Watch This For 18 Minutes, and You’ll Outlearn 99.9% Of People

0:00 So today I want to talk about probably one of the most important things that you need to learn if you ever want to get better at learning and this is called metacognition. The reality is that the technique and the method you use. Your studying strategy doesn't really matter that much. What matters is how you think inside your brain when you use that strategy. And metacognition is about understanding how you think. If you have really good metacognition, you don't need fancy new learning strategies. You don't need to watch a never- ending amount of YouTube videos to figure out how to learn better. You can simply reflect, understand what you're doing, and make the changes you need to get you

0:47 your result. So, we're going to cover three things in this video. The first one is what metacognition is a little bit more deeply. Number two is what metacognition actually does for you and how you are meant to use metacognition and your daily learning to help you improve and then how you can actually start training your metacognition to be better. So the first one to start with is what metacognition really is. So if this here is your brain and your brain is having thoughts Cognition. This would just be called cognition. The fact that your brain is having thoughts is called cognition. Now, if you are aware of the thoughts

1:33 that your brain is having, you would have a level of meta cognition. And there's a spectrum to this. So, a low level of metacognition means that you are just very generally aware of the thoughts that you're having. So you might be learning something really complicated and you're generally aware that you're struggling. You're generally aware that you're trying to solve this problem by thinking about it in a different way. Another level beyond that would be to say, okay, not only are you aware that you're struggling, you're also aware of why you're struggling. So I'm trying to think about this topic in this particular way. I'm applying my brain. I'm using certain methods and they're not doing well for me. So let me actively try to switch to a different strategy to unlock a new perspective. How is that working for me? And so we

2:19 can actually adjust our strategies depending on our metacognition of where the difficulties and issues are. The main challenge with metacognition and this is a key aspect about what it means to train it is that metacognition is trying to gain awareness on something that is invisible completely invisible. If I sit here thinking deeply, what am I thinking? You don't know cuz it's invisible. There's no way for you to be able to point or anyone else to be able to point at your thoughts and say, "Hey, this is the thought that's going wrong." And when it comes to something like learning where not only do you have thoughts, but then these thoughts have to output into actual knowledge. That is not talking about one or two pathways. This is talking about hundreds

3:06 of thousands of millions of potentially billions potentially trillions of connections firing in a certain pattern to create a very very specific function which is consolidating information into your memory. And so there are uncountable amount of micro decisions that your brain is making and uncountable number of thoughts. And so you have to have awareness on what your brain is actually doing when there is no real feedback or way to see it directly. And this is the biggest reason why it is so hard to learn to learn. So this lack of visibility is the biggest reason why learning to learn is so difficult. It is harder to learn to learn than it is to play golf.

3:54 It's harder than to build a rocket ship because for all of those things there is something tangible when you make an error that you can actually point to, trace back to your process and then remedy. And so the only way that we can build metacognition and improve our metacognition and therefore train our metacognition, the first step is we need to get visibility. That's the most important first step. If you do not have visibility on metacognition, you're not able to improve it. And therefore, you will never be able to improve your ability to learn beyond essentially a sort of fixed genetic limit of what you're able to do with the baseline way that your brain tends to

4:39 process. So for example, if your brain has a certain pattern of thinking that is it's very used to. So let's say this pattern of thinking it's very used to thinking in this way. So it means problems that require this kind of thinking, you're already good at. Topics that you're learning that require this kind of thinking, they're kind of the topics you gel a little bit better with. But let's say some other topic comes along that doesn't require this level of thinking, something new. Then that's when you're going to struggle and then you're not going to be able to apply the knowledge. You're not going to be able to solve problems. You're not going to be able to gain any expertise on this. And that becomes a ceiling. And so it's not that the ceiling is innate to you, but it's innate to the thought process that you're good at and that pattern that you're good at. So to change that pattern, you have to have awareness of

5:25 the pattern that you're using. And then you have to be able to make that change. And so usually what happens is that as we grow older, you know, especially, you know, starting from birth through early childhood, as we age, we're gaining these new patterns of thinkings. So this is kind of the patterns of thinking and so at the same time what's happening is that our mental flexibility and that sort of fluidity is going down over time. So when you are a newborn baby, you have a very very high level of this flexibility and fluidity. And as a result, it's very

6:10 easy for you to gain new patterns of thinking. This allows children and babies to learn incredibly fast. As you get older, you start accumulating more facts and more knowledge and more patterns. And then you use those patterns and you realize, hey, this pattern is actually useful for me in my life to go through school and to interact with other people and solve different types of problems. And those things become more and more crystallized. And as those things become crystallized, they form the foundation of our knowledge and skills and habits. And then obviously as we get older, we get more and more experience which further crystallizes those patterns. And so at a certain point, if this is the point where now you need to discover new patterns, your flexibility as an all-time low, but the patterns that you've accumulated are not there enough and you need to increase that here. then this is what

6:57 you're going to feel a lot of the time as kind of a talent discrepancy or an intelligence discrepancy. Some people seem to be able to do this really well, but for me I seem to be struggling. It doesn't really matter how hard I try. It's always so hard for me to learn this material. And that's not because you are not smart enough. It is because you don't know how to manipulate the patterns of thinking in your brain to solve that problem. And it's as simple as that. So how do we gain visibility on the invisible to develop metacognition and start training this? This is a concept that I call building the radar.

7:43 So anytime you're doing any kind of deep thinking or deep problem solving, your brain is constantly working. It's very very engaged. And you will notice that through perceived mental effort. You know a problem is hard to solve because it just feels difficult. And that sounds really obvious but actually that's our door to enter into metacognition. We have to build a very keen awareness for when we feel our brain is spending more effort compared to our baseline. And then we have to trace that back to understanding what is it that's making it feel this increased effort. So if I got you to do like 5 + 5

8:31 for most of you hopefully that doesn't require a lot of effort right now if I said 5 + 10 again not much effort. Now if I said 5 * 5 5 * 5 + 10 5 + 5 / 5 * 10 - 5. So you can see as I start adding things on, it takes a little bit more effort incrementally to hold on to all of that information and to try to process that. So obviously if I now then give you the problem, I want you to find a mathematical proof for why 5 + 5 equals 9. Then you know you're going to be spending the rest of your life, you know, like grappling with conflicting mathematical concepts to try to figure that out. And your cognitive load, your mental effort is going to be through the roof. your brain is going to be working

9:18 at, you know, top capacity. And so that's what we're building the radar for is that anytime that we do something in our learning, it has an effect on our cognitive load, on the mental effort that we're using. And that is an indication of the types of thoughts and the patterns of thinking. So let's use a more realistic example. Let's say I'm reading a book. I've got the book open and I'm reading through the pages. A very passive way of reading that book would just be to say, "Hey, I'm going to start at the beginning. I'm going to go to the end and I'm just going to try to understand what the book is trying to tell me." That would be the most common and most loweffort, low energy way of reading through that book. And allows you to go through each page very quickly cuz that's what your focus

10:04 is on. Mentally, what you might notice is that your brain is switching off. you're halfway through the page and you started daydreaming. You're actually getting drowsy and you're falling asleep. And the reason is inside your brain, the activity level is very low. It's not very engaged. That means the thought patterns that it's using are very simple. So simple that your brain doesn't even want to do it anymore. It'd rather daydream or go to sleep. And so we can use any number of strategies to try to increase that. So let's take one simple strategy which is to say that you're going to read this and then after reading the next few pages you have to then teach it. You have to teach it to a junior. You have to teach it to a pair. You have to hold a seminar on what you have learned. And at the end of that seminar you're going to get asked

10:49 questions to see if you really understood it. You're going to be tested on it. They're going to be people who are really really intrigued in the thing that you've learned probing you and asking questions and challenging you on everything that you've learned in those few pages. So now when you read it just with that perspective alone, the way you think about the information changes. Now it's not about understanding it line by line. Now you understand the line and you ask yourself, okay, well, what does this mean? What could someone ask me? What's the implication of this that I might be missing? And so that increases that level of load. And we have to gain awareness of that. That's building that radar. And that's good because that increased activity means that our brain is using more effective thought patterns. And those thought patterns are going to produce better learning. And so

11:35 the first step to building your radar is to just sit down and learn something. Don't think about how you're learning it. Just use whatever method and strategy feels completely comfortable to you. Have that experience. And then as you do that, have a sheet next to you. Draw a line down the middle. So if this is your sheet, draw a line down the middle. Write A on the right. P on the left. P stands for passive. A stands for active. And what you're going to be doing is as you study, you want you want to start off active. That's the column you want to start. And you want to try to put yourself in that perspective where you're you're thinking really deeply and you're trying to explore it and you're teaching someone.

12:21 You've got that perspective in mind. Keep going. And as soon as you realize at some point you don't have that mental load anymore. Something has drifted. You were intending to teach it but four pages later you realize, hey, actually I've been daydreaming for the last 15 minutes. You don't know exactly when that happened. You don't know what went wrong, but the old habit of thinking took in and you drifted away. When that happens, you're going to go down there and you're going to write a P and write a quick note next to it in terms of what you think just happened. And again, reorientate yourself. Go back to being active. Reframe and then have a session. Do that for one or two hours. And then two things are going to happen. Number

13:07 one, you're going to see how much time you spend passively versus how much time you spend actively. And then number two, as you do this, you're going to become much more aware of when you enter into this passive state. FYI, for most people, this passive state is their default. So for most people, 90 plus% of the time that they spend on learning something is going to be spent purely just in this passive state. It's highly ineffective, which is also the reason why 90% of the time you spend is essentially wasted. So go through that activity. Do that a few times. Get to the point where you can reliably detect whenever you're entering into this passive state. Once you know you're entering into the passive state, it's much easier to use different strategies to enter into the active state because there are so many different ways that you can become more active. The one I gave you as a as a

13:53 teaching example, that's one thing. You could also just test yourself. You can do some really uh smart consolidative paraphrasing or summarizing. You can be doing mind maps. You can be trying to teach to yourself as you're consuming it for the first time. You know, you can be uh pulling out and trying to write your own version of this. You know, you're almost um just mining this for data and and drawing out your own conclusions. So, there are lots of things that you can do. And the point is that it doesn't really matter which strategy you choose. But what matters is that you are forcing your brain to be in a more active state of learning. And the only way you force yourself to do that is by having the metacognition to detect when you're not doing that, which gives you the ability to exert control. So this process of

14:40 building your radar, if you are a complete beginner and you have absolutely no awareness of how you're thinking, this process of just getting to figuring out where you're passive will take you probably about a month. Assuming that you're spending reasonable number of hours studying per week, like 10 plus hours studying per week, it will take you about a month to get to a point where you are very easily able to detect every time you enter into a passive state. From that point to being able to reliably become more active in your learning will only take you about one or two weeks. So if you think about that, most of the difficulty in learning to become a better learner is actually just in building the radar. That's the upfront cost. And the reason why some people take years to improve their learning is not because it actually

15:28 takes years to use these active techniques. It's because it takes years for them to build this radar. especially if you're not really proactive about it. And so the number one step, probably the first step, and this is not something that I would have recommended probably 10 years ago, but a new person coming in blank slate, being coached by me nine out of 10 times, the first most important step that's going to dictate whether this person is going to be successful and learn to learn in a short amount of time is how quickly they can build that radar. So this part is building the radar and that's step one. Step two is that, and this is the part that I think a lot of people probably find boring. Hopefully I make it less boring. Uh, but it's learning about

16:13 learning theory. You actually have to know a little bit about learning science and how the brain works because otherwise you build a radar and you just don't know what to do with that information. You're like, "Okay, cool. I'm learning passively now. Let's make it more active. How? What do I actually do?" So without understanding what the guiding principles of effective learning actually are, what it looks like and what it feels like to do effective, engaging, active learning, then even if you notice that you're in that passive state, and even if there are, you know, hundreds of different strategies that you could use, it doesn't matter if you don't know any of those hundred strategies and the only one that you know is is flash cards, which is not a good one to be using. So step two is actually just to learn a little bit more about how the brain works and how you

17:00 know learning theory can actually help you. And to do that there are two things that I'd recommend. I'm not going to go through all of that in this video because that'll be an enormous video. But I do have another video where I do talk about the learning theory in more detail. So you can check that one out. Or another thing that you can do is join my newsletter. So my newsletter is partially talking about strategies, practical takeaways on things that you can do to be in a more active state of learning, but also within there I try to teach you little bits like little golden nuggets of learning theory that I think are practical and useful for you to know that serve as that that guiding compass. So if you're interested in that newsletter, it gets delivered to your inbox once a week. Uh you can check it out. I'll leave a link to that in the description below. Uh but if you want to continue your journey of learning about

17:46 learning theory or building this radar then feel free to start with this video over here.