Transcription
When most people try to learn technical things, they spend hours watching tutorials, reading documentation, highlighting textbooks, and then a week later, they can't remember any of it. I've definitely been there. But after a lot of trial and error, I found a system that really works to quickly and permanently learn anything.
I'm Marina, a senior applied scientist at Amazon, and I've been teaching myself technical skills for literally decades. At UC Berkeley, while working full-time, through my master's degree, and now in my day job working on applied machine learning.
Today, I'm going to walk you through my exact five-step process for learning anything. This is what I actually do when I need to learn a new concept fast and I need it to stick. By the end of this video, you'll have a complete framework you can use today.
Why most learning doesn't work. Most of us learned how to learn in school, and school taught us to be passive. You sit in a lecture, you take notes, and you reread those notes before the exam, maybe highlighting the important parts. So now, when you want to learn something, you take the same approach, except with YouTube videos and tutorials. It feels productive. But just because you can recognize a concept when you see it doesn't mean you can actually use it. Your brain needs to struggle a bit to build real understanding. Instead of passively learning, we need active engagement at every single step.
So here's how to do it. This system has five steps. Prime, learn, integrate, retrieve, and schedule. Let's break it down.
Step one, prime the topic. Okay, so you want to learn, let's say, neural networks. What do most people do? They grab the most comprehensive textbook they can find and start on page one. This is a big mistake. Here's what you should do instead. Prime yourself first. This means getting the big picture before you dive into the details. This could be something like watching a high-level overview video like three blue one brown where you get an intuition without getting bogged down by the math. Or just skim the textbook chapter and look at the headers, diagrams, and the examples. The goal here is context. You want to know what's the point of learning this? Where is this actually used? What are the key concepts? If you just dive straight into the deep end, everything feels kind of random and disconnected. But if you prime yourself first, when you encounter those details later, you'll be like, "Oh, yeah. I've seen this before. This is the thing that does XYZ." It also creates curiosity, which is really important. If you understand why something matters before you learn how it works, studying becomes way less painful. Spend like 30 to 60 minutes on this. Don't go deep yet. It's really about breadth over depth at this phase.
Step two, learn with multiple modalities. All right, now you're ready to actually dig in. But before you start, we need to talk about setting yourself up to win with some basic environment design. Before you start studying, your phone needs to be gone. Not on silent or face down on your desk. It needs to be in another room away. If your phone is within arm's reach, you will check it. I don't care how disciplined you think you are. Your environment shapes your behavior way more than your willpower ever will.
Once you're distraction-free, it's time to start studying. And here's where my methods are a little bit different from other people. I really recommend using different modalities to study. So, get two to three different courses, books, or video series on the same topic. This helps because one source might explain something terribly or just not be a good fit for how you learn. Don't try to complete each source entirely. Learn topic A from source one, then source two, then source three, and take notes from each. We'll use those in the next step. As you go, write down open questions as they come up. Notice where sources disagree or explain things differently. The goal is to avoid passively consuming the content and to remain actively engaged.
And after you do some intense, focused learning, take a break. Go for a walk, do the dishes, anything kind of mindless. The system of deep work and then taking a break is called the focus-diffuse cycle. Your brain has two modes. Focused mode where you're intensely concentrating and diffuse mode where your mind wanders. Both are important. Diffuse mode is where your brain processes everything in the background and makes connections. So don't feel guilty about breaks. They are part of the system.
Besides using multiple sources, I have another unusual technique. Once I have a few topics going, I don't study one thing until I master it and then move on to the next thing. Instead, I rotate between different topics, which is a technique called interleaving. It might go something like system design on Monday, data structures on Tuesday, and music on Wednesday. It can be beneficial for topics to be related to each other, but it's not necessary. I actually stay more engaged when I switch things up regularly. This works because it keeps your brain active and prevents autopilot. It forces you to discriminate between concepts instead of just pattern matching. And sometimes it creates connections across domains in ways that are super fun when you see them.
Speaking of using multiple modalities to learn, that's actually exactly why I love Rosetta Stone. It's one of the most well-known language learning programs in the world, and it's designed to teach languages the way you learned your first one, through immersion and context. I used it to learn German before moving to Germany for grad school, and now I'm using it to learn French, so I can actually talk to my Swiss family instead of awkwardly just nodding along at dinner. What I really appreciate is their immersive approach. Instead of just memorizing vocab lists, you're matching native speaker audio to real-life visuals, listening, speaking, and thinking directly in your target language. It forces that active learning we've been talking about. The most important part of learning a language is learning how to actually speak. True accent, Rosetta Stone speech recognition technology listens to how you pronounce words and phrases and gives you real-time feedback, helping you sound more like a native speaker with every lesson. If you've been putting off learning a new language, now is a great time. With the link in my description, you can get over 60% off an unlimited lifetime subscription to all 25 languages, which is great for the curious among us. You can use it on the app or desktop, and the lessons are short and easy to fit into a busy schedule. I'll put that link at the top of the description. Learning languages has been a constant throughout my transition into machine learning. And this form of interleaving has been a great way to keep my study time engaging. To do interleaving well, rotate topics across days, not within single sessions. We're not trying to multitask here. And it can be helpful to hold on this until after you've got a baseline in a subject.
Step three, integrate. So, at this point, we've spent some time learning with several resources, making notes, asking questions, and spotting differences. Now, it's time to integrate everything we've learned into one mega document. This is one of the most important steps. You're going to take all of your notes from your different sources and rewrite them in your own words. Reconcile the differences between sources. If source one says X and source two says Y, figure out why that is. This forces you to actually think about what you're learning. If you're a more visual learner, add diagrams or charts to your notes during this phase. A critical thing here is to make sure your final notes are as simple as possible. This is essentially a version of the Feynman technique that says if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it. So, write out explanations like you're teaching a smart friend who knows nothing about the topic. A perfect example for this is math and formulas. When I see a formula for the first time, it means literally nothing to me. It's just a bunch of squiggly lines. What I need to do is translate each symbol. I can't just look at a formula like this and move on. Instead, I write something like, "We're taking each value, subtracting the average, squaring that difference, adding all of those up, and dividing by how many values we have." After I do this once, when I see the formula again, it actually makes sense because my brain has something to grab on to.
If you're working on a practical skill, this is also a great time to apply what you're learning to a real project. It doesn't have to be big. Even a small implementation works as long as it captures the core concept. At the end of this phase, you should have simple, comprehensive notes that fully capture the topic and most importantly make sense to you. These notes will be a big help for you to reference in the future. But if you really want that knowledge to stay top of mind, you're going to need the next step.
Step four, retrieve. I'd say step four is the most important step. If you skip this, you haven't really learned anything. If you can't remember the concept without looking it up, you don't really know it. So, close your notes and write down everything you remember. Make flashcards with questions you wrote while learning or look like a crazy person and walk around talking to yourself out loud about the topic. This is my preferred technique. If I get stuck while doing this, that's a gap I need to fill. I work on this by highlighting the concepts in my notes that I'm struggling with so I know to practice those more. If this is all getting really easy, one level up is teaching. This is the ultimate form of retrieval. You can join study groups where you explain concepts, write blog posts, make videos, or answer questions on forums. This forces the deepest level of understanding because you have to anticipate questions and explain from multiple angles.
Step five, schedule. So, let's say your studying is going super well and active recall is no problem. At a guess, it still isn't going to stick if you've just done one recall session. Instead, you need strategic repetition over time. That's what moves things from short-term memory to long-term memory. A spaced repetition technique that works well here is to review the same material at increasing intervals. So, the first review might be the same day, like in the evening if you learned in the morning. The second review the next day, the third review three days later, the fourth review a week later, and so on. Each time you successfully retrieve something, the interval gets longer. If you can't retrieve it, that interval was too long. So just shorten it, try again. At one point, it will finally stick for good. But only if you do this last thing: sleep. You got to sleep. I don't care how good you are at studying or how smart you are. Sleep is when your brain consolidates learning. Don't sacrifice sleep to cram more studying.
So that's it. Five steps. Prime, learn, integrate, retrieve, and schedule. Prime yourself to get the big picture first. Learn actively with multiple sources and interleaving. Integrate everything into simple notes in your own words. Retrieve and schedule spaced repetition to make it stick.
Now, if this all sounds great, but you're struggling to stay consistent with your learning, check out my video on that that's up next. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.