How to READ so that you ACTUALLY RETAIN Information (Live Lecture)

I recently read this book. Uh it's a book on product strategy and I read this book which is 300 pages. Um it took me about an hour and a half and I did it on the flight here. One of the most common questions people ask me actually the lady next to me on the flight was asking me about this as well. Uh is how you can read 300 pages of a book and have knowledge that is useful at the end of that. actually remember what you read, be able to make decisions, put that into practice, and not need to, you know, basically come to the book every single time you need to access that knowledge. Again, at the time, I also didn't have my normal tools of the trade. Like, I didn't have my iPad with me. So, instead, I just wrote a bunch of notes on the back of my hand, which you can maybe still see. I'll check a photo of what my hand looked like um later. That's all I had. But all I had was my book, my seat, a pen, my hand, and uh I was able to get through this book and get a lot of confidence in terms of this knowledge. And so in this video, what I want to do is break down that process of exactly what I'm doing when I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, the little micro strategies that I'm using that make it much easier to handle this overwhelming amount of knowledge, and then I'm also going to try to break that down in terms of how you can put that into practice yourself. Because the ideal way of learning something, there's not always a way that you can perform every single time. Like in this example and lots of other examples when I'm traveling I'm not able to do like the perfect learning session. I don't have one to two hours uninterrupted with you know all my utensils out. Sometimes I need to have you know absorb a piece of knowledge in 10 15 minutes and then use it straight away in a meeting. You know sometimes I'm in the back of a very dangerous Uber in the streets of India and I have to review stuff. In those situations you still need to be able to make learning work. So I'll share a little bit of the tips about how I change the ideal sit situation into the in practice version of that technique. By the way, if you are interested in product strategy, I highly recommend this book. When you're learning from a book or any source of information, you have to remember that the fundamentals of learning are all always going to be the same, right? You start off your brain confused, not knowing what to think about. So this is your brain. This is your enormous head. Uh and then this is a new knowledge. Let's represent that with a book. So when you're starting off, you have no idea what this book is going to teach you. You don't know what the knowledge is going to be. You don't know the information. concept density. You don't know anything about it. But the most important thing you don't know is you don't know how to think about it. That's the biggest bottleneck for learning is that if your brain is going to take this information and consolidate it and then turn it into long-term memory and be able to use it and apply that knowledge and solve problems, it has to know how to think about it. organize it. Imagine you are in a busy warehouse and then someone says, "Hey, I need you to we we're shipping things to Germany. Go like quickly. We have to distribute these things to Germany. " And you look into your warehouse and it's just all on the floor. There's no possible way you're going to be able to use that knowledge if it's not organized in a way that's meaningful and useful to learn. But we don't often think about how we're organizing that information when we learn. Most of the time what we are focused on is just like throwing the boxes inside the warehouse and just accumulating like stockpiling information as if as long as you just you know yeetated the box inside the warehouse it exists and you can use it which is just not the case. Right? In fact, it is so not the case because this warehouse is very, very clean. And it's very, very clean because there is an army of janitors and cleaners that constantly patrol around the warehouse. And if there's something that's on the floor, they will immediately incinerate it. And that's what your brain is doing. Any information that is just thrown around that doesn't fit anywhere, it it's not organized, doesn't understand why it needs to hold it, it will remove. And so that feeling of why do I need to learn this? It feels so irrelevant. If you have that feeling, your brain also feels that feeling. And you know what's going to happen? You're not going to learn it and it's not going to hold it. Why do I need to know this? If there's no reason, your brain will incinerate that. And so your speed of forgetting is extremely fast. So here's a principle you need to understand is that you will never be able to put information in faster than your brain can take it out again. Your speed of forgetting is extremely powerful and is biologically in tune because from your brain's perspective if it does not forget efficiently enough. Your brain will consume way too much of your energy and that's a survival risk. It's a life or death risk. So it's extremely efficient at forgetting. Whether you remember the exact date that Napoleon died is not life or death. So you cannot beat your brain's forgetting power. But you can trick your brain into

thinking it's important enough not to forget it. Essentially, that's really what learning effectively is all about. It's about tricking your brain into saying this piece of information which is not truly life or death. I'm going to present it to you and pitch it to you so that you see that maybe it could be life or death and therefore it won't forget it. And then naturally what happens is that your retention goes up, right? Right. So memory is not this thing that you like squeeze out like the like the stronger the memory gets. It's actually simply your brain not forgetting. It's the absence of this process that creates strong memory in this information consumption part. The key challenge that you need to start becoming aware of is what's happening to your cognitive load. Okay. So you should this graph that I'm about to draw for you remember this forever. you know, burn it into your eyes so every time you blink you can see it. This band in the middle represents cognitive optimum. Okay, so this is optimum. This is your cognitive load. This is time above and below optimum is the death zone. This is overload. This is underload. When your brain is in this optimum band, things click. You're in flow. Things make sense. It's coming together. It's a great feeling to have. This is the feeling that I had when I was reading that book in the plane is that I'm so excited about the fact that I'm reading this book because I can feel my knowledge expanding. You know, you know the brain expanding meme. Like you're moving your brain is moving down that ladder, you know, with each page that you're turning. It's a really great feeling because your brain loves learning. You know, it's wired to love learning. And so, you feel the fact that your knowledge is really growing. You see how useful this information could be and you can tell, you have confidence that this knowledge is going to stay inside your brain. That's what happens when you're in this optimum state. For most people, they're not in this optimum state very often. It might happen if there's a really good teacher that you love. There's a subject that you're really into. uh there's a particular topic that you're really passionate about and what you're learning is also particularly interesting and in that situation for a brief moment of time you might be able to enter into this optimum band but you know when you can enter into this optimum band really easily is when you're watching your favorite TV show when you're reading a book like a fiction book that you really enjoy when you're getting into you know your favorite movie you just love it you can't wait to see what unfolds you're engaged you're not falling asleep you're excited you're thinking about the events and the characters and the plot and how it comes together and you're thinking, well, who, you know, who who's the culprit? You know, where's the plot twist going to be? And you're thinking, well, could it be this person, but surely it can't be this person because of blah blah blah. So, you're trying to put pieces of the puzzle together. And what your brain is doing right now is it's learning. It's not learning from a book. lecture. It's learning from a movie. And that movie is teaching it about character and plot and all these tiny little arbitrary details that normally maybe you would have to highlight 16 times, write notes, rewrite them, review your flash cards, you know, for the next 3 weeks to hold that into your memory. But purely because your brain is engaged in this optimum band, it stays and you don't forget it. So over and under are really where the issues are. Those are the death zones. Those are situations where you will not remember what you learn. If you are in overload or underload, it is a better idea to just stop what you're doing, walk away, make some tea, go to sleep, do literally anything else that has more of a semblance of productivity because doing this is just a waste of time. There's no situation where you should ever feel that you are learning and that is okay and effective to be learning if you're an over or underload. So, what is underload? Underload is when you're very passive with your thinking. So this means that you're not really thinking about the information much. Overload is that you're thinking too much about it. So the secret really to learning really well is just to think about it well. See you in my next video. No, I'm kidding. Okay, so the things that put you into overload, one of the biggest culprits is overconumption. This is when you're taking in too much information too fast for your brain's ability to think about it. Right? So, if I say to you, okay, I want you to remember the following stream of numbers. Okay? Play this video at 1x speed. Try to follow along. I'm going to say some numbers you I want you to try to remember it. Actually, don't just remember it. Add them together. Okay? 1 2 Okay, so add them together. We should be at three now. 5 8 9 17 43 95 160. Okay, by now probably

most of you have felt my brain's ability to process has been exceeded. So that feeling that you just experienced, if you want to experience it again, rewind like 10 seconds. That experience, that is your brain entering into overload. The exact same thing happens when we read a book. The issue is that people don't realize how easy it is to enter into overload. Our brain is an incredibly powerful machine, but it actually gets overloaded very, very easily. You could be reading a single paragraph, two to three sentences, and enter into overload. What that means is that if you are only consolidating your knowledge, you're only really thinking about it, you're only trying to organize it after one or two pages or one or two chapters or every one or two weeks of learning, not only have you long exceeded your optimum capacity, you've actually been in overload for probably like 99% of that time. So, which means you've just wasted 99% of that time learning, which is also the reason why your friend who didn't spend any of that time studying, who is just going to cram it the day before, is going to do just as well as you. Cuz all they did is they just said, "I'm just going to not waste that time. " There is no real way to prevent overload if consumption is too high. So, as soon as this gets too high, you're entering into overload. So, that's a rule. You have to understand that. So what that means is one of the most effective strategies for preventing overload and therefore keeping you in an optimum band and therefore making you learn faster and hold on to more and therefore meaning that your actual ability to learn from reading is faster. One of the most important strategies for that is to stop reading. So you know that saying slow is smooth, smooth is fast. You know what's slower than slow? Nothing. Just stop. So you read the book and so if you were that lady next to me on the plane. Hi, nice to see you again. This is what you would have seen is that I would have been reading very intently and then every now and again I'll just stare off into the gap between the two seats in front of me and I'll just and then I'll usually make some kind of thing with my hand just thinking through things and then I'll be like okay. and then I'll rapidly consume a bunch more information. And you would have seen me do that for all 300 pages of this book. And that is basically me saying, "Hey, I've recognized I've entered into a situation where I'm at the cognitive peak. Any more than this, I'm entering into overload. " So, what I need to do now is I need to bring myself down to get ready for the next round. And that's organizing it. That's saying, "I've got too many boxes in the warehouse. You need to give me some time so I can organize the shelves. Let me organize the shelves. And sometimes it's very quick because you've got a shelf there. You can just put the box in. You know how to think about this information. You just slot it in there. It fits very quickly. Sometimes it takes a long time cuz you have to change your entire shelving architecture. You realize that the entire way you have been thinking about this topic is actually wrong. So now you have to go back and then rethink about this entire topic. That is very energy consuming and timeconsuming. But you still need to do it because if you don't do it, you're not going to bring your load level down. It's tiring. It takes too long. It's too hard to do. Okay, cool. So, just do the dishes instead. Okay, do something else. Don't don't think don't trick yourself into thinking you can learn without doing that. So, once you hit that level, you compact it back down. You reimplify it. You get to a point where you feel like, okay, the exact same amount of information because you've paused that same information I consumed that I looked at and I thought, man, this is a lot. I'm getting overwhelmed. that same information. You now look at it and you think, hm, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it feels pretty simple now. I I get it. I'm ready for the next one. And that is your trigger that you don't need to spend any more time here. You you're at the optimum band and now it's up to you to consume more information. Bring yourself back to the point where you're like, "Okay, there's too many ideas. I'm starting to get overloaded. " You pause and you bring it down. Every effective study system, learning strategy, learning system, for any type of learning is going to follow this band. Whether you are sitting there in a meeting, someone is talking to you about things, whether you're in a seminar, lecture, taking an online course, reading a book, it's all the same. It's just data is coming in. Data and information increases your load. And then your mental processes that allow it to be organized bring your load back down. The consequence when the load is going up and down is better memory, retention. Your brain is not going to forget it because it's gone through all this effort to organize it. You know, you're not going to be like, "Oh, where should I put this box? Should I put it here? Would it fit on this shelf? Or maybe I can change the shelving so that I can, you know, I don't have to make that decision. I can have the best of both worlds. If I change the shelving and then I move this and this and you move all of that stuff and it's organized and you put the box and it's like on the shelf and everything feels good and organized and now you're like, "Cool, time to throw it away and just take it off the shelf and bin it. " You're not

going to do that. It doesn't make sense for your brain to do that because it's gone through the process of evaluating and seeing how it all connects. And now when it looks at that piece of information, it doesn't see something on the floor to be thrown away. It sees this highly connected, valuable piece of information that is so clearly connected to all these other things. Surely if I remove this, something else is going to break. Let's not do that. That could be life or death from your, you know, monkey brain perspective. — Hey, it's Justin from the future here. I'm back here in my office. I just want to emphasize the point that I just made now in the video. It's a pretty black and white across every instance of learning that you find yourself in. There's endless permutations of it depending on whichever industry you're in, what you're studying, you know, the context of what you're learning. But in all of those different situations, even though the specific method or the technique or the tactic you use might change, this principle has to stay the same always. You have to abide by this principle otherwise you're going to suffer for it. And I think it's important for me to emphasize the principles because learning can be really complicated if you focus too much on individual techniques and individual tactics. The techniques arise based on what you need for that different situation and context. You shouldn't be focused on trying to learn the technique. You should principle that makes that technique work. And if you have mastery over the principle, then you can make any other technique work. And I also want to mention that if you want to know some of the other principles that I don't talk about in this video, uh, then a good single place to get a lot of that is going to be in my free weekly newsletter. You can think of it kind of like a an email miniourse. So, every single week I go through a principle or a couple different principles and a practical takeaway or a tactic that you can practice for that week. Uh, and it's delivered to you for free in your inbox. Uh it takes about 5 minutes to go through each email. And it's the type of stuff that I wish I had known earlier on when I was wondering how to read faster and retain more of what I read instead of spending those hours on like useless speed reading courses that actually just don't help at all. These principles are the ones that I think make the biggest difference. So if you want to check that out, I'll leave a link in the description for you to sign up. And for now, back to the whiteboard where I will explain how you can use this cognitive load principle for learning in any kind of environment even when it's not ideal. Now, how do you apply this in a situation like uh I was in where I didn't have access to a lot of the normal tools. Normally, if I'm reading a book that I think is really important, I need to have that. I'm going to have my iPad. I'm going to be drawing a mind map. consolidating that information. That's a very effective strategy that I've practiced for a long time. So, I I'm comfortable with that. And I would normally like it to do it in that way. But what happens if you don't have any of those strategies? So here are some of the more micro strategies that you can use to abide by these principles even when things are not optimum. So there's three tactics that I want to introduce. These three tactics are ones that you can apply in any situation. If you do have all of your adjunks, like you can write notes and stuff, you can still use this and it's, you know, even more effective because you can offload your thinking with your note-taking. But if you don't have that, it's still helpful. So, if you're just walking around, you're having a thought, you're reading a book, you're having a conversation, this is something that you can do mentally. Takes maybe as quick as five or 6 seconds or up to, you know, a few minutes of thinking, but it's something that you can perfectly do without needing to really be too mentally taxed while being extremely efficient. So, the first tactic is the nearest neighbor pattern. nearest neighbor pattern basically says that this new information that comes through you are taking that information in is in an isolated way, right? Because you can only read it like sort of one word at a time. And so when that information comes into your brain, it's coming in individually packaged. But that's not the nature of the knowledge, right? If it were truly each thing is individual, then a book that is written one way would be no different from a book written another way. as long as the information is all generally still there, right? You should actually be able to just get, you know, maybe like a information dump of everything, every fact that you need to know and it would produce the same value for you as an expert crafting a perfect lesson describing it. But that's not the case. And the reason is because when an expert is perfectly describing it or if there's a really well-ritten book that puts it together, it's making the connections between the ideas clear. That's where the value of information is. is not in the information. It is what the information means about another piece of information. It's the relationship and the network and the model or the pattern that it creates that provides value. When you gain new knowledge, the way you use that knowledge is by taking a new pattern, a new way of thinking, a new set of facts and then applying that to

your problem. So what the nearest neighbor pattern is saying is that this new piece of information that you're taking in this new set of concepts there is some pattern here and you don't know what it is and trying to figure that out is what increases that cognitive load. It is effortful. It takes a lot to try to think about how it all comes together. One way that you can try to shortcut this and it doesn't work every single time, but works enough times that it's always worth trying it out mentally is ask yourself, what is a pattern I'm already familiar with that is similar to this new pattern that I haven't yet discovered that if I were to apply this pattern, oh, I can see it fitting together. Let's say, for example, you're learning uh a new topic. You don't know what the pattern is, but you feel like perhaps the some something that you learned in your statistics knowledge, the way that you think about doing a specific type of data analysis, that pattern of thinking, you feel like, hm, I feel like these concepts are kind of talking about the same things. The relationships are very similar. The way I think about data analysis, maybe I can apply that to thinking about this instead. And then that can then open up all these new connections and make it much faster for your brain to connect. is not having to create new connections from scratch. It's leveraging off existing connections from your nearest neighbor. An example of this in practice is actually just creating analogies. So when you create an analogy, you're basically saying I have a pattern of understanding about common things. Like if I create an analogy about well like a warehouse, right? You know, with memory. So like most people understand what a warehouse is. box is or how to organize it or shelves. So this these are familiar patterns. You understand the connection between those things. No one is sitting there thinking, do you put the box on the shelf or the shelf on the box? You know, people already know that. And because you already know that, your brain has to do less thinking to figure it out. And that sounds stupid. Do I put the shelf on the box? But for a brand new piece of information with a new set of concepts, you don't know the thing that for an expert feels obvious for the beginner, it's a total possibility. So your brain is trying to figure all of that out the first time it learns it. And so with the nearest neighbor pattern, you're sort of skipping a few steps. You're saying, "Well, it could be this, this, or this. Let's try and apply these patterns to see if they fit and even if they don't fit if that's a good starting point for us to start rearranging from. Question people always ask me about um cuz I used to be a former medical doctor right and then I transitioned into education and entrepreneurship you know they always ask me whether I regret having gone through medical school because of the fact that I'm not medically practicing anymore. There's a big whole reason around why I don't regret that but one of the things is that medicine taught me so many useful patterns of thinking. so many ways of thinking about risk and diagnosis and treatment and disease and you know the nature of things you natural histories about teams it taught me so many of those patterns that I have directly translated through into the way that I think about education and learning in fact I actually believe that one of the reasons why I think about learning in the way that I do is because I saw learning through a medical lens to begin with and that formed the foundation of how I framed everything And so even if you're a beginner at a topic, don't feel a lack of confidence because you lack expertise. You know, everyone lacks expertise at the beginning, but have confidence in the other things that you've learned. It could be completely unrelated and still be the nearest neighbor to this concept. So this is something that you can actively do when you're reading through uh you feel like you're getting over overloaded, you just pause and you think a little bit to see if you can find a pattern. So on the plane, this is one of the strategies that I use the most. Um I already have some understanding of a product knowledge and product strategy from other uh things that I've learned. So I'd be looking at this and I'd stop for a bit and then I compare it with the pattern that I had from these other ones to see the similarities and differences. And by allowing me to do that, I found the similarities and the differences. And not only did it help me create the pattern to store this information, it also meant that I had more nuanced questions because I could see how it's similar or different. Instead of just saying, "Oh, okay. This is what it's telling me to do. Therefore, that's what I need to do. " I was able to contrast that, saying, "This is what it's telling me to do. " But I also know this other thing is saying something that's conflicting. Which one is true? Are they both true? How would they both be true? So, you see, the questions are becoming more nuanced. What that means is that my brain is operating at a higher level of expertise because those questions wouldn't have even been things I thought would have been relevant before that level of expertise. That's a good sign. So that's the first strategy. Nest neighbor pattern. You can use this for any type of learning all the time. The second strategy is to visually shape the knowledge. If you have seen any of my other videos, even a couple of them, you probably have heard me talk about mind maps at some point, right? And that's kind of what I became well known for is like the mind map guy, you know. Uh funny fact, uh someone wrote a book on learning and in it they had a method of mind mapping and they actually labeled it the Justin Sun

method of mind mapping and they wrote down the steps and all the other stuff. Yeah, it's a funny story because they never asked me about this. Uh they never got my permission. So yeah, out there is this textbook on learning and in it it's called the Justin song method of mind mapping and they also because they didn't ask me actually they got it wrong. But anyway, the reason I'm so big on mind mapping is because when you do a mind map correctly, not a bad one, bad mind mapping is is a waste of time, right? Just drawing out, you know, different thoughts. But when you do mind mapping correctly, you start organizing the information in a way that feels spatially meaningful to you. So here's what spatially meaningful means. Let's say that I've got two concepts here. uh this concept, the green one, and then one. These are green because they're related to each other. They're talking about very similar things. Okay? So, there is a connection between these two. Now, if I created a mind map that looks like this and then I connect it together like this. This is messy. You know what this looks like? This looks like a placenta. If you've ever seen a placenta, you know that doesn't look like anything. This is very unshaped. It's very memorable. This is a blob of information. So, when you look at this, you realize it cuz it's on paper. You realize doesn't really make sense for me to arrange the information like this. It makes much more sense to bring this red one down here or bring this one up here and then bring these two things closer together. So, instead of it looking like this, it makes much more sense for it to look like this. These two maps are the same thing. This the same information. I'm going to connect this red one cuz it's bothering me. There we go. These two maps rep represent the exact same information. And you can see that this has a more distinctive shape than this one. Now, what we do when we deliberately shape it is we actually lean into this because we're leaning into the spatial part of our memory because the spatial visual memory is often much stickier and stronger than our ability to just remember words and concepts by themselves. Uh let me show you what I mean by leaning into the shape a bit more. Okay, so these two things and these two things, they're clearly, you know, they're related to each other. So, I'm going to actually bring them out. And this relationship over here, I'm actually going to pull that a little bit more. So, now it's going to look like this. Okay. So now if you look at this shape, this shape is unique. And so when you apply this to an entire topic, you end up with the shape of that topic or that shape of those concepts being unique reflecting the nature of the connections between them. It's kind of like if you imagine a city with a bunch of different highways, when you look at just how the roads are connected in a city, you can actually get a sense for where the important areas of that city are because typically the roads are connecting the important areas together. And so similar to this, the spatial arrangement of the information can help you remember which things were important and in what way they were important. It's that situation where you remember where you wrote your notes. You remember the corner of the page. You remember even what pen you were using when you wrote it, but you just can't remember what it is. That's your spatial memory existing when your conceptual understanding is not there. So when we combine the idea of thinking relationally, creating schemas that are already resistant to being forgotten and then lean into the spatial aspect of the memory, it means that it's much easier to remember that information that creates a memory cue. And again, because we are deliberately trying to create spatial arrangement, it forces us to challenge whether this is actually right or not. You might be thinking, okay, I'm going to bring this out, bring this out. And as you do that, you are deciding, is this the best place to bring it? Could I move this over here? Could I move it over here? Which other things could it be potentially more related to? And that deepens your level of thinking and again

produces higher quality learning. You can do this process even without having a mind map available. Obviously, it's a lot easier if you can write it out. Uh but again that lady on the seat next to me what they would have seen is that I'm reading through the book and I was actually doodling with my hand just different shapes that I thought could potentially represent this little cluster of information. So there was this thing that was like you know there is uh like eight different things to think about and mentally the imagery that I created was like this. I created a vin diagram of three different things with an arrow going through a line and then that's splitting into two. It looks like a sideways alien human now that I draw it like that. But uh this is the imagery that I created for myself. There were three prerequisites that have to achieve a certain threshold at which point there are two other factors that matter. So that's the information that I created. And so I spent 30 40 seconds just playing with a few different shapes that I feel represent how that concept fits together. And so that allowed me to take one and a half pages of information and have a really clear visual memory anchor to frame everything in. And that not only allows me to improve my memory, but increases my ability to consume as well because now I've got a shelf. The shelf is ready. It's there. So that information is able to slot in more quickly. And that functionally increases my reading speed. I'm not in a situation where I'm reading each line thinking, "Oh, what does it mean? " I'm now in a position where I'm reading each line thinking, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. " So, it's more almost of a skimming, just confirming that it makes sense as opposed to, you know, feeling really stressed about where to fit everything as I go. So, that's the second strategy. That's visually shaping. And the third strategy is an active reframe. Active reframe is a very useful technique for whenever you're learning something where there is an existing paradigm of how it's normally taught or thought about. If most people think about this in a certain way or if it's very common for it to be presented in a certain way, an active reframe uh can be especially helpful. So, especially in STEM fields, uh this is particularly useful. An active reframe means that you take that same piece of information. So let's say whatever this is. We're taking this information and we're asking ourselves what is a deliberately different way we could frame and think about and organize this information. You're creating this shape which is fine but what's a completely different shape that we could create? set of connections that we could create? The reason that an active reframe is so helpful is because if we are learning about things where there is an existing pattern and it's commonly taught in that existing pattern, then it may mean that when we use the nearest neighbor pattern, what we get to is that the pattern we create is actually identical to the way that we think about another topic. So what happens is that the pattern loses its meaning because it's no longer helping you to remember it because everything is remembered through that pattern. So imagine if every single thing that you learned was always before, during, after. Every piece of information is It's obvious that it's before, during, after. Remembering that pattern before, during, after is meaningless cuz it's no longer unique. And so sometimes we actively change from the nearest neighbor to a slightly further neighbor pattern just to make it unique and more distinctive for us. A very practical way of looking at an active reframe if you're learning for a professional setting or if there's a problem to solve is you just think about it in terms of how will I use this information? How else So, as I'm reading through the book, I'm thinking about it in terms of okay, what does this mean for me planning my product? Thinking about my product strategy. So, that's one frame that I'm looking at it from. And I create lots of different visuals and shapes and patterns and I'm thinking about it. It's all making sense. And at some point I'm also thinking, okay, what does this mean for the rest of my team? What does this mean for recruiting? What does it mean for the different types of roles and responsibilities? Where are the, you know, gaps in the way that I'm currently thinking about the strategy? That reframe makes me look at that exact same information again, but through a different lens. And by looking at it through a different lens, I pick up on new connections. And again, that deepens my understanding and it allows it to come together in a more holistic big picture. You can also do an act of reframe anytime that you feel you can't find a nearest neighbor. So you might try a nearest neighbor, you might try to visually shape it, but you still feel like pretty overwhelmed with this information. In that case, try an active reframe. Try to connect it to a problem or an application or you know some way that you are going to be able to use this information that's different to how you were initially thinking about it because the way obviously wasn't working. So actively shift to a different frame and see if you can find a pattern that feels more meaningful, more intuitive um and let you hold on to that information. So these three techniques basically on repeat and then anchoring just a few key statements you know like you know I wrote a lot of

stuff on my hand but still it was only one back of a hands worth of notes that I wrote. uh allowed me to summarize the most important points from that book because I would do this stuff and then I would actively reframe most of them into what are the key decisions I need to make as a result of this information. And so what I wrote on the back of my hand were the key decisions I would need to make. And by thinking about the key decision, I was able to unlock that pattern of everything involved in making that decision. Um and I could get away with not having to write any notes. So that's one example of how you can use these techniques to apply this principle in practice even when you don't have everything else. All you need is your brain. And if you interested in continuing learning a little bit more about learning when you do have more adjunks, when you are able to do more mind maps and building out a more robust learning system, then you might also want to check out this video over here.