again in my weekly Word Warrior program but I want you to do whatever it takes to start studying words practice memorizing individual words and their meanings to create a shield but a shield that you can throw from yourself so that you don't get hung up on semantics and that you are also able to share with others in a non-semantic way studying words what they have meant what they could mean in the future the flexible ways that they can be used will improve your rhetoric and it will improve how you understand the rhetoric of others so you can practice questioning better and when you can question better on the basis of how people make meaning and you supplement whatever digital archive you're building with physical archives that help you both complicate and simplify everything you're going to find that the words are more powerful than you ever imagined possible and you will have your own library in your mind that helps you grow and stack growth upon growth upon growth because you have a fallen of shields and you know what a phallank is so grab the self-education blueprint watch my books on learning next and with thanks as always until we have a chance to speak again keep yourself magnetic