Learn Pretty Much Anything by Thinking on Paper

Learning faster means solving problems faster. [music] It means making decisions faster. It means not spending all of your time just relearning something you already learned 3 weeks ago. [music] And if you want to learn faster and do all those things, you need to think on paper. This is a principle I discovered halfway through medical school, and it cut down the amount of time I need to spend on learning by at least half. I've used this skill to study not only medicine and learning science, but also business and marketing and finance and AI and ML and problems and decisions that used to take me [music] days now take me one afternoon. So, in this video, I'm going to cover three things. First, [music] what does thinking on paper actually mean? Number two, how do you do that effectively and efficiently? And number three, why is it so powerful? So, let's get started with first one, which is what does it mean to actually think on paper? Well, let's start with what does it mean to not think on paper? Not thinking on paper means picking up a book like this book which I'm reading right now which is on the cognitive neuroscience of memory and flicking through it trying to understand it and keeping all of those thoughts just in your head. And when you do this especially for a dense piece of information you often encounter two problems except the second problem is a problem that you created for yourself. So the first problem is that as you consume more information, so as information goes [music] up because you're reading more, the amount of confusion and overwhelm also goes up. So these two things are related to each other. As you get more information and there are more pieces of the puzzle you're trying to balance inside your head, your brain is finding it harder to hold on to all of that information. And so what do we do when we feel that we're getting overwhelmed? We tend to write it all down. This is not thinking on paper. In fact, that response of feeling this confusion and overwhelm and responding by writing it down actually creates the second problem. And the reason is the way that most people write down their thoughts stops them from learning the information. So this is completely counterproductive. you are reading in the first place to understand what's in here and then use this information in some kind of way. Maybe it's as simple as sitting an exam if you're still a student. Maybe it's you need this information to make some important decisions and build some strategy for work. And in order for that to happen, this information which is initially overwhelming, we need our brain to organize and process it in order to make it stick. That creates memory and that creates deep understanding. However, when we feel this sense of overwhelm and our immediate response is just to write it all down without thinking on paper, it actually directly bypasses all of the useful cognitive processes that would allow you to turn this information into true knowledge. It is the learning equivalent of going for a run to get more fit, but then halfway through you feel tired and so you jump in a car and drive to the finish line. You're no longer feeling tired, but you also kind of defeated the entire point of the exercise. And so what thinking on paper does is it allows us to reduce this confusion and not be so overwhelmed without bypassing all the effective learning and processing that our brain needs to do. And so how do you think on paper effectively? Well, there are three simple principles that I want you to always follow. They're really simple to remember. They go make it wrong, make it shorter, and make it again. If you follow these three principles, you will find that your ability to learn and process information goes through the roof. You will be less overwhelmed in meetings. Difficult, complicated problems that other people don't know how to approach, you will be able to see clarity through that more quickly. And when you go through lots of new information, you will have a higher retention of it and a deeper understanding than the people around you. So let's start with that first one, which is make it wrong. When it comes to thinking on paper, if what you write is right, you're doing it wrong. Here's what this means. If you're consuming a bunch of new information, whether it's listening or reading, the reason you start feeling confused and you don't know how it all connects together, is because there are too many dots you're trying to connect and your brain is just not that good at holding on to that many dots. And so the idea with thinking on paper is that you're just getting the dots on paper. So you're not just holding on to them in your head anymore. But here's the thing, you don't know how those dots connect yet. You're putting it on paper to figure it out. You've got 20 jigsaw puzzle pieces. You don't know how it comes together. So, you're just going to put the pieces on the table to see the patterns. But here's the issue. If you are trying to write notes in order to make it less overwhelming, you've got it on paper now. You feel better about it, but you're trying to make sure that everything you write in your notes is correct and perfectly accurate. If you're doing a mind map, you're trying to make sure that all the connections are correct and in the right place and they're all grouped nicely in a in the perfect organization, you will find yourself immediately paralyzed by analysis. You don't know where to start. You're looking at all the different concepts. You're looking at the words. You're looking at all the new information and you're just thinking, where do I begin? What key word do I put on the notes first? What first connection do I make? How do I group it? You have to remember that thinking on paper, the purpose of doing it is to help visualize and organize your thoughts. So, let me demonstrate what this actually looks like in practice. I'll take some common terms from learning science uh and go through the process as if I'm learning this for the first time. The first thing I'm going to do is just lay out keywords on the page. So, if I'm reading through a book, if I'm listening to someone, as I go through, I'm just going to try to pick out keywords. And again, make it wrong. It doesn't even have to be the right keyword. Just put whatever keyword you think is a good enough representation of the idea that you're consuming right now. So, you can see what I've done is I've just written up a bunch of keywords. Maybe this is from one and a half pages of reading. It's scattered. It's messy. Nothing's really here, but my puzzle pieces are on the table. I get to just look at this now. And all we're going to do is we're going to look at the words that we have and just think about how they might be related together. And again, you can be totally wrong. As you go through this process of thinking on paper, your thoughts will naturally start to become more organized and more accurate. As you read more and as you listen more and you gain more information, you'll also gain more clarity. So, by all means, in the early stages, just put whatever relationships or groups or connections you think maybe makes sense. And purely the act of taking a guess will prime your brain so that later when you learn it, it is easier and faster for you to absorb. So let's see what this would look like. So I feel like encoding and retrieval are both related to memory somehow and maybe memory is also influenced by cognitive load. And I know that the brain and the phalamus are like the phalamus is part of the brain. Uh, I'm just going to move this one to over here instead just to make it cleaner. And I'm I'm just literally showing you this process of just rearranging things on paper just to clean it up. Like this is exactly the process of learning that I would use that allows me to learn huge amounts of information in a very short amount of time. So explicit memory and then working memory and then long-term memory. But I kind of feel like naturally it just relates to maybe like types of memory. And I'm just going to do that. And there we go. That's not hard to do. Anyone can do this. Now, very few people can do that and just get it right straight off the bat. In fact, if it's a new topic for you, that's pretty much impossible. But by quickly getting our ideas on here and quickly visualizing how it all fits together, we have primed our brain and we are moving much faster than just sitting there paralyzed trying to connect it all together mentally. So that's what it means to make it wrong. I'll anchor that in with a few takeaway messages for you. So write down key words quickly. Look at what you've written. Make some guesses at connections or groups. And the most important thing during this stage is that you need to have a really high level of awareness. If you notice that you have a tendency to not write things because you're trying to make it perfect or correct, you have to really understand if you have this tendency. You have to notice that perfectionism once it kicks in and remind yourself it's totally okay to just get it wrong. We're not making a masterpiece here. We are just organizing our thoughts and thinking on paper. The next principle here is to make it shorter. Now, learning is a innately complex and sometimes very time consuming activity. And if you're trying to gain mastery over something that takes one person 10 years to get good at and you're trying to get good at that in just like one month, that's not going to be possible. You would need to have this enormous amount of information distilled down into like a two or three minute segment. And that's usually not going to be available in my free weekly newsletter. If you want to learn more about learning science, you like the perspectives and the takes that I have, you're finding this insightful, and you want to learn a little bit more, then you can join my free weekly newsletter where I send you all of this information that's distilled and packaged down into bite-sized emails that you can read like 3 to 5 minutes. At the end of every email is an actionable takeaway for you to work on that week that will make you a better learner and more productive. It's totally free. I write these emails myself. They are not AI generated. If you're interested, I'll leave a link in the description for you below. But whether or not you join my newsletter, you don't have time to spend hours writing copious notes about everything that you learn. This is one of those habits that starts in school. And I see professionals doing that years later. The act of writing notes does not innately create better understanding or memory or the ability to use that knowledge. And in fact, it can make it harder because not only are we overwhelmed by all this information, now we have all of the overwhelming set of notes that you have written that you now need to sort through and go back through and find time to revise. And so the most important thing when we're writing notes and thinking on paper is we want to make it easier for our brain to find these patterns and connections and extract the learning out of it. That's the number one goal. And especially now with AI, you don't need reference material anymore. You can usually just like upload the whole thing and you can, you know, ask Chat PT about it later. You don't need notes just to create for reference. So, here are some general takeaways to make sure that you are making your notes shorter. Number one, no full sentences. You want to get it as close to just key words as possible. I apologize for the handwriting. It is like the most enduring habit of being a doctor is just like having terrible handwriting. And also, I'm tired and jet-lagged because, by the way, I'm in Dubai right now for the 1 billion Follower Summit conference. It's been a long couple of days and so my handwriting is suffering even more. But actually, that's a good segue onto the next point, which is that you don't need to make it pretty. The only thing your notes need to do for you is for you to be able to see what's on there and remember what you were thinking about. It's just a trigger. It's a memory anchor. It's not the full information itself. And you can see that right here. If you look through the notes that I've written, if I were writing these notes purely for my own learning and not actually teaching it, all of this stuff, I would have made this much smaller. For example, instead of write down key words quickly, I would have just said fast. Instead of look at what you've written, maybe I'd say examine. And the last one, maybe I would just summarize that as guess or connect. If I use these key words and I look at these keywords alone, I know what it's talking about. And this is not just some arbitrary sort of aesthetic tip. Research actually shows that if you're writing notes, the level of retention and depth of understanding that you have goes down as your word count goes up. And the reason is that when you write more, it usually means you are processing it less. It takes more thinking to summarize something into a keyword than it does into a full sentence. It is harder to write concisely than waffle for a page. And on top of that, by having less words, it speeds up your brain's ability to find the patterns and connections. When I have something like what I drew down here, it's just key words. I can look at these words very quickly and spend most of my time thinking about how they might be connected together. If I had each of these as a full sentence, then I would have to spend additional time reading the entire sentence to remember what it's talking about. And if I have to read a full sentence or even a full paragraph on every concept to see how it connects together, that is going to make it much slower and harder to see these patterns. And so it doesn't matter if you're learning something uh very basic and superficial or learning something really deep and technically complicated, you can make it shorter. Believe that you can and push yourself to distill things down into just keywords. So that's the second principle. Make it shorter. The third principle is to make it. Again, this third and final step is actually where the majority of the power of thinking on paper actually comes from. most of your real deep learning and solid memory and and and complex ability to use that knowledge is going to come from making it again. So, here's what this little mini map might end up looking like after another 15 or 20 minutes of more reading or more listening. First, I'm getting more information, right? So, more keywords are going to start appearing. And again, as we go through that process in principle number one, I'm going to look at what I've written and just make some guesses at how it might be connected. So, I think these are kind of connected here and then that leads to that and then this is kind of like this whole thing and then this is related to this. You can see what's already happening is that it's starting to get a little messy. And once more, as you keep learning, you're going to realize some of those connections that you made before are wrong, as we intended. And now you have enough information to correct it. So, for example, before I put explicit memory, working memory, and long-term memory under this category called types. Well, actually, this categorization doesn't make sense. Explicit memory, the definition of explicit memory actually overlaps with the definition of working memory and long-term memory in some cases. Whereas, if I leave it like this, it kind of feels like all three things are separate and distinct. So, that doesn't make sense for me anymore. When I look at my notes, this doesn't reflect how I've organized it and understood it mentally. And that's a problem. We need to fix that. And it's the act of fixing it that produces that learning. We took a great guess, we got it wrong, and now we're ready to fix it and strengthen and consolidate our learning. So, these are the two issues that we will find as we continue to work through the material. Number one, you're going to realize it's getting messy and hard to follow. And number two, we're going to find the mistakes that we made earlier. And so, in order to solve these issues, we have to make this again. We have to reorganize it. We have to clean it up. And so, let me just reorganize this and you will see what that would look like. So this is what the cleaned up version would look like. Hopefully you can see that it's less messy. It feels more organized. But most importantly, again, this is not just some vain aesthetic activity. The reason we're doing this is that the act of reorganizing all the ideas is actually what strengthens the memory. This process of cleaning it up, even though we're not learning any new information and consuming anything new, this is actually where the benefit of the learning is actually going to come from. And most people do not spend much time doing this. And again, this is not the final version either because as again we continue to learn more and more key words start appearing, it's going to get messier and harder to follow yet again. And so we once we feel like it's overwhelming, we make it again. And so the key takeaway to principle number three here is when you start feeling that the notes and the maps and the connections get overwhelming or messy or you're finding some mistakes. Reorganize. And reorganizing often means regrouping. Putting the ideas in different groups that you think are more accurate. rearranging, literally moving the things around on your page so it looks cleaner and recconnecting, which is adding connections or removing connections that you no longer think are the best way to represent it. And so after you do this process where you've made it messy and you've got it all on paper and you're cleaning it up, what you should feel is that that sense of overwhelm and confusion that we initially had, this is starting to go down. We're not trying to juggle everything in our brain. It's on paper. It's less confusing. But the process of now working on the paper is allowing us to achieve organization and clarity. And we're not just using this as just like a mental offload where it kind of goes into like a memory trash bin. And so that's thinking on paper. And you can use this skill in literally any kind of learning. Whether you're sitting down for five hours doing some intensive study, whether you're in a busy meeting just trying to follow the ideas that are coming through, even just by yourself thinking through a complicated problem, you can apply the exact same three principles to massively accelerate your brain's ability to think and create organization and clarity. Now, thinking on paper and writing notes in general is one tool to have in your toolkit, but it is part of a much wider system. There are other tools that are suited for different purposes that are just as useful. So, if you want to have a better understanding about how to think about learning and what are the other tools that you can use to improve your performance and your productivity, then you might want to check out this video where I go through all of that and I show you how I think about training someone to become a better learner. But otherwise, I hope you found this useful. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-thinkonpaper In this video, I teach you a technique called 'thinking on paper' to reduce overwhelm, process information more efficiently, and learn faster. Take my Learning Diagnostic Quiz (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/diagnostic-thinkonpaper === Guided Training Program === I’ve distilled my 13 years of experience as a learning coach into a step-by-step learning skills program. If you want to be able to master new knowledge and skills in half the time, check out: https://go.icanstudy.com/program-thinkonpaper === About Dr Justin Sung === Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.