As a lifelong learner and teacher, I really enjoyed the book even more than Tim Ferriss’ similar The Four Hour Chef. Here’s a list of his top nine tips and my notes which I plan to use:
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Draw a map for the scope of material to learn and a baseline of what you know. Strategize. Know concepts, facts, procedures. Set benchmarks. Know what to exclude or emphasize. Research 10% of total time expected to learn in research.
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Reserve time to focus on learning without interruptions. Recognize that you are procrastinating. Break after 50 minutes. Eliminate distractions.
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Do the things that you want to become good at, not easier things. The goal is knowledge transfer which is done more easily through projects, immersion, simulations, and overkill. Not fun apps.
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Drill. Focus on weak areas. Break complex skills into smaller parts and then reassemble. Alternate drills with knowledge transfer techniques then integrate. Create drills by time-slicing parts, a conceptual part, repeating, drilling down, stepping back to learn prerequisites.
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Test yourself for confidence. Push yourself to recall. Self-testing greatly outperforms concept-mapping and review by reading. Jeffrey Karpicke and Janell Blunt. Free recall without prompts or suggestions after a short period of forgetting is best with a target of having success (desirable difficulty). Regular testing of previous material makes it easier to learn new material. (forward-testing effect) Use flash cards, free recall, question book notetaking at a conceptual level, challenges, closed-book concept maps.
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Get feedback and learn how to incorporate good advice. Ignore the noise. Filter out demotivational comments. Look for outcome/holistic, informational, and corrective feedback. Immediate is better than delayed. Look for environments where success or failure is not completely guaranteed. Notice how your strategy works. Get more feedback more often.
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Figure out why you forget and why so you remember forever. Strengthen natural memory. Decay over time, interference of new memories, and losing the association from key to value are three ways of forgetting. Spaced repetition or other review styles. Pick a mnemonic system and stick with it. Use spacing, proceduralization (creating implicit memories through repetition), overlearning (multiple types of learning or learning a level up), or mnemonics.
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Use play and exploration in conceptual ways to increase your intuition. Don’t rely only on mnemonics. Create examples and look for similar cases. Don’t’ give up on hard problems, prove things. The illusion of explanatory depth keeps us from trying. Draw a bicycle. Always start with a concrete example. “Don’t fool yourself” and " and you’re the easiest person to fool."-- Richard Feynman. The Dunning-Kruger effect is when you think you know more than you do. Ask lots of questions. Write down concepts or problems as if you want to teach them.
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Experiment outside of your comfort zone. Hypothesis, experiment, results, repeat. Experiment with 1) methods, materials, and resources, 2) technique, and 3) style. How to experiment 1) copy, then create, 2) compare different methods side-by-side, split testing, 3) introduce new constraints, 4) combine unrelated skills, 5) explore extremes.
I’ve noticed that many competitive memory athletes start a journal to see where they can improve and follow many other tips. Young bases his tips on research and experience. This has been an excellent summary of how to use memory systems for me.