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Category: Learning Techniques
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I grew up a poor kid in Mumbai who struggled in school, who struggled with learning. Today I am an MIT grad, former CEO and board adviser to billion-dollar companies.
And it's not because I'm smarter or read more, but because I learn how to learn faster than everyone
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around me. And here's the [music] truth.
Intelligence is a commodity in the world of AI today. Any skill advantage you have is temporary.
[music] The only real edge is how you learn and how fast you can stay ahead. So, in this video, I'm
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not going to give you any hacks. I'll share with you how our brains actually work and show you a learning system that puts you in the top 1% even if you've always felt like a slow learner.
But first, you need to understand why 99% of
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people fail at learning. Your brain weighs only three lbs but it burns up to 20% of your body's total fuel.
One of its hungriest part is your prefrontal cortex. This is the uh CEO function of your brain.
Every new theory, every new
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idea you cram into that region [music] spikes up the demand for glucose and oxygen. And that's metabolically very expensive.
This region is your tiny cognitive bowl. 99% of the learners try to learn by jamming and cramming.
Now,
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if you dump a gallon of theory into a 4 oz bowl, how much do you think it will retain? Well, exactly 4 oz of it, right?
[music] And it's a trap that has an almost 100% failure rate. Today's AI can run millions of processes in parallel,
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but our human brain cannot do that. We're built for serial learning, serial processing, one transfer at a time.
So give yourself and your brain a break. Now the next thing you have to understand if you want to learn like the top 1% is that your brain is lying
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[music] to you. Carnegie Melon University tested an adaptive learning system for [music] its students.
The material would get increasingly difficult based on the students prior success. Now of course students at CMU totally hated it but they ended up
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learning twice as much as those who took the [music] standard test. And that's the point we miss.
Sometimes we feel friction and we assume failure. Neuroscience calls it the generation effect.
The harder you work to generate
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the answer, the [music] deeper it's wired in your brain. 99% of us use AI as a crutch, not as a coach.
Your brain doesn't hate struggle. It hungers for it.
The real question is how do you feed
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it? Well, for that we have to build a better learning system.
And I call it the 3C protocol. Compress, compile, and consolidate.
Each step accelerates your learning machine. And when you fire all three of them, you will break out of the
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orbit of the ordinary. So, let's dive into the first C, compress.
[music] The best way to learn that is from one of the best chess players. If you watch Magnus Carlson sitting down at the chessboard, he's not thinking about any specific move.
[music]
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What's happening in his brain is really fascinating. Cognitive studies on chess grandmasters estimate that they can internalize 50,000 or even 100,000 patterns on the chessboard.
But they're not memorizing. They compress what they
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have learned into patterns that their brain can actually handle. Now, why do they have to do that?
Because recent research shows that our brain can only juggle about four independent [music] ideas at a time. Any more than that and it drops the ball.
So the first C is
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compress and it's not about memorizing more. It is about reducing many ideas into fewer stronger chunks and patterns that your brain can carry.
So how do you actually compress? The first step is selection.
Here's an example. When I
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want to learn from a book, I first compress. I ask what's the 20% of the [music] book that I must read that will give me 80% of the benefit.
Most books are just about one single idea. So I read only selective chapters.
Sometimes I would read them more than once until
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it sinks in. That is selection.
Always pick the 20% that matters. Then comes association.
A paper in Science magazine showed that you can't learn something new until you connect it to something
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you already know. That's the secret behind mastering how you learn.
You have to ask, where have I seen this idea before? How does it connect to something I already know?
This is why Magnus Carlson wins, right? Because he connects a new move to an old pattern.
He sees
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the harmony. Then comes chunking.
This is the third step. You take these ideas and compress them into a simple model.
It could be anything. A drawing, a short summary, a metaphor you can remember, a song in your head.
99% of us get
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overloaded. [music] But the top 1% compress before they consume.
But the next C is about how you cut down the tree, compile. A lot of you might have watched a movie called Rainman, and it was actually based on a real person.
His
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name was Kim Peak. Kim grew up in the Midwest.
He was a savant, kind of like walking, talking Google. He could reportedly recall every word of any of the 12,000 books he had read.
And he could also add events tied to that day.
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He would tell you exactly what happened that day. And his unique abilities were linked to his brain's unusual design.
His brain scans found that the bridge between his brain's hemispheres was missing completely from birth. But here's the part that broke my [music]
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heart. That uniqueness also made his daily life very difficult to navigate.
His father would have to take care of his basic needs that you and I take for granted. He lived with his father until he passed away at 58.
[music] Never got
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married. Kim had these incredible gifts, but he had difficulty mastering simple chores and social cues.
It tells you that memory alone is not mastery. You [music] can store the entire world and still struggle to live in it.
That's
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Kim's tragedy. And this is the 99% trap.
We focus on the goal of hoarding information and mistake consumption for learning. And you need three things to do that.
The timer, the test, and the tools. The timer is about managing your
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learning cadence. This is called the ultradian cycle.
Your brain operates in 90-minute cycles. then it needs to rest.
So you get about 90 minutes of peak focus and then your brain must rest for at least about 20 [music] minutes. So
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here's something actionable. Look at your weekly calendar.
Do you have one or two blocks of deep work? If yes, then use this timer.
90 minutes of deep work plus 20 minutes of rest. Have one or two such blocks per week and protect them
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ruthlessly. This is how you're going to learn fast.
Second, the test. Most people learn, learn, learn for 6 weeks, for 6 months and then there is a big test and a big presentation at the end.
This is a giant waste of time. This is one of the biggest mistakes we make in
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learning. You know, software engineers talk about agile development all day long.
Everything is a twoe sprint. In fact, in today's AI companies, everything is a single day sprint.
So, why not apply the same concept to learning? Build a different loop.
Learn,
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test, learn, test, learn, test. So, pick a concept, learn it, and then test.
Then pick another concept. And how do you test?
That's where the tools come into play. There are three that are my favorite.
[music] Tool number one, slow burn. If you're learning something
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physical, like playing a [music] guitar, do it at an excruciatingly slow pace and do it a lot of times. But don't turn off your brain because slow is boring.
Focus on every micro move. The slower you play, the faster you [music] learn.
Tool
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number two, immersion. Every musician will tell you this.
No matter how you practice and rehearse with the band, the moment [music] you start playing on stage, everything goes haywire. So, you must test in the arena.
Practicing a speech in front of a mirror is a good
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[music] start. But practicing it in front of real people, that's even better.
And the third tool, teach to learn. Now, this is the boss tool.
I do this all the time. Once I learn something, I teach it [music] to someone.
Sometimes I even lecture the wall as if I'm giving a TED talk because
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I'm learning, I'm internalizing, I'm [music] connecting, I'm refraraming. And I would do it a few times and try different angles until I feel I have [music] learned it.
Well, we compress the map. We compile the work.
Now comes the final C. you have to consolidate it
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to retain what you've just learned forever. If time was money and you wanted to invest it in learning, then relying on stickies and flashcards will give you short-term gains but terrible long-term returns.
[music] And the most important insight is this.
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Learning is a two-stage process. Stage one is focus.
You're sending the request to your brain to rewire. But stage two is even more important.
Rest. This is where the actual consolidation happens.
So you've got to leave some room for it.
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You have to manage your rest as much as you manage [music] your work both at the micro and macro level. So think about the learning cycle in terms of work rest work rest work rest.
First on the micro level inside your 90minute block you
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have to think about taking frequent 10 20 second breaks. Research shows that after some heavy learning, if you pause for just 10 seconds, your brain replays the information you just [music] learned at 10 to 20 times the speed.
And it might fire that sequence 20 times over.
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So you're literally getting 20 free reps in your brain just by taking a break. And on the macro level, we're talking about the ultradian cycle of 90 minutes of work and 20 minutes [music] of rest again.
And what you do in those 20 minutes is also important. I for one do
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NSDR which [music] is non-sleep deep rest in Sanskrit is called yoga nindra which literally means the rest that helps you connect. So what do you have to do during [music] that 20 minute NSDR period?
Absolutely nothing. For
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instance, I just lie down or sit, close my eyes for 15 minutes, 20 minutes and do nothing. And sometimes I would go for a leisurely walk if I can.
But the point is not to distract [music] yourself and do nothing. And the third most macro thing is a good night's sleep.
There is
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a lot of research that suggests that when we're sleeping, our brain replays the entire thing we learn in reverse. So these three rests are super important.
You know, in this postindustrial technological age, we've forgotten what farmers have always intuitively [music]
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known. You can't keep plowing the field every day of the year.
The soil, the ground, it must rest to regain its fertility. And that's [music] the most important lesson.
I struggled with learning when I was growing up. I failed every single course in college.
Couldn't focus, couldn't retain anything. But
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these techniques, they [music] changed my life and they might work for you too. Remember three things.
First, stop racing other people. There will always be someone who learns faster.
So what? There is someone faster than them.
That loop never ends. Your only
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competition is you from yesterday. Second, get out of your head.
You cannot be the performer and the critic [music] at the same time. While you're learning, be the performer, not the critic.
[music] And finally, give yourself time. Learning is like an ocean.
It has its
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rhythm. It es flows.
Honor that cycle. With enough [music] time, there is nothing you can't learn and nothing you [music] can't become.
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