have you ever read a page in a book but then had to go back and read it again because you realized
you didn't actually take any of it in then this video is for you because i talk about study
smarter not harder quite often on this channel in fact the most viewed video on this channel with
4.6 million views is a video titled study hard and study smart and people ask me all the time
how do you study smarts well reading a page in a book or chapter in a book and then not retaining
any of the information is a waste of time and a great example of not studying smarts there are a
lot of reading hacks or studying hacks online on how you can study smarter and remember everything
you read or remember everything you study but at least in my experience most of them are not that
effective so in this video i'm gonna go through the most powerful most effective study methods
and technique that i have used and that helps me through university but they can also implement
yourself so that you can study more efficiently and achieve better grades without actually
increasing your studying time advanced information processing this is a memorization technique that
i picked up from jim quick who is a reading and memory improvement expert and it's such a simple
idea but it's incredible how powerful it is and how much time it saves you can study for two hours
and retain the same amount of information but someone else who studies for eight hours it really
is that powerful so the key to memorizing what you read is asking more questions if you read a book
and you get to the end when you think back and realize that you don't remember anything you read
it's because you're not asking questions and this is a huge problem when reading big thick textbooks
that let's be honest and not the most interesting and engaging books to read but by simply
asking yourself questions when reading it can exponentially increase the amount of information
you retain from that book i never just picked up a textbook and started reading it without regularly
asking questions throughout because if you're just passively reading rather than actively reading
you're wasting your time and you're not studying smarts you need to engage your mindset where
you're more receptive to the information you're reading when i was reading a thick heavy textbook
i would make notes on a separate piece of paper and i'd put a line down the middle of the page
and on the left side i would make notes and these would just be the most important snippets of the
text that i thought might be useful for the exam on the right side i'd have my own thoughts and
questions on what i just read and jim quick talks about this method of retaining information from
books quite often he says that there are three main questions you should be writing down on the
right side of the page the first question is how can i use this and so it forces you to link pieces
of information from the book to the bigger picture how does the information that you just read
link in with the knowledge that you already know and what happens at this stage is that your brain
is linking these new pieces of information to things that you already know and strengthening
your neural network therefore making it easier to remember in the future the second question is
when will i use this what this question does is that it adds urgency when is your exam coming is
it in two weeks or three weeks or in two months maybe often when you're reading a textbook you're
just skimming through it passively because you're not engaged in the reading there's no
urgency there and the reason why so many students are cramming 24 hours before the exam is because
there's a sense of urgency you know you need to get that material memorized before the exam
the next day so that's why you're far more engaged and by asking the question when will i use this
you're adding artificial urgency to your studying because you do have a deadline usually your exam
date but it's all too easy to forget this when you have weeks or even months to study before the exam
and the third question is why must i use this because if it's not a must then there's nothing
compelling you to do it so it could be because the notes that you just wrote down could be the
answer to a certain question in the exam for example if your lecturer has asked you to read
a certain chapter in a textbook there's usually a good reason why they've recommended it and that
reason could be because the content in that chapter is likely to come up in the exam the
second study method you should be using to study smarter is spaced repetition and space repetition
is where you memorize some information and then a period of time later maybe a couple of days
or one week later you come back to it and you re-read it to reinforce it in your memory and
this was the single most effective memorization technique i used at university it saved me so much
time because i didn't have to spend hours trying to memorize each individual piece of information
instead i would just memorize it for a few minutes until i just kind of remembered it and then a few
days later or sometimes just a few hours later sometimes a few days later i'd come back to it and
re-read it and a few days after that i'd do the same and it saved so much time and honestly it's a
really stress-free way of memorizing information because you're not spending hours getting
stressed out over why you're not able to memorize and retain your study material space repetition
takes advantage of what is called the spacing effects which was a phenomenon first identified
by hermann ebbinghaus way back in 1885 in his book memory a contribution to experimental psychology
which suggests that active recall with increasing time intervals helps the brain process and retain
information so when trying to memorize some of your study material you might read the material
then come back to it six hours later and then again 24 hours later and then after that you might
come back to it in three days and as soon as you start to solidify the information into your memory
the periods in between the time you read it will increase to seven days even 14 days and upwards
and every time you come back to review the information you'll realize that you'll start
to remember the material better each time to the point where if you had a question in the exam
you'd be able to remember everything perfectly one cavity to using this memorization technique is
that you need to be organized and start preparing for your exams well in advance obviously if you're
cramming in your revision for your exam tomorrow this isn't going to work as well however the next
study method utilizing the pareto principle just might help you the pareto principle the pareto
principle also known as the 80 20 rule suggests that 80 of outcomes results in 20 of the causes so
for example it's very likely that 80 of the grades that you achieve come from 20 of your studying
so you need to prioritize this 20 but what exactly does this mean when you're studying there are some
tasks that you'll be doing that are not that important they won't directly help you with your
final exams and this is the 80 of your study and these tasks might include background reading for
your textbooks or completing homework assignments from the lecturer then there are tasks that do
directly affect your grades and this is the 20 of your studying that you need to prioritize
this involves answering past paper questions and consolidating and summarizing lecture notes in
preparation for your exam your brain can only retain a certain amount of information before
over time it starts to forget in late 19th century german psychologist herbert ebbinghaus dubbed this
the forgetting curve so if you're trying to make your studying as efficient as you can and study as
smart as possible it's important that you spend more time focusing on the study areas that will
directly affect your exam paper and this often means you don't need to read whole textbooks but
rather just focus on areas that you think or that you know will be in the exam definement technique
when you're studying for an exam it's important that you put effort into truly understanding the
information it's extremely difficult to memorize and recall something if you don't understand what
it is or what it means and if you forget some part of it you'll not be able to continue because
you've only memorized the order of the words not the actual meaning so what you should do is read
the entire piece of information and rewrite it or reword it in your own words the feynman technique
is a good way of testing yourself to see whether you truly do understand something definement
technique involves teaching the content that you have just learned to others and it involves four
basic steps step one study this is as simple as it gets just sit down and study a topic
step two and here's the interesting part teach what you just learned when you were studying to
someone with zero knowledge of the subjects but make sure that your books and notebooks
are closed you should teach someone who hasn't even read the basics of the field you're studying
simplify the concepts to the greatest extent possible use pen and paper or whiteboard to draw
diagrams if necessary just like a teacher would so for a high school student imagine explaining
it to a sixth schooler for a university student you just have to assume that the person has no
knowledge of the topic step 3 observe which parts of the topic you were able to explain well and
which parts you couldn't explain well and now go back to the book and try to understand the topics
once again if while you're explaining the topic you notice that you used a lot of academic jargon
bear in mind that it may be because you didn't understand the topic well enough you should be
able to explain complex topics in very basic terminology step 4 repeat the above mentioned
steps until you can explain the topic without any gaps or use of jargon in your explanation without
opening your book several studies have shown that students have better memory and recall abilities
when they have the expectation that they will have to teach it to someone else and it makes
sense because a teacher not only has to learn the information for themselves but they also
have to know the material well enough that they can explain it in a very simple terms they also
have to be ready for any question that might be thrown at them as richard feynman once said the
first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool so now you
know how to study smart you can process and retain as much information in two hours that many other
students would take eight hours to learn and now imagine if you can study smart and study hard
imagine if you can study so incredibly efficiently but still be able to study for 14 hours a day
i made a video recently on how you can study hard how you can study for 14 hours a day
you can click on the video on the screen because if you can combine those two things to be able
to study smart and study hard at the same time your grades are almost guaranteed to
increase significantly it's almost impossible for them not to so i'll see you over there