217: Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel

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1. 00:00:00 All right, so before we go through follow up, I've got something to share.
2. 00:00:05 I've shared it with you already, but I put together a simple form that people
3. 00:00:10 can use to recommend book.
4. 00:00:14 And this was in response to you asking me many times, Hey, so where can people
5. 00:00:20 go to recommend this?
6. 00:00:22 And I didn't have a good answer.
7. 00:00:24 So I dug into I've got an account with Tali and I set up a form and that gets
8. 00:00:29 fed into the notion database that we use for all of our show planning.
9. 00:00:35 And it works, we've tested it.
10. 00:00:38 And yeah, if you want to suggest a book now, I will include a link to this form
11. 00:00:43 in the show notes, but just give us, you know, author's name, name of the book, a URL.
12. 00:00:49 So we know exactly which one we're supposed to get.
13. 00:00:53 And yeah, then maybe we will pick your book for bookworm.
14. 00:00:57 And then there's optional, you know, if you want to tell us who you are.
15. 00:01:00 So we can give you a shout out on the podcast.
16. 00:01:02 But I'm excited, Corey, I have to admit, to have a mechanism like this that people
17. 00:01:08 can actually formally submit recommendations now.
18. 00:01:12 And I feel like those might be famous last words, you know, what we'll see
19. 00:01:17 what sort of recommendations we get.
20. 00:01:20 Not that people are not going to recommend good books, but I feel like this
21. 00:01:25 may stretch us a little bit in terms of what we pick for the podcast.
22. 00:01:28 And that's probably a good thing.
23. 00:01:29 I think it might like I'm going to be really intrigued if we start getting a
24. 00:01:33 bunch of like, you know, random cooking books or something like that, you know,
25. 00:01:38 the one that makes me happy about this is you're excited.
26. 00:01:41 I'm the one who suggested this like nine times.
27. 00:01:44 And I'm the one who always struggles to figure out what his next book is.
28. 00:01:47 So it's like, you're good.
29. 00:01:48 I mean, you've got them lined up for for years.
30. 00:01:50 All right.
31. 00:01:50 I'm like, Oh, what's my next book going to be?
32. 00:01:52 What's my next book going to be?
33. 00:01:53 So the fact that you're excited, that makes me happy because I'm jazz.
34. 00:01:56 Like I'm really excited.
35. 00:01:57 It's easy to have a backlog of books to read when you've got like 2,000 of them
36. 00:02:01 just laying around in every nook and granny of your house or your, your
37. 00:02:04 policy on I'm just going to buy it if somebody recommends it to me.
38. 00:02:08 I mean, that lends you to always have a book to read.
39. 00:02:12 It's true.
40. 00:02:12 It's true, which actually that actually, that leads to another point of, of book
41. 00:02:18 related follow up. So we've talked about, should you read physical books or
42. 00:02:24 digital books?
43. 00:02:25 Okay.
44. 00:02:26 I know you're, I know you're a Kindle person, but we have to mention the
45. 00:02:30 Kindle change that happened this week.
46. 00:02:34 Not familiar.
47. 00:02:35 You're shaking your head.
48. 00:02:36 Okay.
49. 00:02:36 So for a long time, there has been in the terms of service when you buy a
50. 00:02:42 digital book, like a Kindle book, you don't actually own this book.
51. 00:02:46 You can't do whatever you want with this file.
52. 00:02:48 Now that has not stopped many people from ripping the DRM off of it and
53. 00:02:53 changing the format and putting it wherever.
54. 00:02:56 And I even laughed when Michael Hyatt on Mac Power users was talking about how
55. 00:03:01 he was doing that with the books that he bought and he worked for a publisher.
56. 00:03:05 Yep.
57. 00:03:07 But Kindle has basically removed the, the mechanism that those types of
58. 00:03:13 programs would use to, to take off the DRM.
59. 00:03:16 So you can't, you can't do that anymore, or you're not going to be able to do it
60. 00:03:19 shortly.
61. 00:03:20 And yeah, this has always made me a little bit uncomfortable with the, the
62. 00:03:25 digital book format.
63. 00:03:26 And I feel like this is kind of inevitable that we would get to this point
64. 00:03:30 where they're just going to crack down on it.
65. 00:03:32 And no, it's not really your book.
66. 00:03:34 But yeah, score another one for physical books.
67. 00:03:38 That's all I'm going to say.
68. 00:03:39 Okay.
69. 00:03:39 All right.
70. 00:03:40 You know, you can, you can be a hater, right?
71. 00:03:42 Like that you have this whole like physical analog workflow that at some
72. 00:03:47 point you turn digital and all that stuff.
73. 00:03:48 I just embraced the digital from the beginning.
74. 00:03:50 I mean, that's different, different structure, different folks.
75. 00:03:53 So okay.
76. 00:03:53 We can, we can do that.
77. 00:03:56 Yeah, it's true.
78. 00:03:57 But basically the thing I just want to make people aware of is now more than ever,
79. 00:04:01 if you're buying Kindle books, you don't really own those books that you are buying.
80. 00:04:05 It's fine.
81. 00:04:06 You know, if you just want to read it on your Kindle, that I totally get the, the
82. 00:04:09 use case for that, you don't want to carry around a thousand books.
83. 00:04:12 You want to just have the little eating tablet that you throw in your bag when
84. 00:04:16 you travel and stuff like that.
85. 00:04:17 But yeah, it's, it's getting more and more locked down, I guess.
86. 00:04:22 And yeah, I, obviously I'm a big fan of the analog books, but it's just something
87. 00:04:28 people should, uh, should be aware of.
88. 00:04:29 I feel like if you're going to spend your hard earned money on something that you
89. 00:04:33 think you own, you know, just recognize the, uh, the terms of service for the, the
90. 00:04:37 stuff that you're, you're using.
91. 00:04:39 Yup, I agree.
92. 00:04:40 That's a good, it's a good PSA for everybody, including me.
93. 00:04:45 All right.
94. 00:04:46 So we've got some follow up items.
95. 00:04:48 I'm going to let you go first.
96. 00:04:50 If that's okay.
97. 00:04:51 Uh, you were going to use what we learned in the last book to help grow bookworms
98. 00:04:57 audience.
99. 00:04:58 Yes.
100. 00:04:58 How did that go?
101. 00:04:59 So the way I started this is I went on a quest for the logins for all of the
102. 00:05:06 account, all of the social media accounts, right?
103. 00:05:09 And I'm happy to say that we successfully have obtained the logins for all of the
104. 00:05:13 social media accounts.
105. 00:05:14 So we now have access to those.
106. 00:05:15 So in my mind, this is a success green checkmark, gigantic green, wonderful checkmark.
107. 00:05:22 Um, now what's our goal for growing audience size?
108. 00:05:25 So, uh, one of the things we're going to think about is we're going to think about
109. 00:05:28 what do we do at the YouTube channel, right?
110. 00:05:30 So in the past, you and Joe, um, actually recorded video live, right?
111. 00:05:35 And through those up, was it live or did you, do you post it after the fact?
112. 00:05:39 Good question.
113. 00:05:40 I don't know.
114. 00:05:41 Uh, I know he used like OBS, uh, and I would log in via zoom.
115. 00:05:46 And then, you know, when, when we were recording, I saw the standard zoom interface,
116. 00:05:49 but he had, you know, the custom overlay and all that kind of stuff that was always
117. 00:05:54 beyond my technical capabilities.
118. 00:05:56 So, uh, so there's the, I'm going to call them live videos because it was your
119. 00:06:01 actual faces as you talked about the book, um, uh, on there.
120. 00:06:04 So, um, there's, there's a bunch of those, but we're trying to figure out what,
121. 00:06:07 what do we do?
122. 00:06:07 Do we ingest all of the, the entire podcast archive and all that stuff?
123. 00:06:11 So one, that's going to be, you know, a new way to access, uh, content or an,
124. 00:06:16 an old way that we're going to revive, um, to access content.
125. 00:06:19 We're going to try to grow there as well.
126. 00:06:21 Um, and then we're going to try to start posting some stuff on, you know,
127. 00:06:25 social media a little bit more when episodes come out and linking it to things
128. 00:06:28 and seeing if people can share it and retweet it and all of that.
129. 00:06:30 So, um, the reason why I say this ties to the book, right?
130. 00:06:34 You know, the courage to be disliked.
131. 00:06:36 It's this idea of like tasks, you know, and like what's my task and what's other
132. 00:06:40 people's tasks?
133. 00:06:41 Well, if we don't put it out there, other people can't engage with it, right?
134. 00:06:46 So we put out the podcast and it's doing well and it's successful from the RSS
135. 00:06:51 standpoint and the podcast player standpoint, but let's try to help some
136. 00:06:55 people, you know, get to find it and get to know it, um, you know, more readily.
137. 00:07:00 And I think social media, YouTube, I think those are the places where we do
138. 00:07:04 that.
139. 00:07:04 So that's what we can do as our task is we can put it out there for, for more
140. 00:07:08 people and, and if people like it, they can share it and they can pass it along
141. 00:07:12 to other folks.
142. 00:07:12 So that's step number one, I would say is to try to grow the bookworm audience.
143. 00:07:16 And then Mike and I, we've been brainstorming and thinking about some
144. 00:07:20 other things that we're not ready to really share yet because we're trying
145. 00:07:23 to iron out some of the details of those.
146. 00:07:25 But, um, in the, in the upcoming, you know, episodes and upcoming months, you're
147. 00:07:29 going to see some other things come out to where we're going to try to, you know,
148. 00:07:32 help grow the audience as well for that.
149. 00:07:34 So pay attention or stay tuned for, for those announcements as well.
150. 00:07:38 How about you?
151. 00:07:39 What, uh, their first one was, uh, start asking, whose task is this?
152. 00:07:43 How'd you do on that?
153. 00:07:43 Well, let me, let me actually just add something to what you just shared.
154. 00:07:47 Uh, so we, yeah, we are, we are figuring out some details, but we did figure out
155. 00:07:51 that we are a hundred percent staying within the Patreon ecosystem.
156. 00:07:56 So we're going to add some new stuff like the ability to attend the live
157. 00:08:01 recordings, using Patreon's built in tools.
158. 00:08:04 We kind of figured out sort of how to do that.
159. 00:08:05 We just need to test it.
160. 00:08:07 And, um, if you were to support the, the show now, you'll just get access to that
161. 00:08:12 stuff when it becomes available.
162. 00:08:14 So you don't have to worry about, you know, supporting the show via Patreon.
163. 00:08:17 And then next month we switch to a different platform or something like that.
164. 00:08:20 It's going to use the same infrastructure that's already there.
165. 00:08:22 It's just going to be more stuff for the, uh, the supporters.
166. 00:08:26 So if you want to support the show, Patreon.com/bookwormFM.
167. 00:08:31 All right.
168. 00:08:31 So now my action item, start asking, whose task is this?
169. 00:08:35 I started asking this, uh, so I've been up to my eyeballs and this
170. 00:08:39 practical PKM cohort.
171. 00:08:40 And I think that basically means that I've sort of failed all of these by default.
172. 00:08:46 Okay.
173. 00:08:47 Uh, just because that's where my focus has been.
174. 00:08:50 So my intention with this is really these things that would fill the margin of my
175. 00:08:56 day to day asking myself, am I really the right person to be doing these, these
176. 00:08:59 things, uh, all my margin has been filled with updating slides and videos and posting
177. 00:09:05 replays and stuff like that.
178. 00:09:07 So yeah, those are my tasks, but, uh, I, I, I guess I sort of took action on this
179. 00:09:14 because I am offloading some of the things that I've been doing to other people.
180. 00:09:21 Uh, we've shared previously about how I'm using the, the video service to help
181. 00:09:26 with the YouTube editing and stuff like that.
182. 00:09:27 I haven't produced a YouTube video in a while.
183. 00:09:30 So, uh, I need to get more consistent with that.
184. 00:09:33 But I'm also, uh, in the process of figuring out the systems for taking my
185. 00:09:38 newsletters, which I write every week and then working with somebody else, not just
186. 00:09:41 me, to take that content and break it apart into social media posts that I can
187. 00:09:48 share, uh, across different platforms and then also taking that and using it as
188. 00:09:53 blog posts on the new website, which is not quite ready to be launched, but it
189. 00:09:58 will be shortly, uh, practicalpkm.com is my personal website and it's about to get a
190. 00:10:03 big overhaul as soon as the other pages for like life HQ and the library, stuff
191. 00:10:08 like that are, are ready to go designer developers doing a great job on those.
192. 00:10:12 I don't think I've ever showed you the one for life HQ, but it's, it's looking
193. 00:10:15 great.
194. 00:10:15 Yeah, you know, it's not, not live yet.
195. 00:10:18 Probably will be by the time this goes out, but, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm basically
196. 00:10:23 just trying to give the whole brand a significant overhaul.
197. 00:10:27 I've been working on like the, the bones of the site.
198. 00:10:28 It's going to be using ghost, which I'm excited about.
199. 00:10:31 I'm working with, uh, a ghost consultant to like use my brand fonts, use my brand
200. 00:10:36 colors, put in all these like custom code snippets and really just getting the
201. 00:10:42 bones there for just populating it with the, the content.
202. 00:10:46 And, uh, it's, it's looking good, but there's still a few, few loose
203. 00:10:48 ends to tie up, like I said.
204. 00:10:50 Okay.
205. 00:10:50 So, um, yeah, whose task is this?
206. 00:10:54 I, I feel like you could maybe give me partial credit for that one.
207. 00:10:56 Avoid comparison, I guess because I've been too busy to compare myself to anybody
208. 00:11:01 else, but I have to say I inadvertently, I realized this because I was working
209. 00:11:06 with a designer developer and I'm trying to explain exactly what I'm looking for.
210. 00:11:09 And then I start thinking as I want to like create these feedback videos, you
211. 00:11:13 know, who else has done something that I want to use.
212. 00:11:15 And I realized that, um, so J.
213. 00:11:18 Klaus is creator science page as, as basically the layout that I was going
214. 00:11:22 for.
215. 00:11:23 And then I started looking at it and I'm like, wait a second.
216. 00:11:25 And then I realized that I had inadvertently bought, I think the same base
217. 00:11:30 theme that he exists.
218. 00:11:32 So I guess that's sort of a comparison thing that I sort of stumbled into.
219. 00:11:36 I, not intentionally, I just went into the ghost web, the ghost, uh, marketplace.
220. 00:11:40 And I was looking for, uh, what I landed on was these bright themes.
221. 00:11:44 Actually bought a whole bunch of them.
222. 00:11:45 And I liked it because for longer blog posts articles, there's this table of
223. 00:11:49 contents that floats on the left hand side.
224. 00:11:51 So you can have, you can jump straight to the different sections.
225. 00:11:54 You can see where you are in the article.
226. 00:11:57 And I feel like that's going to be perfect for some of like my, uh, task
227. 00:12:00 management YouTube video, you know, making that a big long blog post.
228. 00:12:03 So it's broken down into those individual sections.
229. 00:12:05 Like that's, that's what I want.
230. 00:12:07 So yeah.
231. 00:12:09 And then live earnestly in the here and now, um, I don't think, I don't think, uh,
232. 00:12:15 living under an urgency mindset, like I've been really qualified.
233. 00:12:19 But technically, I guess it's like, well, I got this presentation.
234. 00:12:22 I got to give tomorrow.
235. 00:12:23 So I guess I better build this stuff.
236. 00:12:25 I'm living in the here and now by the deadline.
237. 00:12:27 Right.
238. 00:12:27 That's keeping me here.
239. 00:12:29 That wasn't the intention though.
240. 00:12:30 So yeah, I don't think I did real great this, uh, this time around.
241. 00:12:35 Glad you were able to, uh, increase our, our average for the podcast.
242. 00:12:40 Hey, listen, uh, I've, I've been failing at them for a long, long time.
243. 00:12:44 So I got to step up at some point.
244. 00:12:46 Right.
245. 00:12:49 All right.
246. 00:12:50 Ready to talk about today's book.
247. 00:12:52 Let's talk about it.
248. 00:12:54 Okay.
249. 00:12:54 So today's book is make it stick by multiple authors, Peter Brown,
250. 00:12:59 Henry Rotiger and Mark McDaniel, and, uh, this was a recommendation from somebody
251. 00:13:07 in the library.
252. 00:13:08 So shout out to, to ward for recommending this book.
253. 00:13:11 That's how it came on my radar.
254. 00:13:14 Uh, it's basically a book about how we learn.
255. 00:13:17 And I was really curious about that topic.
256. 00:13:19 I know you've, you've picked books previously because you were
257. 00:13:22 interested in, in this topic.
258. 00:13:24 And, uh, I've heard not just from ward, but from other people who have, um, who
259. 00:13:29 have read this book and are interested in this topic, that this is kind of, you
260. 00:13:33 know, this is the good one.
261. 00:13:34 This is the, the one that you should read.
262. 00:13:36 But, uh, I knew that I was going to come at this from a perspective of life
263. 00:13:40 long learning and who cares about the school scenario.
264. 00:13:43 And that's where you live.
265. 00:13:45 So how do we reconcile this?
266. 00:13:47 Where does the conversation go?
267. 00:13:49 Uh, I think that'll be, be kind of interesting, but, um, yeah, it's broken
268. 00:13:53 down into eight chapters with a preface.
269. 00:13:57 There's no parts or sections to this book, although you could probably say
270. 00:14:02 chapters one through seven are a section on like different learning
271. 00:14:06 strategies.
272. 00:14:07 And then chapter eight is really four different applications of the concepts.
273. 00:14:14 Yep.
274. 00:14:15 Chapter eight ball goes my mind.
275. 00:14:16 So we're going to, we're going to get there, but I don't want to, I don't want
276. 00:14:18 to go there right now.
277. 00:14:19 Chapter eight is just kind of like, what just happened.
278. 00:14:22 Okay.
279. 00:14:22 Yeah.
280. 00:14:23 So chapter eight was weird to me.
281. 00:14:25 Um, yeah, we'll, we'll get there.
282. 00:14:27 Um, this book is roughly 250 pages with a whole lot of notes and a whole lot of
283. 00:14:34 research.
284. 00:14:35 Uh, I get feedback from people occasionally.
285. 00:14:38 So shout out to Mark who is, uh, frequently saying, you know, there's not
286. 00:14:43 really research to support that.
287. 00:14:45 Or that's kind of false based on, you know, they haven't been able to replicate it.
288. 00:14:49 Uh, that's basically what they set out to do was to replicate the studies.
289. 00:14:53 And, um, I feel like there's three of them and they have, uh, you have different
290. 00:14:58 perspectives and they milled it all together to try to prove which learning
291. 00:15:03 methods actually work with, with people and in different scenarios.
292. 00:15:08 So, uh, a little bit of a different approach than a lot of the, the productivity
293. 00:15:13 and business books that we read, which is really just, this is my experience.
294. 00:15:17 And this is what I learned and try it for yourself.
295. 00:15:19 Uh, this was really, uh, all, all about the, the replicatability of all these
296. 00:15:24 different research studies.
297. 00:15:26 Yeah.
298. 00:15:26 This was very much in a group of academics, right?
299. 00:15:33 Turning around, when writing a, what they wanted to be a more popular book, right?
300. 00:15:37 Like, so, you know, uh, in, in a few, if you've never gone to grad school, right?
301. 00:15:42 Like most of the articles and stuff that you read in grad school are like,
302. 00:15:47 this only get rid of the, like any popular side of it, right?
303. 00:15:51 Like it's just like, it's like the, the nuts and bolts of this study and this study
304. 00:15:56 and this study and then we, they proved this and they showed this and then this
305. 00:15:59 was replicated in this way.
306. 00:16:00 And like it's, I don't want to say dry because it's like you're interested in it.
307. 00:16:04 Yeah.
308. 00:16:04 I mean, if you're in grad school, you're interested in that topic or if you're,
309. 00:16:07 you know, an academic, you're interested in that, but you don't write for any other
310. 00:16:12 reason than the, like to communicate information.
311. 00:16:14 Like the whole goal of this writing is so somebody else can reference it and use it
312. 00:16:18 and we can build on the field of knowledge.
313. 00:16:21 And like when I'm reading this, I'm thinking like, ah, like they're doing that,
314. 00:16:25 but then they're trying to make it not quite that, right?
315. 00:16:28 Like they're trying to like add a little bit onto it.
316. 00:16:32 And what's funny is they, they referenced Dweck's growth mindset book and Dweck was
317. 00:16:37 one of the first, I shouldn't say one of the first, but it's like the one, the
318. 00:16:40 first one I really had come across who had taken academic research and turned it
319. 00:16:46 into a popular text that like actually got really, really big.
320. 00:16:51 And the problem with, she got flack.
321. 00:16:52 Like she got a ton of flack for that because it was, you know, I don't want to say
322. 00:16:57 selling out, but it was kind of like, that's what the, the academic community thought
323. 00:17:00 is they were like, oh, you just made a, you just made a popular text, right?
324. 00:17:04 Like you should have stayed true to, you know, academia.
325. 00:17:06 And then it was kind of like, wait, why?
326. 00:17:08 Like she just gave, you know, millions more people access to these ideas
327. 00:17:12 who aren't going to ever go read those journals.
328. 00:17:14 So it was funny as they were setting up this book, it was like the academic side
329. 00:17:19 and then blending in and trying to go a little bit more, you know, popular mainstream.
330. 00:17:24 And to, to double click on that point, you know, they mentioned a lot of different
331. 00:17:28 books. I remember specifically the part where they're talking about KELDLEX
332. 00:17:31 mindset, and they speak pretty positively about her book and her experience.
333. 00:17:40 More so than some of the other books that they mentioned, but a lot of, I mean,
334. 00:17:44 there's a lot of different books by a lot of different people that they reference
335. 00:17:48 throughout here. And I did not jot them all down.
336. 00:17:50 Most of the time, you know, in my, my map files, I go through there.
337. 00:17:54 And if they'd mentioned another book, I'll, I'll jot it down.
338. 00:17:56 But this is just, it's like a survey of learning.
339. 00:18:00 And so I think to try to, you know, get everything is sort of a failed approach
340. 00:18:06 in general, but specifically with this book, you got to figure out what is the, the, the
341. 00:18:11 part of this that's really going to resonate with me and like pick, you know, a couple
342. 00:18:14 of these strategies that you want to try to implement, not, I'm going to revamp how
343. 00:18:18 I learn and just redo it all according to their, their research.
344. 00:18:23 So that's one of the things that made this book more challenging for me as I read
345. 00:18:28 is like, I kept switching between me as a learner and then me as an educator.
346. 00:18:35 And like, I was like, oh, okay, how do I process this for me personally?
347. 00:18:39 And then, oh, how do I process for my students?
348. 00:18:41 And like, do I pick up that taught that idea and like try to implement it in my
349. 00:18:44 classes? And I kept like kind of waffling back and forth as I was thinking about
350. 00:18:48 that. So my notes were like really scattered in terms of this is a good idea for
351. 00:18:52 teaching and this is a good idea for me personally, but I didn't, I wasn't good
352. 00:18:55 enough, like to separate those while I was taking the notes.
353. 00:18:58 Like if I went back to my notes, that's what I need to do is I need to separate
354. 00:19:01 them out and be like, try this in the classroom, do this personally, try this
355. 00:19:04 in the classroom, do this personally kind of thing.
356. 00:19:07 Yeah.
357. 00:19:07 So I knew as I was going through this, that you were going to be tackling this
358. 00:19:11 from a couple different perspectives.
359. 00:19:13 And so normally when I pick a book or you pick a book, that person drives the
360. 00:19:19 content outline and the discussion, I'm going to try to give you more space
361. 00:19:26 to talk about this one because I felt right from the beginning, this is, this
362. 00:19:31 is for Corey more than it is for me.
363. 00:19:33 I thought the same thing.
364. 00:19:34 I was like, oh, make it stick.
365. 00:19:36 And then as we got into it, I was like, um, this really like is more of a
366. 00:19:40 me book than this is a Michael.
367. 00:19:41 So it's kind of ironic, like, you know, although we did the poll and all that
368. 00:19:45 stuff, but, you know, whatever.
369. 00:19:46 Yeah.
370. 00:19:46 Yep. Alright, so let's get into the specifics here.
371. 00:19:51 The book starts with a preface, which doesn't have real numbers on the pages.
372. 00:19:56 It's pretty long, but it's really just talking about who they are and their
373. 00:20:01 approach to putting this book together.
374. 00:20:03 And I have to admit that went through that preface.
375. 00:20:05 And I was like, oh, we didn't even get to page one yet.
376. 00:20:08 This is going to be a, it's going to be a long one.
377. 00:20:10 The, the, the saving grace of this whole thing was, you know, the notes
378. 00:20:14 started like 250 something pages and I was like, okay, good, right?
379. 00:20:19 Like we aren't actually going to dig through another, you know, 50 plus pages
380. 00:20:22 of, of this.
381. 00:20:23 So that, that's, that's saved.
382. 00:20:25 Um, I actually don't have anything from the preface, right?
383. 00:20:27 Like, I, I mean, I remember reading it and they were setting it up and
384. 00:20:30 explaining to us how they prepared the study and how they prepared there to
385. 00:20:34 write this and all stuff, but nothing really jumped out at me for the preface.
386. 00:20:38 Sure.
387. 00:20:38 So just real briefly, I guess things to keep in mind as we go through the rest
388. 00:20:42 of the book, um, the reason that this book exists, they mentioned at the
389. 00:20:47 beginning as much of what we think about learning is wasted effort.
390. 00:20:50 The list of effective learning strategies are not intuitive.
391. 00:20:53 And then I thought it was interesting that Henry Rotiger and Mark
392. 00:20:56 McDaniel, our cognitive scientist, but Peter Brown is the storyteller.
393. 00:21:01 So if you're going to take three people and put together a book like
394. 00:21:04 this, that seems like a pretty good mix, you know, two people who can go
395. 00:21:07 through the data and the one person who can spend a good narrative around it.
396. 00:21:11 Um, and they mentioned this is a book about what people can do for themselves
397. 00:21:15 right now in order to learn better and remember longer.
398. 00:21:18 But again, you know, don't try to do all of it, kind of figure out which
399. 00:21:23 of these strategies you think are most applicable to you.
400. 00:21:26 You're going to make the biggest difference and focus on those.
401. 00:21:30 Yeah.
402. 00:21:31 Uh, one of the things that didn't jump out at me, uh, until later in my
403. 00:21:35 reading of this is how much about memory it was, right?
404. 00:21:40 And like, so like learning versus memory, but at the same time, you need
405. 00:21:46 to remember some things in order to then learn and apply.
406. 00:21:50 And like they get into that in terms of like creativity and they, and they
407. 00:21:52 do that later in the, in the book, but like it made a lot more sense.
408. 00:21:56 The title of it made a lot more sense probably when I was in like chapter
409. 00:21:59 six, you know, chapter five, chapter six, I was like, ah, this is a memory book.
410. 00:22:02 We're in the, the, the, the mnemonic section and I was like, oh, make it stick.
411. 00:22:07 This is like a, this is a memory book, right?
412. 00:22:09 And then it all came together for me.
413. 00:22:13 Well, that's actually a good, good spot to get into the first chapter.
414. 00:22:16 If you're cool with that, let's do it.
415. 00:22:18 Okay.
416. 00:22:19 So chapter one, learning is misunderstood.
417. 00:22:22 And one of the things that I jotted down here is the immutable aspects of
418. 00:22:26 learning.
419. 00:22:28 They mentioned to be useful learning requires memory.
420. 00:22:30 So what we've learned is still there later when we need it, we need to keep
421. 00:22:34 learning and remembering all our lives.
422. 00:22:36 Learning is an acquired skill.
423. 00:22:37 And the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.
424. 00:22:39 So you can kind of see in that short list, that memory is a, an important part of
425. 00:22:46 this, they define learning in the first chapter, which is probably important.
426. 00:22:50 They define it as acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily
427. 00:22:53 available from memory.
428. 00:22:54 So you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.
429. 00:22:58 And, uh, I guess maybe that's where like all the focus on memory is where
430. 00:23:04 they start to lose me even at the very beginning, because the stuff that I do,
431. 00:23:11 I don't know, like the whole purpose of like the second brain type stuff.
432. 00:23:17 And I don't think I do specifically building a second brain sort of sort of a
433. 00:23:22 methodology inside obsidian, but it's a along the same lines.
434. 00:23:27 Like what is the goal here collecting information so that I can make sense of
435. 00:23:33 it and I can create something new out of it, but it really has nothing to do with
436. 00:23:38 what I have memorized.
437. 00:23:41 It's really when I am sitting down to write, I'm able to pull together the,
438. 00:23:45 the different pieces.
439. 00:23:47 So the whole idea of just being able to recall things doesn't really land with
440. 00:23:52 me.
441. 00:23:52 In fact, in the cohort, I teach three different levels of information where
442. 00:23:57 the first level is it's stuck in an archive and you can use search tools to go
443. 00:24:02 dig it up when you need it.
444. 00:24:03 The second level is when you can recall something without having to go retrieve
445. 00:24:08 it.
446. 00:24:08 And that's really what they're talking about.
447. 00:24:10 The third level is when you actually do something with what you have, have learned.
448. 00:24:16 And they do talk a little bit about that, but yeah, all the emphasis on being able
449. 00:24:20 to recall things.
450. 00:24:21 And again, you know, from a technical perspective, it makes sense.
451. 00:24:25 You have to have the thought before you can act on the thought.
452. 00:24:29 But I don't know, just the way that it's packaged.
453. 00:24:33 It's not my world, I guess.
454. 00:24:35 I don't know.
455. 00:24:35 It's not, it feels like it's not framed for someone like me.
456. 00:24:40 Well, and I'll tell you, I have a disconnect here as well.
457. 00:24:42 So, you know, being engineering, you know, as my, as my sub discipline, you know, like
458. 00:24:49 it's much more process driven than it is specific knowledge, right?
459. 00:24:53 Like, so we have tables, we have charts.
460. 00:24:55 We have things that we go look up and the memory side of it or the quote, unquote,
461. 00:25:00 learning side of it is remembering or knowing, oh, there is this repository of
462. 00:25:04 information or there is this process or there's this tool that I can use in this
463. 00:25:08 scenario.
464. 00:25:09 It's much less about like, do I know every step of that scenario?
465. 00:25:13 Like, for instance, you know, I may learn calculus at one stage of my career.
466. 00:25:19 And then not know how to do that exact procedure.
467. 00:25:23 Ten years from now, but I know that there's a procedure in calculus that I need
468. 00:25:26 to go look up or like, I know that there's a table that's going to give me, you know,
469. 00:25:30 the relationship between temperature and pressure and all this stuff.
470. 00:25:33 Like, so I don't resonate here with, um, I should say it this way.
471. 00:25:38 I don't resonate as much as like a med student would resonate with this.
472. 00:25:41 So like in a medical school environment, like this is actually why I got out of
473. 00:25:46 biology.
474. 00:25:46 I was not a big fan of the fact that like a lot of biology and a lot of med
475. 00:25:51 school and a lot of medicine was just memorizing a boatload of information,
476. 00:25:56 right?
477. 00:25:56 Like absolutely just knowing it, recalling it and all that stuff.
478. 00:26:00 And I'm like, that's, that's not me.
479. 00:26:01 But what I can say is like, you can give me a bunch of different parameters and
480. 00:26:05 you can give me a bunch of different scenarios and I can take all that and
481. 00:26:07 process it in and run a design process on that that has us get to a decent
482. 00:26:12 conclusion.
483. 00:26:13 And that's a different type of memory than necessarily being able to tell you
484. 00:26:20 all of the people in history, you know, all the kings in history from, you know,
485. 00:26:24 whatever date to whatever date.
486. 00:26:26 Like that's just not my, that's not my wheelhouse.
487. 00:26:29 Yeah, me either.
488. 00:26:31 Um, I also was a biology major at the beginning, but couldn't, uh, couldn't
489. 00:26:37 do it.
490. 00:26:38 Switch to business and understanding the principles and kind of the driving
491. 00:26:42 forces behind all the economic charts and stuff like that.
492. 00:26:45 That was, uh, I was going to say much easier, but it, that's really not just
493. 00:26:51 about things being easy.
494. 00:26:53 It's really that was interesting to me as opposed to all the different
495. 00:26:59 systems and all the different names and all that stuff just seemed like Greek
496. 00:27:02 to me and I could never, never remember it.
497. 00:27:05 Maybe if I had, had some of these things, you know, I, I would be a chiropractor
498. 00:27:08 today instead of, uh, see, but even there, like, even there, like when, when later
499. 00:27:14 on, when they're, when they're going through the mind palaces and they're
500. 00:27:16 going through all the way, different ways to remember that stuff.
501. 00:27:18 And like the memory athletes and all that.
502. 00:27:20 I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I'm good.
503. 00:27:22 Right.
504. 00:27:22 Like I don't, I, I have no interest or desire.
505. 00:27:25 Like I'm good.
506. 00:27:26 Like I don't need to do that in my life.
507. 00:27:29 Um, okay.
508. 00:27:30 So I'm just, I just don't think I'm wired that way on that my brain's wired that way.
509. 00:27:34 Yeah.
510. 00:27:35 Maybe me either.
511. 00:27:36 One other quote that I liked from this first chapter is by Albert Einstein.
512. 00:27:40 Creativity is more important than knowledge.
513. 00:27:43 And I guess this is really at the heart of the argument that you need to learn
514. 00:27:47 how to learn and not just have all the information.
515. 00:27:51 So I definitely agree with that, but there's two more pieces that came out of
516. 00:27:55 this first chapter that, that I thought were really valuable.
517. 00:27:59 I do agree with them that like creativity, having a good foundation of knowledge.
518. 00:28:05 Uh, and I think about it from design.
519. 00:28:06 So, you know, creativity, design that perspective, problem solving, you are
520. 00:28:12 more efficient at problem solving.
521. 00:28:13 I think you are more efficient at being creative.
522. 00:28:15 I think you're more efficient at doing design.
523. 00:28:17 If you have a background in the area or the context in which you're designing.
524. 00:28:22 So, you know, a good example of this is like, if I'm doing automation, you
525. 00:28:26 know, factory automation, it's better.
526. 00:28:30 I'm a better designer.
527. 00:28:31 I'm a more creative designer.
528. 00:28:32 I'm a more creative problem solver.
529. 00:28:34 If I know the landscape of what the top six automation technologies are in the
530. 00:28:40 food industry or what is current in the field right now, and that is what they
531. 00:28:44 would say like from a memory learning standpoint is, can I learn what those are
532. 00:28:49 and how they work and what the parameters are and how they would be applied?
533. 00:28:52 And so I agree with that on there.
534. 00:28:54 Like you can do a higher level, more efficient analysis, synthesis and
535. 00:28:58 creative problem solving.
536. 00:28:59 That's the way they worded it.
537. 00:29:00 If you have that stuff in your brain, so I agree with them completely on that.
538. 00:29:05 The other one is I, they introduced in this first chapter about testing.
539. 00:29:08 They start talking about testing and this is a big part of my world because
540. 00:29:13 for the most part, students hate tests.
541. 00:29:15 I mean, they just absolutely, you know, don't like anything about them.
542. 00:29:19 And they, they pitch testing as not a dipstick to measure learning.
543. 00:29:25 So not something that's going to be punitive or something that's going to tell
544. 00:29:28 you, you did a good job or you did a bad job.
545. 00:29:30 It's going to be something that's going to practice the retrieval from your memory.
546. 00:29:34 And it's going to be like testing is a way for me to, and we would call it.
547. 00:29:38 So in the engineering education world, we would call it, it's, it's a formative
548. 00:29:41 assessment, right?
549. 00:29:42 So really it's just telling you how well you know a thing.
550. 00:29:45 I think you're getting into chapter two because that is to learn, retrieve.
551. 00:29:48 And then that almost my notes on testing are, are from there.
552. 00:29:51 So, uh, you continue your thought, but I'm going to shout a note right here that I
553. 00:29:56 think this is actually where, where we should start talking about chapter two.
554. 00:29:59 Okay.
555. 00:30:00 Yeah.
556. 00:30:00 But that was my only point is like they, they, they re pitch testing as a, as a
557. 00:30:03 different idea than what we normally think about it as.
558. 00:30:07 Mm hmm.
559. 00:30:08 Yeah.
560. 00:30:09 No, the, the, uh, the whole thing about testing, that was something that I wanted
561. 00:30:13 to, to bring up to because they talk about testing helps you stop from forgetting
562. 00:30:16 the material.
563. 00:30:17 But then, uh, at the end of chapter two, there was an important point.
564. 00:30:20 I thought where testing doesn't need to be initiated by an instructor.
565. 00:30:23 And that was on my list of things to talk to you about, because as a instructor,
566. 00:30:28 you probably are the one initiating a lot of these tests.
567. 00:30:31 Do you see your students doing this themselves, like using this as a part of
568. 00:30:37 their, their learning process outside of the formal classroom?
569. 00:30:40 They will only do this to prepare for a test.
570. 00:30:43 Like, so they, you know what I mean?
571. 00:30:45 Like that's the only reason why they're going to do it.
572. 00:30:47 Um, are you familiar with a, with a tool called RemNote?
573. 00:30:50 I feel like I've heard of that, but I don't know what it is.
574. 00:30:52 Okay.
575. 00:30:52 So RemNote was, uh, how do I describe it?
576. 00:30:56 It's kind of like obsidian and like a flashcard system mixed together.
577. 00:31:01 Oh, okay.
578. 00:31:01 Yes.
579. 00:31:02 Yeah.
580. 00:31:02 I do remember that.
581. 00:31:03 So, and what you can do is you can do what's called spaced repetition, which the
582. 00:31:07 folk, our authors of this book would be, you know, they're all four spaced repetition.
583. 00:31:10 And we're going to get into that later in, uh, what chapter three, chapter four,
584. 00:31:13 something like that.
585. 00:31:14 Um, but, but they're, their whole application is based on this where you set up
586. 00:31:20 these outlines and then you can turn them into, it's almost like a flashcard system
587. 00:31:25 that says like, here's the prompt and then can you answer it?
588. 00:31:28 Here's the prompt.
589. 00:31:28 Can you answer it?
590. 00:31:29 So the way our authors would call it is they would call it quizzing, you know,
591. 00:31:32 which is that mini form of testing in order for you to retrieve, right?
592. 00:31:36 Like, Oh, okay.
593. 00:31:36 I'm going to run through this mini quiz now.
594. 00:31:39 And, um, I, that got popular because a lot of people in med school started using it.
595. 00:31:44 Like they would do all their note taking and all their outlining on that.
596. 00:31:47 And then it would turn it into a way for them to quiz themselves, um, automatically,
597. 00:31:51 basically.
598. 00:31:52 So that's how RemNote got, got real popular.
599. 00:31:55 Yeah.
600. 00:31:55 We will get into the spaced repetition formally later, but they do mention it
601. 00:31:59 for the first time, I think here where they talk about how it leads to higher long-term retention.
602. 00:32:04 And I do recall that RemNote application and like the different flashcard
603. 00:32:10 softwares that are, are out there.
604. 00:32:13 And I've seen people try to build that sort of thing inside of obsidian to know
605. 00:32:17 that there are plugins that can help you see stuff.
606. 00:32:20 There's even like a random note plugin, a core plugin where it just opens up a random
607. 00:32:24 note when you open up your, your vault.
608. 00:32:27 That has never been appealing to me though.
609. 00:32:30 Like I've never even been curious about, you know, what is to, what is the value
610. 00:32:35 of doing something like this?
611. 00:32:37 It was always just like, why would anyone want to do that?
612. 00:32:40 The biggest thing I played around with this was for scripture memory.
613. 00:32:44 It's like, Oh, could I use this tool as a way to memorize scripture?
614. 00:32:46 Right.
615. 00:32:46 And that was, you know, that was the only thing that got me close enough to be
616. 00:32:50 interested in using a tool like that.
617. 00:32:52 But I went into it and I started playing around with it.
618. 00:32:54 And I realized I was like, it's just too clunky.
619. 00:32:56 It's just too cumbersome.
620. 00:32:57 So I, I lost that to what the user interface, not at the actual functionality of it.
621. 00:33:03 Well, there are other applications of this, uh, space repetition idea.
622. 00:33:08 Maybe we should get into chapter three before we let me do one more, let me do
623. 00:33:11 one more thing on chapter two, because they, sure, they talk about this concept
624. 00:33:15 of interrupting the process of forgetting.
625. 00:33:18 And I really love the way they phrase that because it's like, what is the
626. 00:33:22 challenge I have with, you know, quote, unquote learning?
627. 00:33:26 It's the fact that I forget a lot of what I learned.
628. 00:33:28 And, and they're, I remember, you know, reading learning theory and all the stuff.
629. 00:33:31 And there was this triangle and it was like, you forget X percent of this and
630. 00:33:35 X percent of that, X percent is, you forget 70% of what you see and 30% of what
631. 00:33:40 you hear.
632. 00:33:41 And I forget what it was, but like, that's a really good way to phrase that is
633. 00:33:44 interrupting the process of learning, right?
634. 00:33:46 Like if we can figure out a way to interrupt the process of learning, we're
635. 00:33:49 going to remember, uh, more of that.
636. 00:33:51 So interrupt the process of forgetting.
637. 00:33:53 I'm sorry.
638. 00:33:54 Yeah.
639. 00:33:54 Interrupt the process of forgetting.
640. 00:33:55 Thank you.
641. 00:33:55 That was, that was, um, I know what you meant, but like, I, I like that, um, a lot.
642. 00:34:01 Like I really like the way they phrased that a lot.
643. 00:34:04 Yeah.
644. 00:34:04 I like, like that too.
645. 00:34:06 That's the other one that got me towards the end of the chapter.
646. 00:34:09 And you might have mentioned on this before and I, and I missed it, but that we
647. 00:34:14 often don't want to work hard to learn, but that the more effort we take to retrieve
648. 00:34:19 this information, a lot of times it benefits us in the long run.
649. 00:34:23 So essentially they, they, they introduced this for the first time here, or first
650. 00:34:27 time here or close to here where they're like, the harder we work to retrieve, the
651. 00:34:31 more likely we are to have it stick in our brain.
652. 00:34:34 And I was like, ah, that's actually good.
653. 00:34:35 Cause that's usually where I fall down is like, ah, that's really hard to remember.
654. 00:34:38 All that stuff I'm done.
655. 00:34:39 Like I don't even care, you know, yeah.
656. 00:34:42 So this is the, the, the spot where like I understand that conceptually and kind
657. 00:34:47 of a different version of that, I think, which is more appealing to me is not the
658. 00:34:54 effortful recall of the information, but the forcing function of sitting down at a
659. 00:35:00 keyboard and writing something as a tool that forces you to sort of codify.
660. 00:35:09 What do I think about this stuff?
661. 00:35:11 I find that that is something that helps force the, the recall for me.
662. 00:35:17 But that's not really what they're talking about here.
663. 00:35:21 It's recalling the stuff so that you can answer the questions on a test really at
664. 00:35:27 this point.
665. 00:35:28 Yeah, they're very specific.
666. 00:35:29 Yeah.
667. 00:35:30 Yeah.
668. 00:35:31 And that whole thing just kind of like drives me nuts.
669. 00:35:35 It's like, okay.
670. 00:35:35 So you, you ace the test, but then to your point about, you know, the forgetting
671. 00:35:39 that happens right after that.
672. 00:35:40 They talk about cramming leading the higher scores immediately, but also higher
673. 00:35:43 forgetting.
674. 00:35:44 Yeah, that's what happens.
675. 00:35:45 You pass the test and then you completely forget the information.
676. 00:35:49 I will tell you that is what most students do.
677. 00:35:52 That is 100% what most students do is they cram and then they forget it the next
678. 00:35:55 day, like they don't even care.
679. 00:35:56 They're just like, okay, it's gone.
680. 00:35:57 I, I took the test and it's gone.
681. 00:35:59 Um, and I'm not even going to say that's, that's not what I did, you know, going
682. 00:36:02 through undergrad and all that stuff because sometimes it's got to survive.
683. 00:36:05 Um, but, but what's interesting, let's actually put this on you as, as an
684. 00:36:09 example of this, you take these ideas that you read in these books that you
685. 00:36:15 think about through obsidian, that you think about through knowledge management,
686. 00:36:18 you know, and all of that stuff and you, you take your notes on it, right?
687. 00:36:24 So you take the ideas, you condense them down and you put them in your notes.
688. 00:36:28 And then you attempt to recall those into a newsletter, into a YouTube video
689. 00:36:33 into something, right?
690. 00:36:34 So right there is your first retrieval, maybe not even your first, you might
691. 00:36:38 have done more retrieval in there, depending on how long it took you to
692. 00:36:41 figure out your script or whatever it's going to do.
693. 00:36:43 So it's like, then you and I talk every two weeks and you consistently bring up
694. 00:36:50 these ideas that you've learned in other places and like how you're making
695. 00:36:53 connections between a book you read four years ago and a book you're reading now
696. 00:36:58 and like on all this stuff, that's, that's retrieval number two, right?
697. 00:37:00 Like, so we are doing this more than I think we realize we're just not doing
698. 00:37:05 it in the way they describe it here.
699. 00:37:08 Because we don't take this anymore.
700. 00:37:09 We don't have any reason to take test anymore.
701. 00:37:12 And that's the thing that I have a visceral negative reaction towards.
702. 00:37:17 It's like, if someone were to tell me, read this book and in two weeks, I'm
703. 00:37:21 going to test you on it.
704. 00:37:24 I, I would not, I would not want to pick it up.
705. 00:37:27 But when I can go into it and be like, I'm going to pick out of this, these
706. 00:37:32 250 pages, the one or two things, maybe that I think are important.
707. 00:37:37 It completely changes the relationship with learning the information.
708. 00:37:41 It's not to please somebody else or to pass a test.
709. 00:37:44 It's, what am I curious about?
710. 00:37:47 It's not, what does somebody else say is going to be important because it might
711. 00:37:51 show up on a test somewhere.
712. 00:37:52 It's really, what do I think is useful?
713. 00:37:55 It's, it's completely different.
714. 00:37:57 So, so this is, I think a big miss on their book that they don't talk about
715. 00:38:03 is the idea of motivation, the idea of, you know, we're talking about
716. 00:38:07 make it stick, right?
717. 00:38:07 Like the whole, the whole one, the book is make it stick, right?
718. 00:38:10 Well, the things that I'm naturally oriented towards, I'm going to want them
719. 00:38:16 to stick more than the other things that I could absolutely care less about, right?
720. 00:38:20 And they, they don't really touch that.
721. 00:38:22 Now that wasn't their goal.
722. 00:38:23 Their goal wasn't to talk about that, but I do think that's a big miss that they
723. 00:38:27 have in the book is how motivation plays into what we learn and why we learn it
724. 00:38:33 and how we care about learning or how much we care about learning.
725. 00:38:36 So yeah, that's a, that's a really good point, Mike.
726. 00:38:39 All right.
727. 00:38:39 Ready to go to chapter three?
728. 00:38:40 Yeah, let's do it.
729. 00:38:41 Okay.
730. 00:38:42 So chapter three, mix up your practice and really this is already
731. 00:38:47 encapsulate this.
732. 00:38:48 You should have different types of practice instead of just, you know, I'm
733. 00:38:53 going to do this and then switch to this thing and then switch to this thing.
734. 00:38:55 By mixing up the problem types, you increase the long term learning and they
735. 00:38:59 had a specific percentage, it was 215 percent, but it also hinders the initial
736. 00:39:03 learning.
737. 00:39:04 So it's like you can do it quick or you can do it right.
738. 00:39:07 And I think, you know, there's a lot of value in, in that.
739. 00:39:12 And kind of, I don't have an application of this, but I guess just as an example,
740. 00:39:17 if you were trying to learn a skill, like my kids are play, they play basketball,
741. 00:39:23 they play soccer, you know, if I was going to try to help them become a better
742. 00:39:27 basketball player, you know, we're not just going to focus on dribbling.
743. 00:39:30 We're not going to just focus on shooting, just focus on free throws,
744. 00:39:33 just focus on layups, we're going to kind of like do all that stuff together.
745. 00:39:37 And the more that we can kind of spread it out so they don't know what's coming
746. 00:39:40 next, the, the more they're going to be able to translate that.
747. 00:39:44 Now they did mention something here, which I thought was interesting about, you can
748. 00:39:48 practice things in your mind and they, they mentioned specifically a football
749. 00:39:51 team that walks through the plays and then rehearses them in their minds.
750. 00:39:56 And then that leads into this whole idea of mental rehearsal and visualization.
751. 00:40:00 And this is my first like big knock against this book, I feel like, because
752. 00:40:05 they touch on this topic, but they don't really go into it.
753. 00:40:07 Yeah.
754. 00:40:08 And this is something that it's right there.
755. 00:40:11 It's such low hanging fruit.
756. 00:40:12 And I have a weird experience with this growing up in the family business because
757. 00:40:17 my dad's software that he developed was allowing the lines of emotional
758. 00:40:23 intelligence and self-determination and stuff like that. And part of that is this
759. 00:40:31 mental rehearsal visualization.
760. 00:40:32 I remember specifically this research study, which it's been credited a couple
761. 00:40:36 of different places, but the one that, that stands out to me is the University
762. 00:40:40 of Chicago, but the research basically is they had these different groups of
763. 00:40:44 basketball players.
764. 00:40:45 And the first group just shot free throws for an hour a day, every day for 30 days.
765. 00:40:49 The second group practiced mental rehearsal visualization.
766. 00:40:52 So they pictured themselves making the free throws, didn't touch a basketball,
767. 00:40:56 though, and the third group did nothing.
768. 00:40:57 And what they found is that the first group, which actually did all the practice,
769. 00:41:01 they improved by, you know, let's say 28% in those 30 days and the group that
770. 00:41:07 never touched a basketball improved by 1% less.
771. 00:41:11 It was like 27%.
772. 00:41:12 I may be screwing up those numbers, but the point is that the rehearsal, the
773. 00:41:16 mental rehearsal visualization was really powerful to the point where it
774. 00:41:20 almost equaled the physical practice and the, increasing the, the muscle memory
775. 00:41:26 of actually doing the thing.
776. 00:41:28 And so this was when I came across this, this was kind of when a lot of the, the
777. 00:41:33 athletes were really starting to, the professional athletes were starting to
778. 00:41:36 focus on this aspect of it.
779. 00:41:38 It wasn't just, you know, the physical practice, the, and doing the things.
780. 00:41:42 It was, it was really the, this became a really big deal, basically.
781. 00:41:47 I started seeing it all over the place.
782. 00:41:49 A lot of, like, I was a tennis player.
783. 00:41:51 So a lot of the tennis players started talking about their, their mental
784. 00:41:54 rehearsal routines.
785. 00:41:55 I remember like the Michael Phelps story, you know, put in the videotape.
786. 00:42:00 You remember that?
787. 00:42:01 Yep, I do.
788. 00:42:02 Okay.
789. 00:42:02 Yeah.
790. 00:42:03 So I won't tell that whole story, but like that was all happening.
791. 00:42:05 You know, as I was, as I was growing up and understanding this, this concept of
792. 00:42:10 mental rehearsal and visualization, and they just, they kind of just mentioned
793. 00:42:14 it and then moved on and I was like, this is the most powerful part of this, this
794. 00:42:18 books up until this point, like not for them.
795. 00:42:20 What are you, what are you doing?
796. 00:42:24 Yeah, I guess.
797. 00:42:25 Yeah.
798. 00:42:26 I mean, so they, they hit these three ideas when we're talking about practice, right?
799. 00:42:29 So spaced, interleaved and varied, right?
800. 00:42:32 So spaced, we got to have some space in between the practice sessions.
801. 00:42:34 Interleave means we need to do multiple related things, but not the exact same
802. 00:42:39 thing over time and then varied.
803. 00:42:41 We need to like essentially change up the way we practice.
804. 00:42:44 I guess that's the way I'm going to, that's the way I'm going to describe that one.
805. 00:42:47 The best analogy to this without a doubt is sports, right?
806. 00:42:50 If you've ever been on a sports team, this is typically what a sports team will do, right?
807. 00:42:54 You space out your practices so you don't practice every day, all day, right?
808. 00:42:58 You actually take some space in between your practices, right?
809. 00:43:01 You interleave.
810. 00:43:01 So, you know, at this time, let's, let's do soccer, right?
811. 00:43:05 Like, so at this time you might be practicing passing and then you're going
812. 00:43:08 to practice, you know, dribbling and then you're going to pass a practice
813. 00:43:11 actual shots and, you know, whatever it might be.
814. 00:43:14 So you mix up those related concepts, right?
815. 00:43:16 And then you're going to vary it up.
816. 00:43:17 Sometimes we'll do it max intensity.
817. 00:43:19 Sometimes we'll do it at minimum intensity.
818. 00:43:21 And I think to myself, like this, this makes absolute sense.
819. 00:43:24 Like 100% absolute sense.
820. 00:43:26 Musicians would do the same thing.
821. 00:43:27 So Mike, you play the guitar.
822. 00:43:28 Like when you're, when you're practicing the guitar, you're not going to do the
823. 00:43:31 exact same thing over and over again, unless you're cramming to play a song on
824. 00:43:36 Saturday night that you need to play Sunday morning and then you will do that.
825. 00:43:40 Because, you know, but if you want to actually get better at the guitar, you're
826. 00:43:43 going to, you're going to mix it up.
827. 00:43:44 You're going to space it out.
828. 00:43:46 You're going to, you know, vary, vary the way you're going to do different things.
829. 00:43:49 And like, I just think there's a lot of validity there, you know, at least on
830. 00:43:55 face validity.
831. 00:43:56 And then they're bringing it to you from a, you know, research, you know,
832. 00:43:59 credibility from a research standpoint that we've tested this.
833. 00:44:02 And I mean, it's credible from the research standpoint as well.
834. 00:44:04 So I really like that idea and like that's one of my action items coming out of
835. 00:44:09 this book is how do I think about the things that I do or the things that I
836. 00:44:13 want to get good at, the things that I want to learn?
837. 00:44:16 I don't know exactly how to phrase that right now.
838. 00:44:18 But how do I think about those things and think about, can I do them in a
839. 00:44:20 spaced way?
840. 00:44:21 Can I do them in an interleaved way and can I do them in a varied way?
841. 00:44:24 And intentionally implement that, that way I can learn or practice better.
842. 00:44:32 So that's that that was a good thing for me is getting out of, you know, an
843. 00:44:37 action item out of this section.
844. 00:44:39 So that actually leads perfectly into the next section.
845. 00:44:42 I want to go back to your guitar example.
846. 00:44:47 So chapter four is embrace difficulties.
847. 00:44:50 And I think what happens by default with most people who play guitar and I
848. 00:44:55 totally would fall into this as well is you pick up the guitar to play it.
849. 00:45:01 And you have your standard lick that you play, your standard chord progression.
850. 00:45:07 That's like, you don't even think about it.
851. 00:45:09 It's just, this is what I do when I pick up the guitar and it's so easy.
852. 00:45:12 Just fall into those regular patterns because this is what I normally do.
853. 00:45:17 So if you really want to learn the guitar, you have to do things that you're
854. 00:45:25 not good at.
855. 00:45:26 And so the very first thing I talk about in embrace difficulties is it's one
856. 00:45:30 thing to feel confident.
857. 00:45:31 I felt confident.
858. 00:45:33 It's another to demonstrate mastery, which became very evident when I sat down to
859. 00:45:37 somebody next to somebody who actually knew how to play the guitar.
860. 00:45:40 And they were playing all these, these riffs and these scales and these things
861. 00:45:44 that, you know, I had a very limited thing that I just, you know, because it was
862. 00:45:49 something I did for fun that I ended up falling into.
863. 00:45:53 So they talk about how learning works here.
864. 00:45:55 There's the encoding.
865. 00:45:55 There's the consolidation and then there's, there's a retrieval.
866. 00:45:59 And they mentioned in this chapter, something that I think is very important.
867. 00:46:02 There's virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we
868. 00:46:06 relate it to what we already know.
869. 00:46:09 So yeah, I see you nodding your head.
870. 00:46:12 Maybe you got something that you want to talk about there.
871. 00:46:14 But really the thing that I wanted to, to chat with you about as a, as it pertains
872. 00:46:20 to that is this whole idea of writing to learn as a way of codifying learning.
873. 00:46:26 I don't think they necessarily use that phrase.
874. 00:46:29 I think that was probably my interpretation of, of some of this stuff.
875. 00:46:32 But yeah, so like you're a professor, you put together these, these tests for
876. 00:46:37 your students.
877. 00:46:39 Do you think that is an effective technique to actually learn this stuff?
878. 00:46:44 Or is that just something that crazy content creators like me do once they
879. 00:46:48 get out of school?
880. 00:46:49 Okay.
881. 00:46:49 So, so you have to understand I don't use tests as what we would call
882. 00:46:54 summative assessments, right?
883. 00:46:55 Like I don't like tests as summative assessments.
884. 00:46:57 They, they, you have to use them sometimes because there's really certain
885. 00:47:01 content where it's just not, there's not a better mechanism for it.
886. 00:47:04 Most of the things I do are projects, reports, presentations.
887. 00:47:07 So we're taking a whole work that we've done over the last two, three, four,
888. 00:47:11 five weeks, months, whatever it might be.
889. 00:47:14 And we're packaging that into either a writing, like you're saying, or a
890. 00:47:19 presentation, um, or some other package that, that is being delivered.
891. 00:47:23 So I do much more of that. I would say like 75, 25, right?
892. 00:47:28 70% of my, my stuff is that now I will still give tests, but my tests are 100%
893. 00:47:35 for you to go, like you essentially to check yourself and be like, listen,
894. 00:47:39 I have no idea what we're doing in this class, right?
895. 00:47:41 Like so, you know, engineering economics is, is one of them teaching right now.
896. 00:47:44 And you know, you're dealing with moving money forward, moving money backward,
897. 00:47:48 annualizing amounts, you know, like present value, future value, all that kind of
898. 00:47:51 stuff. And like students think they know what they're doing when we're in class
899. 00:47:55 and we're going over it. And then you give them like a quiz or you give them a
900. 00:47:57 test and like, nope, I have no idea. Like I understand the formulas you told me,
901. 00:48:03 I understand how to use Excel, but I have no idea how to set things up in order to
902. 00:48:06 do it. And a lot of times you can tell them that, like I guess the instructor
903. 00:48:11 can be like, Hey, listen, I don't think you understand what we're doing here.
904. 00:48:14 Like at a fundamental level, you don't understand what we're doing here.
905. 00:48:17 But then when they see it on like, here's, here's an exam problem.
906. 00:48:21 And I just have no idea what to do. And like, they, they internalize it more.
907. 00:48:28 But what's interesting there is, and I think I don't think this is in this
908. 00:48:30 chapter, but it's, it's in later chapters, the key is feedback and follow up.
909. 00:48:35 So it's like, you have to give them feedback on that.
910. 00:48:38 And then you have to have them follow up and try it again.
911. 00:48:42 Or else all you did was just hurt their confidence, right?
912. 00:48:45 Like, I mean, you just crushed their confidence because they're like, yep,
913. 00:48:47 I had no idea what I was doing. And you just proved it to me.
914. 00:48:50 So I have a little bit of a different take on this.
915. 00:48:52 I don't know if that answers your question or not, but I have a little bit of a
916. 00:48:54 different take on this from the way I know it does.
917. 00:48:57 And I like that you're hitting on one of the major problems, I feel, though,
918. 00:49:02 with the whole classroom model and feel free to push back against this.
919. 00:49:06 But they mentioned, for example, it's better to solve a problem than to
920. 00:49:09 memorize a solution and the feedback that you're talking about.
921. 00:49:13 Once you get the diploma, you get the degree, the natural,
922. 00:49:19 the actual next step I feel like is to be like, well, okay, I don't have to do that anymore.
923. 00:49:25 And one of the things that I tell people when it comes to establishing
924. 00:49:31 a reading habit and reading more is to pick books that you think are going
925. 00:49:36 to solve a problem that you're encountering.
926. 00:49:40 And there's a, there's a nuance there between, you know,
927. 00:49:43 reading to solve a problem and reading to memorize a solution.
928. 00:49:47 I feel like a lot of the productivity books that are out there are written
929. 00:49:52 in a way that they're trying to help people memorize a solution.
930. 00:49:56 Yeah, it's like, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you.
931. 00:49:59 I'm going to tell you and then I'm going to tell you what I told you.
932. 00:50:01 I'm going to say the same thing over and over again.
933. 00:50:03 And it could be a blog post, but it's going to be 200 pages.
934. 00:50:07 Just because I want to drill this idea down, but yeah, the real valuable
935. 00:50:13 stuff happens when you learn to motivate yourself and one of the best
936. 00:50:17 ways I know to motivate yourself is to, okay, I'm experiencing this pain point.
937. 00:50:21 This is really just a problem.
938. 00:50:22 It's something broken in my system.
939. 00:50:24 What are the potential solutions here for making this pain go away?
940. 00:50:29 Yeah.
941. 00:50:29 And, and, you know, tell me if you want me to stop nerding out on this, but it's
942. 00:50:33 like, okay, we have to learn linear algebra in my world, right?
943. 00:50:37 So I do industrial system engineering, right?
944. 00:50:38 So we have to learn linear algebra.
945. 00:50:39 Well, linear algebra is much more related to the testing, right?
946. 00:50:42 Because what are we trying to get you to understand?
947. 00:50:44 We're trying to get you to understand the mechanisms behind linear algebra.
948. 00:50:47 How do you manipulate matrices?
949. 00:50:49 How do you do different things?
950. 00:50:50 Really, we just need you to understand the mechanisms of that.
951. 00:50:53 Now, my difference from a lot of people is I'm going to teach you the underlying
952. 00:50:57 mechanisms, but then I'm going to move you to the tools you're actually going
953. 00:50:59 to use in industry really, really quick, because you're never going to do row
954. 00:51:04 operations by hand.
955. 00:51:06 Like people just don't do that anymore.
956. 00:51:07 Like you put into a software program and it does the row operations for you.
957. 00:51:10 But you actually have to understand like why you would do it in certain ways.
958. 00:51:13 So I'm going to move you an application really, really quick.
959. 00:51:15 But the reason why you need to know that is because when we get into ops research
960. 00:51:19 or when we get into logistics engineering, it's all stats and applied linear algebra.
961. 00:51:26 So it's like, if you don't know those fundamental ideas and you're not good
962. 00:51:28 enough at those and when to use them and how to use them, logistics and ops research
963. 00:51:32 just got a lot harder.
964. 00:51:34 You can't solve interesting problems because you don't understand the fundamental
965. 00:51:37 math that that drives that.
966. 00:51:39 Well, then you're going to go out and you're going to be an engineer and it's
967. 00:51:42 going to get even worse because then you're going to say, well, okay, I need to solve
968. 00:51:45 this actual problem for this company and save them millions of dollars or not.
969. 00:51:51 And I don't understand the logistics engineering side of it, which because I
970. 00:51:54 never understood the math.
971. 00:51:55 So it's like, it's, it's this idea that it builds on it, on itself.
972. 00:51:59 And that is, you know, they, they talk in here about having the coach or having
973. 00:52:03 the, the trainer or whatever it is that like pushes you and keeps you doing
974. 00:52:10 deliberate practice, if you will, I think that's going to be later in the, in the
975. 00:52:13 chapters.
976. 00:52:14 I think that's the value of a university.
977. 00:52:16 If you're going to a place where you have good instructors is, it's not the
978. 00:52:22 rote information that gets input into your brain.
979. 00:52:24 It's the ability for me to help you understand contextually why you need to
980. 00:52:28 know linear algebra and then help you figure out what, what pieces of that are
981. 00:52:33 going to stick with you and then which ones are, we're just learning because
982. 00:52:35 you got to learn them for now.
983. 00:52:37 You know, and like, I think that's the value of the, of the, of our role as
984. 00:52:41 educators.
985. 00:52:42 So sorry.
986. 00:52:43 I just soapboxed soapbox for a minute.
987. 00:52:45 So thank you for your not for energy to, to extend the soapbox.
988. 00:52:48 Cause I think it leads into the next chapter, chapter five, avoid illusions of
989. 00:52:52 knowing.
990. 00:52:52 I would argue that the real value for people who aren't just going to teach
991. 00:52:57 so that their students pass a test to the double click on what you were just
992. 00:53:02 talking about, the biggest thing that, a value that you can show your students is,
993. 00:53:07 you know, you don't understand that thing as well as you think you understand it.
994. 00:53:10 Let me show you why.
995. 00:53:12 You don't know your blind spots.
996. 00:53:13 Having somebody who has done the thing and has experience in your field, having
997. 00:53:17 them show you, you know, this is actually what mastery looks like.
998. 00:53:21 I think that's, uh, that's important.
999. 00:53:23 That's not at all.
1000. 00:53:24 I think what chapter five is really about.
1001. 00:53:26 Yeah, just the title ties in.
1002. 00:53:29 The very first thing they mentioned in here is metacognition, which they have a
1003. 00:53:32 different, weird definition of, you know, I've always thought of metacognition as
1004. 00:53:36 like thinking about thinking.
1005. 00:53:37 Yeah, they define it as monitoring your own thinking.
1006. 00:53:41 It's not thinking about thinking, right?
1007. 00:53:42 Like, so it's, it's always been thinking about thinking.
1008. 00:53:45 It will always be thinking about thinking.
1009. 00:53:46 That's the way you remember it.
1010. 00:53:48 Well, how would you even go about like monitoring your own thinking?
1011. 00:53:52 I, that, that feels like, okay, so I have to figure out a way to actually
1012. 00:53:56 measure this that, that seems ridiculous and too much work and not forget that.
1013. 00:54:01 It's, it's hard enough getting people to think about thinking, let alone, try to,
1014. 00:54:06 try to monitor it effectively.
1015. 00:54:08 I agree.
1016. 00:54:08 Um, but I do have a lot of notes in this section.
1017. 00:54:11 They, they bring up a lot of interesting ideas.
1018. 00:54:13 Um, they, the, so the first like related one, I think is the Dunning Kruger effect,
1019. 00:54:19 which is when we're incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence.
1020. 00:54:22 And they've got kind of different ways of defining these, which are,
1021. 00:54:26 I don't know, they, they provide more context.
1022. 00:54:29 Let's say for the traditional definitions of this stuff, but the Dunning Kruger
1023. 00:54:34 effect that I feel like that's like the, the chart where it goes way up at the
1024. 00:54:37 beginning is you're just learning the skill and you feel like, Oh yeah, I got
1025. 00:54:40 this and it goes way down when you realize, Oh, actually, I know nothing at all.
1026. 00:54:43 And it slowly kind of builds again.
1027. 00:54:46 Uh, is that a accurate description of that?
1028. 00:54:48 Uh, yeah, I would say that's accurate.
1029. 00:54:49 Um, I definitely experienced that in my life before it's like, you know, it's like, Oh,
1030. 00:54:53 I know every, I know nothing and then try to come back up a little bit.
1031. 00:54:59 But essentially they're talking about kind of some different mental models in
1032. 00:55:02 here, which by the way, that's a whole nother topic.
1033. 00:55:04 They got a different definition of mental models.
1034. 00:55:07 Yeah, which I did not really care for, but that's, I don't know.
1035. 00:55:11 I guess I've got my own, you know, we've read several books on mental models.
1036. 00:55:16 I'm a big fan of those.
1037. 00:55:17 So having them define a different way of like how you are actually building
1038. 00:55:21 these things as a system in your head, didn't really click with me, but.
1039. 00:55:28 Uh, so this chapter is interesting to me because, uh, vendetta might be too
1040. 00:55:32 strong of a word, but like, like, I, it, I have more notes on this chapter two,
1041. 00:55:39 but I think they were just trying to call out like a lot of the ways that
1042. 00:55:42 people think they know more than they actually do.
1043. 00:55:45 And it gets in the way of them actually learning or obtaining mastery or whatever
1044. 00:55:50 it is, because, I mean, I'm just going to rattle some off, right?
1045. 00:55:52 Like, so they've got condiments thinking fast and slow.
1046. 00:55:55 Um, they've got hindsight bias, fluency, illusions, memory, conformity, like
1047. 00:56:00 flash bulb, uh, memories, like they've got a ton of these different things.
1048. 00:56:04 And I mean, one of the things, like if you're thinking about reading this book,
1049. 00:56:09 I think this section is really interesting just from a, what are all the
1050. 00:56:12 ways that like, I might mess up the assessment of my knowledge, you know, like,
1051. 00:56:18 like, and I just think this is a really valuable chapter that we don't
1052. 00:56:22 often think about, um, how we might mess up, you know, thinking about thinking
1053. 00:56:28 or monitoring our own knowledge, if you will.
1054. 00:56:31 One of the things that I liked about this was the curse of knowledge, which
1055. 00:56:34 is the tendency to underestimate how long it's going to take someone to
1056. 00:56:36 learn something as I was reading through this, I realized, you know, I'm just
1057. 00:56:40 went through the practical P.K.M cohort.
1058. 00:56:42 And, uh, I think I can maybe fall into this sometimes because there are some
1059. 00:56:47 people in the library who are smarter than I am when it comes to how to use
1060. 00:56:54 obsidian for specific things.
1061. 00:56:56 There are other people who have never even used the app before, have no idea
1062. 00:57:01 where to start.
1063. 00:57:02 And I can move very quickly over some things, forgetting that there are
1064. 00:57:08 people who don't understand some basic principles that other other people who
1065. 00:57:12 are, who are there, you know, that they understand it, but I can't assume
1066. 00:57:15 that everybody has that same level of knowledge.
1067. 00:57:18 And then just because I mentioned it one time, doesn't mean that they're, they've
1068. 00:57:21 now mastered that concept.
1069. 00:57:24 So what is that?
1070. 00:57:25 Like, is there an action I'm associated with that?
1071. 00:57:27 Not necessarily, but I will say that it's got me thinking about the whole cohort
1072. 00:57:32 model.
1073. 00:57:33 And I think what I'm actually going to start doing is break stuff down into
1074. 00:57:37 like a hybrid model.
1075. 00:57:39 So there will be the regular Q and A calls where people can get feedback
1076. 00:57:43 on things, but the actual material, I want to break down into the sort of
1077. 00:57:47 self-paced lessons, which are smaller than the, you know, we're going to go
1078. 00:57:51 through everything related to task management this week.
1079. 00:57:54 We'll break it down into individual pieces so you can learn little chunks
1080. 00:57:58 of it.
1081. 00:57:58 And then you can come ask questions no matter where you are in the process.
1082. 00:58:03 Yeah.
1083. 00:58:03 I mean, you give, you give people agency there too, right?
1084. 00:58:05 So if I don't know anything, I can choose the videos I want to watch.
1085. 00:58:10 Yeah, which allows me to then control that narrative a little bit more and not
1086. 00:58:14 feel like I'm drinking from the fire hose if I'm from a little bit behind.
1087. 00:58:18 Yep, exactly.
1088. 00:58:19 So one of the one, another one that came out of this chapter for me is they
1089. 00:58:23 tie back into that apprenticeship model again.
1090. 00:58:25 And, you know, we learned about that mastery with Robert Greene.
1091. 00:58:30 I am a huge, huge fan of apprenticeship.
1092. 00:58:33 Like I just think, I mean, I don't know how scalable it is.
1093. 00:58:37 And I understand the, what we're dealing with, you know, as a, as a country
1094. 00:58:40 from an educational standpoint, but it's like, I just think this, this
1095. 00:58:43 apprenticeship model is there's legs there and it's like, it's valuable.
1096. 00:58:47 And I think we need to be doing more of it.
1097. 00:58:49 I really think we need to be doing more apprenticeship.
1098. 00:58:52 Duly noted.
1099. 00:58:54 Sorry.
1100. 00:58:55 All right.
1101. 00:58:55 I'm ready to move to six if you are.
1102. 00:58:57 Yeah, let's do it.
1103. 00:58:59 All right.
1104. 00:58:59 So chapter six is get beyond learning styles.
1105. 00:59:04 So there's a specific agenda, which I think I tend to agree with.
1106. 00:59:12 So the big idea here is that we tend to, uh, how would you describe it?
1107. 00:59:21 What we have our preferred ways of learning.
1108. 00:59:25 And I think it's easy to just seek the path of least resistance.
1109. 00:59:30 And they would say that that's not really a good approach.
1110. 00:59:36 If you really want to learn things, you should use all of the different methods
1111. 00:59:42 that are available to try to crystallize the, the knowledge.
1112. 00:59:47 Um, yeah, I think that's the big idea in a nutshell, really, what I want to talk
1113. 00:59:51 about from this chapter has nothing to do with that.
1114. 00:59:53 Well, the, the types of intelligence.
1115. 00:59:55 So let me add it.
1116. 00:59:56 And then we can go on to the stuff you and I actually want to talk about.
1117. 00:59:58 Um, I think one of the things too here is learning styles became really, really
1118. 01:00:03 big and everybody thought like they were going to have this like gigantic impact
1119. 01:00:06 and they tried to make all this, this, you know, news about them and adjust your
1120. 01:00:11 teaching based on learning styles and all the stuff.
1121. 01:00:13 And the problem, one of the problems with them was, is they weren't.
1122. 01:00:16 Really credible from a showing improvements in learning, uh, and improvements in
1123. 01:00:21 performance, um, but they got touted as that, like they kind of got picked up
1124. 01:00:25 as the social phenomenon, but there wasn't a bunch of evidence backing them up.
1125. 01:00:28 And I think they needed to go on the record stating, we reviewed the research
1126. 01:00:34 and there's still not a lot of stuff about, you know, learning styles.
1127. 01:00:38 So people please stop, like stop with the learning style stuff.
1128. 01:00:41 And then we go, now let's go on and talk about the things that we actually want
1129. 01:00:43 to talk about.
1130. 01:00:43 Cause I thought the back half of this chapter was, was pretty good.
1131. 01:00:47 Yeah.
1132. 01:00:47 So just real quickly, they mentioned that the learning styles theory theory is not
1133. 01:00:52 validated by evidence, but they also mentioned in the same sentence that that
1134. 01:00:56 doesn't mean it doesn't have merit.
1135. 01:00:58 So do with that, what you will, but yeah, then they talk about the different types
1136. 01:01:02 of intelligence and there's two models that they share.
1137. 01:01:05 One by Howard Gardner and one by Robert Sternberg.
1138. 01:01:09 Let's start with that one first.
1139. 01:01:10 The theory of successful intelligence breaks it down into analytical, creative
1140. 01:01:13 and practical intelligence, but the one that's probably been around longer and
1141. 01:01:18 more people are familiar with is the Howard Gardner types of intelligence, which
1142. 01:01:23 there's eight of them, logical, mathematical.
1143. 01:01:25 That's the first one, spatial, linguistic, kinesthetic, musical, naturalistic,
1144. 01:01:31 intra personal and interpersonal.
1145. 01:01:34 And these are all like different ways of being smart and having intelligence.
1146. 01:01:41 And again, like this jumps out to me.
1147. 01:01:43 I'm familiar with this model because emotional intelligence is really a
1148. 01:01:47 combination of two of these, interpersonal and intra personal.
1149. 01:01:51 And just to define those two quickly, interpersonal is really relationships
1150. 01:01:59 with other people and intra personal is your relationship with yourself.
1151. 01:02:04 So if you have, and again, my basis of this is experience with the family
1152. 01:02:10 business, where we developed assessment and skill building tools to measure
1153. 01:02:16 these skills and then improve them.
1154. 01:02:19 And there's a whole bunch of research behind the, the effectiveness of that
1155. 01:02:24 approach and the R tools specifically to the tune of like 140 Dr.
1156. 01:02:28 all the whole papers and books and like sample size of eight and a half
1157. 01:02:32 million people or something like that.
1158. 01:02:33 That's crazy.
1159. 01:02:34 That's wild.
1160. 01:02:35 Yeah, it is, it is insane.
1161. 01:02:37 Um, but then, you know, what do you actually do with this?
1162. 01:02:40 How, how does it actually benefit you?
1163. 01:02:43 Well, you can have the ability to communicate well with other people.
1164. 01:02:47 Maybe you've got, you know, sales orientation is one of the scales, which
1165. 01:02:51 really doesn't mean more.
1166. 01:02:52 A lot of people think it means it's really like leadership.
1167. 01:02:54 The ability to sell people on the idea that you can get them where they
1168. 01:02:57 want to go.
1169. 01:02:58 You can have like those types of skills, but then you've got really
1170. 01:03:02 negative self talk.
1171. 01:03:03 Okay.
1172. 01:03:04 So your interpersonal is high or intra personal is low.
1173. 01:03:08 And then you can, I always found this stuff fascinating because you could
1174. 01:03:12 take, you know, the results of this assessment and you could see person
1175. 01:03:15 scores by based on the length of the bars and not, you know, this number
1176. 01:03:19 is the, the tipping point, but you could look at the patterns and you could
1177. 01:03:22 see, oh, this person right here, like you got to watch out because see, they
1178. 01:03:26 have a pretty low self, uh, pretty low self image.
1179. 01:03:31 And, uh, they tend to just repress everything.
1180. 01:03:34 So like one of the skills was aggression versus deference versus assertion.
1181. 01:03:38 That's kind of the one in the middle.
1182. 01:03:40 So this person has a high deference, low aggression.
1183. 01:03:43 So they tend to just kind of take it and take it until they can't take it
1184. 01:03:46 no more.
1185. 01:03:46 And then they lash out, you know, it was always fascinating to me, like the
1186. 01:03:50 types of patterns that you could see from those things, not that, you know,
1187. 01:03:53 this was exactly what was going to happen in the future, but just.
1188. 01:03:56 This is the, the path that you're walking down.
1189. 01:03:58 We know how this ends.
1190. 01:03:59 So if you want to change your trajectory, you know, you could develop
1191. 01:04:04 your assertion ability and learn to stand up for the things that, that you
1192. 01:04:08 want and what you believe in, instead of just, you know, getting aggressive
1193. 01:04:12 and bullying your way, pushing people over or just, you know, being a people
1194. 01:04:16 pleaser, that was, that was me, you know, I had to learn to not just, okay,
1195. 01:04:20 someone wants this from me.
1196. 01:04:21 I'm going to go ahead and do it.
1197. 01:04:23 Um, yeah, fascinating topic.
1198. 01:04:26 And, uh, so I think that, that stuff is cool.
1199. 01:04:30 I don't know exactly what that has to do with learning styles.
1200. 01:04:33 I guess, you know, as it pertains to the rest of the discussion, maybe
1201. 01:04:36 if you find yourself naturally, uh, leaning towards, you know, linguistic
1202. 01:04:41 intelligence or musical intelligence, spatial intelligence, uh, maybe they
1203. 01:04:46 would say don't just stay where you're comfortable and, and try to develop
1204. 01:04:50 your skills in the other areas too.
1205. 01:04:52 But yeah, I think they missed out here when they didn't put intelligences
1206. 01:04:57 in the title, right?
1207. 01:04:58 Cause it's like, yeah, I mean, get beyond learning styles.
1208. 01:05:01 Yes.
1209. 01:05:01 That was like, that's what we're doing through intelligences.
1210. 01:05:04 Like that's, that's how they're trying to pitch it for us.
1211. 01:05:07 Um, and, you know, I mean, I actually, I liked the idea of intelligences, but
1212. 01:05:12 as you said, and as you, you kind of impact, but what do we do with it?
1213. 01:05:15 Like how do we, how do we move forward with it?
1214. 01:05:17 How do we make it actionable?
1215. 01:05:19 And I really think it kind of fell off the cliff here in terms of, um, how
1216. 01:05:24 we, how we make it actionable, how we do anything with it.
1217. 01:05:27 And then what, what is interesting to me is like, there were times when I
1218. 01:05:33 felt like they had like a few notes that they just kept coming back to, like
1219. 01:05:37 so, you know, you say a song's like one, it's a one note song or whatever.
1220. 01:05:40 You know, it's like, like to say they come back into testing again, right?
1221. 01:05:43 And it's like, well, come on, like we already, we already hit testing.
1222. 01:05:46 Like what did we come back in dynamic testing?
1223. 01:05:47 And, and we're coming back into that, that again, like I, I wanted more here.
1224. 01:05:52 I felt like this chapter was the least cohesive chapter.
1225. 01:06:02 Like I kind of felt like it was all over the place, because then we roll
1226. 01:06:05 into, you know, structure, high structure, low structure, but it didn't necessarily
1227. 01:06:11 like in, from what I got of it, it didn't really tie back into intelligence as
1228. 01:06:14 that much.
1229. 01:06:15 It was kind of its own, if its own thing.
1230. 01:06:17 So we've talked about learning styles.
1231. 01:06:18 Now then we've talked about intelligence and now we're going to talk about structure.
1232. 01:06:22 And then we talk about rule learners and example learners.
1233. 01:06:24 And it was kind of like just this hodgepodge of, I'm not sure what to take of this.
1234. 01:06:30 And if the idea was just don't just think learning styles, think of all these other
1235. 01:06:35 things, you know, and think of intelligences, think of what type of learner
1236. 01:06:39 they are, think about what kind of structure they need.
1237. 01:06:41 Okay, I get that.
1238. 01:06:43 I just don't think it came across for me as well as, you know, I was hoping
1239. 01:06:47 it would have come across that kind of felt really jumbled.
1240. 01:06:49 I think that's fair.
1241. 01:06:50 Um, although I will say that while the content of the, the chapters themselves
1242. 01:06:56 can feel a little bit jumbled, probably because they're just trying to cover a
1243. 01:07:00 whole bunch of stuff.
1244. 01:07:01 I feel like they do kind of lead naturally together.
1245. 01:07:04 And that's kind of highlighted to me as we work through the outline here.
1246. 01:07:09 Um, you ready to go to the, the last chapter?
1247. 01:07:11 Yep.
1248. 01:07:12 Or I'm sorry, chapter seven, it's not the last chapter.
1249. 01:07:14 The last chapter in terms of, uh, the first, uh, unexist, non-existent part of the book.
1250. 01:07:20 Yeah.
1251. 01:07:21 For me, this was the last effective chapter, but go ahead.
1252. 01:07:24 Yeah.
1253. 01:07:25 So chapter seven is increase your abilities and this is really the answer to the
1254. 01:07:30 question.
1255. 01:07:30 So what do we do with this stuff?
1256. 01:07:32 Right.
1257. 01:07:33 The ability to do the things that we want to do now.
1258. 01:07:38 They talk about which I liked at the very beginning.
1259. 01:07:40 Our success is determined by our ability to focus and have self discipline.
1260. 01:07:43 I mean, have a co-host of podcast held focused.
1261. 01:07:46 So I, you got me there.
1262. 01:07:49 Uh, they talk about the brain being surprisingly plastic or changeable,
1263. 01:07:53 which I think is, uh, is important.
1264. 01:07:55 But then there's a lot of stuff in here about increasing your IQ and how
1265. 01:08:01 nutrition can affect IQ, uh, how the options for learning have expanded
1266. 01:08:07 significantly over the last decades.
1267. 01:08:09 And that's lead led to a higher average IQ scores.
1268. 01:08:13 I kind of don't really care about that part.
1269. 01:08:15 Me either.
1270. 01:08:16 I agree.
1271. 01:08:17 Uh, again, you know, kind of because IQ and EQ or emotional intelligence,
1272. 01:08:21 I kind of pitted against each other a lot of times, performance goals
1273. 01:08:26 and consciously limit your potential compared to learning goals.
1274. 01:08:29 Failure can give us useful information.
1275. 01:08:32 Humans remember pictures more easily than words, which is why memory
1276. 01:08:35 palaces work so well.
1277. 01:08:36 So there's a whole bunch of things, which, you know, a whole bunch of
1278. 01:08:39 directions we could go with this, like the whole idea of memory palaces.
1279. 01:08:43 I, again, you know, not the first time I've heard about those.
1280. 01:08:46 And I get, you know, kind of how they can be useful in certain situations.
1281. 01:08:50 But I don't have, uh, I don't really have a practical application
1282. 01:08:53 for that sort of thing all that often.
1283. 01:08:55 You had mentioned like the deliberate practice stuff.
1284. 01:08:57 We maybe even missed that, that part.
1285. 01:09:00 You know, I forget exactly where that was, but that it's right here.
1286. 01:09:03 Cause I remember them talking about peak by Andrews, Erickson.
1287. 01:09:06 And that's a great book, but then like the deliberate practice stuff was
1288. 01:09:08 just kind of like, wow, that was over quickly.
1289. 01:09:10 No, I, I just remember this is like the, the second or third time I've
1290. 01:09:13 thought about or heard about deliberate practice.
1291. 01:09:15 And I thought to myself, like, Oh, okay, good, deliberate practice.
1292. 01:09:17 It's different than just wrote practicing a thing.
1293. 01:09:20 Like it's practicing with a purpose.
1294. 01:09:22 That's the way I, I described a deliberate practice, right?
1295. 01:09:24 So I'm practicing with a purpose or with a goal.
1296. 01:09:26 And I liked that.
1297. 01:09:27 The other main thing I got out of chapter seven, because I'm like you,
1298. 01:09:32 like I didn't really care about most of chapter seven.
1299. 01:09:34 The other main thing I got out of chapter seven was, well, these memory athletes,
1300. 01:09:39 I mean, they're pretty wild, right?
1301. 01:09:41 Like they can memorize like decks of cards and they can, you know, they have
1302. 01:09:45 all these like different tricks and rules.
1303. 01:09:47 And then I immediately thought like, well, that was interesting.
1304. 01:09:49 I'm never going to do that.
1305. 01:09:50 And I don't care.
1306. 01:09:52 Right.
1307. 01:09:52 So, so it went away.
1308. 01:09:54 I, I liked the, I thought it was interesting to read about the people doing
1309. 01:09:59 their exams through these memory palaces and go into the different coffee shops
1310. 01:10:02 and like seeing different things and it reminding them of different, um,
1311. 01:10:06 different ways to like pass their A levels or whatever it was.
1312. 01:10:10 Like all of this was interesting.
1313. 01:10:11 So what I think is like, this was the most interesting chapter for me,
1314. 01:10:16 but not due to the, like me getting a lot out of the content.
1315. 01:10:20 It was just like, Oh, these stories are more interesting than the other stories
1316. 01:10:23 that have been told throughout the book.
1317. 01:10:26 So I mean, that's, that's where I'm at on chapter seven.
1318. 01:10:30 Yeah.
1319. 01:10:30 So the, the memory palace, um, the going to the different coffee shops and stuff
1320. 01:10:35 like that, the only real application I have had with this is when I have
1321. 01:10:41 been, uh, giving speeches specifically for like Toastmasters competitions.
1322. 01:10:46 Yeah, that would make sense.
1323. 01:10:48 Because there was a point when I was giving a, a talk in the, uh, the
1324. 01:10:55 competition, you know, the whole, like the big competition is the world
1325. 01:10:58 championship of public speaking, but you kind of works all the way back to like
1326. 01:11:02 the club level and the area level and there's 12 steps in between or whatever.
1327. 01:11:07 And, um, I was at the area level competition and I was giving this talk and
1328. 01:11:13 I had the whole thing memorized and I got up on stage and all of a sudden I
1329. 01:11:17 blanked out and I couldn't remember what I was going to say next.
1330. 01:11:20 And so one of the pieces of advice that I got from somebody who was in the
1331. 01:11:24 program a lot longer than I was and was a much better public speaker than I was,
1332. 01:11:28 was to picture yourself as you are giving your speech, like walking through your
1333. 01:11:34 house and this first section of the speech that represents this room and the
1334. 01:11:40 details represent certain things in the room.
1335. 01:11:42 And you're just describing what you're seeing as you're, you're giving the talk
1336. 01:11:47 and, uh, that helped me out a lot, but I don't give professional speeches all
1337. 01:11:52 that often.
1338. 01:11:53 So I don't really have an opportunity or I need an opportunity, I guess, to, to
1339. 01:11:57 practice this.
1340. 01:11:58 Yeah.
1341. 01:11:59 The one I thought about was Matthew Dick's storytelling book, right?
1342. 01:12:02 Like, so it brought me back to that.
1343. 01:12:04 And I was like, okay, you know, I could see myself using that if I ever went into
1344. 01:12:07 like a storytelling competition, but I don't plan to do that.
1345. 01:12:10 So, um, that's probably where I would use this information the most is I get
1346. 01:12:15 asked to speak at a conference or I get asked to speak at some event.
1347. 01:12:19 And this is the way I, you know, try to do it without looking at notes.
1348. 01:12:22 Um, kind of a thing.
1349. 01:12:24 So all right, you ready to talk about the last chapter?
1350. 01:12:27 Yes, sir.
1351. 01:12:30 Uh, I don't really want to talk about this one.
1352. 01:12:32 Um, I didn't like this one.
1353. 01:12:33 I don't have much to talk about.
1354. 01:12:36 Yeah.
1355. 01:12:36 So this is basically a summary of all of the different things they've talked
1356. 01:12:44 about in the first seven chapters, packaged into four different
1357. 01:12:48 applications of varying lengths.
1358. 01:12:50 They're not all equal.
1359. 01:12:51 Okay.
1360. 01:12:51 So hold on one second before we start this, they actually say at the beginning
1361. 01:12:56 of this chapter, we don't think we need to write this chapter, but the people
1362. 01:13:00 who read the book, they're like, pre read the book told us we should write this
1363. 01:13:03 chapter.
1364. 01:13:04 So here we go.
1365. 01:13:05 We're going to write this chapter.
1366. 01:13:05 Like I thought that was wild.
1367. 01:13:07 I was like, they actually told us they didn't think they needed to write this.
1368. 01:13:10 I just, that's crazy to me.
1369. 01:13:12 Yeah.
1370. 01:13:13 So I, I get why they were told to, to write this and I get why I agree with them.
1371. 01:13:19 They shouldn't need to write this.
1372. 01:13:21 Um, so, you know, the last seven chapters, they've shared a lot of different things,
1373. 01:13:27 a lot of different anecdotal takeaways from, you know,
1374. 01:13:30 this replicates, this doesn't maybe try this.
1375. 01:13:32 Maybe don't do this.
1376. 01:13:33 This is the standard advice.
1377. 01:13:34 Doesn't really work.
1378. 01:13:36 And for people who are curious and intelligent, I feel like you could stop
1379. 01:13:43 there and figure out for yourself what you actually want to implement from what
1380. 01:13:47 they've talked about.
1381. 01:13:49 Uh, the last chapter is really dumbing it down.
1382. 01:13:53 Maybe like, okay, I don't know what I just read.
1383. 01:13:56 And then they break it down into learning tips for students, tips for lifelong
1384. 01:14:00 learners, tips for teachers and tips for trainers.
1385. 01:14:02 It's like, okay, so out of everything that you told me, what should I really
1386. 01:14:05 have paid attention to and then tell me again?
1387. 01:14:09 Yeah.
1388. 01:14:10 Like if, if they had a title in this chapter, make it stick summary and case studies.
1389. 01:14:15 Yeah.
1390. 01:14:16 You know what I mean?
1391. 01:14:17 And then, and then in the future when I want to go back to it, I can be like, okay,
1392. 01:14:20 I want to, I want to, I want to remember what make it stick was about.
1393. 01:14:22 I just go read chapter eight and I think it's going to give me 90% of what I need.
1394. 01:14:26 The case studies are interesting because yeah, like they didn't really talk a
1395. 01:14:31 whole lot about those at the first seven chapters, but now the sudden they've
1396. 01:14:34 got a whole bunch of case studies is how people are doing this.
1397. 01:14:37 And it almost feels like a completely separate resource to your point.
1398. 01:14:41 Like there's the first seven chapters, which is the book.
1399. 01:14:44 And then this is the implementation guide.
1400. 01:14:48 I don't know.
1401. 01:14:48 Well, and one of the, one of the struggles I have with the implementation guide is,
1402. 01:14:52 and I'm probably always going to nitpick this, right?
1403. 01:14:55 Because you can't give all the case cases that would exist in the world.
1404. 01:15:00 You know, like there's not able to do that.
1405. 01:15:02 So they, they tried to give ones that are good representations of, of the core
1406. 01:15:06 concepts that they brought into the book.
1407. 01:15:07 But like the, the challenge I have is it's going to change, right?
1408. 01:15:10 Like as soon as your context changed, right?
1409. 01:15:12 So if you're a teacher and you're not teaching psychology, but you're
1410. 01:15:15 teaching biology, well, now things just shifted.
1411. 01:15:19 And while you can still glean something from that, you're going to need to tweak
1412. 01:15:23 it a good bit, you know, in order to implement it into your world.
1413. 01:15:26 Or I'm at a small private institution versus a large public institution.
1414. 01:15:29 I got 600 students in the class.
1415. 01:15:31 I got 20 students in my class.
1416. 01:15:32 You know, like the context really, really matters here.
1417. 01:15:35 I'm not downplaying the fact that they gave us some examples.
1418. 01:15:38 I still think that's good.
1419. 01:15:40 But I'm just saying like their applicability gets real, real slim, real fast.
1420. 01:15:46 You know, when you're, when you're trying to apply these ideas.
1421. 01:15:50 Yeah, and I don't think that is fair to, you know, hold that against them per se.
1422. 01:15:58 But I have to admit that this, this chapter was by far the longest and by far.
1423. 01:16:04 The hardest to get through.
1424. 01:16:05 Yeah, yeah.
1425. 01:16:07 So, um, I mean, fully admitting there were times in this one.
1426. 01:16:11 I just skimmed through different sections of it.
1427. 01:16:13 Like, you know, I was, I was looking at it and I was like, okay, I, I don't need
1428. 01:16:15 to read all of this.
1429. 01:16:16 Like this is not, you know, you know, and normally I don't do that.
1430. 01:16:20 But in this situation, I was like, I don't think I'm really missing the
1431. 01:16:23 gist of, of what we've done here.
1432. 01:16:26 Yeah.
1433. 01:16:26 And I think to be fair, you know, the way that we read these books for bookworm
1434. 01:16:29 is kind of contrary to how they would probably advise people to read it.
1435. 01:16:33 Like if you're a student, you probably don't need to know about how to use
1436. 01:16:37 this in, in service training, you probably don't care.
1437. 01:16:41 Right.
1438. 01:16:41 But that one, you know, also these sections are not of equal length.
1439. 01:16:46 Like I said, the learning tips for students, they have a couple of them here.
1440. 01:16:49 Practice retrieving new learning from memory, space out your retrieval practice,
1441. 01:16:54 and to leave a study of different problem types.
1442. 01:16:56 And then they have other effective study strategies.
1443. 01:16:59 And they list a whole bunch of them that they talked about throughout the book.
1444. 01:17:02 Collaboration, generation, reflection, calibration, mnemonic devices.
1445. 01:17:06 But for the other ones, like tips for lifelong learners, there's really
1446. 01:17:09 retrieval practice, generation, reflection, elaboration.
1447. 01:17:12 That's it.
1448. 01:17:13 Okay.
1449. 01:17:13 And then tips for teachers, I think this one, they get a little bit more specific
1450. 01:17:18 where you explain to students how learning works, you teach students how to study,
1451. 01:17:21 you create desirable difficulties in the classroom and you'd be transparent.
1452. 01:17:25 And then the last one, the tips for trainers, there's just the in service training.
1453. 01:17:29 That's it.
1454. 01:17:30 This is how you might want to implement this.
1455. 01:17:32 And then again, you know, the case studies is how people are doing it in these
1456. 01:17:35 different businesses and organizations, which are useful.
1457. 01:17:40 If you're the trainer, if you're the in service, you want to figure out how to use
1458. 01:17:43 this in in service training, you'll read those case studies to get inspired
1459. 01:17:47 for how to use it.
1460. 01:17:48 But you're not going to read the case studies for the students and the lifelong
1461. 01:17:52 learners and the teachers necessary because it's not applicable.
1462. 01:17:55 It's more of a reference.
1463. 01:17:56 It's absolutely more of a reference.
1464. 01:17:57 I completely agree with you.
1465. 01:17:58 Yep.
1466. 01:17:59 Absolutely.
1467. 01:18:00 All right.
1468. 01:18:00 So that's the end of the book.
1469. 01:18:01 Anything else you want to say about this?
1470. 01:18:03 No, I'm ready to go to action items and then stop writing.
1471. 01:18:07 I'm ready to go.
1472. 01:18:09 All right.
1473. 01:18:09 So I have actually just one action item from this and it's not tied to a
1474. 01:18:15 specific thing here.
1475. 01:18:16 And I don't even know how I'm going to really get it to work.
1476. 01:18:18 But the whole idea of space repetition is something that I have been familiar
1477. 01:18:23 with and I'm interested in my, I guess, the way that I've used this previously
1478. 01:18:30 and it hasn't really stuck has been with the service read wise, you know, where
1479. 01:18:35 you actually have the highlights and then they will, if you open up the read wise
1480. 01:18:42 app, instead of just like browsing all your highlights, you can have it sort of
1481. 01:18:46 quiz you and you review, you know, certain number of things per day.
1482. 01:18:50 And I feel like that could be useful if I am very specific about the things
1483. 01:18:54 that I send there.
1484. 01:18:56 Now I'm not reading digital books.
1485. 01:18:58 So that's kind of out unless I were to manually create some highlights from those
1486. 01:19:04 things, which I've done before to create those like quote graphics and stuff that
1487. 01:19:08 I share in my newsletter and things like that every once in a while.
1488. 01:19:11 But I know you can also pipe in a lot of other things.
1489. 01:19:14 And I want to think about how I might use read wise for space repetition.
1490. 01:19:22 And I have no idea what exactly I'm going to be using as the basis of that
1491. 01:19:26 space repetition.
1492. 01:19:27 But I feel like that's something I could incorporate into probably my morning
1493. 01:19:32 routine very easily if I had a good content library there.
1494. 01:19:36 And I really like the way that read wise implements it.
1495. 01:19:38 I just don't know what in the world I'm going to use as the basis of my space
1496. 01:19:42 repetition.
1497. 01:19:42 That was my question is, I was like, if you're not like interested or really
1498. 01:19:46 motivated by this, I mean, I feel like you're throwing spaghetti at the wall.
1499. 01:19:50 Like, I mean, what's the point?
1500. 01:19:51 You know, but I mean, I'm not trying to shut down your action.
1501. 01:19:54 I know I'm just trying to say, I agree with you.
1502. 01:19:56 You have to think hard about what are you trying to do space repetition on or
1503. 01:20:00 else, I mean, I think it's going to go away real fast.
1504. 01:20:04 Yeah.
1505. 01:20:05 So again, like I've got a read wise account.
1506. 01:20:08 I'm already paying for the service.
1507. 01:20:11 I want to, I want to just explore it.
1508. 01:20:13 I think, you know, just exploring it is the definition of success for this
1509. 01:20:16 action item.
1510. 01:20:17 So remind me of that when we check back in on this.
1511. 01:20:19 Cause there's a, there's a possibility that I look into it and be like, no,
1512. 01:20:22 that's not going to actually do not give me any sort of value.
1513. 01:20:26 It's going to be way too much to transfer stuff over here to actually use a space
1514. 01:20:29 repetition.
1515. 01:20:30 And that's still going to be, you know, at least I, I explored it.
1516. 01:20:35 I don't know that space repetition is going to fit in my workflow.
1517. 01:20:37 However, I do think they made a pretty compelling case for a space
1518. 01:20:42 repetition.
1519. 01:20:43 So I would agree.
1520. 01:20:45 All right.
1521. 01:20:45 So mine is, um, the one I brought up before and I'm only going to have one here.
1522. 01:20:49 It's, how do I think about the things I want to learn?
1523. 01:20:52 Um, how do I think about some of these ideas from a spaced interleaved
1524. 01:20:56 and varied perspective?
1525. 01:20:58 And where I get a little bit more of a, a grace window or ability here is I
1526. 01:21:04 don't care if it's head knowledge or if I'm trying to learn a skill or, you
1527. 01:21:08 know, like, you know, some movement or whatever it is, like, I can, I can do
1528. 01:21:12 space interleaved and varied for essentially anything that I want to get
1529. 01:21:16 better at.
1530. 01:21:17 So that's like, that opens me up to a lot of different things.
1531. 01:21:19 So I think mine should be fairly easy to like actually hit and get a, get another
1532. 01:21:27 green checkmark.
1533. 01:21:28 And if that's the case, I'll be in, I'll be on a streak, right?
1534. 01:21:31 You only got to do it twice to go on a streak, Mike.
1535. 01:21:33 It's true.
1536. 01:21:34 It's true.
1537. 01:21:36 All right.
1538. 01:21:37 So style and rating.
1539. 01:21:40 Um, man, do we have to?
1540. 01:21:42 Yes, you do.
1541. 01:21:43 And you start because it's your book.
1542. 01:21:46 Okay.
1543. 01:21:46 So I actually think that, um, the style of the book is pretty good for what it is.
1544. 01:21:55 It's not my cup of tea.
1545. 01:21:57 Okay.
1546. 01:21:58 Uh, I guess I, I didn't really do a whole bunch of research into what
1547. 01:22:02 exactly was this, um, I understand the premise.
1548. 01:22:08 Uh, I've always pushed back on people who have shared that feedback of like,
1549. 01:22:14 well, you know, that thing that you've been doing, there's really no rep, there's
1550. 01:22:18 really no research behind it.
1551. 01:22:19 They can't really replicate that study.
1552. 01:22:20 And my, my response has always kind of been like, who cares?
1553. 01:22:25 Okay.
1554. 01:22:26 Like, I like it seems they're working for me.
1555. 01:22:28 I'm going to continue to do it.
1556. 01:22:29 And I think there's an element of truth to that for most of the stuff that
1557. 01:22:32 we read.
1558. 01:22:33 So this is a totally different perspective, totally different approach to these, uh,
1559. 01:22:39 these things than we would typically get in these books.
1560. 01:22:42 Now they mentioned a bunch of books that we have read previously, or I've read
1561. 01:22:45 previously, you know, mindset by Carol Dweck, peaked by Andrews, Erickson.
1562. 01:22:50 Then there's a whole bunch of books that they mentioned that I did not read.
1563. 01:22:54 But there was enough overlap there where it's like, okay, I've heard some of this
1564. 01:22:57 stuff before.
1565. 01:22:58 And I understand the approach here is they're going to really just look at all
1566. 01:23:03 of the different approaches to learning.
1567. 01:23:05 And they're going to try to help people separate.
1568. 01:23:07 You know, this is what actually works.
1569. 01:23:08 This is what doesn't.
1570. 01:23:10 And I guess the measure of effectiveness that they're using for this, I kind of
1571. 01:23:15 don't care about, which is, are you able to recall it?
1572. 01:23:19 Can you pull out the answers when you need to on a test?
1573. 01:23:23 A zero application for me.
1574. 01:23:25 Yeah, I got you.
1575. 01:23:27 So I'm not the ideal audience for this.
1576. 01:23:31 However, you know, if you were going to write that book, I feel like the way
1577. 01:23:36 that they went about it is the right way to do it.
1578. 01:23:38 You got two people who really know the research.
1579. 01:23:41 You have one person who can tell a good story.
1580. 01:23:43 And that comes through in the style.
1581. 01:23:46 This could have been way harder to get through than it was.
1582. 01:23:51 Absolutely.
1583. 01:23:51 Yeah.
1584. 01:23:52 And there are certain people who even in that scenario would have absolutely
1585. 01:23:57 loved it because they are debunking all of these different things.
1586. 01:24:01 And yes, finally, the truth is becoming known.
1587. 01:24:03 And I'm just kind of like, tell me a good story.
1588. 01:24:07 So it held my attention.
1589. 01:24:09 I'm glad that I read it.
1590. 01:24:10 I don't think I'm the right person who's really going to apply a whole
1591. 01:24:13 bunch of stuff from this.
1592. 01:24:15 You know, if I get into space repetition, you could argue that that's
1593. 01:24:18 a life-changing action item that that came from this.
1594. 01:24:23 You'd be right.
1595. 01:24:24 I feel like the first seven chapters having talked through it
1596. 01:24:28 are tied together and presented in a way that is way more effective
1597. 01:24:34 than I thought when I first just was like grabbing these points
1598. 01:24:38 and putting them in my outline.
1599. 01:24:39 I feel like there's a really strong connection between those.
1600. 01:24:41 And chapter eight is totally just tacked on.
1601. 01:24:45 And to your point, like they called out, we don't really think we need this.
1602. 01:24:48 The editor says we do.
1603. 01:24:51 So I'm not going to hold that against it.
1604. 01:24:54 Yeah, I think I'm going to rate this four stars because even though, you know,
1605. 01:24:58 I've kind of picked that different things and I wish, you know,
1606. 01:25:02 they would have spent more time talking about this.
1607. 01:25:04 That's not the purpose of the book.
1608. 01:25:06 You know, they were never going to do a deep dive on mental rehearsal
1609. 01:25:11 and visualization or talk about the widespread applications of emotional
1610. 01:25:17 intelligence.
1611. 01:25:17 That's just where my brain went because of the other books and things
1612. 01:25:22 that I had read prior to this.
1613. 01:25:24 So trying to keep in mind, you know, the, the goal of, of this particular book.
1614. 01:25:29 I think this one's a little bit harder to recommend than the average bookworm book
1615. 01:25:36 because you really got to be interested in the whole process
1616. 01:25:42 of learning and metacognition for this really to be a fascinating page turner.
1617. 01:25:48 You know, as, as a good a job as they do of, of making it not boring
1618. 01:25:53 and telling good stories, I feel like there is a good portion of the audience
1619. 01:25:57 that this, they just not going to care about this, which is totally fine.
1620. 01:26:02 So it's hard to, hard to say, you know, exactly who this is, this is for.
1621. 01:26:06 But I totally get why, why some people think this is, this is absolutely fascinating
1622. 01:26:11 and an incredible book.
1623. 01:26:13 I mean, you could have been taught certain ways of, of learning and practice
1624. 01:26:17 them your entire life and like, why is this so hard?
1625. 01:26:20 And this is going to help you see things.
1626. 01:26:21 Oh, I should do it this way instead.
1627. 01:26:23 Oh my gosh, this is so much more effective, you know, if, if that's you
1628. 01:26:27 and you're trying to figure out how to learn successfully, then you should
1629. 01:26:32 definitely pick this one up.
1630. 01:26:33 Even if you're just a lifelong learner who wants to make sure that you are
1631. 01:26:40 doing things in a way that they are going to be useful long term.
1632. 01:26:44 I feel like there's value in, in going through this, even if like me, you know,
1633. 01:26:47 you're not trying to pass a test or anything at, at this point in your, your life.
1634. 01:26:51 But yeah, it's, it's a weird one.
1635. 01:26:55 But I do think it's, it's closer to the four than it is to the three.
1636. 01:26:58 Even, you know, as I've kind of railed against different things as we've gone
1637. 01:27:01 through the, the conversation here.
1638. 01:27:03 Um, so I'm going to rate it four stars.
1639. 01:27:05 Okay.
1640. 01:27:06 Um, I'll put my rating and then I'll describe it.
1641. 01:27:08 Uh, so if I was rating this not being an educator, it'd be a three star book.
1642. 01:27:13 Right.
1643. 01:27:14 And it, because it's, I would get something out of it.
1644. 01:27:17 Like I think they did a really good job making the points they, they wanted
1645. 01:27:21 to make based on the research clear.
1646. 01:27:24 And I think they communicated those wells.
1647. 01:27:26 Well, I think they gave good examples of those, how you could implement those
1648. 01:27:30 or how they've been implemented, what the impact of those are, what the effect
1649. 01:27:33 of them is, uh, those types of types of things.
1650. 01:27:36 So I think if I was just doing this as a personal lifelong learner, it's a three
1651. 01:27:40 star book, which in my mind, if we're rated on a three star book, that's above 50%.
1652. 01:27:45 Like that's above half.
1653. 01:27:46 So I think it was better than 50% or halfway between, um, but at the same
1654. 01:27:52 time, it, it wouldn't have like blown me away.
1655. 01:27:54 Like it wouldn't have been a, oh my gosh, I'm so glad I read that book.
1656. 01:27:58 It could have been something that I got into a much shorter form, right?
1657. 01:28:02 That told me the exact same things without all of the other stuff, you know,
1658. 01:28:06 wrapped around it being an educator and having the ability to then apply some
1659. 01:28:12 of this for my students or help my students work through some of these things.
1660. 01:28:17 It bounces it up to a four star book for me.
1661. 01:28:18 So I'm in the same place that you are that, um, I think it's a four star book.
1662. 01:28:22 I don't think it's by any means the best book on learning theory, memory,
1663. 01:28:28 cognitive science, any of that stuff.
1664. 01:28:30 Like I don't think they're, you know, they're going to go into the top of the
1665. 01:28:34 list for that, um, for me or on a list in general.
1666. 01:28:38 But I also don't think it, um, I don't think it's a bad thing to read this book.
1667. 01:28:42 If you're interested in this, these ideas, you're interested in learning,
1668. 01:28:45 memory, um, those kinds of things.
1669. 01:28:48 I think it's a, it's a, it's a worthwhile book to read with the exception.
1670. 01:28:53 Like we've said before of chapter eight, I think chapter eight, you know,
1671. 01:28:56 like if you want to read the reference stuff, cool, skim it first.
1672. 01:28:59 Like before you, before you commit to reading chapter eight, skim it first.
1673. 01:29:03 I think if you are a person that is into cognitive science or learning theory,
1674. 01:29:11 I think this book actually bounces up to a four and a half star book because
1675. 01:29:16 I think their notes section and then them really hitting home on the fact that
1676. 01:29:21 they've like kind of vetted this stuff, you know, as they've worked through it.
1677. 01:29:25 I think it could bounce up to a four and a half star book, but that's a very,
1678. 01:29:28 very small group of people.
1679. 01:29:29 Like those are the people who are like needing to use this professionally
1680. 01:29:33 or needing to justify something they really want to do either personally
1681. 01:29:39 or in an educational environment.
1682. 01:29:40 I think it bounces up to a four and a half star book.
1683. 01:29:42 So my rating is a four star book.
1684. 01:29:45 Um, I think it was good.
1685. 01:29:46 I think if this is, if, if you listen to us talk about this or you read the
1686. 01:29:51 description of this book and you go, huh, that sounds kind of cool.
1687. 01:29:54 Pick it up and read it.
1688. 01:29:55 Like I don't think you'll do yourself a harm.
1689. 01:29:57 If you listen to us talk about this and you go, yeah, I'm good.
1690. 01:30:01 But yes, I think you're good.
1691. 01:30:03 Like I don't think you need to pick this one up.
1692. 01:30:04 I don't think you're going to, you're not going to miss out.
1693. 01:30:06 Um, go, go read another, another book that you like more.
1694. 01:30:10 So there you go.
1695. 01:30:11 That's my, that's my style of rating for this one.
1696. 01:30:14 All right.
1697. 01:30:15 Well, let's put, make it stick on the shelf.
1698. 01:30:18 What's next, Corey?
1699. 01:30:20 Okay.
1700. 01:30:20 So, um, my next book is actually of a recommendation from, uh, from a listener.
1701. 01:30:27 Uh, so Mark recommended the catalyst, uh, how to change anyone's mind by Jonah
1702. 01:30:31 Berger.
1703. 01:30:32 And, um, it's basically identifying barriers to change.
1704. 01:30:36 How do we mitigate those barriers to change?
1705. 01:30:38 And how do we think about, you know, anybody who wants to like actually make
1706. 01:30:42 change happen?
1707. 01:30:44 How do we think about that?
1708. 01:30:45 So, uh, it's, it's gotten some pretty good accolades.
1709. 01:30:48 Um, you know, fortune named at the top, a top book to read.
1710. 01:30:51 It was an editor select from Audible.
1711. 01:30:53 So it's like the, on the face, it looks like it's going to be a pretty decent one.
1712. 01:30:58 Um, if you're interested into, you know, change and change theory and, and those
1713. 01:31:02 type of things.
1714. 01:31:03 So we'll pick up the, uh, the catalyst, how to change anyone's mind by, uh, Jonah.
1715. 01:31:08 Berger.
1716. 01:31:10 How about you, Mike?
1717. 01:31:11 All right.
1718. 01:31:11 It's after that.
1719. 01:31:12 So after that is a book that I have already read and have been waiting to select
1720. 01:31:19 for bookworm.
1721. 01:31:20 And that is tiny experiments by Ann lore, the coop.
1722. 01:31:24 So we actually interviewed Ann lore for the focus podcast.
1723. 01:31:29 And it was one of the best conversations I think we've ever had for that podcast.
1724. 01:31:34 And just one, like data point from this kind of behind the scenes.
1725. 01:31:39 We did the interview.
1726. 01:31:41 We arranged it through, uh, Ann lore is publicist.
1727. 01:31:43 She's actually the one who connected, uh, us.
1728. 01:31:46 And then when we did the interview, she had just moved.
1729. 01:31:51 So she was like setting up her microphone on top of a box and like stuff's all over.
1730. 01:31:56 And she's like, I'm really sorry, but because I just moved, they might be delivering
1731. 01:32:01 something, you know, and I'm going to have to step away for a moment.
1732. 01:32:04 Yeah, I had no problem.
1733. 01:32:05 So most of the time when that happens, someone steps away, they come back and they're like, okay,
1734. 01:32:11 so where were we?
1735. 01:32:12 And you have to like reframe everything.
1736. 01:32:14 So it happens in the middle of the episode, the doorbell rings.
1737. 01:32:17 I'm really sorry.
1738. 01:32:18 I'll be right back.
1739. 01:32:19 I just asked my question and I'm thinking to myself, how am I going to reframe this
1740. 01:32:23 in the context of the great conversation that we were just having?
1741. 01:32:26 She comes back and she's like, okay, sorry about that.
1742. 01:32:28 And she picks up exactly where the question left off.
1743. 01:32:33 So she's gone for like two minutes, talking to somebody else about something
1744. 01:32:36 completely different.
1745. 01:32:37 She comes back and like, I don't even have to reset the stage.
1746. 01:32:41 She's she's one of the smartest people I have ever met blown away.
1747. 01:32:45 So this whole book, though, tiny experiments, I mean, I feel like this is a really
1748. 01:32:52 important book about personal growth.
1749. 01:32:55 And I've been familiar with Anla for a long time, a member of her nest labs.
1750. 01:32:59 She's one of the people that I first started reading when I got interested
1751. 01:33:02 in in PKM and personal knowledge management.
1752. 01:33:05 So like I've been a big fan of hers for a long time, but this book is, oh, my
1753. 01:33:09 gosh, spoiler alert, I guess it's it's better than anything that anything else
1754. 01:33:15 that she's made out there.
1755. 01:33:16 Like this is this is her signature work.
1756. 01:33:19 I don't know if she wants it to be that, you know, I don't know what she's
1757. 01:33:23 got planned after this, but this is one that I am really looking forward to
1758. 01:33:28 having a conversation about because it's, you know, it's right in my wheelhouse.
1759. 01:33:34 It's, you know, it's where I live as a, as a creator.
1760. 01:33:37 And I'm kind of curious how maybe your approach to this, your perspective
1761. 01:33:42 might be different case in point.
1762. 01:33:44 This book that we covered here today, you know, I learned a lot by talking
1763. 01:33:48 about these things that people who have different perspectives.
1764. 01:33:50 So I think this is going to be a good one.
1765. 01:33:52 Awesome.
1766. 01:33:53 I'm looking forward to it.
1767. 01:33:53 I just got, I just got my copy and it's a physical book.
1768. 01:33:56 I'm going to read a physical book.
1769. 01:33:58 Yes.
1770. 01:33:59 Read a physical book.
1771. 01:34:01 Mike, do you have any gap books for this time?
1772. 01:34:04 OK, I've got a gap book, but I'm not guaranteeing.
1773. 01:34:06 I'm going to get through this.
1774. 01:34:07 I think I will be able to because I've got some travel coming up.
1775. 01:34:10 And when I travel, I typically just read books while on airplanes and stuff like that.
1776. 01:34:15 So I came across a recommendation via somebody's social media feed.
1777. 01:34:21 I forget who said this and they they said the book, someone had asked Charlie
1778. 01:34:27 Munger, what's the best book you ever read?
1779. 01:34:31 And they shared this book.
1780. 01:34:34 OK, it is deep simplicity by John Gribben.
1781. 01:34:38 OK, and I'll share this link in the chat so you can look at this.
1782. 01:34:43 It was published 20 years ago.
1783. 01:34:46 It looks like one of those old paperback style books that's been around forever.
1784. 01:34:51 Oh, yes, the subtitle is chaos, complexity, and the emergence of life, which I mean,
1785. 01:34:57 this this this has PKM ties to, I think.
1786. 01:35:01 Yeah, but number one, you know, if Charlie Munger says this is a great book,
1787. 01:35:05 that guy wrote read a ton.
1788. 01:35:06 We talked about the poor Charlie's Almanac, you know, so I feel like right
1789. 01:35:12 away, you know, my my filter, like people I trust to recommend a book.
1790. 01:35:17 Charlie Munger's got to be up there.
1791. 01:35:18 Never talked to him directly, obviously.
1792. 01:35:21 But I don't know.
1793. 01:35:23 So this one, I think I'll either love it or hate it, hopefully love it.
1794. 01:35:27 And yeah, I'm looking forward to digging into this one when I got some free time.
1795. 01:35:32 Well, if if you like it, let's bring it on to the show because this is interesting
1796. 01:35:36 enough to me just from a face, like having seen it for 14 seconds now, but
1797. 01:35:41 I'm going to let you go after it first.
1798. 01:35:44 And then you can tell me whether it's worth it or not.
1799. 01:35:46 Yeah, I'll report back.
1800. 01:35:49 I do not have any gap books right now on purpose.
1801. 01:35:53 It is healthy for me to not do a gap book right now.
1802. 01:35:56 So therefore I'm I'm bailing on this one.
1803. 01:35:58 No gap books right now.
1804. 01:36:00 All right.
1805. 01:36:02 All good.
1806. 01:36:03 Well, if you are reading along with us, you can pick up the catalyst and we will
1807. 01:36:11 go through that one in a couple of weeks.