How To Study So You Actually Learn #215 Corey Boutwell

Probably the most useful podcast you can listen to if you want to:

• Remember the books you read
• Teach other people what you've learnt
• Speed up your learning process
• Feel better about study 
• Get that excitement back for learning

If you found this one valuable guys please be sure to share it with someone who will benefit from the listen! 

Big Love, 

Corey 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:29

It is pure human desire that we love and get fascinated by human behavior, and everyone loves learning about themselves.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Stop everybody. In this video, I'm going to teach you how to study like an absolute boss. If you don't know me, my name is Corey Boutwell. I'm the founder of the men's personal growth community. Set the standard community. You can follow on Instagram and, if you like this video, please check us a follow.

Speaker 1: 0:57

So, essentially, one of the reasons that I wanted to create this is after creating hundreds of episodes of podcasts and countless modules and education through reading really difficult, challenging books and studying those books and learning how to conceptualize concepts and then bring them and showcase them to people. So then, not only can you understand it, but other people can understand this as well. I remember when I first started studying at uni, I was studying and learning and I did aviation before I studied business and during aviation I remember I was studying the first lecture. The uni lecturer was all maths is on aerodynamics, and he wrote up this equation and then he derived the entire equation of what it meant and then brought it back into what the actual equation was, and I remember looking at the equation at the very end of the the lecture I turned to my friends and I said what's an equation? And he just looked at me and went he's like who would know what an equation was? He's like man, you know over your head. Anyway, I failed a whole bunch of subjects and I wasn't any good at aviation, but there was a few subjects that I passed and I started to hack to learn how to study.

Speaker 1: 2:03

When I transferred to business, I graduated with honours. Now the thing was and I like top of my class and the thing the thing was is when I finished, I had this yearning to keep on studying. I was like man, I need to keep on learning and consuming. And over a period of time when I started set the standard community, we worked with over 250 men and we've been active for it's getting close to three years now. So we're getting 250 men plus. We run retreats all around Australia. Our community is international and people are coming and joining us and learning. We have crazy, like crazy testimonials and results. Like people are becoming millionaires, people are having relationships that they never thought possible, they're finding their dream partner, they're becoming healthy and fit and they're finding some serious fulfillment. And some of these people have some pretty intense problems or distractions, and you know procrastination, and they're just overcoming this and they're finding a group of people that they actually love.

Speaker 1: 2:52

And what that all stems from and is coming from is the education and the study that I have learned, that I pass on to my coaches and my friends, and you know, being able to get outside your comfort zone because you've done the research and a whole thing of personal growth, which is so important, is just self study. It's studying yourself. Hence why Tony Robbins is so powerful for what he does and create so much impact. One main reason is because he helps people to study themselves and learn about themselves. It is pure human desire that we love and get fascinated by human behavior, and everyone loves learning about themselves. And the more we know about ourselves whether it's painful or whether it's exciting the more powerful that we become, which is why the work that we do is extremely powerful.

Speaker 1: 3:31

So I'm going to teach you guys in this video what I do to study, so that you can now use it to turn yourself into the best version of yourself. So I'm going to start off with books, because what I study firstly is books. I like to find one challenging book at a time, and if you haven't got the discipline to this, I've got a masterclass summer around here you can get and it'll teach you the discipline to learn how to stick to something that is challenging. So I've just finished reading this book and you won't be able to see in this. Maybe if it zooms up you might be able to see a little bit in here, but there's a lot of pages that have been underlined and noted. Now I'm going to run you through essentially what I do in this book to study them, to make sure that I can understand the concepts and then speak them and teach them and actually remember them, because one problem that we have commonly is not being able to remember anything Like.

Speaker 1: 4:19

A lot of people come to me like man, I hate a school, school sucked, like I didn't have a positive experience, and now, when it comes to studying or reading, I'm like, oh, and I hate it. For me, I had that exact same experience as I hated it until I loved it. When I overcome and use a discipline, understand that, oh, I've got this reward now. Now it doesn't take any discipline. It's not discipline for me to read this book and finish it because I enjoy it. It's not something. I have to be disciplined with. It's just a habit now, because I love it and I want to do it and I love becoming more like, more smart and more intellectual.

Speaker 1: 4:48

So let's start it off. I just wrote down a bunch of lists here and I'm running over these with you. So if I find something extremely important in a book that I'm reading, I put a hashtag in the top right hand corner, just, for example, that was a green one. You won't be able to see it. I'll grab this one here so you can see here I have a hashtag written in the top corner of the page. This means first priority. I want to revisit this page as it is extremely important. There is something there and every now and then I'll write like a comment or someone's name or something which is who I think that it relates to, and this helps me sort of start to remember it. Right, this is what I'm doing. So I'll read something really important. Wow, I put a hashtag in the page in the top corner when I find a sentence. I've got all these underlined sentences here, but when I find something that is really powerful, I have my notebook and I rewrite the sentence in my notebook so that I can remember it in my brain. I'm like this line here is extremely important. I want to remember this. I'm going to write it down, and the trick is is I try to write it down in my own words. And this is the start of the process of memorizing it, and it's also, once it's written to the book, that is going to be my first preference when I type up all of my notes. So that's how I study it.

Speaker 1: 6:00

The second thing that I do is I underline. I mean, the third thing that I do is I underline. As you can see, there's underlines of different colors in this book. You should be able to see here that there's underlines of different colors. Now, red is something that is really impactful and usually something like wow, this is something that's telling about me. This is first priority. It's blowing my mind and most of the times it's either like a neutral or it's maybe some sort of negative statement, like it's like you know. You know, this is this fight, figuring out the darker side of yourself. This is literally one of the lines in here. It's like whoa, this is crazy. I need to understand this to make myself better. That is the vibe that I have when I write underlining red.

Speaker 1: 6:37

When I underline in blue, that means this is just a high quality line or quote or whatever it may be. When I underline and the whole point of underlining is, it's like okay, this is another process for me wanting to start to memorize this. However, it's not powerful enough for me to write it down. Is that the memorizing thing? I want to come back to this and do it after, because otherwise it's just going to take me way too long to finish this book. The third one is green. So I like to highlight things in a green, in a green color, and the green for me represents is something positive that we can see here in this one and on that line. You can't see somewhere in there, but somewhere it says like people feel good about themselves for said reason and I've done it in our Michael this is something positive to know right, which is really cool. So underlining is extremely important and it has these different, you know, modalities which for me, help memorize it in my brain. So when I look at this, I go, oh, this is cool. I also write out if there's any studies like this one here has a study in the book.

Speaker 1: 7:38

I rewrite the author or the books. In my notes, like these are some other books or other authors that I need to check out and I'll always Google them first. Another tip that I do is I sit here with Siri on my computer or any type of word speaking device, and what I do is, whenever I have a word that I don't understand, I say, hey, siri, what does piety mean? And I say, like, what does that word mean? And then Siri is like it means this. And every now and then I write down a different definition of that word because I want to increase my vocabulary, and I write down the definitions of the word and I think about it and sometimes, you know, I won't remember it straight away. You might have to use it in a sentence or remember it, but when someone uses it in a sentence and triggers your brain, you're like, wow, I learned that word in a book. Do I remember it now? Don't I need to Google it again? Don't I need to Google it again. Other times you're like, wow, I can use this and use it in a sentence and you're like this feels really good, but it's not of the purpose to use it in a sentence. The purpose is to be able to understand it, for when you're reading, you can really grasp the ideas of something.

Speaker 1: 8:34

The next thing that I do is I also put vertical lines next to the paragraph. I just woop next to a paragraph. As you can see there are some vertical lines in this book, those the vertical line stands for. Reread this, because you might want to write it down later. Reread it and I can put it in red, which is a little bit more of a priority, or in blue, which is a little bit less a priority, and then in green, when it's something positive. So it's the same thing, but I'm like this is like to reread, revisit. I might want to write this down, I might want to type it up later, but all the notes that I write and type up later on are the ones that I've written down in my book and are underlined. Definitely and it's a maybe for the ones on the side of my I just want to reread this. I might just need to read it in order to really allow it to sink in and land and memorize it.

Speaker 1: 9:22

The next one that I have is I actually have comments, as you can see on here. I've got wow comments on this side and this side of the book and I put down these wow comments like arrows and a wow meaning like this thing blew my brain. This is I want to share this with someone. I had a wow moment reading this. So you because you might reread sentences sometimes and you're like, wow, I didn't really have a wow moment rereading that, but why did I have that wow moment then?

Speaker 1: 9:47

And most of the time for me, that is like I want to use this somewhere outside of book, maybe in my coaching, in my personal life, like where do I actually want to use this wow moment, which I think is really powerful? I also write down people's names and clients' names if they pop up, if I'm thinking about someone and that helps me conceptualize it. I also sometimes write how I felt about it. I'm like sad, like angry, like powerful, and then sometimes I write the intention for how I want to use it. I'm like, oh, I actually want to like share this on social media. So, like I wrote here on this one, I've written social media on the top right hand side. That is something that I actually want to share on my social media because I believe it is so powerful. So write down my intention.

Speaker 1: 10:27

And then what I also do is, if I have a hashtag I'll see if I find it somewhere in here like this, I have a hashtag in the corner and then I put arrows. Any arrows that I put and like into a paragraph may means this is critical and I must reuse this as a reference. Like that, there is gonna be a reference to something else that I'm either creating or that I'm using in general. I wanna reuse that For some times. It's like and you might have a conversation with it about someone If you're like a PT or something, it's like I wanna teach someone this. Or if you're leading a team, it's like oh, I wanna teach my team this. So that's what the arrows mean. It's like this here is I'm using this as a reference.

Speaker 1: 11:05

And then when you finish your book, essentially what you go through is you go through all your notes on your notepad. You go through all the underlines of the book and you type out everything so you can keep it. You're gonna just re-type everything. You don't have to type it out in terms of word for word, for word. You just write it in your words so it doesn't take up as much time, as long as you can conceptualize the topics and the ideas and what you do is to make sure that you can do it is use the appropriate headings and lots of dot points. So it's like certain heading, idea dot points, idea, dot points, idea dot points just so that you have an idea about it.

Speaker 1: 11:38

Sometimes, to take it to the next level, as a coach, that I do I create presentations and I'll create diagrams out of it. So if you wanna really memorize this, it's create a presentation online and deliver it to people, actually deliver the ideas and teach them. So when people ask you questions, you have to answer back or you can go into chat, gpt and you can plug in. I just read this book. Can you please question me on it to test my knowledge? I don't really do that too much. I prefer to create a presentation because it's what I do for a job and that enforces you to consolidate everything that you've learned. Like, I spent like essentially four weeks reading this book and it's gonna take those four weeks of reading and conceptualize it in like one hour, cause people don't wanna listen to something, for you know longer than an hour most of the time. Teaching it also helps your memory greatly, like that's the best way to learn is to teach. And if you wanna learn how to teach and create a presentation I've got that in the set the standard community you have to join that. You have to join that community for wanna learn how to do that one. But for now, I hope you guys took something.

Speaker 1: 12:35

This is how I study, this is how I take notes. This is how I understand concepts and become extremely smart and intelligent. I believe that I have done that through hard work. It wasn't like a hundred percent natural thing to me. It was repetition, repetition, repetition. That's how I've learned and when I understand these challenging concepts, it just feels like my brain is becoming larger. I'm being able to think more deeply, I can. When someone having a conversation with someone, I think about their ideas and I can see them in so many different ways and it just brings this confidence in this and this power to my presence, which I find is extremely powerful. And then when I'm speaking in front of people or I'm teaching people are asking me questions, I can bam, bam, bam like answer them in a really awesome way.

Speaker 1: 13:15

So if you liked this video, please give us a follow or subscribe. If you liked listening to this, please give us a podcast, a follow and a review. I would absolutely love that, and if you're interested in joining set the standard community, you can book in a call with me below or check out set the standard community on Instagram, which is just set the standard community, or you can send me a DM Corey Boutwell, on Instagram as well. Big love everyone. Thank you so much. If you wanna learn how to do the presentation, come and join set the standard community for podcast listeners only. We do a little cheeky offer for you guys, so send me a DM on Instagram and we can help you out there. So big love everyone. See you in the next one.