(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Today, we're gonna talk about learning and how to learn more efficiently and essentially how to just learn a lot. Right now, the world is very big on change. Most of the work that I do didn't exist even a few years ago. And being able to learn and adapt is super essential, both in terms of just financial security in the modern world.

And I also think in terms of your own personal fulfillment, if you are learning, you're usually happier, at least that's what I find. However, continuously learning new things all the time, if you don't do it properly, it can fry your brain very quickly. So what I want to talk about is how I approach learning because every single day I'm learning a ton of new things and how I do that without hitting burnout or at least trying to limit it as much as possible.

So we'll cover, I think, five main things. We're gonna talk about change, what I like to call the learning energy bar, sleep, task switching, and also general motivation and discipline and how they kind of interact. So first I want to talk about change. Now, my experience with burnout is kind of different to what I see most people talking about.

Most of these people are like, "Okay, burnout is when you're working too much "and don't have any breaks, "like the volume of work triggers the burnout." I think it's more like the continuous chipping away at a task without seeing much progress and without changing the task. I think that's what seems to trigger burnout, at least for me.

So for me to avoid burnout, change is really important. So the ideal scenario here would be to find work that is incredibly varied so that every single day is like a new novel experience. However, I think that's unrealistic for a few reasons. First, I think if you need to, you want to master something, okay?

In your professional life, you need to master some sort of craft, and you can't do that if you're not repeating some things over and over. And second, my work is pretty varied. I think more so now than it ever has been in the past. But I feel like if I relied purely on my job to provide variation and change in my life, then I would end up probably burning out.

So it's bad advice if I'm like, "Oh, you need to change your job to have a more varied working day or working week." It's just not realistic in a lot of cases. Okay, I'm not saying it's not possible, but there are other things that we can change much more easier and get as good as or even better results.

So the two options that work for me are changing my work environment and changing my focus. So trying my sports or doing some sort of hobby. So what do I do? One, I travel. So if you can travel with work, 100% try that. I know not everyone can, but I think a lot of us can at least work from home a few days a week.

So even if you can do that, that's still good, right? Okay, you can't maybe not travel abroad, but you can travel within your own country, or you can even go to a local cafe and just work from there, or go to a local library and work from there, just for a change of scenery.

It helps a lot. And the other, so changing our focus, this is something that I stumbled upon quite early in my life without even realizing until much later, which was going to the gym. And that gave me almost like a change in focus. Now, that's good for a few reasons.

Okay, so sports in general are good for a few reasons. First, if you're more active, your body is healthier, and you have more energy, so you can do more essentially with each day without getting tired. Okay, so you increase your energy bar. And second, it gives you something else to focus on, something else to stop with, drilling away at the same task over and over again without any breaks.

So there's two levels and maybe more to having some sort of sport to switch up your focus. And as I mentioned, those two points are completely valid, whether you're lifting heavy weights at the gym, practicing yoga, or like catching waves at the beach. All of those things and much more are all useful for this sort of thing.

Okay, point number two is that we seem to have like a learning energy bar. So what I mean by that is with each day, you can view your learning energy bar as kind of like a health bar or stamina bar from a video game. And the more things you learn or the more things that you pay attention to, the more that's gonna decrease throughout the day, okay?

And you only have a set amount of energy for learning every day. And the importance of this is if you use that energy on things that are less important. So learning something that maybe is less important as something else, or maybe you use it on not even learning, but just looking at social media or watching TV, something along those lines.

Whenever you're doing these non-productive things, you're still kind of learning, your brain is being simulated and that decreases your learning energy bar. So what you need to do is prioritize what you need to learn and deprioritize things where you're not actually learning anything. So you start first thing in the morning and just try and start learning straight away or doing the important work first before you do anything else.

Don't pick up your phone and look on social media because straight away, you wake up, you're depleting your energy bar and you're also setting the tone for the rest of the day. So I always try to be productive first thing and be very mindful of that energy bar. Now, the third very important thing is sleep.

Now, this is very cliche advice, but I feel that not many people, including myself in the past, listen to this. You need plenty of sleep to function optimally. In the West, and actually, I think a lot of the world, there's this idea that successful people work hard and because they're working so hard, working so many hours, they don't have much time for sleep, but they're just so driven that they just push through it, it's fine.

And I can't think of a scenario where this is a good thing. At least if you need to use your brain, your brain needs to have sleep. Sleep is like the oil that powers your brain. Every time you sleep, it kind of flushes out all of the rubbish and when you wake up in the morning, hopefully, your brain should be fresh, okay?

But it's only gonna be like that if you get enough sleep. And how much is enough sleep? That's gonna vary for each person, but I would recommend you start with about eight hours. Okay, and then you can move up or down depending on how you feel based on that.

Another thing that's super important is that you should try and wake up without an alarm, okay? So if you have to rely on waking up with an alarm every morning, that means you're probably sleeping too late. So you need to bring your sleeping time earlier in the day before and with that, you should over time begin waking up earlier as well.

Like initially, sure, maybe you will need to keep that alarm clock, but just bring your bedtime earlier, sleep earlier, and another very important thing that is very understated when it comes to good sleep is having a routine with your sleep. Have a set time every single day, not just the weekdays, but also the weekend.

A lot of people wake up really early on their weekdays and then on the weekend, they have a lie in and that's just not good. You need to have a routine. Try and like the same time every day if possible. Sleep is really important. It's definitely worth the time getting it right.

The next thing is task switching. So what I mean by task switching is when we switch from doing one thing to another thing, which we do all the time, okay? But when it comes to your work and learning new things, I'll use examples for myself right now, okay? So let's say I need to edit a video, okay?

Or I need to record and edit a video. And I also need to write an article on something unrelated, okay? And then I also need to do some freelance developer work. Okay, I need to do these three things throughout my week. What would be a really bad idea is if I do those three things or two of those three things every single day.

That's really bad. What you need to do is cluster the tasks into bigger time buckets, okay? So the first two days what I should do is focus on the freelance developer work. The next two days I focus on recording and editing a video. And the final day maybe I focus on the writing the article.

That is how you should break things up. Just try and cluster each task into the same time bracket and minimize that task switching where you're going from one task to another because every time you do that, your brain needs to kind of change what it's focusing on. And you will notice that when you're switching from one task to another, your brain kind of needs time to kind of easing into that other task, okay?

So every time you switch to another task, you're wasting time. So minimize those switches as much as you can. It's not always possible. And let's say with your work, you do need to do one particular task every day, just try and do that at set time every day. I think that's probably the best approach if you are forced to switch tasks.

The final point is motivation and discipline. Now, learning is a lot harder without real motivation. Now, motivation in itself is a very hard thing to achieve. And even if we do achieve motivation on a particular thing, it's a very fragile state of mind. And you're probably gonna lose it at some point, okay?

It would be very impressive if you managed to stay motivated forever on a particular thing. It's probably not gonna happen. Motivation will come and go. And when it does go, there will be that inevitable moment when we are not motivated anymore. We have to then rely on discipline. And the best way to be disciplined is to have a schedule.

Now, there's a quote I really like that I read in a book called "The War of Art." Not the art of war, the war of art. And it's a quote attributed to a Nobel Prize laureate and prolific writer, William Faulkner. William Faulkner describes this concept pretty well. When asked where he gets his inspiration to write from, he responded, "I only write when inspiration strikes.

"Fortunately, it strikes at nine every morning." Now, the sort of joke or point that Faulkner is trying to make here is, okay, a writer is a creative discipline. You need to be somewhat inspired in order to do your work. But you can't just rely on that inspiration 'cause it's very much, it's the same as motivation.

It can come and go. Instead, he relies on a disciplined approach to that inspiration or that motivation. So by almost scheduling that inspiration every day, his mind gets into that sort of mindset of, okay, it's nine a.m., I'm sat at my desk. Now is the time to work. Now is the time to be inspired.

And even when he is not inspired, at least he sits there and he tries. You'd be surprised. It can actually trigger that motivation. It can trigger that inspiration. And even if you cannot trigger it, you at least try your best, okay? Maybe it will not be the best quality of work when you're not as motivated or inspired, but you will at least get something out.

Now, both discipline and motivation together are both incredibly important for both learning and producing high-quality work. Now, there are the five points. And just to summarize, I think the active application of the brain, the brain is the biggest consumer of energy in the human body. So the active application of this massive sink of energy is hard, and you will use a lot of energy.

But this ability to learn and adapt, it is our unique selling point in nature. And in industry, in tech, and in any other place, it is also your unique selling point, okay? If you can learn and adapt faster than others, you have a advantage to other people. And at the same time, if you're able to learn and adapt quicker, you can kind of scramble your way into doing something that you actually enjoy and something that fulfills you.

And that's probably, I would say, the more important side of things, like trying to find something that you enjoy doing and being able to learn quick is, at least from my point of view, the way to do that. Now, learning to learn optimally, as far as I'm aware, never gets easy.

It's always, like every day, it's almost like an upward, uphill struggle. You're always gonna be pushing the boulder up the hill. And I don't think that will ever end. But applying yourself in this way is incredibly fulfilling. And it's the way to achieve what I think most of us want to achieve in our lives.

So even if it's just a little bit every day, just try and focus on learning. It pushes you up that hill. It gets you further along and makes your life progress. So that's it for this video. If you're interested in more videos like this, I feel like I have a lot to say on these sort of things, either on travel, learning, tech, you know, a huge number of things.

So let me know if you're interested in hearing something else in that area. But for now, that's everything for this video. So I hope it has been useful. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. (gentle music) (gentle music)