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    PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
    Podcast 13 min read

    Stop Studying, Start Learning w/ Justin Sung

    with Justin Sung

    Justin Sung and Chris Do examine why collecting information is not the same as learning to use it.

    Chris Do

    Chris Do

    Founder, The Futur™ · August 19, 2026

    The comfort of collecting

    A full notebook can conceal an empty understanding. The satisfying part of studying, gathering information, is not necessarily the part that makes it usable. Dr. Justin Sung, a learning coach, certified teacher, former medical doctor, and co-founder of I Can Study, brings that distinction to his conversation with Chris Do.

    Sung works with students and professionals on how they learn. His central concern is not whether information reaches them. It is what happens after it arrives, when a clear explanation has to become knowledge that survives outside the explanation.

    The problem is recognizable: a book makes sense, a speaker delivers a compelling insight, and the listener leaves feeling better informed. Later, the insight is difficult to reconstruct. The memory of understanding remains, but the understanding itself is unavailable when needed.

    Sung describes that residue with an unusually sharp image: “You will have the shadow of the light bulb.”

    The distinction matters because the familiar evidence of effort can be misleading. Pages read, videos watched, and notes accumulated all document activity. They do not, by themselves, establish what someone can explain, connect, or apply without the original material doing the work.

    Collecting information is not the same as building knowledge.

    That is the uncomfortable premise underneath Sung's advice. The learner cannot outsource the entire process to an articulate instructor, a comprehensive document, or an AI transcription tool. Each can preserve or present information. None can perform the learner's interpretation on the learner's behalf.

    Sung is especially critical of the moment when taking notes becomes a retreat from thinking. Something feels complicated, so the listener starts recording everything. The resulting document looks productive precisely when the more difficult work, deciding how ideas relate, has stopped.

    The distinction is functional, not technological. A notebook is not the enemy. The problem begins when preserving an explanation substitutes for working through it, or when the existence of a searchable record becomes reassurance that the material has been learned.

    His critique brings a useful tension to the wider discussion of The State of Design Education: educational material and the ability to learn from it are separate concerns. Better access does not remove the need for interpretation.

    Do keeps pressing toward practical consequences. How does someone learn faster? How does a struggling reader participate? How should a speaker design an experience that produces more than approval?

    Those questions move the conversation away from finding a perfect study setup. Sung's answer is less convenient and more demanding: examine the response to difficulty. When information stops feeling simple, the next move matters more than the amount already consumed.

    The apparent interruption is where the work begins.

    Confusion needs a destination

    Sung treats overwhelm as a signal to investigate rather than an automatic instruction to withdraw. In the situations he describes, the learner has encountered several ideas, senses relationships among them, and cannot yet organize those relationships clearly.

    The temptation is to reduce that discomfort immediately. Stop reading. Simplify the argument until its complications disappear. Write everything down and postpone the thinking. Each response can relieve pressure while leaving the underlying uncertainty untouched.

    His alternative is not an instruction to endure unlimited frustration. It is a change in the task: stop treating the whole subject as an undifferentiated problem and identify the particular connection that is missing.

    Turn uncertainty into a specific question.

    The question creates a target. Instead of deciding that a book is overwhelming, the reader can identify a claim that conflicts with experience, a term whose relevance remains unclear, or an application that has not been explained.

    Sung offers several directions for that inquiry:

    • Identify where the new information fits in the larger picture.
    • Connect the idea to a personal context or purpose.
    • Determine how the idea would be applied.
    • Compare it with something already understood.

    These are not four mandatory stages. They are possible ways into the same difficulty. The useful question is the one that makes the learner's particular uncertainty more precise.

    That distinction prevents the advice from becoming another ritual. Copying a standard question into a notebook is not the objective. A question matters because its answer would change how the material is understood.

    Sung also challenges a familiar classroom performance: the person who nods through an explanation, reports complete understanding, and has no questions. Silence can mean clarity. In the situation he describes, it can also mean the learner has not examined the explanation closely enough to discover a gap.

    Confusion, then, is not necessarily a worse position than confidence. It can represent a more accurate reading of what remains unresolved.

    Do translates the idea into staying with the uncomfortable moment rather than immediately escaping it. But staying is only useful when it leads somewhere. Sung's questions supply that direction, converting an emotional response into a problem that can be examined.

    There is an important limit to the interpretation: difficulty alone is not proof of effective learning. Sung's practical proposal includes both noticing confusion and actively reorganizing the material. Remaining confused without changing the approach is not the same process.

    The desired movement is from vague discomfort to a defined gap, then from that gap toward an answer. New information introduces another gap. The learner repeats the work rather than expecting one explanation to remove uncertainty permanently.

    This is a more active role than simply paying attention. Attention admits the material. Questions begin deciding what it means.

    Knowledge grows through relationships

    Once a question has been answered, Sung does not prescribe an entirely new technique. The same cycle continues with the next piece of information. Take in a manageable amount, examine what does not fit, and reorganize the understanding before adding more.

    He illustrates this with two ideas held against each other. The learner considers why each makes sense, where they overlap, and where they differ. The aim is not to choose a winner immediately, but to understand the relationship clearly enough to make a considered decision.

    What accumulates is not just a longer inventory of facts. Sung calls the developing network a schema: interconnected knowledge that provides reference points for interpreting what comes next.

    In his account, that network explains why learning should become more manageable as expertise grows. Familiar concepts provide places to attach unfamiliar ones. Comparisons become easier because there is more relevant material available for comparison.

    The contrast is with accumulation without organization. More information enters, but its relationships remain unresolved. Instead of gaining reference points, the learner acquires more loose ends.

    Expertise requires connections, not just coverage.

    This is also where Sung locates a useful form of individuality. Learners arrive with different prior knowledge, purposes, experiences, and intended applications. Those differences shape which questions become interesting and which connections make an explanation meaningful.

    Two people can hear the same presentation and leave with different results without one of them having heard a better version. One connects the content to an active problem. The other recognizes the words but never establishes why those words matter.

    Do raises precisely that frustration around conferences. An attendee can report gaining nothing from a session that another person found valuable. Sung directs attention toward the work of comparison and application taking place inside the listener, not only the performance onstage.

    His account does not require declaring every presentation effective. Rather, it identifies something the listener can influence even when the teaching is imperfect: whether the content is being tested against an actual goal.

    The surrounding discussion connects naturally with Learning, Collaboration, Critique & Feedback. The relevant distinction here is between receiving input and doing something intellectually consequential with it.

    That consequence can be modest. A learner notices that two claims are compatible only under different conditions. A familiar idea needs revision. An explanation answers one question but reveals another. In Sung's model, these are movements toward an organized understanding rather than distractions from finishing the material.

    Speed is therefore a downstream concern. Faster consumption does not solve disorganized interpretation. Sung places the emphasis on thinking more clearly about what has already been encountered, so the next encounter has somewhere to land.

    The unit of progress is a relationship understood.

    The learner is not the defect

    Do tests Sung's argument against a less comfortable situation than an ambitious professional with an overflowing reading list. He describes a Brazilian colleague with dyslexia who struggled with reading, moved to Florida, and encountered a teacher who made the classroom feel unsafe.

    The difficulty was no longer limited to decoding words. In Do's account, experiences associated with school could trigger an emotional shutdown. The colleague wanted to learn, but the setting and the task carried a history of humiliation.

    That story changes the stakes. A demand for more effort can sound very different to someone who has repeatedly been told that difficulty reflects a lack of intelligence.

    Sung responds by separating the person from the method. His reassurance is that struggling under a particular approach does not settle the question of someone's capacity to learn. An ineffective fit between task and approach should not become a permanent verdict on the learner.

    The distinction he draws is between taking in information and processing its meaning. Reading difficulties can make written material harder to access. Once information is available, there is still the separate work of organizing it, comparing it, and connecting it with existing understanding.

    That is not a reason to dismiss access barriers. It is a reason not to confuse those barriers with every other part of learning. Do's colleague can listen to material, and that matters because it provides another route into the work.

    Sung recommends a broad repertoire rather than allegiance to one format:

    • Read and write when those activities serve the task.
    • Listen to explanations and examine their meaning.
    • Create or study visuals that clarify relationships.
    • Use diagrams, images, and video alongside other material.

    His objection is to turning a preference into a restriction. A person who finds one format comfortable can begin treating every other format as unavailable. The preferred route then becomes a boundary around what the person believes is possible.

    The practical objective is flexibility, not forced uniformity. Different material arrives in different forms, and the learner benefits from having ways to work with it without treating every uncomfortable format as a judgment of ability.

    Do's example also resists an easy motivational ending. One conversation cannot establish how a particular person should address dyslexia or the effects of an unsafe classroom. What it can establish is a better starting question: which part of the process is causing difficulty?

    That is more useful than asking whether the person is smart enough. It allows access, emotional response, interpretation, and application to remain distinguishable problems rather than collapsing into one identity.

    The learner does not need another label that explains failure. The learner needs a more precise account of the obstacle.

    Good teaching leaves work to do

    Sung's emphasis on the learner raises an obvious challenge for the teacher. If interpretation cannot be outsourced, what should an instructor actually do? Simply making material harder would confuse responsibility with abandonment.

    His answer begins before the presentation is written. Identify the difficult concept, then identify what makes it difficult. Which prerequisite understanding, perspective, or experience would make the concept easier to grasp?

    He calls these prerequisites meta concepts. The term matters less than the shift in attention. Instead of repeatedly simplifying the final explanation, the instructor examines what the audience needs in order to understand it.

    The design process follows a clear progression:

    • Identify the difficult concept. Name the understanding the audience needs to reach.
    • Map the missing prerequisites. Identify the perspectives or knowledge that would make it intelligible.
    • Design a route to discovery. Use questions or activities that help learners reach those conclusions.

    The teacher still has a demanding job. Someone must choose the question, construct the activity, notice the misunderstanding, and guide the sequence. But the learner participates in producing the conclusion rather than merely receiving it.

    Sung's phrasing captures the division of labor: “You're guiding them through that, but you're never walking it for them.”

    Once the audience reaches an insight, the instructor can name it. The formal term arrives as a label for something already understood, not as an unfamiliar object that the audience is expected to accept and memorize.

    This reverses the familiar sequence of definition first, meaning later. In Sung's version, the experience prepares the definition. The teacher can then explain more directly because the audience has a reason to recognize the concept.

    The issue belongs beside the broader subject of The Importance Of Mentors, while preserving a clear distinction: support and substitution are different functions. Sung describes support that develops the learner's own capacity to interpret.

    Do immediately sees an application to keynotes and workshops. Instead of opening with a stream of finished ideas, a speaker can first expose the structure of the talk and ask the audience to identify what they expect or need to learn.

    That makes the opening more than an agenda slide. It becomes preparation for attention. Listeners establish a purpose before the explanation begins, giving them something to test as the presentation develops.

    The approach also changes how an instructor reads audience engagement. Agreement is not the only useful response. A considered prediction, a revealing question, or a conclusion reached through an activity can show what the audience is doing with the material.

    The speaker's task is not to eliminate every difficult moment. It is to make the difficult moments worth working through.

    Reading begins before reading

    When Do asks how Sung reads a book, the answer does not begin with highlighting. It begins with preparation. Sung wants to know what the reading is for before asking attention to remain attached to the page.

    He previews headings and titles, identifies keywords, and writes them down. Then he considers which terms are familiar and predicts what the book will say about them. The preview becomes an initial set of expectations rather than a quick substitute for the text.

    Give attention a purpose before adding information.

    That purpose can change as the book unfolds. The point is not to force every passage into a predetermined answer. It is to arrive with enough orientation to notice what is relevant, surprising, unclear, or inconsistent with the initial prediction.

    Sung's reading process offers a practical sequence:

    • Scan the headings, titles, and recurring terms.
    • Write down the terms that seem important.
    • Identify existing familiarity and predict what the material will explain.
    • Record the questions that make the reading worthwhile.
    • Stop and reset when page coverage replaces inquiry.

    The final move is especially revealing. Sung does not treat uninterrupted reading as an achievement in itself. If the purpose disappears and the activity becomes merely getting through pages, he stops to recover the question.

    This gives the pause a specific function. It is not an escape from the book's difficulty. It is a check on whether the reader is still doing the work the book was opened to support.

    Do recognizes that the same preparation can happen in a room full of people. A speaker can share the major ideas, invite predictions, and ask listeners what they want answered. Sung endorses that move as a way to prime an audience.

    He also describes using an initially plausible but incorrect conclusion to create a later correction. The teaching opportunity lies in the contrast between what the audience expected and what the explanation reveals.

    For this conversation, his example is the expectation that becoming better at learning means learning will feel easy. His counterpoint is that effective learning can remain effortful; the learner becomes more willing and able to work with the effort.

    “Learning feels effortful,” Sung says.

    That statement also reframes the promise of reading faster. A useful reading process is not simply a way to finish more books. It gives the reader a method for deciding what deserves attention and when the current approach has drifted away from understanding.

    The tactical value is in the reset. A reader does not need to finish the chapter before acknowledging that its purpose has been lost. The next useful action can be recovering a single question, then returning to the text with something specific to resolve.

    Completion is visible. Purpose has to be maintained.

    Evidence comes from the attempt

    The conversation's final obstacle is not ignorance of a technique. It is the reluctance to use one badly. Do describes giving a group what he considers clear instructions, only to receive a flood of questions aimed at preventing even an initial mistake.

    The behavior looks conscientious. It can also postpone the only experience that would reveal what the questions are really about. Before an attempt, some uncertainty is unavoidable because the learner has not yet produced anything to examine.

    Sung separates two conditions that are easy to confuse: insufficient thinking and insufficient data. More analysis can help with the first. It cannot automatically supply the second.

    “You need the data first,” he says.

    His example is making a post. Someone who has never published one has nothing of their own to analyze. Questions about performance remain detached from an actual attempt, so the demand for clarity can become a barrier to obtaining it.

    The distinction offers a practical companion to Looking Into The Future: action is valuable here because it produces evidence. It gives subsequent reflection something concrete to work on.

    Sung draws on his medical experience for an analogy about progress that has not yet become obvious. He uses the idea of a subclinical period to describe skill development in which useful changes are occurring before the desired outcome appears.

    The analogy is not a timetable or a guarantee. Its purpose is to challenge the assumption that an unsuccessful attempt contains no progress. Discovering a recurring error can be consequential even when the finished result still looks disappointing.

    The useful reflection becomes specific: what prevented the intended result, and what tendency did the attempt reveal? That is different from concluding that the method simply does not work for this person.

    Sung then separates accuracy from fluency. First, perform the task correctly. Repeat that performance with greater consistency. Speed comes later, rather than being the first standard against which every awkward attempt is judged.

    This creates a more demanding definition of patience. It is not passive faith that improvement will eventually arrive. It is continued examination of mistakes, followed by changes that address what those mistakes reveal.

    The next attempt should have a reason to be different. A question becomes more precise. A connection becomes clearer. An error becomes recognizable before it is repeated. These are smaller developments than mastery, but they give practice direction.

    Do's anxious workshop participants wanted confidence before the activity. Sung's argument places some of that confidence on the other side of experience. The missing information cannot always be supplied by another instruction.

    Before collecting another explanation, the learner has a narrower decision to make: identify the unanswered question, or produce the attempt that will reveal it.

    No attempt. Nothing to analyze.

    TRANSCRIPT

    We've all heard that everyone's got a unique way of learning and what makes someone an effective learner is figuring out what that way of learning really is. The idea here is that in order to be a really effective learner, you need to figure out your learning style and you should really be leaning into it as kind of like a core principle of learning. Makes sense, right? Are you aware that this is completely wrong? I'm Dr. Justin Sung and you're listening to The Future. In the 70s, this dude basically said, hey, I think we all have a unique style of learning. And then also in the 70s, there was this big cultural movement where everyone was trying to get this sort of sense of self -identity and independence. It's called the self -esteem movement, I think some people call it. And so this really fit in culturally really well. Hey, everyone is unique. We all have a unique learning style and we should be leaning into it. And so to this day, right now, some surveys show that 98 % of the population believes that you have a learning style that you should lean into. Since the 70s, there's been decades of research that shows that people do not have a unique learning style. So the reality is actually we have learning preferences and those preferences are built up based on biology and habit. Habit is usually years of formal education. And then there's also biology. Our human brain tends to process visual information tens of thousands of times faster than written information. So often, actually universally, when you survey people, what's the most dominant learning style people say that they have? Visual. What's the second most dominant? Read and write. What's the third? And usually by a big margin through listening. The important thing here is understanding that just because you have a preference for learning something in a certain way also doesn't actually mean that it's more effective. And the real takeaway here is that if you want to be a better learner, you should learn to use multiple modalities. You should read and you should write and you should listen and you should use visuals, create visuals, find images, diagrams, watch videos. And you want to be mixing those modalities and creating strategies for each of those modalities. Because also in the real world, you don't have the if you want to be a better learner, you should learn to use multiple modalities. You should read and you should write and you should listen and you should use visuals, create visuals, find images, diagrams, watch videos. And you want to be mixing those modalities and creating strategies for each of those modalities. Because also in the real world, you don't have the freedom of choice. The danger of believing that learning styles is real is that you start thinking that you can only learn within fixed conditions and in a fixed way. And then you just create this artificial box around yourself. And that's just completely not true. Today's guest is Dr. Justin Sung, a learning coach, certified teacher, and former medical doctor who has helped tens of thousands of students and professionals build research -backed systems to learn anything faster. He co -founded I Can Study, a program on self -regulated higher order learning. And he's known for his TED Talk, Stop Studying, Start Learning, and Widely Watch YouTube Masterclasses. Justin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Chris. Thanks for the intro. I actually got to meet you at the One Billion Follow Summit as a face -to -face. And what struck me, first of all, is your fan following. And our friend Dave was like, you know who that is? I'm like, no, tell me more. He's the guy. He's the goat when it comes to learning. So already your reputation precedes you. But if I may just pull on this one string, you were a doctor before and now you're doing something a little bit different. What made you change? What I always say is that I think there are a lot of things about a career and about yourself that you can never know until you've gone through it. And if you asked me when I decided, hey, I want to be a doctor and you asked me to give you a reason, honestly, you could just fill that with any generic reason that you think is socially acceptable and that I probably would have run with it. And I think especially feels like doctor, you know, things that have this sort of prestige next to it, makes you feel good when you say, yeah, I'm going to be a doctor. Everyone passes you on the back. You feel good about it. And that uncertainty is gone. Like, oh, I've got a path now. I have a road that I can just follow down. And I got good at following down that road. And I went through it and I realized, actually, this is not ticking the boxes for me. And it was nothing to do with the field. It was nothing to do with my colleagues. It was really to do with just how the health system was structured and the management of it. And it was extremely exploitative. follow down and I got good at following down that road and I went through it and I realized actually this is not ticking the boxes for me and it was nothing to do with the field it was nothing to do with the my colleagues it was really to do with just how the health system was structured and the the management of it and it was extremely exploitative and I felt that I had very limited impact it was quite frustrating so now I'm doing what I'm doing so for me it was lots of gradual tiny little decisions that got me to explore it more dip my toes into business dip my toes into education just accumulating experience so that eventually that decision became easier and easier it was very gradual and and I wouldn't have done it any any other way I want to learn faster how do I do that so every act of learning is a leap of faith you have an unknown a sea of unknown variables that you have to swim through you don't know how to make sense of it you don't know what transformation you're going to receive at the end of this learning process in order for you to navigate through to the end yes you need to have strategies and you need to have techniques and all the other things but you need to have faith that you're going to be able to jump into this and get to the other side better off for it and if you don't have that faith that you can do that then you're never going to learn and so the first part is actually understanding when you're learning anything new and complicated it's going to feel overwhelming overwhelm is simply your brain saying there are lots of things going on I know they connect together but I don't know how that's all it is until you start feeling overwhelmed you haven't really started the process of learning particularly for something that's deep and complex so don't see overwhelm or uncertainty as the big bad wolf let's say that I'm reading through a book and there's lots of insightful information that's coming through great you know light bulbs are being turned on things are clicking into place and now I'm starting to feel like okay well how do I apply this what does it mean for me how do I hold on to all this information how does it influence with my own personal context and now it starts feeling it starts to feel a little bit more complicated things start feeling a little bit more like they all connect with each other they relate with each other they all influence each other and it's not clear how and at this point of overwhelm the habit that most people have is that they recognize the overwhelm and they step away because the uncertainty is something to be avoided and so the first feeling a little bit more like they all connect with each other, they relate with each other, they all influence each other, and it's not clear how. And at this point of overwhelm, the habit that most people have is that they recognize the overwhelm and they step away because the uncertainty is something to be avoided. And so the first most important technique, if you even want to call it a technique, is just to recognize your habit of avoidance. When you feel overwhelmed, when you're learning something new, what do you do as an instinctual response? Most people, they just stop thinking about it. They say, this is so overwhelming. I'm just, I'm not going to try to think about it at that level of depth anymore. They maybe oversimplify it. They just stop learning altogether. Or maybe they think, okay, well, I need to get this down. They start writing tons of notes. They turn on the AI transcriber, whatever it is. They basically create these illusions of learning that makes it feel like they're getting this information down because they don't know how to navigate through that overwhelm. All of this is counterproductive. There's this really great quote, I think from someone called William Cunningham. It says that memory is the residue of thought. So you cannot create any knowledge without the thinking. So any response that you have to that feeling that things don't make sense, that feeling of overwhelm, any response to that, that reduces how much you need to think about it is also going to reduce how much you're going to learn from it. That means you're not going to remember this later. Even if it makes sense to you now, those light bulbs that turned on a week from now, those light bulbs will be off. You will have the shadow of the light bulb. You'll remember a week ago, you had a really insightful moment, but you can't remember what the inside is anymore. You can't apply that insight anymore. That knowledge is not yours. And so in order to make that knowledge yours, you have to respond to it by turning that uncertainty into a path forward. And you do that by asking questions. So if I said, Chris, what's the last thing you ate today? You see, in the two seconds after I asked you the question, you already start thinking about it. It's automatic. The brain has this strong response to try and fill those blanks. And the question opens up that blank. So when you're learning something new and you have uncertainty, all you do is you say, okay, I'm feeling this uncertainty. Great. I'm ready to learn. Why am I uncertain? What is the specific information? already started thinking about it. It's automatic. The brain has this strong response to try and fill those blanks. And the question opens up that blank. So when you're learning something new and you have uncertainty, all you do is you say, okay, I'm feeling this uncertainty. Great. I'm ready to learn. Why am I uncertain? What is the specific information, the question that I have, that if I had the answer to, the uncertainty would drop and write those questions down. And now what you've got is you've got a path through the uncertainty where if you follow that path, learning is going to occur. You're thinking critically. You're thinking deeply about it. You're building that knowledge mentally. You're making that knowledge yours. And you're not just avoiding the overwhelm and trying to bypass the thinking anymore. That's really the core of it. Every learning strategy, every technique that is going to be effective for learning things faster centers around just saying, how do I navigate through the uncertainty rather than avoid the uncertainty? And so most techniques, if you just think about that as a guiding principle, most techniques will be effective as long as it achieves that. So what we do is we recognize or we feel the overwhelm as soon as we feel that we're like, okay, what's going on here? And we tell ourselves that it means we're doing something that doesn't make sense yet, but it will. So we have to stay in the pocket, if you will. So we have to recognize we have a habit of avoidance, things that are difficult, confusing, makes us feel anxious, and we want to run from it. So what is the question that we should be asking ourselves at that point so that we can push through it? Yeah. So it's whatever question you think is going to help us to be less uncertain. So if you think about it this way, if someone is not thinking about it at all, like we've all had the experience where we're explaining something to someone and you're giving them instructions, you're explaining something and then they're just nodding. And then you ask, do you have any questions? They're like, no, no questions at all. It's like, do you understand? Yeah, yeah, I understand. And you just know this person does not understand. Actually, they have not even thought so much about what I've told them that they recognize that they don't understand. So overwhelm is a sign of thinking. Overwhelm is your brain trying to connect the dots. And it's difficult if it's complicated, if you don't see how the dots connect, if you don't see what pattern you can form through connecting those dots. And your response there is to just not connect dots, then the picture is never going to form. So all we're doing is we're saying, well, what are the dots And it's difficult if it's complicated, if you don't see how the dots connect, if you don't see what pattern you can form through connecting those dots, and your response there is to just not connect dots, then the picture is never going to form. So all we're doing is we're saying, well, what are the dots that I'm trying to connect right now? Why does it not make sense? Why do I not see where the pattern is? So it could be a question that's as simple as just saying, well, where does this fit in the big picture? Where does this new piece of information fit relative to my context and my purpose? How am I going to apply it? Anything that forces that single piece of information to try to fit with a wider network, a wider body, that's going to create more clarity. It can be any question. It could be the most obscure question that you just happen to be curious about. The human brain is largely pretty similar across most humans. What's unique is that we all carry with us a unique set of prior knowledge and connections and points of relevance and applications. And when we summon those and activate it and apply that to what we're learning, naturally, new questions start forming. We start being curious about different things from the person next to you. And then the question you ask is going to be different. It's not to say that your question is better or worse than anyone else's, but it's about finding which question resonates the most with you that allows you to make sense of it, connect it to something else, and feel like it's more intuitive and simple to understand. Okay. So is that step one? The thing with learning is that it's actually, you just repeat this cycle until all the uncertainty is gone. It's the same loop that you continue to go through. So at first, when you're starting to learn something new and complicated, you have questions about everything because you don't know anything. And so you're taking just like a couple of concepts. You read like a page or something. You read a video of someone explaining something. You've got like literally two ideas and you're balancing them against each other. You ask these questions. You get to a point where you're like, okay, I see why both people are saying what they're saying. It makes sense to me. I see where there's similarities. I see where there's differences. I feel like this is the way that I want to approach it. Cool. Then you take in the next round of information. Now you've got new information. You've got more things to be uncertain about. You just repeat that cycle. And then eventually what happens is that your own knowledge, we call it a schema, which is basically the interconnected network of knowledge, starts growing and it starts building. And what happens then is that you get more anchor points. It's easier to make comparisons because you have more knowledge to draw on. You're becoming an expert. as. You're becoming an expert as. repeat that cycle. And then eventually what happens is that your own knowledge, we call it a schema, which is basically the interconnected network of knowledge starts growing and it starts building. And what happens then is that you get more anchor points. It's easier to make comparisons because you have more knowledge to draw on. You're becoming an expert as you learn. So what happens with most people is that the more they learn about something, they get more and more and more overwhelmed because they're never actually organizing that overwhelm. Then as you learn more, it becomes easier and easier to learn. I call this a snowball effect of learning is that as you learn more, you should be increasingly becoming an expert. And so new information is easier and faster to understand. Where should we take the conversation next? Because you gave us a lot to process. And at first I was like, okay, he's going to like keep doing this and my brain's going to explode. But it turns out like that was self -contained, like we've got this essence of it. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. The only thing that I would add on there is just that don't confuse learning from the feeling of learning. Most people feel that the feeling of learning is that they understand things, but actually understanding does not produce memory. If all it took to remember things and have knowledge and build expertise was just to understand, then learning would be trivially easy. Because most of the time when you hear someone say something, when you read something, you spend a bit of time, you can understand it. But most people, if you look at the studies on this, if you ask them how much they remember like a week or two later, it's only like 20 to 30%. So that means that 80 % of the time that you spent on learning new material, you just forget it. So it's like, what's the point? But you may as well just slept more instead, spend more time with your family, you know, do other things. And so a big part of that comes down to the fact that people feel that they're learning because things just, they just understand what they're consuming. But what learning should feel like is this constant ebb and flow of confusion. You should constantly be feeling as you're learning actively confused, and then you're actively organizing it to make sense. So if you're not constantly feeling confused and then reorganizing and confused and using that effort to actively reorganize it, then the learning is probably not taking place. And so writing lots of pages of notes in your Notion, that's not going to be learning. Creating like an enormous Google doc where you're just typing out all your thoughts, that's not. If you're not constantly feeling confused and then reorganizing and confused and using that effort to actively reorganize it, then the learning is probably not taking place. And so writing lots of pages of notes in your Notion, that's not going to be learning. Creating like an enormous Google Doc where you're just typing out all your thoughts, that's not learning. is only occurring when you're actively thinking about it inside your brain. You met Drigo. He's a tall Brazilian guy. He has some unresolved trauma around schools and he's dyslexic. He has a hard time reading words. He can listen to things. How do we help him become a better learner? Because he's not stupid. It's just he doesn't learn in a traditional way. And there's some stories about how he's in school. He moved from Brazil to Florida. And when he was in a class because he already was struggling with dyslexia, the teacher just ripped on him and just created a really unsafe learning environment. So now anything that reminds him of school, he just shut down emotionally. But he knows it's like, I need to read. I need to learn. I need to figure out stuff. And I'll ask him, what'd you learn? And he has a hard time processing it. Do you have any specific advice for someone who's like him who might be neurodivergent and they're struggling and they've always been made to feel like for some reason they're not smart when in fact they are much smarter? The issue is that traditional learning is bad for everyone. But a neurotypical person, they can just brute force their way through it. The method of learning doesn't work. The brain hates doing it. Every traditional learning method that we get pushed on to us, it's not effective. It's not supported by science. But if you're neurotypical, you can just power your way through. When you're neurodivergent, you can't power your way through as much. You just feel the symptom of it a lot more. The bottleneck of learning is never how quickly you can consume information. The bottleneck of learning is 99 .9 % concentrated in just how do you think about what you've consumed. The person who can think about it with more clarity is able to learn more quickly. So people who have dyslexia, yes, it's harder for you to take in and consume the information and to make sense of the actual word itself. So that part might be slower for you. But if you can just think, and once you have consumed it, if you can organize your thoughts more clearly, then you're going to be 10 times faster than the person who cannot do that. And let me tell you, as someone who does this for a living, Yes, it's harder for you to take in and consume the information and to make sense of the actual word itself. So that part might be slower for you. But if you can just think, and once you have consumed it, if you can organize your thoughts more clearly, then you're going to be 10 times faster than the person who cannot do that. And let me tell you, as someone who does this for a living, most people cannot think clearly. Most people cannot organize it. Most people do not even want to organize it. They don't even try because the mental effort of trying to organize it and ask themselves questions and be active in the learning is something that they just want to avoid. So just going from the person who's willing to think about what you're learning already puts you in the top 20%. So to Drugo and anyone else that's listening, that's feeling jaded from the school system, I would say that you feeling jaded and you feeling put off or even traumatized about learning from school, that's perfectly valid because you got pushed to use a method of learning that no one really should be learning through. And when you use a method and a technique that is based around how your brain actually works, then you realize that there's really nothing wrong with you. You've just never been given the right tool. As long as you engage and are willing to spend a bit of mental effort trying to think through it, trying to make sense of it, and trying to connect it to what you already know, where there are similarities and there are differences, you're going to be learning. I'm going to ask you this question. So this is a personal question. When you were at the One Billion Follower Summit, did you go to any sessions? And if you did, I want to know the session and what you thought about it and just to help us understand, like when we go to one of these conferences, I think the teacher is asking us to do too much of the heavy lifting. And so a lot of people are like, I didn't get anything from it. But I'm like, I know you didn't, but I did. And why do we have such different experiences with the same person? To be honest, I actually didn't go to any of the sessions because the only session I went to do was my own to speak, you know, because I had to, because I was just chatting with people and I was learning so much from the connection, you know, from all the other speakers that were there. But I can't speak to that, that particular experience because that's like a universally common sort of thing. So here's something really interesting. There was a study that was done with Air Force Academy students. This was over a decade ago now. And what they did is that they. people. And I was learning so much from all the other speakers that were there. But I can't speak to that particular experience because that's like a universally common sort of thing. So here's something really interesting. There was a study that was done with Air Force Academy students. This was over a decade ago now. And what they did is that they got a bunch of the cadets who were taking calculus one and they got them to rate their professor. And so the professors who made it really manageable, made the subject really enjoyable, the teacher did a great job instructing and being a good teacher. Those professors got higher ratings naturally. So then they would compare that against the performance of the actual students. And what they found was that at the end of calculus one, the students who were taught by the professor with higher ratings did better. So let's fast forward now to calculus three, much more advanced. We find the exact opposite relationship. The students who had been taught by higher rated professors consistently underperformed. The idea is this. At a certain point when you're learning anything, especially anything complex, it's going to get overwhelming. You need the skills to navigate through it and make sense of it yourself because there is no amount of lifting that the teacher can do for you that is going to be able to bridge it. And the basic levels, it's possible. But when it gets sufficiently complicated, you need those mental tools. Before you get dropped into the ocean, you need to learn to swim. And there's no amount of floaty paddles, whatever you put into your arms is going to save you when you're in the ocean. At that point, if you haven't learned to swim, you're going to struggle. And so although yes, partly I think, you know, you should be a good teacher and you should try to make things simple and easy to understand for you. I actually really strongly believe that 90 % of the effect of teaching or instruction is actually just about how the learner themselves takes in that information and makes it their own. And especially any situation where you're not being taught one -on -one, you can almost guarantee that how it's being taught is not perfectly suited for you uniquely. So you have to come to the middle ground and extract that. And so I guarantee it. If someone went to that talk where you felt that there was a lot that you really learned from it. any situation where you're not being taught one -on -one, you can almost guarantee that how it's being taught is not perfectly suited for you uniquely. So you have to come to the middle ground and extract that. And so I guarantee it. If someone went to that talk where you felt that there was a lot that you really learned from it, either that person is not pursuing any goals that are related to what this person was talking about, in which case, I don't know why they were listening to the talk. But probably what was happening is that they weren't actively connecting that goal to what the person was saying. They weren't actively thinking about how it's similar or different to what they already know. They weren't comparing. They weren't actively really thinking about it. And that's the reason why they didn't extract that learning. This is the whole idea of learner -centric learning, as opposed to just being instructor -centric. If I want to be a better speaker and be more learner -centric or student -centric in the way of my approach, what are some things I could do? When you have a topic that you're trying to teach, there are usually these concepts that you know are tricky to understand. So start with those concepts, write down those concepts. And then what I like to draw is I draw an arrow above that concept and I say, okay, what is it that makes this concept difficult to understand? These are the meta concepts. So these are the prerequisite understandings and perspectives and insights, maybe experiences that someone needs to have in order for this concept to be easy. If someone were to have this knowledge and understand all these other components, then this final concept should make a lot of sense to them. If they're lacking that, then they're going to be confused. So now what you've done is you've actually mapped out the reason for confusion. Now, what a lot of people try to do is that they focus on the concept and they think, how can I break down the concept so that it's easier and more manageable to understand? And sometimes you can do that. But what I believe is that if you really want to create the best learning experience, then what you should do is you focus on the meta concepts. And then you ask yourself a question that is, what could I teach? What activity could I do? What questions could I ask that would allow the learner to be able to arrive at those conclusions by themselves? You're not teaching it to them. You're not actually telling them this is how it is. You're asking them questions. You're engaging them in activities. You're doing whatever it is so that they themselves are generating those conclusions. learner to be able to arrive at those conclusions by themselves. You're not teaching it to them. You're not actually telling them this is how it is. You're asking them questions. You're engaging them in activities. You're doing whatever it is so that they themselves are generating those conclusions. And by doing so, they're creating their own knowledge. They're navigating through that difficulty and all those patterns of thinking by themselves. You are showing them which path of difficulty to walk through. You're guiding them through that, but you're never walking it for them. The realization that you see when people really click and they understand this really difficult concept that you know is so hard to wrap your head around, but then they arrive at that by themselves. And all you say is like, that's exactly right. And then you just anchor it. You say this thing that you just explained that you just thought of that you thought it must be like this. That's exactly true. And we call that this term. And now you can teach it. You've done the hardest part. They get it. They're on board. They resonate with it. They've got the right perspective. They go to the insights. And now you can just teach it. And you can teach it didactically with whatever way that you want to. And you can break it down and make it simple and do all the stuff that you like to do when teaching. And then when it comes to the next major concept, you walk through that journey again. Cool. Now that we've covered this term, now let's put ourselves in this situation. Imagine this, blah, blah, blah. And then you do the exact same thing. And it becomes this really engaging, natural way of sort of self -discovery of learning almost. In educational circles, what is the term that's used to describe this way of designing the question, the frame, or the activity such that they reach the conclusion? What do we call this? Yeah. Some people call it the Socratic teaching. It's based on this idea that there's this book, The Teachings of Socrates, written by Plato, where there's this boy who makes the argument that you can kind of pull out all this knowledge. And he teaches trigonometry to this boy by just asking the boy questions. And the boy just answers the questions and arrives at the conclusions of trigonometry without Socrates ever having actually taught him any other principles of trigonometry. So what we're doing here is we're using an adaptation of this Socratic method. Are there any other nuggets that you want to share with people? Well, one thing that I think will be really helpful is this concept that I first encountered when I was working as a doctor, which is called a subclinical symptom. So in medicine, you have these of this Socratic method. Are there any other nuggets that you want to share with people? One thing that I think will be really helpful is this concept that I first encountered when I was working as a doctor, which is called a subclinical symptom. So in medicine, you have these diseases, obviously. And at a certain point, the disease becomes obvious enough that you then go to the doctor and then you get it diagnosed. But there are also these things that we call subclinical features or subclinical disease. And this is basically when the disease is there, but there aren't actually observable symptoms of it yet. And the reason I talk about subclinical symptoms is because any time you're trying to develop or build a complex skill, like learning faster or anything, literally any complex skill, the 90 % of the journey is subclinical. You do not actually see observable changes in your performance or your outcomes for the vast majority of skill development. Because the vast majority of skill development is just figuring out how to not do it wrong. You need to go through those hundred mistakes to figure out the wrong ways of doing it to eventually figure out how to do it correctly. So every time you try to do this and you feel like it's difficult and it's not working and you just can't get the right outcome, don't take that as a sign of discouragement or being like, oh, this is not right for me or I just can't learn this. Reflect on that and say, well, what was the reason why I didn't get the result that I wanted? Turn that mistake into the learning and then tick that off. Like that's one mistake that you now know that you have a tendency to make that you didn't know that you had a tendency to make before. And you just continue and then you find another tendency and you learn about all of your tendencies and then you figure out how to overcome all those tendencies to eventually do it correctly. And that process for some skills takes months, even years if it's a really complex skill. And only at that first point where we are able to do it correctly, do we actually see any observable difference in the outcome that we were trying to produce. And at that point, you are also very, very slow. And you recognize that the next part of learning is actually getting fluency. So now that you can do it accurately, more consistently. And just focus on continuing to be accurate and consistent and don't focus on this. And I'll see you next time. you are also very, very slow. And you recognize that the next part of learning is actually getting fluency. So now that you can do it accurately, do it accurately, more consistently and just focus on continuing to be accurate and consistent and don't focus on trying to get faster. You will naturally get faster as that thing becomes more and more of a habit. But most people, even though they completely have the cognitive neurological capacity to be exceptional learners, never become exceptional learners. They use the right strategies. They practice in the right way. Everything that I've taught right now, they could go and apply it. And the reason that most people will not is because they see that subclinical period where they're making mistakes and it's not working and they'll say, okay, well, it must not work for me. They stop and they give up before they actually have a chance for it to manifest in the outcomes that are actually worthwhile waiting around for. I feel that most people are capable of learning much, much faster and much more efficiently than they are now. They don't have to be spending hours every day. They don't have to sacrifice their weekends. They don't have to sacrifice time with their family. They don't have to sacrifice their sleep with their hobbies to keep up with the industry. You can actually perfectly learn all that stuff three, four times faster. Your brain is capable of that. But you will never, ever reach that point if you think that it's going to happen with just a few attempts. I just finished doing a session earlier this morning. I tried to give them what I thought was pretty clear instructions to go and do small group activity. They had a thousand questions because they're trying to avoid doing it wrong one time. And I find this to be very common with most people. Any tips or advice besides what you just said? Because they get stuck in this. I don't want to make any mistakes. Knowledge, expertise. This is when you have connected the dots. This is when you see the picture. It's when you look at the stars and you can see the constellation. The dots are connected. I think thinking, asking these questions, that's fine. You can ask questions. You can think about things. But you need dots first. If you have zero dots on a page, there's nothing to connect. If you've never made a post, you have nothing to analyze. You need the data first. So there is a place for thinking about and really introspecting and trying to avoid mistakes. That's fine. these questions, that's fine. You can ask questions, you can think about things, okay? But you need dots first. If you have zero dots on a page, there's nothing to connect. If you've never made a post, you have nothing to analyze. You need the data first. So there is a place for thinking about and really introspecting and trying to avoid mistakes. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with trying to avoid making the mistake. Just understand when is it the right time to avoid making those mistakes? Are you limited right now by how you're thinking about it or are you limited right now by the lack of data? And often the clarity that you're looking for comes through from having a little bit more data. How do you read? Here's a book. Tell me about how you read so you retain. Are you highlighting? Are you putting notes? What are you doing so that you can learn better? The first thing that I do is make sure that I'm ready to read. You cannot just throw information at your brain and expect it to be able to catch it and know what to do with it when it's not ready. So the first thing that I'm going to do when I read through the book, I'm going to skim through the headings. I'm going to skim through all the different titles. I'm going to pick out some keywords. I'm actually going to write that down. I'm going to look at that list and I'm going to ask myself, which of these terms do I feel more familiar with? What do I think this is going to tell me about these terms? I'm actually going to make predictions about what I think the book is going to teach me. I'm going to ask myself questions about the parts that I feel particularly curious about or particularly uncertain about. But if I don't have a question and I don't have a clear focus or goal of why I'm reading this, why I'm consuming it, what my frame of mind needs to be, then I'm probably not going to get anything out of it. Your brain is constantly filtering out information depending on what you're paying attention to. So if you're reading a book and you don't even know what you're meant to be paying attention to, you're probably missing lots of crucial information. You don't even have a chance to think about it because your brain didn't even register that it was there. So the most important thing that you can do before you read something is just to be clear, what should I pay attention to? What is my goal? What am I trying to get out of this? What questions do I want to have answered? And as I'm reading, if I feel that I'm losing track of that goal or I'm not having questions and I'm just sort of in this flow of, I'm just reading for the sake of going through the pages and covering the material, I just stop. I stop. I do the process again. I ask myself, why am I reading him? What are the questions that I have? And as I'm reading, if I feel that I'm losing track of that goal, or I'm not having questions, and I'm just sort of in this flow of, I'm just reading for the sake of going through the pages and covering the material, I just stop. I stop. I do the process again. I ask myself, why am I reading here? What are the questions that I have? What answers do I need to seek? And then only at that point do I go back into reading. So if I'm scanning chapters, titles, keywords that light me up, I'm asking myself, what are the predictions? What do I think they're going to talk about? What is it that I know about this? And I'm asking questions about the material itself, so that when I'm reading, I'm searching for these things that excite me. Should I do this if I'm going to do a keynote? Should I tell people, here's the chapters, the key ideas, the key words, and then ask them to make a prediction, to ask them, what is it that you want to pay attention to? What is your goal of being here? And what questions would you ask? And then I begin the talk or the workshop. Would that help them? The answer is yes. That's instructionally priming your audience. And that's a very effective strategy. Now, one thing that you can actually do, and I actually love doing this when I do physical workshops, right, is that you can deliberately prime them to arrive at a conclusion that's wrong. So that later when you correct them, it creates a more powerful learning moment. This works best when there is something that you feel the intuitive way of understanding something is one way. So, for example, like people intuitively feel that when you get better at learning, feels easy. The truth of it is that when you get better at learning, learning doesn't feel easy. Learning feels effortful. You're just okay with the effort. This is called the hypercorrection effect. The strength of the learning that happens after hypercorrection is stronger than without the hypercorrection being in place. And it's proportional to the level of confidence that they have before the hypercorrection. Justin, before we get out of here, first of all, I want to say it's been a great pleasure to learn from you. got me thinking about how I read and you gave me a very practical tool on perhaps the next workshop or talk. And I'm going to try and frame it and prime them the way that you were talking about. And I'm going to use the hypercorrection effect. I'm really excited to try it. And I will report back to you how well it went or not. I'm sure it's going to do great. That's why I'm so excited. So if people want to learn more about your programs and your coaching and other anything else, where do we send them? Best place to find me is just to find Dr. Justin Sung on most socials or just Justin Sung on YouTube. And you'll be able to find. or not. I'm sure it's going to do great. That's why I'm so excited. So if people want to learn more about your programs and your coaching and anything else, where do we send them? Best place to find me is just to find Dr. Justin Sung on most socials or just Justin Sung on YouTube. And you'll be able to find all my links here and there. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks, Chris.
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