there's a strategy for getting better at learning that I've been using for the thousands of people that I've coached for the last 10 years it's a strategy that not only helped me go from studying 20 hours a day to 2 hours a day while maintaining top marks but also create that kind of change in other people as well I call it the Broken Barrel approach and although everyone is different I found that when used correctly this approach is effective for virtually every person I've ever coached I'm going to show you exactly how you can use the Broken Barrel approach as well as explain the five Dimensions that you have to understand to use the approach in the first place but before we get into that we need to understand the more common ways that people try to get better at learning and why that absolutely does not work there are generally three ways people try to become a better learner the first one which is the most common is the Silver Bullet approach now if you have ever asked what is the best studying technique then you're probably using the Silver Bullet approach and this approach is pretty much doomed to be a waste of time from the very beginning so 80 years ago there was this French writer called HRI purah who wrote this novel about werewolves and this werewolf was causing havoc in the town but no one could stop this werewolf and then at the end of the book this Hunter comes up and shoots the werewolf with a bullet cast out of silver and everyone is sa and thus the term Silver Bullet was was born so why is it that asking what is the best studying technique the Silver Bullet approach because it assumes that there is a single almost magical solution that solves all of your learning and studying related problems if this was true then learning to learn would be very easy becoming a genius would be a walk in the park uh but unfortunately there is no such thing as the best technique there is no Universal trick or hack that works for everyone in every circumstance uh for every challenge for example flash cards are a great technique for memorizing and recalling isolated facts but they're pretty useless for complex problem solving this is why it's not a very popular method for post-graduate study or professional work likewise you can have 10 different people using the exact same studying technique and have very different outcomes and as long as you're looking for a silver bullet solution you're never really going to get any better at studying cuz you're looking for something that actually doesn't exist once we accept the fact that there's no such thing as a best studying Technique we can ask the real questions that make a difference like what are the parts of the way that I learn that are helping me which parts are holding me back and importantly what are my learning strengths and weaknesses everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and is the combination of these strengths and weaknesses that determine the results that you get which brings us to the second less common but smarter approach to improving studying which is the strength's first approach and as the name suggests this is when we focus on our learning strengths and we enhance them to get better at studying unlike the Silver Bullet approach figuring out our learning strengths and then making them stronger is a lot more personalized and when it comes to learning personalized means effective so what even is a learning strength well a strength is something that you find naturally easier to be good at they're a manifestation of our natural talents and tendencies which means that when we put effort into improving them they can become our Ultimate Weapon at least that's the idea but when it comes to learning and studying that doesn't actually work and the reason is because for learning you are only as good as your weakest link so imagine this wooden barrel is our ability to learn now if one of these pieces is broken it doesn't matter how high the other pieces are when we try to fill the barrel with water the highest level it's going to reach is the level of the broken plank now when it comes to learning there are five planks that make up your learning ability Barrel I call these the five dimensions of learning and and these are deep processing self-regulation mindset retrieval and self-management I'll explain those dimensions a little bit more later but let's say for example I have great processing skills which means I'm able to understand Concepts deeply connect information together for complex problem solving but I have terrible retrieval skills which means that I'm never really revising what I learn therefore I'm forgetting things needlessly and therefore I'm going to be missing out on marks it doesn't matter if my processing ability is Sky High if my retrieval is the broken part of the barrel then I'm always going to be limited by that or if I have great learning skills but then I procrastinate like crazy well then again I'm going to be limited by that which means that for learning our results reflect our weaknesses more than they reflect our strengths which is why instead of focusing on the strengths first approach I'm going to teach you the Broken Barrel approach the Broken Barrel approach starts with addressing the weakest links first the parts of our Barrel that are the most broken and the Broken Barrel approach is a GameChanger because it ensures that your method of learning is person personalized to what is actually holding you back from being better and remember when it comes to learning personalized means more effective so the Broken Barrel strategy in itself is pretty straightforward figure out your weaknesses and then improve them until they're not your weakness anymore re-evaluate see where your next weakness is and rinse and repeat I recommend re-evaluating to see if your weaknesses have changed every 3 or 4 months the hard part is figuring fing out your strengths and weaknesses in the first place and for learning figuring this out is not easy in fact it's so not easy that there's even research around something called the black box of learning which basically says that people know that in order for them to get good results they need to put in time and effort but in terms of how that time and effort becomes a result is inside what's called the black box it's basically a mystery and inside this black box are the processes of learning and until we are able to open up this black box and see what's inside it we're never going to be able to effectively translate our time and effort into better results this is the reason why I said that the Silver Bullet approach was doomed to waste time from the very beginning most people have no idea which dimension they're weaker in fact most people are not even thinking about which weaknesses they have in the first place and research has repeatedly shown that people are pretty bad at identifying their true learning weaknesses which means you could spend an entire week trying out a new learning technique to see absolutely no improvement because it's not targeting the right part of your Barrel AKA you're not targeting your weaknesses in fact when you do this it actually makes it even harder to improve than doing nothing at all because now you've just given yourself more things to think about which is taking time and effort and energy away from the things that could be directly helping you to improve as if you didn't have enough to worry about already so how do we actually figure out our learning strengths and weaknesses when I coach people on a one-on-one basis I'm able to open up the black box for them I guide them to figure out where their strengths and weaknesses are and as a result I've been able to help people who have strugg strle to improve for years make multiple breakthroughs in Just 2 or 3 months obviously I can't do one-on ones with every single one of you but I still want to help you out so I've created a free quiz that will ask you a series of questions that assess and evaluate your learning strengths and weaknesses the calculation and questions are ones that I've not only tested and refined across almost 20,000 Learners going through my paid program that I can study but I've also conducted a study with Mones University to assess its validity it's free to use it only takes a few minutes and at the end you'll get a personalized report on your learning strengths and weaknesses based on three of the most important dimensions for most Learners based on the combination of your results it will also tell you your learner type which helps you figure out which dimension you should work on first I'll leave a link in the description for you to check that out now the reports will go into a little bit more detail but I'll briefly describe each of the five dimensions and when they become strengths versus weaknesses each Dimension is equally important and remember that a limitation in just one of those Dimensions can limit your overall result now the First Dimension is the dimension that defines genius when people talk about learning or intelligence or or someone who's a genius they're usually just talking about this Dimension and that is deep processing deep processing is your ability to understand and extract meaningful learning from from information deep processing is what allows you to form stronger memories understand information more deeply form connections between ideas and ultimately use what you've learned to solve complex problems deep processing is probably a strength for you if you find it easy to do well you don't have to study as much as other people to do well and you feel like your memory and depth of understanding tend to be stronger than most other people on the other hand and it's probably a weakness if you struggle to do well despite studying a lot it takes you a long time to understand Concepts or you struggle to apply your knowledge in ways that are different to how it was directly taught to you most top Learners have pretty good deep processing which is also why you shouldn't just copy the study techniques that top Learners use because they can get away with using pretty mediocre techniques and do well anyway because they can compensate for it with just better deep processing I like to think of deep processing is how powerful the engine is in your car but remember each Dimension is equally important so if de processing is the power of your engine then what also matters is how well you can drive the car and that's the next Dimension the second dimension is self regulation and I find that this is a common weakness in most people that haven't been trained on learning skills which is most people self-regulation is the awareness of how you learn the methods you use the way that you think and then your ability to then make adjustments to those methods and processes to achieve your goals this is probably a strength if you have a clear idea about how you study and which methods you use you also know how you think while you're using those methods you understand which techniques are helping you or harming you and you can make adjustments to those techniques to keep your learning effective even when you have different time pressures uh different subjects levels of difficulty or different levels of energy now I'm saying probably these are your strengths and weaknesses because these are all pretty generalized descriptions I still recommend taking the quiz because it's going to give you a much more personalized look at which of your weaknesses is limiting you the most and to what magnitude anyway self-regulation is probably a weakness for you if you don't really know where to start with improving the way that you study you don't have a clear idea about what methods or processes you use and you're not sure how You' make a predictable change in your results by adjusting your techniques or processes self-regulation becomes much more important usually in the later years uh especially if your deep processing isn't as high or your deep processing is high but you're aiming for a competitive result amongst lots of other people that also have highd processing now I would argue that although every Dimension is equally important the next Dimension is potentially the most crucial of all I say that because it's the most limiting weakness and over 70% of Learners I've assessed this is a dimension that focuses on how we respond to stress challenges and making mistake this third dimension is called mindset here's the thing learning to learn takes trial and error it feels uncertain a lot of the time most of the time and it requires a lot of experimentation which means if you are afraid of making mistakes and you don't know how to handle uncertainty you're not really going to improve this is the kind of situation where people can spend years trying to get better at learning and make almost zero progress the mindset Dimension is probably a strength for you if you're able to jump into new challenges and experiment very easily you're also able to make mistakes and learn from them quickly on the other hand it's probably a weakness if you don't like experimenting because it feels uncertain and you avoid making mistakes because you're afraid of making them you might feel a significant blow to your confidence or self-esteem when you don't do well and you might ask a lot of clarifying questions before giving something new AO these clarifying questions are basically an attempt to reduce the level of uncertainty and avoid making mistakes having said that hands down the most impressive Transformations I've ever seen are the ones who originally started off being limited by the mindset Dimension and then improved it now the next Dimension is what takes a roar diamond and polishes it into a sparkling gem you see human memory is far from perfect and no matter how good your deep processing or self-regulation are there's always going to be gaps uh there's always going to be things that we forget and we can always be faster or more fluent with applying what we've learned this is the fourth dimension retrieval retrieval is how we recall and test ourselves on what we've previously learned it's probably a strength if you have a good space retrieval schedule and you challenge yourself at multiple levels of difficulty it's probably a weakness if you don't really review what you've leared before at all or the way that you challenge yourself isn't reflective of the way that you actually need to use your knowledge retrieval is actually a dimension that many students score pretty highly on and that's because they've heard lots of great things about space retrieval and flash cards uh however most of those students also aren't seeing great results and that's because it's usually not their limiting weakness in other words they weren't using the Broken Barrel approach and finally there is potentially no other dimension that is as frustrating to fix as the next one if you've ever wasted an entire evening scrolling through social media or binging your favorite series or youve struggled to manage your time or stay focused then you have been limited by this final Dimension and that is self-management self-management is the dimension that is focused on the way that you manage your time how you prioritize your tasks how you manage your focus and distractions how you avoid procrastination basically ensure that you're spending your time in the way that you should be and it's probably a strength for you if you can manage your time and tasks sustainably and consistently you prioritize your tasks effectively ensuring that you're spending your time on what really matters you can manage your focus and reduce distractions and you can mitigate the procrastination tendencies that everyone has it's probably a weakness if basically you struggle with all of those things uh or you can only do those in short bursts of intense concentration which is not sustainable once we figure are where our true strengths and weaknesses lie we can usually improve our learning ability week after week in fact when I'm coaching someone if I don't see progress on a weekly basis it tells me that we're probably not focusing on the right true weakness so please do make sure to use that free quiz that I made for you guys it goes through the first three dimensions which are usually the most important for most people in fact I I'll actually show you how to use it so this is the quiz first I'll start off by answering the questions I'm not going to answer this the way way that I used to study like 10 years ago when I was an amoeba floating through the the learning universe so you can see the results that I've gotten here it said I'm a sprout it's rated My overall score 65% honestly feels kind of high compared to uh how it felt at the time but I guess I did end up doing pretty well in that year so uh it goes through tells me exactly uh which each dimension means for me how much of an impact it has and what I need to do about it and I also get a more personalized uh comprehensive report sent through in my email and I can now take that information and start using the Broken Barrel approach which I can tell you is about a thousand times faster than trying to figure out my learning strengths and weaknesses like years ago which required me to spend years and thousands of hours trial and error to figure it out again I'll leave the link in the description for you to check out I hope this approach gives you as much success as it has for me and my students thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one