Transcription
Everyone is a student, including you. Lifelong learning is a life skill essential for making progress towards your goals, discovering new things, and ultimately finding yourself. And right now, in this moment, I have to study for the education system, as I'm sure many of you have to as well.
I'm Korean, and Korea is notorious for the 16 hours of studying a day: preschool lessons, post-school lessons, homework, literally learning how to lose a dream just so you can cram more than the two hours of sleep that your mom lets you get. But thankfully, I escaped from the country, yes, but from my parents, no. And I think throughout the years, I've built up enough knowledge to call myself somewhat of a studying expert. And I won't deny, at school, I am that guy. The guy that everyone hates because they seem to do well no matter what. The Asian who everyone sees having a no-life, rice-eating, 20 hours a day, studying good at everything type of student. The Asian students. And not to my own horn or be arrogant, but I genuinely probably study the least in my class. And this is hard to digest because surely, if you spend more time in something, the rewards will be directly proportional. But that's not the case.
Throughout the years, I've tried a lot: pretty notes, highlighting, Pomodoro Technique, Forest app, studying tips and tricks. And throughout this journey, I've learned a few things along the way. And whether you're an adult or you're 12 and just starting your learning journey, this video will be valuable to all. Because to be able to study effectively and efficiently is the key in not only enjoying the studying aspects but also getting the progress to make your parents proud. So, this is how to study, made for students, made by a student.
Firstly, you have to let go of the thought you have in your mind that time studied equals knowledge gained. You've seen and heard it everywhere, especially in Asia: "How many hours does your child study?" "I study for 12 hours for this test." And it's like a propaganda machine because not only does this cause severe depression, but it's also shown to be extremely ineffective. It's like in the gym, doing three sets to failure is better than doing 12 sets. It's like it's better to use LED lights than filament bulbs because they're more efficient. It's like, okay, you get the message. Sometimes less is more.
And as cool as it sounds to please your Asian parents or to flex on your friends that you studied for 10 hours a day, the smartest students know how to practice deep work. And deep work refers to a state of peak concentration that lets you learn hard things and create quality work quickly. It's essentially decreasing studying time but increasing results. And this sounds so magical and golden, right? Being able to only study for 2 hours a day but have a more fulfilling and more efficient session. But deep work is just a concept and is very general. And there are many steps, like stepping stones, that you need to cross in order to fully utilize them.
Okay, so the first step we have to do is to apply a principle. It's called the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. Because we've already established that you're going to drastically cut down the amount of time you spend studying into, let's call it, 2 hours a day. So if you only had 2 hours a day to study, what would you do? You would make pretty notes and highlight them. This is the part of the 80%. Sure, these help, but considering the amount of help ROI (investment return) you get, these aren't worth doing. Instead, you better are focusing on this 20% that will give you the 80% of the results. So you would do practical past paper questions and topic questions because, in the end, the questions are what's going to be on the test and what they're going to be asking.
And making notes is good. My form of studying for the longest time was rewriting notes by hand into this notebook, so that by the end, I would have rewritten the whole topic. And obviously, this does work to some extent, but not only is it inefficient, it doesn't prepare you for the exam itself because you just learned the content, but exam technique is half of the equation. And this inefficiency becomes blatant when you think about the fact that when you write these notes, you're writing on everything, so you're not able to target weaknesses. And you ignore the fact that you probably already know a good chunk of this, so you end up wasting time. And so that's why past papers, topic questions are so valuable because you get to see where your gaps in the topic are, and then you consolidate those gaps with knowledge. And then you also get to see the mark scheme, which is the model answer for you to look at and memorize. And there are many sites that I personally use: PMT and Save My Exams. And I realized that the reason I was writing these notes is that you feel like you've done a lot because when you copy the notes and you get three, four, five pages worth of notes, you have this tangible, physical evidence that you tell yourself, "Damn, I've studied really hard. I've got five pages worth of notes." Whereas in fact, that doesn't amount to knowledge. And whereas if you do past papers or topic questions, you don't actually get a physical, tangible piece of work that you've completed, so it doesn't feel like you've actually studied.
And the Asian secret I'm spilling it right now is that you just spam these topic questions, past papers, until, for example, you have a biology test, and they just become easy, like times table questions. "What's 8 * 7?" "56." "What's the powers of the cell?" "Mitochondria." "What's the bacteria cell?" "God damn." And okay, if you're in higher education, towards A-level or university, I appreciate that memorizing everything like times tables isn't going to work. But the principle of doing past paper questions, topic questions, specific questions instead of just writing the notes is a principle that you can agree with and that's proven to be effective.
And the next section is about distractions. Distractions are like Kryptonite to students, bane to the arthropods, social interactions to emos. Okay, you get it. You can all relate. You try and sit down and focus, but the distractions are always there. The best way to avoid distractions isn't to cut them out, although in an ideal world, you could just go cold turkey and cut out video games, all these distractions out of your life. But I appreciate how hard it is in this day and age for you to just go on your phone and delete all social media apps. So we can't get rid of them fully. So then, how do we stay focused when we have to work? It's simple. You just delay it. You tell yourself you'll do 2 hours of deep work, and then after that, you could spend the day watching Netflix guilt-free because we all know that worst feeling is when you're watching Netflix, but you still have that exam you haven't studied for. But you have to promise yourself that the condition is you have to do those two hours fully, 100% focused and distraction-free. And only if you do that, you're going to promise yourself that you're going to enjoy Netflix, social media afterwards. Because if you can truly focus in those 2 hours and do two hours' worth of deep work, it's more valuable than a whole day's worth of work.
And this works for some people and not for others. I appreciate that if you can completely cut out your bad habits, go for it. So while you're doing deep work, full-screen Word, or whatever you're doing, turn off the Wi-Fi, bury your phone in a hole, I don't know, make sure there's no things that can distract you and that you can just focus on your work. And of course, this isn't going to work straight away. We've grown up in a world of distractions, and distractions are ever more prevalent. And I still mindlessly autopilot onto YouTube while working. I just waste time, but it's a work in progress. And tell yourself that you want to get to the stage where you can focus fully for these two hours. In an ideal world, we will cut everything up, but as I've talked about, this isn't something that can just be done overnight.
And the third and last one is to be precise. Set a goal for your 2-hour study session because 2 hours realistically is a very short time, especially if you're going to go from 6, 8 hours down to two. For example, "I'm going to do plant reproduction in this 2-hour session. I'm going to do all the topic questions and make sure I don't have any gaps in my knowledge." This is a specific and smart target you're setting. And it doesn't have to only be one thing, but open up a notepad and write down the list of things you want to finish in that allocated set of time. Because goal setting in itself makes it so you're more likely to achieve all those goals. And if you go into this session headfirst without any idea what you're going to do, not only is that going to be a cause of distraction in yourself, it's going to take up a lot of time considering what you're going to do. Whereas if you sit down and not in your head what you're already going to do, it's so much easier for you to just get stuck in the task and focus.
And the mistake that people make is that they vaguely say, "Oh, I'm going to study," and they start flicking through their textbook, wasting hour after hour. You must create specific targets. And by doing this, it's like you're a guided missile, and you're absolutely going to decimate a specific area and nail that topic.
To conclude, studying is made to seem like this 10 hours a day, "wow, yay, so cool" type of thing, but it's not. I promise. If you learn how to utilize deep work, it will change your life, making it more fun, leaving time for other things, and also prevent you from feeling burnout and exhausted from studying. So make sure to do practical, focused study sessions of practice questions and distance yourself from any distractions. And lastly, be precise and set goals for yourself to make sure that you actually get things done in the session.