How To Learn & Remember Anything, Fast - Ali Abdaal - #231

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, podcast listeners. Welcome back. My guest today is none other than Ali Abdaal. He is a huge time YouTuber. Cambridge med students now turned productivity guru, and we linked up after having circled each other like two deer about to fence, circled each other for a while, finally sat down, I got him on the show, to discuss about as timeless and evergreen a skill as you could hope to learn, how to learn and remember anything fast. Consuming, retaining and deploying information literally is a superpower, especially in the 21st century, we don't have jobs for life anymore. We now have jobs for half a decade or a decade, and then you need to retrain, re-get new skills. Many of you may be going back to studying, university is just reopened now, perhaps after the terror of COVID this year, you're looking to change career or just make yourself more competitive in the job market. All of that requires you to be able to synthesize and then re-remember all of the information that you have consumed. Ali takes us through such a wonderful, simple and robust framework for how you can improve your ability to study and retain information. This really is a great run through. There's a lot of references here to other books and other podcasts that you can go and listen to if you want to really deepen your understanding of this. But Ali definitely is worth his salt. His YouTube channel is phenomenal. And if you enjoy what he gives us today, I implore you to go and check that out. We've also developed a bit of a bromance behind the scenes. So you very well may see a collaboration in future on either his or my or both channels. So stay tuned for that. But for now, it's time to learn how to learn with the wise and wonderful Ali Abdaal.

**Ali Abdaal** (2:13)
I was going to say, it's always a bit strange to hear a British accent on the end of a productivity or just like any kind of podcast, because all of the ones I listen to, they're just so overwhelmingly American that when I hear a Brit, it's like, oh, he's one of my boys.

**Chris Williamson** (2:28)
This is my people. This is my people here. Who do you listen to?

**Ali Abdaal** (2:33)
Oh, all of the things that I'm sure you do. I started out with Tim Ferriss and then Farnham Street, and I've got like 80 on my podcast library thing, which is now swelling. I recently started listening to a lot of Dave Asprey as well, because I'm trying to get into the whole hacking your health and all that stuff, dabbled with a bit of Peter Itea. These are all like white American dudes, though, so I need a bit of variety in my podcast diet.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
Yeah, I get that. I know that we're both mutual friends of Chris Sparks, Tiago Forte. Have you been introduced to Taylor Pearson yet?

**Ali Abdaal** (3:07)
I know of him through his website and stuff, but I haven't spoken to him personally.

**Chris Williamson** (3:10)
Phenomenal writer, absolutely wonderful writer. So today, we're going to be talking about how to learn and remember anything fast. This is right slap bang in your wheelhouse, I think.

**Ali Abdaal** (3:22)
Yeah, man. This is like my specialist subject. If it was a- If it was a-

**Chris Williamson** (3:27)
What was it, like Mastermind?

**Ali Abdaal** (3:30)
Oh, yeah. Yeah, Mastermind. I'm not sure if that's still on, but I used to fantasize about going on the TV show. And at the time, my specialist subject would have been the Harry Potter books. And I still think it probably would still be.

**Chris Williamson** (3:44)
You reckon?

**Ali Abdaal** (3:47)
Yeah, that's the only thing I actually know anything about. But apart from that, studying is another specialist interest.

**Chris Williamson** (3:53)
Got you. So where do we begin? People are now just about arriving back to university, perhaps. We have people who are maybe even venturing into a new career post COVID, or looking to become increasingly competitive in the job market. They want to be able to consume, retain, deploy information and learning and comprehension and all this stuff. Where do we even begin?

**Ali Abdaal** (4:17)
Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say probably the main principle that everything else hinges on is that learning is supposed to be effortful. It's supposed to be hard.
And it's sort of like the analogy I sometimes use for my students is it's like when you're going to the gym. If you're lifting weights that you can easily lift, you're not actually going to make any gains. It's just going to be a total waste of time. But it's when you start doing that progressive overload, when you start lifting weights that are at the limit of what you're able to do, that gives your muscles the stimulus for growth. And then, assuming you eat right and you sleep well, then you're going to get more hench and you're going to be able to lift more weight. And it's somewhat equivalent for learning that the harder it feels to learn something, the more likely that information is to stick. And this is very counterintuitive, right? because still to this day, despite all of the decades of research that have been done about this, that show that when learning is effortful, it's better. Despite all of that evidence, most teachers still focus on trying to make the content as convenient as possible for their students. Like very well-meaning teachers who want to sort of categorize things into nice syllabuses and create a nice presentation and give them mnemonics and essentially take all of the difficulty out of studying for the student, essentially give them this packaged up thing that they just have to learn. But in doing so, the thing that they're packaging up that the student just has to learn, it actually makes it a lot harder for them to learn because the student then is not putting in any of the effort themselves. And so they have to start finding weird ways to put effort into it. So that is probably principle number one that all of the rest of the kind of learning theory is based on.