Speaker 1: Everyone is a student including you. Lifelong learning is a life school 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 out a lucid dream just so you cram one of the two hours of sleep that your mum 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 calls having a no life, rice eating, 20 hours a day studying good at everything type of student, the Asian student. And not to toot 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 studied 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 two hours a day but have a more fulfilling and more efficient session but deep work is just a concept and it's very general and there are many steps like steppingstones 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 two hours a day. So if you only had two hours a day to study, what would you do? You wouldn't make pretty notes and highlighting 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're better off 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 actually prepare you for the exam itself because you just learn 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 memorise and there are many sites and I personally use PMT and save my exams and I realised 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 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 span 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 times 7? 56. What's the power 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 memorising everything like times table 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. The next section is about distractions. Distractions are like kryptonite to students, Bane to the arthropods, social interactions to emotes. 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 two 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 two 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 and 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 two-hour study session because two hours realistically is a very short time especially if you're going to go from six eight hours down to two. For example I'm gonna do plant reproduction in this two-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 destruction 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 know 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. Then 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. And 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 burned out and exhausted from studying. So make sure to do practical focus 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.