Transcription
I want you to imagine a top student at a university like Cambridge, which is where I study, or Oxford or Harvard or MIT. How long do you think they study every single day?
Now, when I've asked this online on my social media, most people will say between 10 and 14 hours per day. I've managed to consistently get top grades, full marks in some of my exams by simply studying for 4 hours per day. And this is the routine that's going to allow you to do the same.
Now, the biggest thing that you should take away from this video is that the pitfall of most students is that they assume that because something is productive, it is helping them learn. That is just not the case. Not everything that you do in the process of learning has equal waiting. And some of the things that some students do thinking it's beneficial actually do absolutely nothing. Reading through notes is productive. Highlighting is productive. But they're not actually helping you learn whatsoever.
What helps you learn? Two things. Number one, active recall. This is where you take information that is stored in your brain and put it onto a sheet of paper, whether through blurting or answering past paper questions without looking at any notes. And two, space repetition. For when you need to look at the notes to get the information into your head, you want to be doing it at pretty consistent regular intervals so that you're constantly revisiting it and rebuilding those neural pathways in your brain, strengthening them. And by strengthening those neural pathways, it's easier and faster and more efficient for you to retrieve the information because your brain inherently learns through retrieval and not exposure. If you reread something 10 times, that is worse than simply answering a question on it once because that's retrieval. That's how your brain actually works. You have to go over those neural pathways to collect the information. If you just look at the information, it's not going over those neural pathways. And that's why these things don't work.
And fundamentally, when you're studying for an exam, you need to be thinking, okay, what does an exam want from me? Well, an exam wants you to take information out of your own brain and put it on the sheet of paper. That's active recall. So, if you don't train your active recall in your studying, you're not going to be able to do it in the exam.
For me, the singular habit that completely transformed my abilities as a student is what is known as the 24-hour rule. It's as simple as it sounds. Within 24 hours of learning something new, I revisit it. If I've seen something new in a lecture, in a supervision, if I came across it in class notes, then within 24 hours, I'm reviewing it. But I'm not reviewing it for 2 or 3 hours. No, I'm reviewing it for 10 or 20 minutes. I can do this because it's within that first 24-hour window. It's still super fresh in my brain, but it's in my working memory. It's not really transferred into my long-term memory. By revisiting it, I'm enabling that transfer into long-term storage.
Because research into memory consistently shows that the steepest decline in retention happens immediately after learning. Basically, studies have shown that this translates to roughly 75% of new information being lost within 24 hours. Why? Because there's no signal in your brain that that information is actually needed. That that is actually valuable information for you to have. To signal it to your brain, the best way of doing this is to go back to that information and go over it again. That is what the 24-hour lets you do.
Together with my 24-hour rule, I will do one other thing that I think is really important. And this comes from the fact that whether you like it or not, whether you feel like you're a night owl or you work best at midday, your brain's peak cognitive capacity is after waking up. From about 30 minutes after waking up to about 2 hours after waking up, you've got a really core window. And the reason why this is so powerful is because during the course of a day, you make a lot of decisions. Those decisions create a bit of a mental tax in your brain. Every time you make a decision, you're using up cognitive resources, and this creates what neuroscientists call decision fatigue by the end of the day. And that inhibits your ability to engage in complex decision-making and logical reasoning. So, you want to be really frontloading your day with these tasks, doing it in that peak window that you have in the morning. And that is why I do something known as eating the frog.
Every evening, I will write a little to-do list. These are my tasks for tomorrow. I will then highlight one task. That is my frog. My frog will be my hardest task, the task I'm most likely to avoid, the task that I most need to get done that day. And it's going to get done first. And I'm not going to allow myself to do any other task until that one is complete. This is because most students will spend their best mental hours either scrolling on their phone or doing easy tasks like admin. Save those easy tasks for later on when your brain is tired and do the hard things first.
And my final tip for you is that the biggest difference between the most successful students and the least successful students has nothing to do with the material that they're studying. And it also doesn't have anything to do with what they're doing whilst they are studying. It has everything to do with what they're doing after they study. So consistently the most successful students that I've met and I've been incorporating this most frequently when I've been at Cambridge but I also did it during my studies before that is to engage in reflection just two to 5 minutes after a long study session. I will think to myself, okay, what went well? Like when was I revising and I felt like I was in flow state? When did I not feel like I was really doing well? Is there a correlation? Was I doing a particular study technique that allowed me to reach flow state? Was I most distracted with a different technique perhaps? And by engaging in these reflections, I can actually gauge what study techniques work best for me and what information feels easy, what feels good, and what feels much more difficult. and then I can adjust subsequent sessions accordingly.
Because if you don't take a step back to reflect, you're not going to be able to iterate your processes. And iterating your processes is how you converge on those study cycles and techniques that work best for you. And that lets you do what most people will know as studying smarter, not harder. Basically, being able to cover the same amount of content in less time because you're doing what works for your brain.
So, if you want to become a bit of an academic weapon like myself, then these tips will hopefully help you be able to do that. For a bit of background, I'm in my second year studying at Cambridge University. I'm reading land economy, which is basically economics and law. It's a very interesting course. If you do want to know more about it, then do leave a comment and I'll explain. And I hope this video has been super super helpful. As always, please do subscribe if you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next video.