Speaker 1: This is my calendar. My calendar says that I should be self-studying some Python right now. However, I'm currently lying here, scrolling, eating random things, and watching anime. If you're anything like me, you really did have every intention to self-study. You actually love learning new things, but somehow you always end up degenerating on the couch and feeling guilty and disappointed in yourself. So why does this keep happening? Short answer is your schedule. In this video, I'm going to talk about how to create your personalized self-study plan, custom to your lifestyle and your habits, so you can self-study consistently. Oh my god, I really wish somebody told me this like years and years ago, because I would always try to copy other people's self-studying schedules and then it always wouldn't work for me. So then at some point, I thought my brain was just broken. Plus, I also want to deep dive and explain to you how to use dopamine to trick yourself out of what I call a procrastination spiral. But first, I want to explain why your self-study schedule probably doesn't work right now. You get up in the morning at 7 a.m. Get ready, have breakfast and head over to work. You make some progress on your projects and take a couple of meetings before taking your lunch break at 12 to 1 p.m. Then you go back, do some more work, maybe take a couple more meetings and get off work at around 5 p.m. You head to the gym and then head home for dinner. Some of your days may look like that, but other days may look like this. It's 9 a.m. It feels so good to sleep in. Today is wide open. So much time to catch up on things. I can get some self-studying done. Catch up on some work I've been neglecting. Run some errands. Maybe get some groceries so I don't subsist on takeout. Even getting a workout. The possibilities are endless. But there are also some days like this. Oh god, who's calling me at 4 a.m. right now? The entire website is though? God damn it. Okay, okay, I'll be right there. Okay, so I gotta deal with that and then I also have two back-to-back meetings. All of us have many types of days with different schedules. Yes, it may not be exactly what I described earlier, but I just hope you can see that you don't have a single type of schedule. It's actually a combination of different schedules. So how do you expect for you to create a single self-studying schedule and expect yourself to stick to that schedule all the time? Maybe studying two hours before work works great if you have a predictable schedule day, but not so much if you're having a day in which your time is limited. But not so much if you're having a day in which your time and energy is being pulled all over the place and shit is hitting the fan. Let's now talk about the three most common types of days that all of us have and how to schedule a self-study time for each of them. After work or school, you may fall into the most common trap of thinking that you're actually going to self-study, but then find yourself to be too exhausted. But I have good news for you. Days like this is actually the easiest to schedule a self-study session and stick through with it. The most important concept for you to understand is the idea of energy management versus time management. Technically, do you have time to self-study after work or after school? Yes, you do. But what you don't have is energy. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, who is one of the lead researchers into expert performance, studied a sample of 30 violinists, tracking what they do throughout the day. He found that the top violinists would practice in intense, relatively short intervals, first thing in the morning and no longer than 90 minutes per session, followed by a break. They almost never practice more than four and a half hours, and usually after lunchtime, they wind down. Energy, motivation, self-control, all the things that make it so that you can get yourself to do things that you're supposed to do, starts off highest in the morning and then drains throughout the day. Since you spend most of your day at work or at school, you use most of your energy there, so you barely have anything left when you come home and you're trying to self-study. Okay, so let's talk about solutions. The easiest solution is to get up early and self-study before you go to school or go to work. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. But I know that doesn't work for everybody, because research shows that some people are genuinely night owls. Plus, some people's schedules might just not align, like if you're working night shifts. So instead, what I want you to focus on, it's about scheduling your self-study session when you have a high level of energy, self-discipline, and motivation. Plus, if you can, I recommend choosing the same time slot that matches your energy levels all the days in which you have a consistent schedule, because that just reduces decision fatigue and is easier to form a habit out of it. Your energy and self-control motivation can also be deliberately replenished, and we'll talk about how to do that later when I talk about dopamine theory.

Speaker 2: Whenever I have free time, I just practice my new anti-stress technique, transcendental procrastination.

Speaker 1: Next up is the open schedule. When you just happen to have a quiet weekend, holiday, whatever, you probably want to take the opportunity to catch up on some self-study. But suddenly that entire day just flew past, and you look up and it's like 12 a.m. and you haven't done anything at all, and it's time for bed. This is because of something called Parkinson's law. It states, work expands as you fill the time available for its completion. Say that if you have something that you have to do, and you have two hours to complete it, you'll finish in two hours. But the same task, if you had 10 hours to do it, then it'll take you 10 hours to do. So this work will just keep expanding indefinitely until it's suddenly time to go to bed. What to do about it then? You gotta make your brain think that it has a specific time, specific deadline in which your self-study has to be done. You can do this by two different ways. The first one is by scheduling an explicit commitment at a certain time. For example, I might schedule a time like 5 p.m. in which I'm gonna go hang out with my friends, have dinner, watch a movie, and not get home until really late. So that gives me a deadline that I need to hit. So I'm like, oh, I know I'm gonna study two hours beforehand, that means I have to start at three o'clock. The second method is an even more powerful method, and that is to schedule a commitment that's specifically associated with whatever you're self-studying. Like for example, I do these weekly lunch and learn live streams where I talk about like tech, data, and AI stuff, which linked in description if you want to check out. I need to make sure that I learn the things that I have to learn and I prepare before doing the lunch and learn, or else I would embarrass myself in front of thousands of people. That gives me a very strong motivating factor for me to do my self-studying, do the things that I need in order to make sure that it gets done before that time. For most of y'all, maybe it doesn't make sense for you to go use something like a live stream. But other things that you can do is to do like little accountability groups or check-ins with other people who are also self-studying, which gives you the urgency to do your self-studying before the check-in.

Speaker 3: It seems like you're unmotivated to do things because you're stuck in a loop of short-term dopamine rushes.

Speaker 1: All right, now let's talk about dopamine theory because this is especially important for the next schedule type. By the way, this is a fantastic episode from Andrew Huberman, but it's also like two hours long and goes into a lot of detail about dopamine theory. So if you're interested, do check it out. But what I'm talking about is two concepts that will help you use a dopamine theory to trick yourself into getting out of procrastination spirals when you just need that little boost. So number one is the nature of dopamine. Dopamine is often mistaken for the feel-good neurotransmitter, but actually it's more about anticipation and motivation. Andrew Huberman makes a great analogy about getting a sandwich. When you're hungry and you're thinking about food, and maybe in particular, you would love to have a roast beef sandwich on sourdough bread. Conveniently, you see that there is a roast beef sandwich on sourdough bread store right across from you. So when you see that, you actually have a spike of dopamine and you have this corresponding craving for that sandwich. With that spike, there's then a dip in dopamine, which gives you that craving, the motivation to want to go into the store and buy a sandwich. So you go and do that, you take a bite, you satisfy your craving, and then there's another spike of dopamine and you feel happy and satisfied. That's probably most situations. But maybe when you take a bite of that roast beef sandwich and it was literally the best food you ever had in your life, there would actually be a really big spike in dopamine, which then teaches your brain, wow, this particular sandwich store and roast beef sandwiches are amazing. However, say you walk across the store and you realize that the sandwich shop is actually closed or you actually buy the sandwich and it just tastes awful. This would then cause your dopamine to actually dip downwards and that's how your brain learns that it doesn't want to go to that particular store and just generally, maybe we don't like roast beef sandwiches. So yeah, dopamine is a way for your brain to learn what it likes and it doesn't like. So keep this in mind. This is very important to understand. So the second concept to understand is how dopamine works in your brain, like generally speaking, how dopamine works. Andrew Huberman makes this really good analogy about a tidal pool. Usually, you know, there'll be like little waves that go down and every wave would have like a little trough that goes underneath that, you know, etc, etc. So sometimes there's little waves and little dips and then sometimes there's really big waves and really big dips. And sometimes when you're having those really big waves and really big dips, one of those really large waves might actually cause some of that water to splash out of that tidal pool so that you're left with less water in total. So in this analogy, the water is the dopamine in your brain. So what's really important is that you maintain a good baseline level of dopamine, where else there's no dopamine for you to make any of these waves anymore, which would make you feel really tired, really drained, and just like not have any energy or motivation to do anything. So what you naturally want to do when you're in that state is to increase your dopamine levels as quickly as possible. So that's when you do things like scrolling on a phone, watching TV, something like that, just hoping that you get like a dopamine hit and just like a little bit of a spike. So unfortunately, this doesn't actually work because you're kind of generating that little burst of dopamine, but then it just goes back down again. So how do we get our baseline dopamine up when we're in that state so we can be motivated to do things like self-study? So the funny thing is, if you actually do nothing at all, the dopamine amount will slowly climb up again and you will gather more motivation. But there is actually a trick that can make your dopamine regenerate much, much faster. It is by doing something that you really, really, really hate. Hey, I don't like that. I don't like that one bit. Remember how we talked about dopamine is about anticipation? So if you think about doing something that you have learned that you really, really, really hate, you would have that big decrease in dopamine. But this is where the trick comes in. You see, what goes down must come back up. If there's a dip in dopamine, there has to be a increase in dopamine because you're glad that the thing is done afterwards. And with that spike in your dopamine, it correlates to having a burst of motivation. Isn't that really cool? Like I hate cold showers. Just the idea of going to a cold shower just makes me like want to just, I just, I just hate it so much. I can feel my dopamine dipping right now. I have this huge burst of dopamine afterwards and motivation and then I can get myself to get out of my procrastination and then start working. However, it is not socially appropriate or possible to go take a cold shower anywhere like if you're in public. Can't just like go dunk your head into the sink in cold water like you could, but that's really weird. So my emergency backup activity is by doing push-ups. I also hate push-ups. So I always get a little burst of motivation afterwards. By the way, in that Andrew Huberman episode, he also talks about the fact that people have varying levels of baseline dopamine. Like some people who are really, really lucky just have like really high dopamine, but other people just naturally have really, really low amount of baseline dopamine. Unfortunately, I found out that I am someone that has really, really low levels of baseline dopamine, which is why I get in that procrastination spiral so often. So if you're someone that also now knows that they have really low baseline dopamine levels, I promise you it's going to change your life. All right, so now let's go back to that third type of schedule, which is one of those days in which you just have like things popping up everywhere unexpectedly and you feel super overwhelmed. And that's where the dopamine hack really comes into play. So maybe you only have like 30 minutes in your schedule where you can do some self-study. So what you can do is do the dopamine motivation hack, get yourself that burst of motivation to be able to sit down and just study even for a short period of time. Not going to lie, these are not going to be days in which you're going to get a lot of work done, but generally speaking, it's good to try to maintain a habit of self-studying, even if it's for a much shorter period of time. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the sponsor of this video, Brilliant. Thank you, Brilliant. If you're watching this video, you're probably someone who's interested in self-study. I don't know why you would be watching this video otherwise. So if you're interested in learning about STEM subjects specifically, I would highly recommend using Brilliant. Brilliant is a STEM learning platform that specializes in interactive hands-on learning. I first knew about Brilliant years ago when I was recommended by Metta when I was interviewing to actually go on Brilliant to review my stats. And after I did that, I genuinely can say that it is one of the first places I look at whenever I want to learn something new. That's because it's just so effective for learning STEM subjects that are notoriously hard to learn because there's such like abstract concepts. But with Brilliant, they have interactive problem-solving stats where you can like click things and then things pop up and then you just get like bursts of dopamine and motivation. So you're actually really enjoying learning in the process. They have timeless course offerings like math and stats and coding, which y'all know I can't recommend enough. And they have continuous new course offerings as well. One of my favorite more recent courses is Introduction to Large Language Models. It's a course that doesn't require any coding abilities. It just does a really good job of giving you an intuitive explanation of how large language models work, which I definitely recommend that you learn about because AI is here to stay. And the ones taking advantage of new technologies will be the ones that have the most opportunities. If you want to go deeper into the subject, they also have a couple of courses on neural networks, which I really like as well. You can join a millions of people already learning on Brilliant and head over to this link over here, also linked in description to get started for free. If you go through my link, the first 200 people will get 20% off an annual membership. All right, back to the video. So I hope that was a helpful video. I know there was a lot that happened. So let me know in the comments what you think about this video and also report back if you're actually going to go try the dopamine motivation hack. Okay, so I'll see you guys in the next video where I live stream.