Transform the way you learn with spatial thinking & a second brain

You can master anything quickly, but you have to stop studying and start reframing. Here’s the secret.

Introduction

In college, I had a reputation for learning new material quickly. One of my professors used to say: “I think Zac absorbs entire textbooks overnight by sticking them under his pillow.”

The ability to quickly gain a deep understanding of any topic is a skill that’s served me well. But, it doesn’t come for free.

I’ve always rejected disorganization and chaos. As information piles up, I start to look for ways to organize it — some way of bringing order and clarity out of the chaos. In college, the best tools I had available to me were mediocre at best. Over time, I’ve explored other ways of capturing information: Cornell notes, mind maps, visual note taking, knowledge networks.

Today, capturing facts, knowledge, news and advice is pretty easy. With a quick tap, you can bookmark or copy just about anything. That new bit of information is added to your ever-growing record of trivia, thereafter to be referenced on demand… but then what? Before you know it, you have thousands of browser bookmarks, a hundred open tabs, and so many scraps of information tucked away in Evernote or Notepad that it becomes unmanageable. Effectively useless, unless you can manage to find that one fact that you might have tucked away somewhere.

Instead of a learning resource it’s a dumping ground of abandoned facts and ideas.

Disorganized chaos. I can’t stand disorganization.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about keeping the chaos at bay. As I polish the latest edition of my Delivery Playbook, I find so many opportunities, potential excursions into new areas. Interesting diversions, useful bits of knowledge, techniques that should be examined more closely — but not yet. Soon. When the time is right. If those ideas don’t get lost in the chaos.

And there’s a constant battle of not getting buried under all this knowledge — both potential as-yet-unexplored knowledge, and new, freshly acquired knowledge. It takes time to organize that knowledge into something useful. Which is another problem, because time isn’t infinite, there’s pressure to Get Stuff Done. That means Learn Stuff Quick and decide what to do with it. The faster I can truly master new ideas, the more I can do.

There’s a trick to capturing knowledge quickly. To truly comprehending new ideas, locking them away, to a level that you have mastery over them.

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Learning versus studying

Very few schools teach us the difference between studying and learning. It’s unfortunate, because the vast majority of our time spent in school is poured into studying. And the way we study is, essentially, just the way everyone else studies.

We come out of school thinking that taking detailed notes, memorizing with rote activities, and highlighting the heck out of our textbooks is a good idea. If you’re lucky, you might be introduced to better ideas — like Cornell’s note taking method. It is better, but it’s not that much better.

By and large, these study methods require a huge investment of effort for a disappointing small return in knowledge gain.

Traditional note taking is laborious, distracting, and not that effective.

The problem with this kind of studying is that it creates barriers to actually comprehending what we are trying to learn.

It’s exceptionally distracting, especially if you are trying to listen to someone else and also write down detailed notes. We end up spending all of our mental capacity trying to transcribe what has been said — to make a rote copy. We don’t have any capacity left over to comprehend. The entire note-taking exercise is just a distraction.

We also aren’t thinking about the information. We don’t have the capacity to integrate it into our mind, and that means we don’t have room in our thoughts to try and figure out how this information fits into our world.

By transcribing in a linear fashion what we hear, we aren’t reframing information. We’re just trying to take it in, as it was presented to us. We create an original format bias — the assumption that the way information was presented is the right way for us to think about it, to integrate it into our own mental model. The problem is, it’s usually not the best way for us to interpret and understand a subject and retain knowledge.

Linear note taking is one of the least effective ways for our brains to interpret and connect with information. Our brains like to establish patterns, connections, mental maps. It’s impossible to build that when facing a huge wall of text.

But this is, by and large, how we were taught to learn.

What we aren’t taught is how to build mental maps, reframe new information, reason about it. We aren’t given the tools to find gaps in the knowledge. All because a huge wall of text is very hard for our brain to convert into a network of information. There is no network. It’s just a drawn out, tedious inventory of facts. Plus, all that writing is slow. This is why we call it “lower order learning.”

There is a much better way to capture, absorb, and master information.

I can show you. Here are my notes for everything I just told you about “lower order learning:”

A mental map of lower order learning: Slow, ineffective, and hard to comprehend.

The power of spatial thinking

You might be thinking, that’s a very simplified picture of what I wrote about — which is true, I’m not showing you the whole page, quite yet.

But it illustrates a point. That little sketch does encapsulate all the ideas I introduced so far. It is my mental map, my way of navigating the information. Years from now, I’ll look at it and know exactly what it means. (Below, I’ll show you the rest of my notes, which provide a lot more detail and the mental cues to truly master this topic.)

These are the limitations we’re dealing with, and what we know so far:

• Writing extensive notes is distracting.

• It’s also slow.

• We aren’t reframing or reasoning about new information.

• We aren’t building mental maps.

• We can’t see information gaps.

If traditional note taking is so bad, what’s the alternative? We need to rethink how we capture information.

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