Learning anything superquick is SIMPLE
since
childhood i’ve often been enamored by
displays of extraordinary memory
by people who seem to be no different
than you and i
i’m sure all of you probably felt the
same way on many an occasion
after all doesn’t it make us wonder how
someone can be so great at learning
things
while we face a constant struggle today
i’m going to let you in on a secret one
that can change your life
it certainly changed mine i’m going to
tell you
about a simple method which will help
you learn anything
super quick yes that’s right we’re going
to unravel
the secrets to being an efficiently
quick learner
now before i begin i must tell you
that while the method in itself is quite
systematic in its approach
and effective in its outcomes adopting
and adapting this method to your life is
going to take a little practice
but once you’re there it’s going to make
learning even complicated things
reasonably simple and as quick as can be
so now let’s get straight to it the
methodology i’ve developed for myself
over the years
is quite literally called simple
s-i-m-p-l-e
an acronym it really is just that
six baby steps that can help you
supercharge your brain
to accomplish remarkable feats of
learning
so when i was an engineering student at
iit bombay
pursuing my dual degree i had to submit
a master’s project thesis
and for any of you familiar with the
process the first step
in the research journey involves
literature survey
reading an extensive set of research
articles on your chosen area of work
written by other researchers the process
can get really intimidating
there is so much to read and such
limited time
and that’s when the first step of this
method actually rescued me big time
the first step is s sensory involvement
that is seeing speaking writing
touching and hearing so basically
what you do is that you involve as many
senses as possible
in the process of immersing yourself in
learning
that way if one sense feels exhausted
the
others help balance the load of learning
and together
the process becomes much less fatiguing
and much faster
now what i did for my learning process
was
that i started reading the contents of
the paper out aloud
under my breath so that i don’t disturb
the others while actually dragging
the cursor over the screen to highlight
the text that i was reading as i went
along
now that way my hands help my eyes focus
on a particular area of the page while
my speech was getting fed back to me
as an audible input as if someone is
reading to me
now this maximized my sensory
involvement as much as i could probably
manage to do
and what happened because of this well
it allowed me
to improve focus and retain information
for
much much longer without tiring out but
you see
this in itself is not sufficient why
because the amount of work done
is humongous so i needed another step in
the right direction
and here i figured step two
step two is i identification
you need to figure out the three most
important points
to focus on in a given page paragraph or
section of information
remember the key is just three important
points
now what that does is it doesn’t
overload you
with needless issues and keeps your
brain tricked into feeling
that the content is easy enough to
master quickly because
there really isn’t too much to know
so what i started doing was i started
breaking down
every section of a paper into three most
important points
that i could identify based on now what
i was reading more efficiently
and believe me within a matter of trying
my hand
at this strategy over a couple of papers
i was
not only becoming great at finding out
what i needed to focus on
it was happening really quickly this
of course is aided a little by prior
knowledge of the background
that i was looking for but then that’s
something that we all generally have
anyway
and even if we don’t the first few pages
which are usually
the slowest to read up drop a great deal
of hints
now some of you may ask what if there
are more than three important points
that’s very possible yes here’s the
trick in that case
the moment you figure out the three most
important points
while you’re scanning the remaining text
your brain will automatically help you
find patterns
that it feels will justify what you’ve
chosen to focus
on for example try reading what’s coming
on your screen now
if you’ve read correctly the text will
read this text is jumbled
quite substantially and still makes
sense this is the power of the brain
that you can leverage
to make sense of even jumble lettering
it is this very power
that you will automatically hone in the
process of identification
without actually taxing your brain
you’re
literally tricking your brain to helping
you connect stuff
without reading or focusing too much on
it explicitly
and this automatically led me to the
third step of the process
m making sense of the three
most important points that you’ve zeroed
in on
practically as you master the arts of
step one and two
three in fact starts happening quite in
parallel
as i was reading my brain was connecting
the dots
in much the same manner as yours did in
the sentence i just showed you a couple
of minutes ago
it automatically started imputing
meaning to the information based on the
context
which i was now just quickly skimming
over and now you see
suddenly there’s a sense of clarity that
starts coming in
from stuff that you actually didn’t know
and stuff
that you haven’t particularly even
worked on focusing on
this is what amazed me a lot
in no time now i was actually reading
much faster engaging with the content
much sharper
and analyzing the information much
clearer and better
than what i was ever doing before and
all this happened
in just three sim steps i haven’t even
reached
the ple part yet so yes the making sense
of stuff part
becomes much quicker and much easier
if you are automatically great at
sensory involvement in identification
a few pages down and making sense
becomes
very very easy because now the brain
also has context
to connect the information to now this
was going
wonderfully well for me personally until
i hit an unexpected roadblock
sometime during my teaching journey the
thing is
i didn’t realize that there are a few
more things i was
unconsciously doing till my students
needed me to help them
do better and that’s where it hit me
step number four p personalizing
is a vital cog in the entire process
that
most people don’t really understand too
well
now what is personalizing i’m sure
many of you here are fans of sherlock
who probably no doubt heard
of the words memory palace yes so while
i can’t see you do it
let me still ask you to raise your hand
in case you heard about this
i’m sure right now you’ve probably
raised your hand
so what exactly does the memory palace
or any similar technique achieve the
answer
is as simple as it gets it helps you
to convert data to a form that you can
easily connect with and hence visualize
when you want and where you want now
some of us love images while many others
would probably love songs
i personally know a lot of students
who’ve learned the entire periodic table
with one song which is a remarkable feat
of personalizing learning
the trick is fairly simple no matter
what you want to learn quickly
after you’ve reached the same stage you
now convert these pieces of information
into a format that you can best relate
to
be it an image a song a memonic a crazy
word
or even a movie scene you’d be amazed
how it helps to help you get quickly
retaining content very very fast
now picture this imagine a boy and a
girl who’ve never
met but whose parents want them to get
married to each other
obviously they’ve got two choices one is
resist meeting each other never get to
know each other
and therefore when they get married
they’re going to be hiccups along the
way
obviously not the fastest of processes
the other is
did they meet each other in a nice
coffee shop sit down without moving
around too much
get to know each other comfortably
smooth out the issues
and of course that will lead to a much
more comfortable much more better
marriage in the long run right
now if you replace the boy and the girl
with chemicals and if you replace the
coffee shop
with a catalyst providing a surface area
for them to sit around and combine
you’ve just understood the mechanism of
how a physical catalyst action
happens to speed up a chemical reaction
now that was fairly simple wasn’t it
and this is what i did to personalize
things for myself
and in turn my students it works even
today
now many people ask me can you do this
with all subjects
the answer is yes of course in
mathematics
whenever i’m struggling with formulae
what i tend to do is
i group similar formulae into bunches of
two and three
and create a correlation between these
formulae now
that way even if i forget one of the
formulae
the other formulae help me to remember
what i’m forgetting
now let me give you an example we know
that sine of 3 theta
is 3 sine theta minus 4 sine cubed theta
yes
now what i do in my head is i think of
it this way i think of sine and cos
as somewhat opposites of each other so
if i replace a sign with a cos
what i do is i replace every plus with a
minus
and vice versa now suddenly that leads
me to the easy way of remembering
the formula for cos 3 theta which is 4
cos cubed theta minus 3 cos theta
you see this may seem like an easy
example to work with
but the point is that the same general
principles
can be used on many other formulae
right you can easily choose to replace
the sign with the cost the plus with the
minus
and that opens up a bunch of
possibilities which will help you to
remember
a lot of different formulae very very
easily
now that wasn’t too hard to figure out
with this trick
was it this is the beauty
of personalizing many people would
probably now
feel that that’s the end of the trick
you don’t really need
anything more to do but actually
there are two very very important small
steps
that people often skip often neglect
okay the fifth step in the entire
process here
is l letting go and this is something
that most people are actually unable to
do
once they start focusing on learning
something
ask yourself this how many times have
you gotten stuck
with a particular problem and never
gotten past it without wasting lots of
time
if your answer is many times i won’t be
surprised at all
that’s just the way our brain is wired
to work sometimes
we focus too hard on something and try
to know everything about it
without realizing that it’s just
fatiguing our brain
and making us less productive on things
that could otherwise still be managed
and here’s
where we need to learn to let go don’t
stick
with the same content for too long move
on
even if you think the picture in your
mind isn’t fully evolved yet
or that mnemonic hasn’t seeped in
completely don’t worry
don’t over tax your brain the brain
shouldn’t get too bogged down
or else it will stop listening to you
just give your brain a small push and
help it to move on
that way it will help you to focus a lot
better
remember we’re trying to speed up the
process of learning here
and letting go allows you to learn most
of what you need to
on a faster timeline finally
we reach the sixth and final step that
clinches the deal completely
e evaluate yourself at short intervals
remember i told you not to stick to
learning that one bit of information for
too long
but that doesn’t mean that you don’t
come back to it
by all means this is perhaps the most
underestimated step now keep revisiting
what you’ve committed to your memory
periodically to check
how well you’ve learned for you that
period
can be an hour a day or a week but the
key is
to keep on fleetingly coming back
remember
don’t stick to it just revisit it and
evaluate
how well you know what you know make
this
your feedback mechanism this will help
you
build a long-term memory and also allow
you to understand
what kind of information sticks longer
and better for you
and that will help you make the slight
tweaks in the learning process
that will help you overcome any small
drawbacks that you may face along the
way
well it really is that simple
to learn anything super quick all you
need now
is a little effort to put these six
steps into practice
and i’m hoping that after today each one
of you
embarks on your own remarkable simple
super quick learning journeys thank you