All right, Jesse, I think we have five good calls on the docket. What's our first? - All right, our first call is about a professional worker going to a training, wants your advice on how to approach it. - Hi Cal, my name is Spencer and I'm a security engineer and information security officer.

I would like to know how to best tackle the training opportunity I have coming up in two months. On two months, I get to take a week long security training course that's about eight hours a day and pretty intense. Some people call it the experience of learning security through a fire hose.

I've reviewed the syllabus for the course and I've started reading a chapter a day on some of the topics in the syllabus, but I still wanna get the most out of this training experience. How do I stay engaged when I have four eight hour days in a row of really deep learning?

This is also in an area that I'm not as comfortable with. Any tips and tricks would be helpful. Thank you. - It's a good question. I'm gonna actually go back and draw from advice I used to give to college students to help give you some guidance about this particular endeavor.

Now, first, I'm gonna recommend not reading those chapters in advance. I'm gonna assume in a, unless they tell you to, I'm gonna assume in a training like this, the idea is they're going to give you the information you need during those lectures, backstopped by the textbooks. So it's not gonna be, we assume you know all these things, now let's build on that in these lectures.

Most of these type of trainings is we're gonna be giving you the information from these chapters of these textbooks. So it's probably an unnecessary investment of your time to read those things in advance. The question is what you do, what you do during the actual, what do you do in the actual training?

We just break something. Off, by the way, off scenes, Jesse just ripped the microphone off the stand. So I'm gonna say he's really mad about this training. I think it screws in, yeah. He's have to find a right way to turn it. He was so mad about the idea of the security training that he ripped the microphone off the stand.

Look, I'm gonna switch to his camera. He doesn't know I'm doing this. There he is trying to fix the, viewers of the YouTube channel can see the devastation Jesse has wreaked. All right. Anyways, Jesse's protest notwithstanding, what I'm gonna recommend is that you approach this with the question resolution method I used to teach the college students.

So the idea is you have all this information coming at you. You should have printed out in advance. If they're giving you a detailed syllabus or detailed notes, have that all printed out in advance as your guide for what you're going through. And if you're supposed to take notes, take notes as they're talking.

But the most important thing is to mark every topic for which you did not fully understand what they said. And we have a syllabus printed out. You can actually just put a question mark next to those topics in the syllabus, incredibly efficient. Otherwise, if you're typing notes, you just very big, bold question mark or the word question in caps, this thing here.

I didn't quite understand that. So then when you're done with a session for the day, you have notes on the stuff that made sense and you have question marks next to the stuff that didn't make sense. And your goal is to fill in those questions as quickly as possible, talking to the instructor, going back to the chapter.

This is what I'm always telling college kids. The goal is making sure that you understand what you don't understand and you fill in that understanding as soon as possible. And that's what I'm gonna recommend here. So it's all about your capture information, fire hose, fire hose, great. But make sure you mark the stuff that does not make sense when it first comes at you.

And then as soon as possible after the lecture, try to fill in that gap. Then you will come away from this training having at least at some point understood everything in the training. That's where you wanna be. Now you can, if you need to study for an exam later, you're starting from a foundation of having known everything.

Studying should be reviewing things you already know, not learning things from scratch. You don't need to study for an exam. You'll have a good basis in all these topics so that if you have to review it in the future, again, you're starting from a foundation of you understood that at some point, you're not trying to learn it from scratch.

So that's the main thing I would recommend. And beyond that, just take it easy. You know, eat well, drink a lot of water, don't do any other intellectually demanding work outside of those trainings during those days, rest. I mean, make it clear that that's your primary thing you're doing.

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