Speaker 1: We ran a poll on our YouTube community, and not surprisingly, the majority of us agree, studying is boring. But I've spent over 10 years building my learning skills to now teaching them in a program, StudyQuest, and I never thought I'd say this, but studying is kind of fun. So I want to share three lessons from my personal journey that have made studying not just bearable, but actually enjoyable. If studying is boring to you, you're not hitting the learning sweet spot. The way that you're studying doesn't engage your brain to enjoy learning. Robert Bjork describes this concept called desired difficulties, where there's an optimal level of effort we need to expend a sweet spot in order to both enjoy and learn from studying. If it's too easy, we'll get bored. But if it's too challenging, we'll get frustrated and also bored. Think of it like playing a video game. Let's use Valorant. As you get better and you win matches, you get to rank up and queue against more competitive players. But what if you were only allowed to play against complete noobs, you know, like first-time players? The first few pub stomps, you know, might feel pretty satisfying, but eventually you're going to get really bored and then stop playing. On the other end, if you're thrown into matches against the best pros in the world, you're going to get steamrolled over and over. And no matter how much effort you put in, they're just too good. And yeah, you'll probably also get bored and stop playing. Our brain enjoys a challenge, but not futility. If it feels pointless to try, both trying too hard or not trying at all, that is really hard to enjoy what we're doing. But if we hit that challenge sweet spot, which Bjork found to be just a little bit outside of our comfort zone, it's addictive to our brain. And yes, this is partly why we can play video games for five straight hours without feeling bored. But there's a very important nuance to desired difficulties that I want to talk about. Just because we hit that sweet spot doesn't necessarily mean it's better for learning because studying and learning are not the same thing. Studying is like the physical actions and the study techniques that we use. Learning is what we get out of using those. So it's more than just about making it more effortful. We need to hit that sweet spot for the right type of effort. For example, I can make practicing flashcards more challenging by dimming the lights in the room or putting a movie on in the background. Like, sure, that's more challenging, but it's not really going to help me get more out of doing flashcards. So the question I ask myself when I'm bored isn't just how can I challenge myself more, but how can I challenge myself to think about what I'm learning more? Reviewing the same flashcards 10 times or even 20 more times for my exam, it's more challenging, sure. And in hindsight, regrettably, that's something I used to do a lot in medical school with Anki and RemNote. But challenging myself that way with doing more reps doesn't make me think about the information any differently. I'm not learning anything new when I review that flashcard again. Therefore, I'm not challenging my brain to think and I'm going to get bored. What if instead you laid out five flashcards on your table and then you challenged yourself to find what are the similarities and differences between these different concepts? Or how can I describe what this flashcard is saying using an analogy? Turn it into a game and now you're engaging your brain to think differently. So next, if you're the type of student that can't focus on a subject, then you don't see why it matters. I'm sure you've probably thought while studying, why am I learning this? Because this information is useless and I'm never going to use it. If you have to ask yourself that question, then you need to make it matter and make it more relevant. I'm not going to lie, in medical school, there were a lot of classes that I felt this way about, particularly like biochemistry and obstetrics. But I found allergy medicine really interesting and fun to learn about. And I'm positive now it's because I personally suffer from terrible allergies. I have food allergies, I can't eat peanuts, cashews, and other nuts. I can't drink alcohol without turning into a tomato. You know, being outside all year round makes my eyes and my nose cry. I can't have pets because of dog and cat dander. Even my own sweat breaks my entire body out in hives. And because allergies impact me on such a deep and emotional level, learning about how that works was like learning about myself. It was like I was solving my own problem. So that got me thinking, if I can figure out a way to understand how the thing I'm studying is used to solve real world problems, would that make it more interesting? And the answer was absolutely yes. Like say you're in physics class learning about frequency and pitch and all you see are the equations. It's a pretty elusive concept to grasp and it's hard to see how that's useful. But what if instead you learned it in the context of how a piano works or how a guitar produces music? Now all of a sudden understanding sound waves and frequencies and pitch becomes super interesting because it's relevant to how it's being used in the real world. So my point is, if what you're learning seems boring or irrelevant, then make it relevant. Ask ChatGBT, how is this concept being used in the real world? Watch documentary about it or watch some YouTube videos about it. Read up on case studies. If we can understand why a concept matters to solve our own problems or how it was used to solve other people's problems, especially the people that we admire or look up to like other creators or influencers or celebrities and stuff, it immediately becomes much more interesting and enjoyable. Finally, studying might be boring because you view it as a chore. Not a lot of people get a dopamine rush from taking out the trash or cleaning the toilet. Those are things that we see we have to do, not necessarily the things that we want to do. But you can change your perspective and stop viewing studying like a chore. And the reason this works is because of how our brain interprets perceived control. When we feel like we have no control, we get stressed out, hopeless, and then we lose motivation. But if we can reframe our mindset to look at things through a lens of gratitude, we can actually enjoy it. Because the only thing that we can't control is our mindset. It's like if you're baking a cake for your friend's birthday and you think, ugh, I have to bake this stupid cake because they want it. It's going to be such a drag. That statement in itself comes from a place of having no perceived control. But if you think instead, I want to make this cake because I know it'll make them happy and I like doing nice things for my friends. Then it becomes something you actually enjoy. You've regained control because you want to do it for your own fulfillment. And so think about this in terms of studying. If you know you're going to spend 20 hours studying for next week's exam, like that's for sure going to happen. How do you want to approach it? You can either be stressed out and feel like you have to study like it's a chore, or you can accept it, relax, and enjoy the process. The choice is yours. You're going to study 20 hours either way. Do you want it to be stressful or do you want it to be joyful? Now, if you'll notice, the thing that each of these three lessons have in common is how they're focused on what's happening in our brain versus what's happening on our computers or on our notes. And that's because enjoying learning has nothing to do with the actual study techniques or the fancy apps we use. It's all about the way we train our brain to think about information, to make it matter to us on an emotional and relevant level, and to see it from a class half full versus half empty point of view. These are all topics and mindsets that Mike and I dive really deep into in StudyQuest, our learning skills program to help you all build systems to learn smarter and faster in less time. So if that interests you, definitely check it out. Enrollment will be opening up again soon, or it might already be open depending on when you're watching this video. In any case, I hope these lessons were helpful for you. If you want to know how I tricked my brain to be addicted and love studying, you're also going to want to check out this video right over here.