Transcription
I've taught mind mapping to thousands of people. Game says this is the best mind map guide I've ever watched, with a capital "best." SAA says they've been teaching mind maps for 30 years; it's about time someone started getting it right. Fantastic! Well, thanks, I appreciate you.
So, this is the ultimate mind map tutorial. I'll be going from a blank page to a complete mind map, so you can follow along step by step. I'm Mike; I'm a doctor turned learning coach, and I created Study Quest. It's a program that helps you get better grades while studying less. We have students from all over; we've got med students, computer science students, and all the Ivy League students. They're all academic weapons who save about two hours of study time per day. A key part of their success is our technique called Tree Notes. It's really a combination of mind mapping and concept mapping done in a way that maximizes how much you can learn and minimizes the amount of time spent learning it.
We teach it this way because learning isn't just about getting good grades. If you want to earn more with your mind, then you need a way to retain and apply even the most complex concepts. So, let's jump right on in. I'll be mind mapping some marketing concepts because I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs and side hustlers on our channel now, so I thought I'd use an example that will actually be helpful to you.
Tree Notes: "Tree" is an acronym for the four steps, and each of these comes from evidence-based techniques. We'll start with "T," which stands for thought process. Back in medical school, a really big mistake I would make is that I would just jump right in and start trying to memorize everything without really thinking about what order I should be learning these things in. It's a big mistake, right? I was too occupied with learning all the leaves of the tree—these are the facts and the details and all the things you had to memorize. But I realized that if you understand the trunk of the tree first, which is the thought process, then everything else becomes so much easier to understand.
So, if we have a bunch of keywords we're trying to learn, we want to first identify what the main concepts are and then what the details are. By using the 80/20 rule, we can identify the 20% most important keywords because those are the concepts, and we can just kind of ignore the 80% other keywords for now because those are the details. We'll come back for them later because the most important concepts make up the trunk of our tree.
Looking at my keywords here, I'll create an outline of which are the concepts and which are the details. It should be pretty obvious which keywords are concepts and which are details, but let's say you have no idea whatsoever. Well, you can use ChatGPT to help do a little bit of the heavy lifting for you. So, I'm studying for my marketing exam; here is a list of keywords I need to know. Please separate them into concepts and details for me. I'll go ahead and leave these prompts in the description for you, so you can just copy and paste if you want to use them.
From this exercise, you might find a lot of concepts, but to make the trunk of the tree, you really want to focus on two to four of the most important concepts. So, here we have paid advertising, cold calling, organic content, and warm outreach. All right, so I'll set aside all the other keywords for now, and I'll just work with these first. I'll lay out all these concepts onto the page, making sure to leave some room in between them so that I can brainstorm what the connections are between these concepts.
This is super important to figure out connections between these. The typical mind map would just write the topic in the middle and then have the four branches coming off of it like this. But the problem here is that you don't think about the connections between the core concepts, and without those connections, your tree becomes really weak and flimsy. This keeps all the branches isolated and makes it harder for your brain to retain the information.
An easy way to connect these core concepts is to ask evaluative questions: How do these ideas relate to each other? What are the similarities? What are the differences? Is there a cause and effect? Are they all parts of a bigger whole? Is there a chronological order to them? Is there a logical or scientific basis for why these are all related? These are all questions that will help you connect these words together. Of course, you can use AI to help you brainstorm as well, but it's always a good idea to try it with your own brain first because that's the way that you're really going to remember it. Again, I'll leave some of these prompts in the description if you want to use those.
All right, so let's go through some of these terms. I've identified these four terms to be the main concepts of the material, and what they have in common is that they're all forms of marketing in order to find more customers. So first, we have paid advertising. This is when you pay money, usually a lot of money, to show an advertisement to a bunch of people all at the same time. Think about the ads that you see on TV commercials; these could be the ads at the beginning of YouTube videos.
Next is cold calling. This is where you call people one at a time; they're usually strangers, hence the word "cold," like a cold approach. Another version of cold calling that you might be familiar with is going and knocking on people's doors to see if you can try to sell them something.
So, using evaluative questions, let's compare and contrast cold calling versus paid advertising. Cold calling deals with one person at a time; you're calling one person on the phone at a time or knocking on a person's door one at a time. Compare that to paid advertising; it's usually not one person at a time; it's a lot of people at a time. You're making a commercial, and probably thousands or even millions of people are going to watch it all at the same time.
Next is organic content. We're all pretty familiar with this, right? This is the content that you see, like this YouTube video, for example, or Instagram or TikTok, or writing blogs on the internet. So again, evaluative questions: How does content relate to the previous two main concepts? Well, content can also be viewed by thousands of people all at the same time, so it's similar to paid advertising in that way. But unlike paid ads, you don't have to pay money to put it in front of people. Like, I didn't pay any money to force you to watch this YouTube video, right? I just published it to my channel, and the algorithm just showed it to you.
Then we have warm outreach. This is basically reaching out to people one by one, kind of like cold calling, but unlike cold calling, this is reaching out to people who already know you. Since you already know them, it's usually free for you to contact them, whereas cold calling is reaching out to strangers. It can cost money sometimes because you have to pay to acquire lists or emails or phone numbers to contact, but warm outreach is contacting people who are not strangers. Maybe they already follow you on social media, maybe they subscribe to you on your mailing list or on your YouTube channel, or maybe they're just your friends or family members on your contact list.
So, asking those evaluative questions really helps us think about the relationships between those four main concepts, and it really helps me see that the connections have to do with how many people you're reaching out to at once. Is it one person at a time or many people at a time? The other connection I see is how much money it costs. It costs money to do paid advertising; it also costs money to do cold calling, although not as much, and the other two are generally free.
So, thinking about these four concepts in this way will really help me draw out my thought process. How do they all connect? Well, I see them kind of like this: we got paid advertising and content creation reaching many people, and we have warm outreach and cold calling reaching one person at a time. Then, what do they cost? Well, these two will generally cost more money compared to these two. These two will generally reach more strangers, while these two will generally reach more people that already know you.
So, what's the thought process here? Well, to me, it's kind of like a matrix, right? We got the X-axis, we got the Y-axis. It's not perfect, but this is how I would roughly picture it. Now, here's the important part: everyone's thought process will be a little different, right? It's your personal relationship to what you're learning.
For example, in the world of habits, there are two very famous authors: you got James Clear and you got Charles Duhigg. They both wrote best-selling books about habits, but if you open both of their books and put them side by side, and then you look at their table of contents, you're going to see that their headings and their frameworks on habits are similar, but they're also slightly different. You'll see that the topics they wrote about and the order of topics in which they put their chapters are slightly different. That's because they both have their own unique thought process on how they think about habits.
That's what makes learning and science so fun: people have different approaches, and they debate about it, right? There are all these different perspectives, and it's up to us to evaluate these different viewpoints and then synthesize them to form our own conclusions. This is something called syntopical learning. If you just searched on Google or YouTube on how to mind map, you probably found me; that's why you're here watching this video. But you also found dozens of other people who are all teaching their approach to mind mapping. Everyone teaches it slightly differently, so students will just gravitate towards the thought process that resonates with them the most.
So, that's how you want to think about it, right? Every author, every teacher, every professor, every lecturer—they all have their own thought process. When they teach you, they try to convey their thought process of the subject to you, but not all students will understand it in the same way. That's why some professors make no sense to you, but with other professors, it just clicks.
When you have mastery or expertise on a subject, that means you have such a clear and useful thought process for that subject that you're able to teach it better. You're able to make better content, and you're able to deliver more value. That's how you use your knowledge to earn more money in your work and your career. So, thought process, right? Super important—don't skip this step; it makes up the trunk of the tree.
Next is "R," which stands for relationships. We're going to add all the rest of the keywords into the tree now. These will be the branches and the leaves, but we want to add them by relationships. An easy way for me to demonstrate this is to show you what you don't want to do.
What we touched on briefly before is that a typical mind map will put the main topic in the middle like this, and then you add keywords one by one in a very hierarchical manner. This is not ideal because it forces our brain to think of these groups as isolated from each other, and so it encourages us to start memorizing all these details. That's not what we want to do. Knowledge isn't stored in our brains like a filing cabinet where information is just siloed away in folders. It's more like a tree with networks and connections. A strong tree has a network of roots and branches, and to achieve that, we want to add our keywords in relationships. This is relational learning; it reflects how our brain prefers to store information.
So, when you're adding your keywords in relationships, you can do this layer by layer. You can start with the sub-branches and then connect them as you go, again always making sure to focus on relationships rather than letting them stay isolated. If you want to add them in layers, you can start by ranking all your keywords by which ones have the most relationships with the other keywords.
For example, this word "target audience" has multiple relationships with other terms, whereas this one "SEO" has fewer relationships with other terms. So, this term will probably be a bigger branch, and then this one will probably be a sub-branch. After doing more critical thinking and using the evaluative questions to compare and contrast these terms together, I found that all these relate together as one big funnel. The thought process here is like the start of the funnel that gets the attention, right? It gets the eyeballs from all the customers and takes the customer down a funnel where they start to build a deeper connection with the brand the deeper they go.
Actually, this funnel can be our new thought process going forward. Just be aware that your tree note can grow and evolve as you continue adding relationships to it. Also, just a side note here: I highly recommend you do this with an iPad or a tablet rather than using paper and pen because it's so much easier to erase and move things around if you find a better fit for that somewhere else on the map. Trust me, if you're doing it right, you're going to be doing a lot of erasing and a lot of moving things around.
All right, so you're just going to continue adding all the keywords by relationship until they're all added to your tree. Next, we have "E," which stands for expressive. The brain remembers visuals better than it remembers words. If I told you to think of an apple, then you probably think of it visually first, right? You probably think of a red piece of fruit rather than thinking of the word "apple." Plus, visuals are much more efficient than words. It would take me several seconds to read this paragraph, but I could just look at an image and instantly know what it's telling me.
When it comes to reviewing your notes for an exam, imagine having pages and pages of paragraphs to read. It's going to take so long. So right now, if you have a lot of words on your tree, then you want to go through and turn them into visuals. We teach dozens of different visualization techniques in our program, but to get you started, I suggest you think about how to represent these parts of your mind map using visual frameworks, which are much easier to remember.
You can see I already started implementing expressive as I was going along. I expressed these ideas as a matrix, and then I expressed these ideas as a funnel. But there are so many other ways you can have pillars, pyramids, cycles, flow diagrams, charts—I mean, there are so many more examples. Our brains are already familiar with these visual frameworks, so when you apply these to what you're learning, it makes it so much easier to just instantly remember your notes.
All right, the second "E" stands for efficient, and this refers to making it efficient for review. Again, there are dozens of techniques here that we teach, but a great one to start with is mnemonics. This is something that I used so much in medical school. We had acronyms, we had abbreviations, we had rhymes—all of these things to help us remember. A great example of a mnemonic is the tree method that you're learning right now in this video, where each letter reminds us what to do and in what order.
Actually, Tree Notes is just one of the many skills that we teach in our program. There are others that we use alongside it to make it even better. So for you, if you have a list of processes or keywords, then you can form an acronym or a rhyme—anything to make it easier to remember. You can definitely use ChatGPT to help you brainstorm here.
So, looking at the marketing terms here, we have a mnemonic for a sales script. It's going to make it a lot easier to remember all these steps and in what order to use them. At this point, you've gotten all your keywords onto your tree. It's time to put your knowledge to the test, and the challenge is: can you close all your notes, pull out a blank piece of paper or a blank iPad screen, and actually draw your mind map from memory?
This exercise is similar to the blurting technique or active recall, where you close your notes and write down everything that you can remember about the topic, which I think is really beneficial for retaining the information. But if you can actually redraw your Tree Note, complete with all the relationships and the structure and the expressions that you created, then this would truly reflect your mastery of the information.
Once you're able to redraw your topic several times from memory with ease, that's how you know that you're ready for an exam or that you're just ready to use that knowledge in a masterful way anywhere you go. Like if you're at a job interview and you get asked a question, you can just mentally retrace the steps to your mind map in your head, and you'll be able to recall information pretty effortlessly.
This is why some people are really good at creating content or being on podcasts or just creative writing. This is how mastery of your knowledge can translate to more than just getting good grades, but actually leveling up your earning potential.
So, this Tree Note example was on marketing concepts, but I do have another example. If you're a med student or even a premed student, then I do have a prior demo on a medical concept. If you want to check that out, then I'll leave a link in the description. If there's any other subject you want me to try, then definitely let me know in the comments below.
And of course, to all you synthesizers and innovators out there who are really looking to turn your knowledge into online income, this is how I would recommend you approach learning. This is how I built a channel and a business around my knowledge. So trust the process and keep practicing. See you next time!