Why your studying routine is f*cked

You want to know why? This is why. You know, mine used to be fucked too, so don't worry. When I was in university, I failed the first 2 years. I had to meet with the Dean of Science and had to tell him why I should stay at university, and I made up an excuse. Well, it was actually, it was a real excuse, but it was a fake excuse. My good excuse was that my dad was sick, which he was, but the real excuse was because I was lazy and I wasn't paying attention I was doing the opposite of what I'm about to talk about in this video, right? So, if your study routine is messed up, if you think you could improve it, you're watching the right video. Why? Because I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Basically, my whole life revolves around maximising my energy for mental and physical capacity. And the mental part of things is to learn new things, to work on things, to create things. Like, that's my purpose for for being is to learn to create and to create to learn. That's my— if you put it in a circle, you could have learn here with a little arrow down to create and then another little arrow, right? Like, I don't want to say yin and yang, but it's— yeah, one can't exist without the other. Put it that way. So, the other day, I wrote an article which was 5 things or 6 things, 6— I can't even remember my own article. How good a start is that? See, this is why I need to optimize for mental capacity. But I wrote an article which was 6 techniques which helped me stay How to Study Machine Learning 5 Days a Week. Now, it was targeted at machine learning because that's— 2 years ago I started learning machine learning. Like, it's, it's actually kind of funny. On this day 2 years ago, I started in this room at this desk learning machine learning, and it was by myself. It was online. So, basically, this is where these techniques have come from, right? How to optimize your study routine, because in the day it was just me sitting in this room studying. So, if you've got 10, 15, I don't know how long how long this video is going to turn out to be, but it's basically just me going to be riffing about the points in the article. So, if you want to just read it and get it over with, there's a link below. You can check it out, bookmark it, read it at your own pace. Otherwise, this video will go through them and we can kind of, kind of add a little bit more to each. So, to improve your study routine, stop doing the opposite of what I'm about to tell you. Pay attention to this, okay? Number 1, reduce the search space. And what do I mean by this? Well, when I first started learning machine learning, I Googled, "How do I learn machine learning?" And there was a lot, and I mean a lot of resources. And thanks to the internet, there's basically going to be a lot of resources on how to learn almost anything. Like, of course, the stuff at the forefront is going to be a bit scarce. That's, that's where you optimally, ideally want to end up is you becoming that person at the forefront. But to get there, you're going to have to build some foundations, right? And so, when I googled, "How do I learn machine learning?" a whole bunch of different resources came up. I, I was overwhelmed, right? I had so many options that I basically had no options. So, what did I do to circumvent that? Well, I spent a week, or however long timeframe. I'm going to say a week because that's what I remember doing. I spent a week researching, trying to figure out where the, where the commonalities were, right, for my particular task, which was I wanted to learn machine learning. And so, I thought about what my background was, which was not much. I'd never coded before. If you're not sure what machine learning is, it's, it's your writing computer programs to, to get a computer to do something that you're not explicitly telling it what to do. But this video isn't about machine learning, so I'll let you Google that. And so, there's a lot of different ways that you can do that. And because I didn't know anything about it when I first inspected it, I was like, holy crap, there's so much I have to learn. And truth be told, there is still a whole lot more that I have to learn. I'm only 2 years in. But what I did was researched, and then I went through, I spent a week going through, okay, where are the commonalities? Where are the resources saying that you should probably learn this? And then I started to pick up the patterns, right? And then I put it together and I streamlined it in my own curriculum, right? I created my own AI, self-created AI master's degree, and that formed the basis of my learning curriculum. And so, what that meant was rather than having a whole abundance of different options, right? Too many options that I had a paradox of choice. You know, when you go to the ice cream store and you're trying to pick out your different flavour, you'll be like, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, and then you go and there's like 30, however many flavours there are, 36 flavours, and you're like, "Okay, yeah, I'm gonna get me chocolate, honeycomb, peppermint," right? It's just all of them there. But when you've got lesser options, right, you find it's easier to make choices then. And so, me reducing my search base and creating my own structured curriculum that I'm going to go, "Hey, I've done my research. I think these are the steps," even if they're not exact, right, because you don't know anything about it, you might not know that they were the exact steps. I didn't know that they were the right steps to take. I could have, if I look back, I could have adjusted a little bit more, but the best action to take was just to take at least one step forward and then work out the rest on the way. Alright, if I— I'm saying "right" a lot. I really need to work on that. So, please comment below if I've been saying "right" too much so I remember this. I'm trying to improve the way that I speak. And so, taking one step forward allowed me to go, "Okay, is this the right thing to do?" That's okay if I say "right" when it's the right thing to do. And then, if it wasn't, I'd take a step back. If it was, I'd keep going. That is my approach to doing anything these days, is have a bias towards action. Make a decision, verify to see if it's the right one, keep going. So, when you're first beginning, when you're first trying to study, when you're first trying to learn anything, I think it's important to first become a researcher. Now, if you've never done this before, well, the internet, good news, has given you skills to do so. You probably actually have. Whenever you Google something, that is you being a researcher. And so, whatever field you're trying to get into, whether it be machine learning, whether you want to learn marketing, whether you want to learn health, another massive broad field with lots of different things that you could learn about, start by treating it as if you're a researcher. And then, if you want to get serious about creating your own online curriculum, it's— this is why people go to university, right? Because the curriculum is laid out for them. But this, my article, was kind of targeted to people who are wanting to learn things online by themselves, which is how a lot of education happens these days. When I was at university learning nutrition, I spent most of my time researching my own interest online. When I was failing pre-medicine for the first 2 years of university, I switched to nutrition because I clicked in my head, "Hey, I'm coming home and spending 4 to 6 hours a night just Googling different things about nutrition so I could perform better in the gym and build these pythons." You know what I'm talking about? So, number 1, reduce the search space. That was a kind of a long-winded explanation. That's how the rest of these are going to go, right? Because this is just a riff video. Reduce the search space. Pick something that you want to learn. Spend some time researching, finding out the commonalities of that field. If it's a large field, there's probably going to be a lot, but this is your task. This is your first task, is to figure out what are the trends, what are the things that, that you should be paying attention to. If you could ask the advice of some experts in the field, even better. They might be able to point you in the right direction. Create yourself a curriculum and go, okay, I'm going to read these 4 books, I'm going to take these 4 courses, and it's going to take me the whole of 2020. Something like that. That's, that's step 1. Choose something, reduce it down, create less options for yourself. Number 2, fix your environment. Look at this. I spend a lot of time here and I make it beautiful for a reason. There's basically nothing on there because if there was something on there, I would be distracted. And that's what you need to learn things, is you need a lot of time alone, whether you're trying to learn or create. You need a lot of time alone to really just hammer down and be you, your brain, and whatever you're trying to learn. I removed all the distractions from here. My phone is in another room. It literally is in another room right now, and All of my devices have permanent Do Not Disturb. Whenever a notification comes through, you've probably seen this before. Again, everything in here is non-revolutionary that I'm about to speak to you, but you've probably seen that once you get distracted from one little task, whatever you're in, it can take you up to 20 minutes to get back on task. And so, if I'm getting notifications on all of my devices while I'm trying to study, That's, that's a problem. So, to fix my environment, remove all of that. I've fixed my dock on my computer, on my Mac. It's not turned on because I'm focused on doing this video. That's another thing. One thing at a time. The myth of multitasking. There's no such thing. We can only do a single task at a single time, which is, I think this is, this is leading into point 3, but When you're trying to do, like, I remember when I was in high school, when I was trying to do an assignment and I had Call of Duty playing in front of me, and I've got my laptop here trying to type, and I've got Facebook Messenger just going, "Duh dum, duh dum, duh dum, duh dum, duh dum." And I wondered why I was always hitting the deadline and not, and I've been up till 4 AM the time it was due. It was because I was trying to do 3 tasks, and this is the same thing as before, right? Number 1, reduce the search space. When you're trying to do too many things, there's a Chinese saying, and we're going to get very wise right now, "Try to chase 2 rabbits and you end up with none." And now I have a really, really hard time doing this. I'm high on openness, which means I get excited about anything. I have shiny object syndrome, which is where this video will probably deter, which is why I have a little personal assistant with me that I use Basically every day I wake up in the morning. This is one, one step I do to fix my environment. I make my bed, I sit down at this desk, and I write down a list of things that I'm going to do during the day. Sometimes I've already written that list, so I don't even have to think about that, and I've written the list the night before. So this morning I wrote down 22nd of September 2019. CW, that's a project I'm working on, but that's secret for now. So a little checkbox there. Workout, still yet to do that. Did go for a bike ride and do some sprints this morning, but I'm going to do another workout later. Blog post, I write a blog post every day, so sometimes I don't even need to write that down because I already know that, but I do anyway because checking off the tick box is a good little success, dopamine tick. And the beautiful thing is, is once I've checked off enough of them, I can go back through this book and just flip over. If I'm thinking, "Oh, I didn't get enough done today, I didn't get enough done this month," I can just flip back through this book and go, oh wow, I've actually done a fair bit of things. I can go here, 5th of September, 6th of September, 9th September. Anyway, back to the list. I've got another one, plan week, because today is Sunday. It's actually a beautiful sunny day, so after this video I'm going to go for a bike ride. Plan the week, because on the week— on Sundays I reflect on how I spent my week and then plan the next week ahead. So I might go Sunday Okay, these are the 10 or so things that I need to get done. It's really longer than 10, it's like 25. These are the 25 things I need to get done throughout the week, and maybe I can do these 5 on Monday, these 5 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you get the picture. Another one, video, why your study routine is fucked. That's what we're doing right now. And there's a final one, start filming Oura Ring unboxing plus review. And this is the Oura Ring here. Well, this is the trial one. I've got the other one over there. I need to film the unboxing of that. So, that's another way I fix my environment, is I write down a list of things to do in the morning or the night before, and I don't do anything outside that list, which is very hard, but I've told myself or tricked myself or created the habit into finding more fulfilment from finishing off this list, and now this is why it's important to reduce the search space, I decided that what makes me happiest and what gives me the most fulfillment is creating and learning. And so, this is what these items are most related to. I decided, or created the habit, that I get more enjoyment out of doing these things than something like watching TV or, um, going out drinking or playing computer games or something like that. I'm not against any of these things, and I do do them time to time, but I've just figured out after trial and error— remember, a bias towards action— that these certain things, creating and learning, bring me the most fulfillment. So, number 2, fix your environment. Tidy up your room, remove distractions, keep your phone on permanent do not disturb. Really, I've, I've thought about it the other day when I upgraded my software to iOS 13. I basically don't need a phone other than like messaging. The rest of it is just a distraction, like email on the phone, and I don't have social media. That's another thing, I don't have social media. So, I tried that whole thing of only using it every so often, and that just— I'm all or nothing type person, right? So, I just cut it off. Instagram cut, Tinder cut, Facebook cut, yada yada ya. I just decided I'm going to work on these things and ignore everything else. Very hard to do, but with some practice it works out fine. It's now about 10 months without social media and I don't miss it. Number 3: Set the system up so you always win. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, Scott Adams, you should probably Google him. His way of thinking is where I've stolen this from. So that's his saying, is "Set the system up so you always win." Maybe someone else said it before him, but he is the one who implanted it in my head. And I've also decided to only drink out of chalices from now on. See this one? This is a Premier's mug because we won dodgeball. Remember, set the system up so you always win. And what this one in the article I talked about was sometimes you'll set out to complete a certain amount of study per day and maybe you're like, okay, I'm going to get through this next 3 sections of this course, or I'm going to solve this next problem. It's always problem 13. I get stuck on problem 13. I'll be putting it off, right? Because I know I'm looking at this pile of books, I'm looking at this course or this pathway that I'm going through, and problem 13 is staring me right in the face, and I've been working on it for hours, and I still can't solve it. So you know what happens? I go, I take a break, and I walk around for a bit, and I think, You know what? I'm done for studying today. I'm just getting madder and madder because I can't solve this damn problem and I'm not making progress and that is annoying. And so the next day comes around, I stare at my books and I stare at the course I know in my head I have to do. I wake up, I come out of bed and I go, "Ah, I gotta do problem 13." And you know what happens? Because I know and because I know how hard it was yesterday, I avoid it. Right, it's off my list because I'm not— it's a challenge, right, and it's hard. And now the way you set the system up so you always win is that you won't always be able to, to reach that certain goal in terms of, okay, I'm going to complete, uh, let's say a section per day. If you're doing— I remember when I started doing free CodeCamp online and there was, say, let's say 100 sections And I'm like, I'm going to do 100 sections, and if I don't do 100 sections, one a day for 100 days, well, I'm not going to be satisfied. And then it got to a point, I got to like section 37, and then I couldn't do a section in a day because I had things on, and I got disappointed, and it really demotivated me to keep going because I wasn't doing my set out goal of a section per week. And so, how you set the system up So, you always win is that you think about the things that you can control versus the things that you can't control. What can you control? I can control that I spend an hour studying this one thing for today. One hour or maybe 25 minutes or maybe less, maybe more, who knows? So, time-based parameters are very, very good ways to set the system up so you always win. So, you can go, "Okay, today I'm going to spend 2 hours studying." A lot of the time it will be— that will be one of my checklist items will be study. And I use a technique called Pomodoro, which is a 25-minute timer. You do nothing but one task for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, and then keep repeating that over and over again until you've done enough Pomodoros. So, my task in the morning might be study times 6 Pomodoros, and that will mean eventually if I complete 6 25-minute sessions, I'll get about 3 hours worth. So, that's something I can control, is spending that 6 Pomodoros, 6 25-minute sessions focused on a single task. I may not solve Problem 13, that drasky little Problem 13. I may not solve Problem 13 in that 6 Pomodoro session, but at least I've given it a red-hot go, right? I've said, right, I've caught myself. I'm going to improve. I promise you I will improve. I promise myself I will improve. I have to edit this thing later. And so, and I say so too much, so that's what I'm going to work on, right? And so, I need your help. When I put down 6 Pomodoros, I can control that. When I put down I'm going to complete a section per day, I can't really control that. And another really good way and another thing that I'm a real big fan of is the 100-day things, like where you go 100 days of code or 100 days of machine learning. Because all your goal is to do is to study that thing for a little bit of time every single day. I'm a real big fan of everyday things, which is why I move every day, which is why I create every day, because it's— that's how you can set the system up so you always win. Now, if your goal is to lose weight, maybe you set a target of 75 kilos and you try to lose weight for 3 months and you don't hit 75 kilos and you're disappointed. But change the goal to set the system up so you always win. Instead of losing 10 kilos, my goal is to stay active every day and eat healthily every day. You follow those two protocols, you have no choice but eventually you'll lose weight, right? I said right! Ah! So that's number 3, set the system up so you always win. Choose a time-based goal rather than a progress-based goal, and you'll probably figure out eventually. Challenge yourself in that time. What can I get done in this 25-minute session? What can I get done in this hour session? If you only had 1 hour to study or to work on something per day, like you was— a doctor diagnosed you with, with some terminal illness, you've only got 1 hour to work on the thing you want to work on today, or you will die. What would you work on? And again, these are kind of the 1, 2, and 3— reduce the search space, fix your environment, set the system up so you always win— are kind of all looped in within, within the same thing. It's think about the things that you can control versus what you can't control. Number 4: sometimes do nothing. You ever had those times in the shower where you just, you do some of your best thinking? Where the water's coming down and you're washing yourself, or you're just standing there, not like looking into space, and all of a sudden, this beautiful idea comes. It's like this rainbow, and you're just watching it so clearly, and it's like, where did this come from? And see, the value in— I did this course on Coursera, which is highly recommendable. It's a learning how to learn course, and you think about this. There's two ways of thinking, and this is kind of the greatest analogy for it. Is study like an athlete. So, how does an athlete train? An athlete doesn't train 12 hours a day, right? They can't. They train, they go and do a 2-hour or 1-hour hard intense session, then the rest of the day is, is for recovery. And when I go to jiu-jitsu, I go down there for an hour, I'm training my guts out, I'm working as hard as I can, And I stop, take the rest of the day off, let my body recover so I can come back in and do the same the next day. The same with studying. You can take that analogy. If you want to learn something, the brain really only has like 3 to 4 hours max. If you're checking all the boxes, some of the things I'm going to talk about in a minute, if you're checking all the boxes, you really only have 3 to 4 hours of really hardcore creative and learning capabilities per day, max. And I, in a night, in a world like today where everyone's far too busy, getting even 3 to 4 hours in is, is a, is a rarity. So, what you have to do is balance it out. Study like an athlete. This is where that set the system up so you always win comes in. Maybe you put down, I'm going to do 4 Pomodoros today, which adds up to about 2 hours. And so, for that 2 hours, you are going hard, and then for the rest of the day, you're letting things go off. And so, it comes back to the point— I'm saying so again. I'm gonna stop correcting myself because that'll get annoying. But imagine yourself as having 100 energy points at the start of the day. This is your 4 hours of taking in information. Now, if you're using like a smartphone and browsing through social media and reading garbage on the internet, you're going to be using up some of those energy points, which could be dedicated towards doing the work that you need to do. Which is why I got rid of all of my social medias. I'm not saying you have to, I'm just saying that this is one solution. This is what I found works for me. It's because I figured I've only really got 3 full hours of hardcore work every day. That's it. I got 3 hours, 3 to 4 hours, 5 hours if I'm really lucky, if I'm doing something amazing. Where am I going to spend those times? Now, if I'm sucking in information from Facebook, I'm sucking in information from Instagram, I'm sucking in information from news, I've only got 60 energy points left. Now I've got 2 hours. Now, if I keep doing that over time, my brain is wired to want the short-term goal. Studying is a long-term goal. You might think that you're not learning anything day to day, which you might even think that you're going backwards day to day, but don't compare yourself day to day. Compare yourself in 6-month blocks. Compare yourself year on year. What am I hardwired towards? I'm hardwired towards getting that short-term reward, which is that, that quick information. That's what we want, that quick information, which is why I had to cancel out all of, all of that quick information source for me. I only want the information that is hard to build because that is the the valuable information. That's, that's going to lead into number 5, Embrace the Suck, but we'll wrap up Sometimes Do Nothing. The premise of Sometimes Do Nothing is use your 100 energy points during the day as best you can, and when you've used them up, do nothing, right? Because in that, in that time that you're doing nothing, those energy points are going to be reaccumulated And the things that you learned are going to be put together. When you're in the study, you might think, "Ah, I'm reading this book and nothing is coming, is connecting, none of the dots are connecting." But then you go for a walk, you do nothing, you're looking out into space, you're riding the train and you're watching things go by, and all of a sudden— connection! That's a connection in your brain where seemingly those thoughts and that that information that you were learning that, that didn't mean anything at the time have now just connected and you can use that information. Number 4, sometimes do nothing. Embrace the suck. Now this is, this is a tough one and it's actually counterintuitive. It happens whenever you try something new. What holds people back from trying something new is they have to start from basically ground zero. You have to be bad at something. This is— if you can embrace the suck, if you can get comfortable being bad at something, and I don't mean like get used to being bad at something because you want to improve, you want to get better, but if you can be comfortable at going, okay, I know I'm not the best at whatever it is I'm trying to learn at the moment, but I can improve. If you can embrace the suck, that, that, that time frame of at the beginning when you're going to be bad at something, that is a very strong mentality to have. You can go into any room and go, that's all right, I know everyone in this room is smarter than me, but that gives me the opportunity, that gives me the opportunity to learn. And learning by definition is hard. Because you have to take something that doesn't exist in your brain and somehow get it there. We don't even know how these things happen. Do you know how it happens? I really don't know how it happens. Like, I'll read a book or I'll do a course and I won't remember 99% of it, maybe more, maybe 99.9%, but I try really hard to hold on to that extra 1% and then eventually maybe that extra 1% matches up with another 1% of something I've learned somewhere else, and I can combine that and improve my knowledge. So, it's— when I use it, me and Dave were talking about it. Dave's my arch nemesis. Really important, if you don't have one, get an arch nemesis. I'll talk about that in another video. But, my arch nemesis Dave, we do jiu-jitsu together, and we talked about it. He's starting to make jiu-jitsu videos, which is actually really cool. We talked about it. It's— we're white belts, right? And I thought about it as I was driving in the car, listening to no music. I've tried really hard, actually, to start doing a lot more of nothing so that my brain can, can think about different things, have freedom to just explore whatever I want to explore. I was thinking about it. It's white belt mentality, and eventually we're going to move up from white belt But, I want to always maintain the white belt mentality. And what does that mean? It means always having that new way of approaching things, or that beginner's mind. That's the real valuable thing. And at the start, in jiu-jitsu, it sucked. I got in there, I got beaten up for the first 3, 4 months. And now, I'm getting a little bit better. I can avoid that. I still get beaten up. Have a go at this. Look at that bruise. That's from the other night. Oh, all part of the parcel. But it's really important for whatever you're going to try is to embrace the suck. Learning by definition is hard. When you try to learn something, you have to literally form something that doesn't exist in your brain and keep it there. And now, as I said before, progress day to day might not be much. You might even think you're going backwards. I think that all the time. I think, well, I've just been studying this whole thing for a week. and I don't remember a single gram of it. But then in 3 to 4 months' time, ah, I revisit that thing and I'm like, oh, I actually know this stuff. So what you have to do is get— be very comfortable being bad in the short term, and remember, with consistency, with that 100 days of continued effort, with that— 100 days is just an arbitrary number, 100 days of code or something like that— you will get better. Over time. So, be patient, let it happen. Where are we up to? 3-year-old mentality. I really like this one. Really, really like this one. I had— if you've ever listened to Alan Watts, and if you haven't, you should, because he's a lot smarter than I am and a great talker. He has this notion, or one of his videos that I watched, and it's just ringing in my brain, like, every time I think of work. It's, it's having this notion we see in society as work and play being two different things. You work 5 days a week and then you spend the weekend playing. What really changed my way of thinking about things is that everything is play. And so, when you see a 3-year-old, this is a 3-year-old mentality, when you see a 3-year-old at a playground, they're running around, they're having the time of their absolute lives. Like, they don't know, like, they're just enjoying it, and the whole world is new to them. And so this is where I, I relate. I use the 3-year-old mentality. You could use work as play, all this, etc., etc. But the way you can think about it is whatever work you're doing, instead of seeing it as work, see it as play. Your challenge when you're studying something is is instead of it's, ah, this, and I know the one before, number 5, was embrace the suck, but this, you can think of this at the same time, is to go, oh, hold on, this isn't actually work. This is me connecting the dots in my brain. This is me jumping from one concept to the next. Oh, machine learning. First, I'm going to learn the concepts. First, I'm going to learn what machine learning is valuable. First, I'm going to learn about why machine learning, what problems it can be used for. Then I'm going to figure out, oh, okay, I can code machine learning in Python. And then you're going to figure out, oh, before I do that, I need to figure out how to use Pandas to get my data in the right format. Or whether it be health, you're going to be like, oh, I'm going to figure out first how to lose weight because I need to get skinnier. Then I'm going to figure out how I can use what I've learned to lose weight to improve my athletic ability. And all of a sudden, you're just skipping from one concept to the next. It becomes a dance. So, work is play. That's a 3-year-old mentality. That's why I think I have so much energy, right? Because I just see everything as play. I remember one time we were doing a 5K run and I'm at the front of the pack, I'm running, and my godfather is sort of— because you have to do a loop and come back around— and I'm doing the loop and coming back around and he's coming up this way and we're passing each other. And I'm walking past, I'm running past, and I'm gassed, like I'm— but I'm putting it in, I enjoy doing that. And he's like, "Hey, how you going?" I'm like, "Easy money!" And so, that saying stuck around with us. And it's that concept, that white belt mentality, that me thinking that everything is play, that work is play, that 3-year-old mentality, that is what enables me to do to go through those hard tasks, to study the things that I'm finding difficult, to put in that time with that 6 Pomodoros, that 4 Pomodoros, that 2-hour session every single day. What else did I miss out? So, yeah, number 6, 3-year-old mentality. Treat work as play. Dance between the different concepts. Does everybody like to dance? Name someone who doesn't like dancing. If they tell you they don't, in secret, they've actually— everyone's danced on their own. Come on! You're going to tell me you don't like dancing? Alright, these last 3 can kind of be balled into one, because they're the concept of health, but I'll do number 7 on its own first. Number 7 is sleep. So, there were times where I would stay up till all hours of the morning before my exam. For high school, I remember I sat in, not this room, I've got a new room now, but that room in high school on the other side of the camera, you can't see it. I sat there at my desk, it's like 2 AM, 1 AM in the morning, something ridiculous like that. My mum comes in, it's like, "Are you gonna go to bed?" And I'm crying. I'm like, "Why?" Because I hadn't done the work, I hadn't studied, but I'm thinking, "Yeah, if I study up, I can just go all the way to the exam. I'll just study till 'til 8:30, which was stupid, but so many times I did that mistake when I was in university. I would stay up till— maybe this is why I failed my first 2 years. You know, they say study things in little doses before the actual exam. No, I didn't listen to that. Silly me. Silly me. And I was wondering why I was failing. But I would stay up 4 AM. Yeah, no worries, I'll study, study this stuff. I've got an exam at 8 AM. No worries, I don't need Sleep, me, sleeps for the week. How wrong. I couldn't have been more wrong. Probably could not have been more wrong. Out of sleep and the next one, spoiler alert, is nutrition. Out of these two things, these are the two things I focus on most. And, well, movement's the last one, number 9. Spoiler alert, I've just ruined the last two. But don't trade, don't trade sleep for study. Oh no, no, sorry, don't trade study for sleep. You get the point. I can't remember which order those, those should be in. But what happens during sleep is part of the sometimes do nothing. What— in sleep, your brain cleans itself. It removes all of the crap. It connects the dots that didn't want to be connected before or that weren't being there. So, imagine this. This is what an athlete does. This comes back to that study, Like an Athlete. An athlete trains really hard. Like, I go to jiu-jitsu. I'm wrestling, I'm putting people in chokes, I'm getting my armbar. I'm— hopefully I'm not getting armbarred, actually, but we've been doing footlocks lately, and I really love footlocks. My Achilles are a bit sore. And what happens then? Well, my muscles break down because I'm using them, and so when I go to sleep, my muscles get repaired. The same thing happens with the brain. When you study, you're breaking down connections in your brain and reforming new ones. So, you have existing connections, what you're doing when you're studying, you're going, "Pfft!" And then, when you sleep, your brain is like, "Oh, such a mess up here. I need to fix all this." And goes in and puts them all together. And so, this is why I have such a priority on sleep. Like, I go to bed, try to go to bed at the same time every night, try to wake up at the same time every day, and don't drink caffeine after 12, 2 PM if I can help it. All these things, right? I try to optimise sleep because my goal is to optimise my capability to learn, optimise my ability to have 100 energy points to dedicate to creating and learning. So, if you have a choice, don't trade your sleep for more study time. Instead, close the books, close the screen, get a good night's sleep, come back to it tomorrow. Number 8 is nutrition. And so, these— I love these 3 things, right? Because they're, they're life lifestyle choices, and they're like the force multipliers of life. That is, sleep and nutrition and exercise and movement are the force multipliers of life. You do these 3 things and it's very hard to, to go wrong. If you take care of your sleep, if you take care of your nutrition, if you take care— it doesn't matter if you're trying to study, if you're trying to love, if you're trying to, trying to be healthy or something like that— you take care of these first principles of sleep, nutrition, and movement, you'll, you'll set yourself up up with a great foundation, which is why I'm kind of lucky, I'm kind of happy that I stumbled into studying nutrition and getting into health, because I realised a little while ago, "Oh, wow! I've just set myself up with a great foundation for the rest of life to be able to use this energy that I've got, because I sleep well, I eat well, and I move a lot, to learn the things I want to learn and to create the things I want to create." And so, I'm reading a book. At the moment called Genius Foods. Why? Because I want to be a genius. And a lot of it, it's very, it's, and see, the thing about nutrition, I studied nutrition for like 4 years and, or maybe longer, formally, like as a university degree. 3, 4, it doesn't matter. Timeline's arbitrary. I studied it more on my own and that's kind of what got me interested in studying online was that I found that I was just, if I found something that I was interested in, I just followed my curiosity like no tomorrow. So, that's kind of my formula at the moment. Just follow your curiosity like no tomorrow. Shiny object syndrome. But I'm reading this, this book, Genius Foods, and it's phenomenal, right? The amount you can influence your ability to think, your cognitive function with just what you eat. If you think about it, it makes sense. Like, what do you do 3 times a day? Sometimes more, which, which you shouldn't be doing too much more, right? 3 times a day is probably the maximum amount of times you should be eating during the day. That was the one takeaway I had from doing a nutrition degree, was if you want to be healthy, eat less often. The body has adapted to being able to thrive when you eat less often. But if you eat a certain array of foods. And now, again, there's— depending on where you're from in the world, depending on what your genetics are, depending on what your lifestyle is, there's different foods that may suit you better than me. But what I essentially did was I went through a whole plethora of different eating styles. I tried them all. I tried vegan. I tried vegetarian. I tried high carb. I tried low carb. I treated myself as an experiment. Because I figured I've studied nutrition, if I'm going to recommend to people how they should eat, I need to at least try it myself. And what I found, I'm pretty happy with this, by trial and error, if you can see the front cover, there's like salmon, there's beef, there's broccolini, there's blueberries, there's nuts, there's olive oil. What do these all have in common? They're simple. Simple foods. They're whole foods. Single Ingredient Foods. And now, they're— you've got some of them that are high in fat, meat is high in protein, it's fairly low carbohydrate because there's a lot of different green vegetables in there. And so, I'm pretty happy with myself because I kind of figured out through trial and error that I eat this certain way. And what the book is based on is how you can use nutrition to improve your overall cognitive function. Remember at the start of the video, that's what I said. I mean, that's— my whole life is basically dedicated to optimizing my ability to perform physically and optimizing my ability to perform mentally. And if I can do that with what I eat, well, that's even better. And so, what can you do? Well, avoid garbage. Don't eat crap. And when you're at the supermarket, stay towards the perimeter because that's usually where A few tidbits that you can do— I might actually do a video on nutrition in a little bit, but a few quick rules are simple foods, like single ingredient foods that you cook yourself. Learn to cook. That's step 1. Learn to cook. Number 2, keep it simple. Single ingredient foods, the less the better, or less ingredients the better. If it requires a packet, you probably don't need it. So all of those refined things that you find, you probably don't need it. Number 3, if it requires— number 4, doesn't really matter. If it requires an advertisement, you probably also don't need it. A lot of these foods you barely see advertised, like broccolini. Who's doing ads for broccolini? Not many people. But you do see a lot of ads for food that you don't really need. And the final one is eat less often. So, there's this whole rigmarole of like being, um, snacking and all that sort of stuff. You don't really need to eat that often because what you're trying to do is minimize the amount that your blood glucose spikes. And if you're eating constantly, you're gonna be spiking your blood glucose. What does this lead? That leads to different hormones being triggered. Different hormones being triggered leads to you having a very hard time controlling how your body operates. If your hormones are out of whack, your whole body is out of whack. So, that's why you're trying to minimize those blood glucose spikes because that leads to a plethora of different— and again, this is for a different video. I might make a more in-depth one in the future. But, comes back. If you want to use nutrition, remember, you got a 100-point energy bar. The way you optimize that is with sleep, eating well, simple foods, not as often as you think, and with movement. That's the final one. Number 9 is movement. Now, in that course era, Learning How to Learn course, the— one of the best ways to, to also help your brain was exercise. Now, the thing is, they also really— scientists— I was listening to a podcast the other day and they're talking about Alzheimer's prevention. My dad has Alzheimer's and if you've ever seen someone with Alzheimer's, you know you don't want to get Alzheimer's because it's a terrible disease. You can't— you lose your ability to think. And so, out of these two people were talking on this podcast, best researchers in the world, were talking about to optimise your brain function, which is what we're trying to do when we're studying. We want to have optimal brain function. To optimize brain function and to avoid the, or lessen the effects, now I'm gonna word it wrong here, but let's just say lessen for lack of a better word. I'm pretty sure they did risk reduction or some kind of thing. But to lessen the effects or stop your chances of Alzheimer's developing, the number one thing that you could do was exercise. Movement. And I've found that to be 100% true as well. You can treat it as your, your sometimes do nothing. When I'm stuck on a problem, I go for a walk. Problem 13, that pesky problem, Problem 13. When I get stuck on Problem 13, I go for a walk, do a walk around the block. And you know what happens if I'm thinking of nothing? Sometimes the problem will just go and it'll just appear and it'll solve. I'll come back down, code it out in the computer, boom, we move on. Sometimes it doesn't happen, but moving every day is probably one of the best habits that I have. Because why? It seems counterintuitive that I'm using my energy bar, but it actually makes it higher because I move every day. My brain is getting a rest from— from— well, actually, it's probably getting used because Jiu-Jitsu is kind of like, it's kind of mental, kind of physical. But anyway, this, I don't know the exact mechanism behind it. All I know is that I am able to learn better, I am able to function better, I'm able to talk to different human beings better when I move every day. So, if you're not moving or if you're not getting up, sitting down and studying is kind of terrible for your body, like being sedentary, like sitting here and talking to this this camera for— how long we going for? 45 minutes! Oh man, I'm sorry, maybe I could have concised this. There's the article below if you wanted to read the concise version anyway. But I want to start doing more of these, these talky-facey videos, so leave some feedback if you have any for a future one. But every day that I move, I feel better. I also am able to learn. If I put it this way, when you first start it, right, this is It's a part of embracing the suck. When you first start exercising, it's got this whole stigma that it's like, "Oh, exercising is so hard. It's so difficult." Well, yeah, it is when you first start, but now I've switched, I've switched it. Now that I've been doing it for long enough, I know the high that I'm going to get. Like, I'll get this absolute, like, feeling of absolute joy when I've pushed my body to its physical limit. And you don't have to push it to your physical limit every day. Maybe you do 70%, right? Because then you can recover for the next day. And that's the same with science, study. I've basically treated my whole life now as though I'm an athlete. I have a training schedule and a studying schedule, and I do each to the best of my ability while I'm doing them, and they each help each other. I think that's good enough. Yeah. So, let's summarise that. Number 1, reduce the search space. If you want to learn something new, there's an abundance of resources on the internet. So, to study, to get started, don't be thrown off by having no— too many choices, because remember, too many choices leads to no choices. So, reduce your search space, create a list of things that you want to do, write down a list of things at the start of the day. This is part of number 2 that we're going to get into in a second. Reduce your search space so you have to make less decisions. Less but better. Number 2: Fix your environment. Clean your bloody room. Have no distractions. How do you do that? Of course there's going to be distractions every single— God, there's distractions everywhere. Close your door. Don't study with friends because friends are good for being friends, but find a study partner, someone who wants to get after it as much as you. Because if you study with friends, you're just going to distract each other. You have too much fun together. Have fun with your friends, find a study partner, study with the study partner. And yeah, put your phone in another bloody room because you probably don't need your phone to study unless you're doing an online course on your phone, then you can use your phone. Number 3: Set the system up so you always win. Remember, you might not be able to complete problem 13 keeps coming up, problem 13. If you're actually running into problem 13, that's a massively wild guess from me, but set the system up so you always win. Write down, remember, write down a list of things at the start of the day and don't do anything off that list. You can, or treat yourself so that you find fulfillment in ticking off those things, because over time they will add up to be something incredible. And focus on time, not the amount of progress that you make, because you can control time but you can't control the progress. Focus on what you can control, not on what you can't. Number 4, sometimes do nothing. If you find you're stuck in a rut, take a break. Uh, the healthiest break you could probably take is like a little walk or even just laying on the ground for 20 minutes. But when you're doing that, make sure it's actually doing nothing. Like, don't pull out your smartphone phone and start browsing, because remember, you've only got 100 energy points. You really want to spend them on mindless tasks? No, you want to spend it on things that matter. Number 5, embrace the suck. Get comfortable being bad at something, but don't get used to it, right? Because you will be your own biggest fan and biggest critic at the same time. Don't get— get comfortable being bad, right? So you can walk into a room and go, ah, I don't know much here, but I'm going to figure things out, have that white belt mentality that you can— it's always day one and that you can always improve. But again, you want to eventually get good, right? That's what gives us fulfilment is when we make that progress. So, be comfortable being bad, but you don't have to get used to being bad. You want to get good eventually. And remember, learning something new by definition is difficult. I remember, I'm lucky if I remember 1% of what I learnt. Compare yourself year on year, not day to day. Number 6, the 3-year-old mentality. Treat work as play. Remind yourself, I'm playing, I'm gonna play today. It's a very hard mentality to get over because a lot of society— and again, I'm a realist here, I know working on things suck, I know I'm not going to enjoy studying some things or learning some things all the time. That's why I embrace the suck, and then I remind myself, oh, this is just play. I'm just dancing, dancing between different concepts. That's what you want to do, dance between different concepts. Number 7, 8, and 9 are the 3 pillars of physical health and mental health, of course, is sleep, nutrition, and movement. Focus on your sleep. Don't trade sleep for extra study. The more sleep you get, the better. 7 to 9 hours minimum per night. Make sure it's good quality. Because that's when your brain's gonna clean itself out, it's gonna form those new connections, it's gonna heal itself. Study, study like an athlete. An athlete uses sleep to repair their body. Because you're a student, you're a student, you're gonna use sleep to repair your brain. Number 8, eat nutrition, eat good food. If you've got 100 energy points during the day, and nutrition is a big, big part of that, you wanna stick to simple foods Avoid the refined stuff. Avoid eating every 2 hours, right? You probably don't need to snack. When you do eat a meal, make sure it's voluminous. Like, have lots of different greens. Have some good simple fats in there. Because your brain is about, I think it's mostly fat. I was going to say 60%, but I'm not sure the exact number. Your brain is basically all fat. So, get some good fats, some nuts, some eggs, some olive oil. Again, this will depend on your region. Learn to cook your region's home food the traditional way, not the stuff that you buy in a packet. Avoid things in a packet. Number 9 is movement. Remember, Alzheimer's, terrible disease. It does affect your cognitive function, and eventually many of us will get it. Or if you want to reduce it, the number 1 thing they found is exercise. So, if you're planning on learning for the long term, which you should be because life is about learning, right? We spend We spend our whole lives learning. The day you stop learning is the day everything else stops. So, they found movement, if for anything, you want to optimise for learning, they found that movement stops Alzheimer's, which, Alzheimer's impairs your cognitive function. So, move every day. And that's it. That's how your study routine can be unfucked. And that's how I unfucked my life. I basically started paying attention to all these different things. That's how I learned machine learning in 2 years. Again, I'm still a newbie. I got that white belt mentality, but I'm a lot better than when I started, which was 2 years ago today. So have a read of the article. If you did enjoy this video, leave a comment below on what your favorite one was. There's 9 points there. I'll leave some timestamps so you can, you can jump back and forth between them. Or if you have any other sort of tidbit or trick that you've learned to really help help you study and that, that I've missed, and because I'm always looking for these things, right? Remember, my goal is to optimize for physical and mental capacity, to create to learn and learn to create. Leave a comment below so you can help other people out. Otherwise, keep learning, keep creating, keep moving. I'll see you in the next video.