Your Questions Answered

After finishing my self-study project I got:

Comments
Emails
DM’s

Of people asking about it.

So…

I decided to spend some time looking through the most common questions.

Below you’ll find answers to 7 of them.

1. “There are days when I struggle to solve problem sets, and it becomes so frustrating that I feel like quitting. Could you please share some of the best rituals or strategies we need to adopt in order to stay motivated and persevere?”

This is a large question, and the answer depends on the nuances. (I plan on making an article covering this in the future).

However, I’ll give a general piece of advice that has served me well- specifically when self-learning.

You have to change your definition of winning.

Go from:

Wining is me solving this problem.

Winning is me trying as hard as I can.

Reframe: You don’t develop skills or character by solving problems. You develop them in the process of solving problems-the more you are in the process the more you are winning.

You can imagine that this is easier said than done.

A secret trick I use when I don’t feel motivated is I envision a desired self-image of the person I want to be and I link the process of solving problems as the means to bridge the gap between where I am and the desired self-image.

This way, when you go through the motions you aren’t thinking about going through the motions. You are thinking about the person you are becoming as a result of the motions.

A person who is:

More skilled
More determined

etc….

So, ask yourself:

What would a person with those qualities and skills look like?

Then let your imagination run. And once you have a picture, use it.

2. “What are your future career plans after this?”

In short.

I’d like to combine online business with independent research.

That’s my dream, and in the future (Once I’ve achieved it) I hope to scale my process to make it easier for others who are interested in a similar path.

3. “How did you afford to do this?”

Long story short. After having left school in late 2020 (around October) I took a gap year — for reasons that aren’t important for this question. But then that gap year ended up being several years — haha.

During this challenge my mom supported me- and I can’t thank her enough for that. She truly believed in me, even when I had my doubts.

In the beginning, she felt it was risky, but after seeing how much passion and effort I was putting behind this she wouldn’t have had it another way.

4. “I’ve abandoned courses way more than I finish, how do you stick to finishing courses even when they get difficult or life becomes busy?”

This is a tricky question because it depends on why you abandoned it.

For instance, I’m a firm believer that knowledge is more important than the source, and when the source I’m consuming isn’t giving me the information that I want, I go to another source.

Quick Tip: Whether you finished the course or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get the knowledge you need out of it. This also removes the NEED to finish it (When you make something a need it inherently makes it less motivating).

That being said, assuming that this course has everything that you want and need — which is rare. I would still need more context, however, If it was because you simply didn’t feel like it I’d refer you to the first question where I talked about this.

As for the second part of the question, below are some strategies you’ll find useful.

1. Micro-learning.

This was an important tactic I used while I was traveling during the challenge, fulfilling other duties as well as now growing my online business.

The basic idea is this:

Whenever you find yourself with a few minutes to spare throughout your day- going to the washroom, walking from place to place, etc… use that time to learn.

Surprisingly micro-learning is more effective than when you sit down and learn for a session.

Let me explain.

Let’s say that you can spare 5 minutes to do some micro-learning.

What studies seem to indicate is that those 5 minutes would be more efficient than 5 minutes of studying within a longer session (say 1–2 hours).

Some possible explanations are that you can focus on the important ideas, or that you’re more mentally clear than you would be in a longer session.

So…

Reflect on small blocks of available time throughout the day and insert a micro-learning session in it. You’ll get much further ahead

2. Organizing your time

The other strategy is to better manage your time — big surprise haha.

There are two important pieces I consider when allocating my time and attention:

How clear is my mind at that moment in the day?
How important is this task?

Depending on how clear my mind is in a certain time block I’ll allocate a mentally demanding task or not.

Now, it doesn’t matter how well you allocate your time based on mental clarity if you don’t have your priorities straight.

Sometimes we do activities that aren’t as useful as we might think. So, try to focus on figuring out what are the most important tasks. And what are the highest leverage activities I could do to fulfill them?- and get more of my time and attention back?

5. “Tips on how to study more effectively and when and how to revise whatever I studied.”

This could go on forever haha- which Is why I’m planning on releasing some workshops and a coaching program about this soon.

However, I do have a method for answering the last two questions more specifically.

1. When

The two metrics I use to determine when and how long you should focus on each concept or idea are the following:

Importance

How important is understanding this concept relative to the learning goals that you have set out for yourself?

Let’s say that you want to learn how to code certain applications. Functions are one very important concept for being able to do this, therefore it makes sense that you spend more time on them than on other things.

TLDR: Focus on high-leverage concepts.

Spaced Repetition

You might have heard of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve before. The basic idea is that humans forget information a certain amount of time after we’ve learned it- which makes sense.

But you can combat this if you periodically review or recall the material. You’ll notice that after each time you review it, it will take you longer to forget it the next time.

For each concept, I like to have the cadence of:

Recall it the day after, then the week after, and then one month after.

But you can adjust it however you like.

2. How

Now…

This depends on two things.

What goal do you have with learning this?

and

What kind of knowledge is it that you are trying to consume?

Let me explain.

It’s important to know why you want to learn something because this goal will inform the kind of studying you do.

For instance, learning because I’m interested in the subject would require a different study plan than if I was learning because I wanted to solve certain problems.

In the first case, I would focus more on theory, while in the other case, I would focus more on practice.

It’s important to have this clearly defined.

The next question is what techniques should I be using given the stage of learning that I am in?

For example:

If I’m starting I wouldn’t spend all my time on practice problems because I lack too much prior knowledge- hence it wouldn’t be effective. I probably would try to get a general gist of the main ideas and connections between the main ideas.

After doing that I would still consume more content and try to make important connections between concepts.

After this, I might start looking at examples in different scenarios.

And then I would start practicing.

6. “How do you stick to a schedule like this when one feels tired, overwhelmed, or when something unexpected happens?”

I’ll answer each one of these independently.

1. Tired

Two things that helped with this.

Continually stretching your work capacity (This is probably the biggest lever you can pull-you’re more capable than you think you are).

You can do this by trying to stretch your focus a bit each day.

The second tactic would be to allocate my tasks based on how mentally clear I was.

(Something I talked about in the previous question)

When learning I would leave solving problems for parts of my day where I would feel clear and focused. And I would usually leave less strenuous tasks like skimming certain pages, etc… for parts of the day when my mind would feel more foggy or tired,

2. Overwhelmed

When dealing with overwhelm you usually either have a lot to do, or you have a lot to do in a short amount of time.

In either case, here’s what I would do:

Train yourself to focus on the present
Focus on factors that you can control

3. When Something Unexpected Happens

On the other hand, if something unexpected happens it usually falls under these two categories.

Either I have to do something else.
Or something happened (like my Wi-Fi connection got lost) while I was doing a particular task.

In the first scenario let’s say I was doing something at 11:00 and I got interrupted until noon, then If it’s urgent and important I would shift my schedule one hour later (11:00 becomes the new noon), etc…

On the other hand, if the task is not as important I would skip it and continue where I left off after having finished the task that interrupted me.

In the second case if something like the Wi-Fi connection was lost, then I would just skip the task I’m doing and do the next task (Shift it back a certain amount of time instead).

PS: Funnily enough my Wi-fi connection got lost as I was writing this.

7. “How did you use active recall in your project for applying it to learn math and physics specifically.”

At the beginning of my project, I didn’t do any active recall, but around 9 months in I started doing it- a big mistake.

Throughout the challenge, I kept a document of all of the concepts I learned digitally or on paper so that I could readily refer to it when necessary and do active recall in the usual fashion.

But towards the end of the challenge, my approach was different:

I started to document explanations of the different concepts I was learning and whenever I would go back to them I would refine the explanations by searching for new resources to find further insights as well as thinking of ways to simplify and condense it.

The Cadence would look something like this:

Daily

This would usually be while taking a shower or doing some small task that didn’t require much attention (I wouldn’t do anything fancy, just recall the concepts from the day before).

Weekly

Toward the end of each week, I would look at what I learned and use the “Feynman technique” to explain the concepts in simple-to-understand language and from multiple perspectives.

I would continue doing this until I reached the next checkpoint which was the month- Each week starting the process from the beginning with new concepts.

Monthly

Now is where the interesting part comes in.

At the end of each month I would do explanations for the final week, but also go through the explanations I made for each of the other weeks and see if I could adjust them by:

Adding more insight
Simplifying
Making it more concise

etc…

Problem-solving is also a form of recall that I used. And this is what it looked like for me throughout the challenge:

Beginning:

At the beginning of the challenge, I made the big mistake of trying to learn everything first and then do problems instead of alternating.

Later:

I later corrected this and I would tend to do some problems every day (usually during the times of day when I would feel most energized)

That’s it for this Q/A

Hopefully, that answers some of your questions. If there are any more you have, be sure to email me or leave a comment.

Until next time.