Stop Studying, Start Learning w/ Justin Sung | Ep 447

**Justin Sung** (0:00)
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. It's 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 Futur.
In the 70s, this dude basically said, hey, I think we all have a unique style of learning. And 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 percent 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 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.

**Chris Do** (2:24)
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 Watched YouTube Master Classes. Justin, welcome to the show.

**Justin Sung** (2:52)
Thanks for having me, Chris. Thanks for the intro.

**Chris Do** (2:55)
I actually got to meet you at the 1 billion follower summit as a face-to-face. And what struck me, first of all, is your fan following.
And our friend Dave is 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?

**Justin Sung** (3:19)
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. 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 taking 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. 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.