how watching your favorite TV series can be a learning opportunity

what is this about?

A short post/blog on how you can learn better. For the past year, I have been reading research about how to learn better and running those experiments on myself and in my videos. This post will share a small tidbit around that. Go through the subheadings and read whatever you feel like.

the problem with schools and colleges

The reason why most students fail at jobs or interviews is that they haven't applied anything they have learned in the real world. So the moment they have to transfer their learning to the application they fail. The educational institutions teach the basics well (debatable) but fail on how to apply it to real-world scenarios.

do you read a book and then forget everything about it after some time?

It used to happen with me a lot. I would read a book on say Marketing, something which is not related to my day to day job, and then after a few months, I would forget everything about it. However, recently I have started applying the principles of transfer learning on real-life skills and it has worked amazingly well, thus, warranting this blog.

so how do transfer learning work?

Some call it transfer learning, some call it calibration, some call it directness. From all the research and books I have gone through this is the most efficient way of learning and (most importantly) remembering something which you read. The idea is that when you learn something you apply it in real-world scenarios. As simple as that. Remember when we learned about evaporation and condensation? The reason we never forgot that is because it had a day to day application in life. Similarly, if you're learning programming or any job-related skill, the best way to remember what you learned is to apply it. Learning programming, write programs, a lot. Designing then design a lot, don't look for opportunities just copy existing stuff or redesign existing apps.

but how can you apply this with life skills or abstract skills? like negotiation, psychology, or cognitive science?

These are things I got interested in which have no use in my day to day life. I don't negotiate billion-dollar deals or run experiments on people to understand their psychology or do research on how the brain works. However, these fields interest me a lot and I want to remember stuff.

So, here's what I started doing: Any Youtube video, or Netflix series I watch I try to label the stuff I have learned. I found so many examples of accelerated learning in Cobra Kai, or tons of examples of negotiation skills in almost every other series: preferably Suits (okay, I am a die-hard fan so I keep watching videos on youtube). I see a tweet where people are getting angry, I know it's because of X bias which I learned in psychology. Just by observing the stuff happening around me, and labeling them with the acquired knowledge, I can remember much more. Otherwise, I always miss out on that "term" and then feel stupid about knowing but not remembering it correctly.

bye bye

Hopefully, I'll write more and more about my explorations with cognitive science. Just by actively using a few of these tools you can be so much better at learning and mastering skills. If you liked this blog/post, please show it up in whatever way you can. Feedback helps! Ooh! Another topic about turbolearning(TM) will come out soon.