Test Yourself

All right all right.

This technique is kind of a repeat of another one but I do want to mention it again because it is important

and there’s a few things that I want to add.

This is the idea of testing yourself.

We talked about it when we discussed passive versus active learning with that practice.

You’re never going to get anywhere that’s as simple as that.

You can watch all the soccer videos in the world.

You’re not going to be a professional soccer player.

You need to practice.

You’re not going to be the best singer in the world by watching people sing.

We learned also about deliberate practice to actually push yourself to your limits.

This idea of self testing is super important.

It’s uncomfortable.

It’s so much easier to just watch a bunch of youtube videos and feel good about yourself.

But at the end of the day you have to ask yourself when you’re learning a topic to pause every once

in a while and say what are the key ideas.

How can I summarize this a good way of doing this is when you’re reading a book every once in a while

take a pause and take notes.

What did you just learn in the last couple of chapters.

Try to quiz yourself.

Maybe you’re listening to an educational podcast instead of playing that podcast at two time speed instead.

Pause every 20 or 30 minutes and then write down a summary of what did you just learn.

Because we learned that rereading or watching videos is not the best learning strategy.

At the end of the day you need to quiz yourself.

You need to recall information and see what you did wrong.

The key here is that just going to school taking a multiple choice test and then getting a score back

doesn’t help you in order to test yourself.

You need that feedback.

So if you get something wrong in school or when learning understand why you got it wrong write down

why you got it wrong and fix that problem if you want to learn.

You have to do the uncomfortable and the uncomfortable to test yourself and fail many times and learn

from your mistakes.