Efficiently Chunking

Interleaving

Shuffling multiple cards or decks of cards together, each card representing a skill or concept you’re trying to learn.

Jumping back and forth between different problems and situations that requires different techniques or strategies.

• Do this once you have the basic idea down.

• Helps you recognize patterns and boosts your creativity.

Spaced Repetition

Watering Seeds in a Garden.

Repeating what you’re trying to learn, but spacing this repetition out.

• Don’t Cram learning, it’ll make a terrible knowledge base.

• Gradually increase the time intervals between the sessions.

Deliberate Practice

Going to Failure in a Workout.

Focusing your attention to something harder.

• Adds balance to your studies.

Recall

Neural Hooks

Calling back on a concept without referencing the material.

• Deepens neural pattern, this is how you actually learn and begin to chunk.

• miles better than rereading

Doing

Jumping into the Swamp

Getting straight into the thick of it.

• the greatest test of your competence besides teaching

Teaching

Becoming a sensei with a dojo.

Imparting knowledge, skills, and values to others.

• Involves finding a clear way to explain difficult concepts.

• The greatest test of competence and extremely humbling.

• Reinforces understanding

Analogy

A tarp with the number of tents depending on relatability.

A way of realizing one concept is somehow like another.

• The first thing you should do when trying to learn or understand a concept.

• Links the concept to information you already know.

Work-through Examples

Looking at a Recipe before baking. Listening to a song before playing it. (Pre-Chunking)

A demonstration on how to solve a particular problem or task.

• Reduces cognitive load

• Focus not on the individual steps but the connections between them, what they add to the holistic whole, then you’ll see the key features and underlying principles of a problem.

Enriched Environments

Living in a vibrant, stimulating city filled with diverse opportunities for growth & exploration.

Being surrounded by people alike. (Driven people, creatives, intelligence.)

• Create new neurons

• Drive creativity

• Catch blind spots

Flash Cards

Looking at a picture in a photo album and recalling the memories associated with it.

A learning system designed to help you memorize concepts, facts, definitions, or procedures.

• Utilizes Recall, Interleaving, and Spaced Repetition

Overlearning

A dancer who rehearsed the same choreography repeatedly until every move becomes instinctive.

Learning after grasping what you can in a session.

• Does not deepen understanding

• Great for creating automaticity in behavior

Chunks

Faint puzzle pieces that darken with practice and connect with understanding.

Compact packages of information your mind can easily access.

• Unites bits of information through meaning.

• Can expand

• 3 steps to chunking

• Best chunks are ingrained

Illusion of Competence

Walking on a thin layer of ice, believing it’s solid ground.

Deluding yourself into thinking you understand the material you’re studying.

• Rereading (w/o Spaced Repetition).

• Excessive Underlining or Highlighting.

• Sticking to Unchallenging Work.

• Merely Glancing at a solution.

Mistakes

Unexpected detour on a road trip.

Unintentionally performing an incorrect action.

• Reveals blind spots in your knowledge and allows repairs.

• They are great for learning, so don’t be a perfectionist and be wrong ASAP.

Law of Serendipity

Lady Luck favors the one who tries.

Mining coal for years and one day finding a spot teeming with the rarest gemstones on earth.

Einstellung

Thinking you’ve lost your glasses when there right there on your head.

Having a cognitive bias that blocks you from making connections or solving a problem.

Handwriting

Carefully handcrafting a piece of furniture instead of assembling it from a pre-made kit.

Writing text by hand using a pen, pencil, or other writing instrument.

• Assists memory formation & deeply encodes new information because the brain’s connectivity patterns are significantly more elaborate when writing by hand.

• Typing movements are more repetitive and less stimulating.

• You often can learn in the best way when you attempt to write about it.

Speaking

Anchoring a boat in a busy harbor.

Conveying information in spoken language.

• Sets auditory hooks to the material.

• You can choose what hooks are set.