This video will help you become an excellent student even if you struggle staying focused!
As someone who really struggled with ADHD and lack of motivation in school
Oh look, there's a squirrel!
Sorry, what was I saying?
Oh, yeah. I tried out and tested almost every possible study method available to me
It took me over 8 years of struggling and failing from one method to another
until I finally figured out how to study, despite my severe attention problems
and it worked out so well for me, that I ended up graduating
as the number one best high school student in my entire country
and later I also ended up at Harvard and MIT
The reason why none of the commonly used study methods worked for me
was because I simply lacked focus, motivation, and discipline
to sit down and have a productive study session
Some of the most successful students that they've met
never really implemented any advanced study methods
All they had to do was: take a book. Read it once, or twice.
Maybe take some notes. And they would ace all of their exams!
The secret to their success was: an incredible focus!
If you're not fortunate enough to be one of these people with incredible focus
Don't worry! You are in no way worse than they are!
Your brain is just wired a bit differently
And all you have got to do is
find a clever study method, to use your brain's fullest potential
And if you are one of the people with incredible focus you should still watch this video
because you can learn how to become even better!
There are two key components to successfully studying.
Memorization and understanding
In order to successfully study, you have to become good at both of these!
When I say understanding, your first thought may be physics or mathematics
When I say memorization, you might be thinking about history or learning a foreign language
But the truth is that in order to learn anything
you always need both of these components
understanding and memorization
Throughout my physics studies, I had to study incredibly complex concepts in quantum mechanics
My quantum mechanics exam was, by far, the most difficult thing I've done in my entire life
Just for this exam alone, I had to study for 6 months, 8 hours per day
Stupid fly!
My friends and I spent the first 5 months just with understanding
That is: going through the concepts, writing them up
explaining them to each other, until they eventually made sense
And I could have stopped after these five months!
After all, I understood everything. Right?
But what is the point of understanding something
if you cannot actually memorize it for a long time?
Well, I would have most likely failed my quantum mechanics exam
if I hadn't spent the last month trying to memorize all the hundreds of complex concepts
that I now finally understood
Therefore...stupid fly again!
Oh my god, I'm gonna kill it!
Get out of here!
Bastard!
Therefore, I decided to make this video specifically about memorization
Whether you're a high school student trying to study history
or maybe a college student studying computer science
or an adult trying to learn a new language
In this video, I will show you the scientifically proven most effective way of memorizing
Let me know in the comments down below if you would like me to make a video
about understanding complex concepts in science, engineering, and mathematics
And also, while you're there, you can hit the subscribe button
and turn on the notification bell, so you don't miss the video once I upload it
For a start, I'm going to walk you through 3 study methods
which are extremely common, but not very effective for people who struggle to focus
I personally used these methods from primary school, until roughly 7th grade
The number one worst study method is
Rereading!
Obviously, this is one of the easiest and laziest ways of studying
And many publications have shown that this is also one of the most commonly used study methods
While this may work for someone with superhuman focus
when I start reading anything that isn't very interesting
after 3 sentences, my mind just goes phiuuuu
and then my eyes just continue going through the lines of the text
And usually, after a page or two, I just realize that I have no idea what I just read
Method number two is
highlighting!
Obviously, this is a lot better than just reading a text because
having to decide which parts of the text are worth highlighting and which aren't
makes you focus at least a little bit!
So, at least, your eyes won't just continue going through the text
while your brain is actually phiuuuuu!
But at the same time, this is not a very effective study method if you cannot focus
Because, first of all, it doesn't force you enough to focus
and secondly, in all these studies
it has been shown that this is not a very good method for memorization
Method #3 is creating mind or concept maps...
Actually, why am I wearing headphones?
Method #3 is creating mind or concept maps
I personally spend an excessive amount of time carefully drawing all of these
With my complete lack of focus on the actual subject
my brain would become fully occupied while drawing all these little pictures and branches
This study from 2011, amongst others, has shown that creating concept maps
at best marginally improves exam scores compared to re-reading or highlighting
I mostly worked for these methods until 7th grade
And I was a really bad student!
Now that I've shown you the 3 methods that are not very effective
let's talk about one more effective, but not super effective method!
And after this, I will show you an upgrade to this method
which is the main reason why I managed to graduate as the #1 best student in my entire country
Despite serious ADHD
Method #4 is summarizing and making notes!
This is a method that I started using in 8th grade
and I still use it from time to time, even though I know it's not super effective!
This method is clearly an improvement over rereading and highlighting
because it requires you to think about what you read, understand it
and then summarize it and write it down
The process of understanding something is super important for the human brain
To demonstrate this, let's try a little experiment
I'm going to give you a bunch of letters here
and you have 4 seconds to remember as many of them as you can
Are you ready? Here they are!
Were you able to remember them?
Well, neither was I!
Let's try this again!
I'm going to shuffle the same letters
and you again have 4 seconds to remember as many as possible
Here they are!
Were you able to remember everything?
Well, I wasn't able to remember everything but I do remember some of the words
and therefore I can also remember some of the letters
So, let's try this one last time
I'm going to again shuffle the same letters
and you have again 4 seconds to remember as many as possible
Are you ready? Here they are!
All three of these were the exactly same letters. Just in different order
The first time, it was completely random
There was no meaning to this, so you could also not remember much
The second time, there were some random words
They didn't form a complete sentence, but at least you could remember some of it
And the third time, there was a complete sentence
And you understood it!
And the fact that you understood this was very key to being able to memorize it
Back to summarizing and making notes
The key here is that, even though you may be a bit slower than somebody who has great focus
as long as you go through the entire text that you're trying to understand
and summarize everything
You at least went through the mental process of understanding
As long as you do that, even if it takes you longer
you know that you have memorized already something!
Until 10th grade, this was as far as I went with my memorization methods
Summarizing and making notes helped me switch from being a failing student in 7th grade
to doing just fine in 8th grade
And for some smart people, who have an incredible ability to focus, this may even be enough
to get them into top schools such as MIT or Harvard
But I certainly wasn't one of these people
The problem with summarizing and making notes is that, in order to actually memorize it
in the end, you still have to read your notes
And if you struggle focusing – well, reading isn't exactly a great solution for you!
Also, the things that you do eventually remember slowly start to disappear from your brain
They don't actually disappear out of your brain. You just struggle finding them inside your brain
So, for example, if you cannot remember someone's name
then someone reminds you. Then you have that "ahhh, I knew it!" moment
It was always there. You just couldn't find it in your brain
This is the so-called forgetting curve
The basic principle behind the forgetting curve
is that everything that you do manage to store inside of your brain
undergoes an exponential decay
It's kind of like radioactive decay if you're into that!
How quickly this exponential decay happens, it depends on a variety of factors
but mostly on how often you go through the material, and when you repeat it
So, let's go back to 10th grade me
I was doing okay in school, but I was still kind of struggling
And the solution to my struggles, which drastically changed my life in so many ways came
from my mom!
One day in 10th grade, she came to me and told me about a software called Anki
Anki is the only software for which I would seriously say that it changed my life!
It is open source and the simple, but yet powerful algorithm is based on active recall
and spaced repetition techniques
Anki has a completely free browser, Windows, Mac, and Android app
If you want to use it on an iPhone, I think you have to pay around $25
But at least for me personally, these $25 will one day have been a better investment
than buying a winning lottery ticket!
So, does Anki work? What can you use it for? And how does it work?
To answer the first question, other than my own very positive experience
we can look at studies such as this one
They found that there is a very significant increase in exam scores
among students who use study methods, which the Anki algorithm is based on
The answer to the second question is: you can use Anki for learning anything!
I used it for studying history, or languages in high school
but I also used it for advanced differential geometry and quantum mechanics in college
Lastly: how does Anki actually work?
Well, Anki is essentially an upgrade to method #4
That is, an upgrade to summarizing and making notes
But instead of putting your notes on a piece of paper
you directly put them in the form of Q&A cards into your computer
When it comes to creating the Q&A cards for, for example, history or a language
the process of "understanding" the content isn't very hard
and therefore you will also very quickly be able to create the cards
But on the other hand, the process of memorizing them will take a bit longer
When it comes to creating Q&A cards, for example, physics and mathematics
the process of understanding is very hard
And therefore, it would also take you a long time to create all these Q&A cards
But, once you've created them, memorizing them should be quite easy
So let's have a look at a few examples of how Anki works in practice on my phone
Over here, since I'm a bit lazy and don't want to create everything manually
I have a whole collection of different topics with different decks
I'm just going to click on geography!
Here you can see a few examples of decks
So the word deck essentially just means a collection of Q&A cards
that belong to one specific topic
You can obviously create all of them manually which,
in practice, you, will have to do eventually
But just for testing purposes, I'm gonna pick countries in the world
I can download this deck and then I can directly
get started with studying some countries in the world
I downloaded this – when I open the deck here – I have it already open
I select "countries of the world", I can just directly start answering the questions!
So here, this is an easy one: which country is in the following location?
I think this is Bhutan – not sure if I'm spelling it correctly – I do
And now, what I can do here, I can choose how easy it was for me to remember that
So, if I don't know it, I would just push the red button
and after one minute it would ask me again about the same thing, so I can memorize it
but this was fairly easy for me, so I'm just going to select 4 days
So that means 4 days from now it is going to ask me the same question again
The same thing over here, I have a flag and I have to figure out which country that is
I think this is Hungary, even though there are a few countries with similar flags
so I'm not 100% sure, so I'm just going to type this in
And yeah, I got it right, although i wasn't completely sure
so I would maybe select the green one and have it again after 10 minutes
I can also do this for something else
For example, let's go through not graph theory, but let's choose quantum field theory
That sounds very fancy!
So under quantum field theory
I have a question that is obviously a bit different than just memorization
Here it's asking me for the full derivation of the quantum model of the hydrogen atom
Obviously, if I hadn't studied that for a long time, I would have no idea how this works
and actually just creating this card required me to go through the mental process
of understanding how this quantum model of a hydrogen atom works
And obviously, getting to that point takes weeks, so I cannot just quickly create that card myself
But here it is! So, let me just see what the answer is
I can zoom out a little bit, and as you can see this is an entire book chapter
Now, obviously, the goal of this isn't memorizing page by page
and letter by letter what exactly this book chapter says
But normally, when I would go to such an exercise on quantum mechanics and try to memorize this
this assumes that I already spent months studying it
and now, you know, when I see this, I would just take a piece of paper
and I would start writing down everything that I know about the derivation of the hydrogen atom
And it would probably take me 20 minutes or so
And assuming that I have done it correctly and that all the math worked out
I would just choose if it's 4 days (easy), 10 minutes, 6 minutes, or 1 minute
And if I go to this process many times, you know, eventually I'm going to memorize this
and eventually, I'll be ready for the exam
Here you saw a few different examples
The first example was just countries in the world, which is pure memorization
so creating such decks, even if you do it yourself, wouldn't take a long time
The other example was something more on the physics and math side
Here it was very important for me to actually understand everything that I create
before making the deck over here
The reason why Anki works so well is because every time when you review a flashcard
or Q&A card, as I called it, you reset your forgetting curve!
That is, you started over here – remembering something
and then your knowledge started dropping
But then when you see that again – bloop – you just hop up and you remember it again
And the next time your forgetting curve becomes a lot slower
So it takes a lot longer until you forget something
Let's say the first time you reviewed a card again after 10 minutes
Then, if you remember it, then you review it again after 4 days, after 4 months, and after a year
And then your forgetting curve becomes so slow
that you will almost never forget the stuff that you learned!
In this video, I explained to you that there are two key components to learning something:
Memorization and understanding
I focused on memorization in this video
and explained a few study methods that don't work
and then I showed you one study method, based on Anki
which works very well even if you have attention problems!
The reason why Anki works so well
even for someone who has attention problems, such as myself
Is because it actively forces you to interact with the program
and constantly make decisions by pressing these little buttons
In this video, I didn't really give you a full tutorial on how to use Anki
and how I personally use it to my advantage
But if you would like me to make such a tutorial
just let me know in the comment section down below
Thank you so much for watching!
If you learned something new in this video
please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel somewhere down there
I wish you best of luck with acquiring and memorizing new knowledge
And I'll see you next time! Goodbye!