🌘 Patrick's notes

How to become smarter

3 min read

How to become a genius

Set your goals, and consider your current status. Self reflect often. Ask yourself what (you did), how, why and what’s next.

Focus on the high yield changes

  • Rate limiters → no matter how good all the other barrel planks are, if one plank is broken, water is gonna leak. Fix the broken planks first
    • Anxiety, stress
    • Procrastination
    • Schedule, routine
  • Low-lead time changes: undoing your old habits is gonna take a while. Focus on the quick changes first: better retrieval strategies, flashcards, interleaving, pre-studying
  • Incremental change: small steps towards better retention
    • Start with small minimaps
    • Interleaved retrieval: test yourself on topics often, forcing your brain to think at a higher level
  • Priority Change

Cognitive growth: The primary activity that creates activity to grow your cognition is pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. It ain’t easy. Shifting from comfort zone to learning zone creates a lot of uncertainty as you go have to go through the fear zone, as everything that is new carries the risk of failure with it.

Different levels to learning, let’s say you have to learn 20 new words, here’s 7 possible levels - at one point these should be merged into a single process:

  1. Memorise and understand
  2. Compare to find similarities
  3. Group based on similarities
  4. Evaluate and rate
  5. More similarities
  6. Evaluate groups
  7. Connect groups
  8. Simplify network

Unlocking speed Learning slow is learning fast. You have to be accurate and effective when learning. Accurately use your effective learning techniques consistently on a multitude of topics, even when tired or unmotivated. When this becomes habit, speed will come automatically. The only way to become fast is making it easier for your brain to do the accurate slow learning, without leaving any gaps behind.

Adaptability How you act on a good day has to be your baseline for bad days too. Go back to step 1 (self-reflection) and figure out your new set of goals, how to micro-optimize your learning techniques, if there’s any further low-hanging fruits, etc.

How to remember what you read

2 stages to reading:

  • Consumption (from sensory memory to short term memory)
  • Digestion (bringing something into long term memory) These two have to stay balanced. If you do no digestion, you’ll never retain anything.

5 category of knowledge to identify while reading? PACER system

  • Procedural techniques! digest by practicing
  • Analogous analogies with things you already know. digest by critiquing (how good is this analogy? Why is it similar?)
  • Conceptual conceptual information that can be linked with analogous information digest by linking and mapping topics together
  • Evidence examples to prove a conceptual point, they reinforce conceptual information. digest by storing (noting it down - this happens while consuming) and rehearsing (use and apply this information the way we want to use it - this happens later on)
  • Reference nitty-gritty specific information that doesn’t change your conceptual understanding. They’re not analogous, not procedural, but we might need to know this later. digest the same way as evidence information → store and rehearse (SRS is the best way to deal with this, as we’re not really gonna use this).

PAC are gonna be the bulk of our knowledge. Spend the most time on these while reading.

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