How to Study More in 1 Month Than Most People Do in 12 Months

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can study more in one month than most people do in an entire year. I'm going to do this by teaching you a unique strategy that helped me graduate at the top of my class for my mast's program while studying less than 10% of the time compared to my peers. I call it the displacement strategy.

And in this video, I'll teach you what the strategy is, followed by a four-step framework on how you can actually use this strategy to achieve 12 months of work in just 30 days. So, what is the displacement strategy? Well, there are two ways that you can try to achieve your goals.

One is using the distance strategy, which is much more common. And the other is the displacement strategy, which is much less common, but much more effective and efficient and less stressful and just better in every way. So, let's say that this person here is yourself, and you're trying to reach this goal, which is a star.

There's going to be a path between where you are now to you achieving this goal. And so let's say that uh just for the sake of this analogy, let's just say that this is 10,000 steps for you to go from where you are to achieving your goals. But just because someone takes 10,000 steps does not mean that they are equally closer to their goal.

For example, someone could take 10,000 steps, but their path could look like this. And so actually they have not really progressed from where they started at all. And so what we can say here is that both people have traveled the same distance, which is the same number of steps.

However, the first person had much more displacement as in where they ended up compared to where they started. Whereas this first person had very little displacement. And so to be an efficient person achieving their goals in a shorter period of time, you want to have the maximum possible displacement with the minimum possible distance.

Aka, you want to make the most amount of progress with the least amount of work and time. Now that statement might seem obvious to you, but most people never think about displacement and they purely measure distance, especially when it comes to something like learning. Here's what I mean when I say people are measuring their distance for studying and learning.

Some common examples are measuring how effective your studying is, how efficient you are, how close you are to achieving your learning goal based on the amount of content you've covered or the amount of notes that you've written or the number of practice questions that you've completed. Well, a common one, how much time you have spent on studying. Even among really advanced learners, I'll have uh doctors training for their specialization exams trying to follow this 1,000 hour rule.

I'm going to study a,000 hours before my exam because if I hit this magic number, I'm going to pass. And so these are actually all very useless measures of progress because what you get done during that time completely depends on your methods and your processes and all these other strategies. This is something that I wish I knew when I was trying to enter into medical school.

When I was 17, 18, studying 15, 20 hours a day. And all I thought about was how can I study more? In order for me to reach my goal of entering into medical school, I just need to study as much as possible.

If I'm not doing well, it must be because I'm not studying enough. And so, I just study more and more and more and more. And I left that year feeling extremely burnt out, constantly stressed, constantly anxious, working as much as possible and being the busiest I've ever been, but somehow despite that, feeling the least in control of what the result was going to be.

And so if you're feeling that way or you felt that way and your response is just to keep measuring distance to see whether you're on track to achieving your goal or not, then uh you need to use the displacement strategy. So what does it look like instead to measure these things using displacement? Well, measures of displacement tend to be a lot more specific to the goal.

They're actual markers of if you were to achieve these metrics, then you are on your way to achieving your goal. So for something like learning a common one would be retention or mastery as in how deep your understanding is, how complex of a problem can you solve using what you've learned. And when it comes to learning, you actually have to test yourself to figure this out.

You have to actually test your retention and how deep your understanding is to see where the gaps are and how close you are to your goal. So when you measure yourself based on displacement instead of based on distance, it allows you to make much more meaningful and strategic changes. The point of the distance, the point of studying content and writing notes and doing practice questions and spending time is to achieve the retention and the mastery.

This is the standard by which you need to assess the effectiveness of what you're doing. There's no point measuring all this distance stuff and then thinking that it's not good enough. So, just doing more of this without actually realizing if it's even helping with your retention or your mastery.

And the powerful thing about this strategy is that it's not hard to do. It doesn't require training. All of you are smart enough that once you understand this concept and you just aware of the fact, hey, I should measure displacement more.

You will already be able to make changes that are more productive. Just yesterday, I was having a call with one of my students and she was talking about how she was running out of time to do all of her her her practice test and testing strategies while she was studying during medical school. So I asked her, okay, so of the things that you're doing, which ones do you think are contributing to your retention and your mastery the most and which ones do you think are not?

And just by asking her that question, she was able to point out a strategy that she was using and had been using for months, which she realized is not serving her anymore. The human brain is great at fixing the problems we can see. And if you've been trying to fix a problem to do with your time or your efficiency or your workload and you can't seem to fix it, it could be that the problem is that you're just not looking at the right place.

And I highly recommend that one of the first places that you look towards is down into the description because I have a free newsletter where I distill through all of these insights and concepts that I think will help you to look at the right types of problems as well as give you strategies on how to fix those common issues. It's a free newsletter. I write them.

It takes about 3 to five minutes to read, but it's the type of stuff that if I had had someone explain to me would have saved me weeks or months or years of trial and error. So, if you found this video interesting so far and you want more tips on how you can achieve more displacement and less distance, then check out the newsletter. The link is in the description below.

Now, here is my four-step framework on how you can actually get 12 months worth of displacement in just one month's worth of distance. This is a four-step framework that I have refined over 11 years of experience starting from 2011 when I was trying to enter into medical school through to 2022 where I aced my masters. Now, the first thing that you want to do is make the win criteria very clear.

This means making your goal very clear and explicit and actually breaking it down into what you need to achieve to achieve this. So, if your goal is to get a really good grade in an exam, don't just say, "Okay, my goal is a 90% for this exam. " What do you need to get 90% in that exam?

What topics and what concepts covered at what level of depth? What are the things that you can get away with just trying to memorize? And what are the things that you need to use in a more complex way?

You don't want to be able to enter into an exam having no idea how well you're going to do and then the only piece of feedback you get is whether you succeeded or failed. You want the ability to test yourself on your progress every week or every two weeks to see where the gaps are and actually make targeted changes to your strategy. So, how did I achieve this?

So, before the first day even started, I went through and read all of the learning objectives, all of the lecture objectives, all of the assessment criteria, all the marking rubrics. I went into day one having a very clear understanding about what it would take to succeed, which enabled me to check myself before I wrecked myself. Do people still say that these days?

Anyway, once you've made the win criteria very clear, the second step is to scout the type of challenges. Back when I was trying to enter into medical school, I was very reactive to any problems or issues. So, I set a test and I realized I didn't do very well.

And then I'll be very reactive to trying to figure out what went wrong there. And then I'd realize, oh, okay, I screwed up here and there was this challenge that I was trying to overcome that I only realized because I did badly. And looking back on it, I made a lot of mistakes on how I handled my workload, how I tried to distribute my studying, how I tried to think about preparing for exams because I just wasn't proactively aware about what types of challenges I was going to face.

And there are two types of challenges that I think is worthwhile to actively scout for like at the very very beginning of the year or the beginning of your program. The first is content type challenges. So content challenges are looking deliberately for concepts that you're less familiar with the topics or the concepts that you feel like you're going to struggle with the most.

Knowing this is useful because it means that you probably need to spend a little bit more time on those areas. you need to tackle that a little bit more intensively than you might need to for a different subject. You might need to check yourself more frequently for those types of concepts.

And if you're knowledgeable about different learning strategies, you might use different learning strategies to tackle those more complex concepts. The second type of challenge is to think about timing challenges. This means actually looking at your personal schedule and actually trying to figure out how you're going to manage on a daily basis to overcome your content challenges.

Take the time to properly plan that out. Don't make yourself get to a situation where you didn't plan it out. Something happened and now you're having to react and micromanage and make it work.

That's going to waste time. It's going to create stress and anxiety. It's going to destabilize you during that week and then you're going to have to catch up on it later.

All of those things make you have more distance without really getting you any closer to your goal. So, me using the displacement strategy was very different. and how I handled my workload.

I used to just have time blocks of like two hours to study this paper, then two hours to study this paper and just repeating that every single day. But for my masters, it was very targeted. It was I'm spending more time for this paper where I feel less confident and there's more density and I'm splitting that across these different things.

And I could see that the plan that I had created was tailored for my specific challenges, my specific restrictions, and for my specific goal, which was to be the best. The third step of the framework is to plot your landmarks. Your landmarks are basically like displacement milestones.

So if you're starting off here at the very very beginning and you're trying to reach your goal at the end, there are certain points where you can use as like checkpoints of progress. So, I used to think about these landmarks and milestones as just my next exam or my next assignment. So, I'd say, "Okay, I've got six weeks to study this thing.

" And I'd think, "How can I fit it in within six weeks? " And that's good to know, but again, it doesn't actually give you information between now and those 6 weeks. It's really hard to tell whether you're on track.

And I wanted a way to see how on track I was on a weekly or fortnightly basis. So instead what I did is I looked through the topic and I tried to find where there are key changes and concepts or topics like okay we're spending the first one and a half weeks learning about this and then we're shifting to another topic at this time. So I need to be able to check my understanding after the first one and a half weeks to make sure that this topic has been well covered.

So on top of the university's own schedule I had my own schedule layered on top of it of the test that I made for myself and when I was going to start assignments. So I'd start assignments weeks earlier than everyone else. I would have meetings with the lecturers after the first two weeks where I present to them a model or a framework of what I've learned to be able to check my understanding in advance.

And that's not required. I didn't need to do that, but I chose to do that because it allows me to operate on my timeline. So in step three where you're plotting your landmarks you're looking proactively for areas where you can test yourself where you can check your knowledge anytime the challenges uh are changing moving from one topic to another topic not because anyone else requires it of you not because you need to test yourself but because you know that by testing yourself and getting that feedback data you are in a position where you can make faster changes and progress towards your goal more quickly.

And once you do that, you just move on to step four, which is to actually create the strategy. How are you going to overcome the challenges and then hit your landmarks and therefore achieve the win criteria as quickly as possible? And so while before my kind of only strategy was how do I study more tomorrow than I did today, my new strategy was saying how can I make sure that every hour I spend on trying to progress towards my goal is actually creating displacement and not just distance.

How can I make sure that every minute I'm spending helps me to overcome my challenges and then achieve my landmarks and milestones. And obviously the strategy you actually end up creating depends on your goal and depends on your challenges. It's going to be different for everyone.

And part of creating a good strategy is going to be about eliminating some of the assumptions and traditions of learning that you might be used to. For example, I was really used to studying a certain way through high school and early university. if I chose to study for my masters in that exact same way just because that's what I'm comfortable with and that's how I just assume studying is meant to look like and that's the schedule I need to follow then I wouldn't have been able to do so well in such a short period of time while also working double full-time and so when you create the strategy you have to start from a blank slate start from the ground up one of the strategies that I had was that for one of the papers I decided to study the entire paper in just the first week Now, that as an intuitive concept of doing doesn't seem like something that many people would consider, but after going through the process of realizing what it takes to win for that paper, what types of challenges I expect and where the landmarks are, I realized there's no reason why I couldn't achieve that.

I had access to the textbook. I had the resources. I knew that I could check myself and test myself.

And I knew that I could start that assignment earlier. And so, when I plotted it on a timeline, it seemed to work. And later in the year when my classmates asked me what my approach was, they never even considered tackling the paper that way.

And that's because their win criteria was just do well. Their mechanism was just write more notes, spend more time studying. They responded to challenges very reactively.

They didn't understand how to check themselves earlier on. And so naturally, they were forced onto a distance strategy. And this strategy of trying to maximize displacement instead of distance is a strategy and a principle that I think about all the time.

I've used this in many aspects of my life, including business strategy. I even use it for YouTube. Any situation where you want to make more progress towards your goals in a shorter period of time than it would normally take you.

Now, if you're trying to create your strategy of how to study 12 months worth in one month, you may also want to know more about different types of learning strategies to help overcome some of those challenges. And if that is the case, then you might be interested in this other video here. Maybe here.

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