How To Learn So Fast It’s Almost Unfair

I grew up a poor kid in Mumbai who struggled in school, who struggled with learning. Today, I'm an MIT grad, former CEO, and board advisor to billion-dollar companies, and it's not because I'm smarter or read more, but because I learn how to learn faster than everyone around me. And here's the truth. Intelligence is a commodity in the world of AI today. Any skill advantage you have is temporary. The only real edge is how you learn and how fast you can stay ahead. So in this video, I'm not going to give you any hacks. I'll share with you how our brains actually work and show you a learning system that puts you in the top 1% even if you've always felt like a slow learner. But first, you need to understand why 99% of people fail at learning. Your brain weighs only 3 pounds, but it burns up to 20% of your body's total fuel. One of his hungryest part is your prefrontal cortex. This is the CEO function of your brain. Every new theory, every new idea you cram into that region, spikes up the demand for glucose and oxygen. And that's metabolically very expensive. This region is your tiny cognitive bowl. 99% of the learners try to learn by jamming and cramming. Now, if you dump a gallon of theory into a 4 ounce bowl, how much do you think it will retain? Well, exactly 4 ounces of it, right? And it's a trap that has an almost 100% failure rate. Today's AI can run millions of processes in peril. But our human brain cannot do that. We're built for serial learning, serial processing, one transfer at a time. So give yourself and your brain a break. Now, the next thing you have to understand if you want to learn like the top 1% is that your brain is lying to you. Carnegie Mellon University tested an adaptive learning system for its students. The material would get increasingly difficult based on the student's prior success. Now, of course, students at CMU totally hated it. But they ended up learning twice as much as those who took the standard test. And that's the point we miss sometimes. We feel friction and we assume failure. Neuroscience calls it the generation effect. The harder you work to generate the answer, the deeper it's wired in your brain. 99% of us use AI as a crutch, not as a coach. Your brain doesn't hate struggle. It hongers for it. The real question is, how do you feed it? Well, for that, we have to build a better learning system. And I call it the 3C protocol, compress, compile, and consolidate. Each step accelerate to your learning machine. And when you fire all three of them, you will break out of the orbit of the ordinary. So let's dive into the first C, compress. The best way to learn that is from one of the best chess players. If you watch Magnus Carlson sitting down at the chessboard, he is not thinking about any specific move. What's happening in his brain is really fascinating. Cognitive studies on chess grandmasters estimate that they can internalize 50,000 or even 100,000 patterns on the chessboard. But they're not memorizing. They compress what they have learned into patterns that their brain can actually handle. Now, why do they have to do that? Because recent research shows that our brain can only juggle about four independent ideas at a time. Any more than that, and it drops the ball. So the first C is compress, and it's not about memorizing more. It is about reducing many ideas into fewer, stronger, chunks and patterns that your brain can carry. So how do you actually compress? The first step is selection. Here's an example. When I want to learn from a book, I first compress. I asked, what's the 20% of the book that I must read? That will give me 80% of the benefit. Most books are just about one single idea. So I read only selective chapters. Sometimes I would read the more than once until it sinks in. That is selection. Always pick the 20% that matters. Then comes association. A paper in science magazine showed that you can't learn something new until you connect it to something you already know. That's the secret behind mastering how you learn. You have to ask, where have I seen this idea before? How does it connect to something I already know? This is why Magnus Carlson wins, right? Because he connects a new move to an old pattern. He sees the harmony. Then comes chunking. This is a third step. You take these ideas and compress them into a simple model. It could be anything. A drawing, a short summary. A metaphor you can remember, a song in your head. 99% of us get overloaded. But the top 1% compress before they consume. But the next scene is about how you cut down the tree. Compile. A lot of you might have watched a movie called Rain Man. And it was actually based on a real person. His name was Kim Peak. Kim grew up in the Midwest. He was a savant, kind of like walking talking Google. He could reportedly recall every word on any of the 12,000 books he had read. And he could also add events tied to that day who tell you exactly what happened that day. And his unique abilities were linked to his brain's unusual design. His brain scans found that the bridge between his brain's hemispheres was missing completely But here's the part that broke my heart. That uniqueness also made his daily life very difficult to navigate. His father would have to take care of his basic needs that you and I take for granted. He lived with his father until he passed away at 58. Never got married. Kim had these incredible gifts. But he had difficulty mastering simple chores and social cues. It tells you that memory alone is not mastery. You can store the entire world and still struggle to live in it. That's Kim's tragedy. And this is the 99% trap. We focus on the goal of hoarding information and mistake consumption for learning. And you need three things to do that. The timer, the test, and the tools. The timer is about managing your learning cadence. This is called the Altradian Cycle. Your brain operates in 90 minutes cycles. Then it needs to rest. So you get about 90 minutes of peak focus and then your brain must rest for at least about 20 minutes. So here's something actionable. Look at your weekly calendar. Do you have one or two blocks of deep work? If yes, then use this timer. 90 minutes of deep work plus 20 minutes of rest. Have one or two such blocks per week and protect them ruthlessly. This is how you're going to learn fast. Second, the test. Most people learn learn learn for six weeks, for six months. And then there's a big test and a big presentation at the end. This is the giant waste of time. This is one of the biggest mistakes we make in learning. You know, software engineers talk about agile development all day long. Everything is a two week sprint. In fact, in today's AI companies, everything is a single day sprint. So why not apply the same concept to learning? Build a different loop, learn test, learn test, learn test. So pick a concept, learn it, and then test, then pick another concept. And how do you test? That's where the tools come into play. There are three that are my favorite. Two number one, slow burn. If you're learning something physical, like playing a guitar, do it at an excruciatingly slow pace and do it a lot of times. But don't turn off your brain because slow is boring. Focus on every micro move. The slower you play, the faster you learn. Two number two, immersion. Every musician will tell you this. No matter how you practice and rehearse with the band, the moment you start playing on stage, everything goes haywire. So you must test in the arena. Practicing a speech in front of a mirror is a good start. But practicing it in front of real people, that's even better. In the third tool, teach to learn. Now this is the boss tool. I do this all the time. Once I learn something, I teach it to someone. Sometimes I even lecture the wall. As if I'm giving a TED talk, because I'm learning, I'm internalizing, I'm connecting, I'm reframing, and I would do it a few times and try different angles. Until I feel, I have learned it well. We compress the map, we compile the work, now comes the final scene. You have to consolidate it to retain what you've just learned forever. If time was money and you wanted to invest it in learning, then relying on stickies and flashcards will give you short-term gains, but terrible long-term returns. And the most important insight is this. Learning is a two-stage process. Stage one is focus. You're sending the request to your brain to rewire. But stage two is even more important. Rest. This is where the actual consolidation happens. So you've got to leave some room for it. You have to manage your rest as much as you manage your work. Both at the micro and macro level. So think about the learning cycle in terms of work, rest work, rest work, rest. First, on the micro level, inside your 90 minute block, you have to think about taking frequent 10-20 second breaks. Research shows that after some heavy learning, if you pause for just 10 seconds, your brain replays the information you just learned at 10-20 times the speed. And it might fire that sequence 20 times over. So you're literally getting 23 reps in your brain, just by taking a break. And on the macro level, we're talking about the old trading cycle of 90 minutes of work and 20 minutes of rest again. And what you do in those 20 minutes is also important. I, for one, do NSDR, which is non-sleep-deep-rest. In Sanskrit is called Yoganendra, which literally means the rest that helps you connect. So what do you have to do during that 20-minute NSDR period? Absolutely nothing. For instance, I just lie down or sit. Close my eyes for 15 minutes, 20 minutes and do nothing. And sometimes I would go for a leisurely walk if I can. But the point is not to distract yourself and do nothing. And the third most macro thing is a good night's sleep. There is a lot of research that suggests that when we're sleeping, our brain replaced the entire thing we learned in reverse. So these three reps are super important. You know, in this post-industrial technological age, we've forgotten what farmers have always intuitively known. You can't keep plowing the field every day of the year. The soil, the ground, it must rest to regain, it's fertility. And that's the most important lesson. I struggled with learning when I was growing up. I failed every single course in college. Couldn't focus, couldn't retain anything. But these techniques, they changed my life. And they might work for you too. Remember three things. First, stop racing other people. There will always be someone who learns faster. So what? There is someone faster than them. That loop never ends. Your only competition is you from yesterday. Second, get out of your head. You cannot be the performer and the critic at the same time. While you're learning, be the performer. Not the critic. And finally, give yourself time. Learning is like an ocean. It has its rhythm. It abs, it flows, honor that cycle. With enough time, there's nothing you can't learn. And nothing you can't become. If you like this video, please subscribe. Thank you, and I love you.