Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0389: Exclusivity: How to apply the 80/20 rule when you are new to a learning topic

Episode Date: September 3, 2015

… What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 389. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Jonathan submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Jonathan says, I recently heard you refer to the exclusivity principle, which I would guess is also related to the Pareto principle, 80% results from 20% of actions. My question is, how can you recognize

and find these crucial 20% causes in what you're learning, especially if you're new and don't know which are important or not? So Jonathan, this is a good question. And yes, what you're referring to with the Pareto principle is exactly what I'm talking about with exclusivity. So you can take a mountain of information that you have to learn, but really 80% of what you have to know is in a specific 20% of that information.

And 80% of your results will come from 20% of your work. And so if you can focus on that 20%, that's the exclusivity that you need to work on to get the best results for the amount that you do. And that's where I always like to start with a learning project. Now that said, it is sometimes difficult, especially in a field, as you say, that you don't necessarily know a whole lot about. It's difficult to identify what are those 20% that you need most. So sometimes it's really quantifiable. Other times it takes a lot of testing and trying to figure out what's giving you the best results. But I would say that more often

it's a combination of both of those. There are certain aspects that are quantifiable, but you also have to do some testing in your field to figure out what will give you the best results and just kind of play with it a bit. So I'm going to give you two examples of this in two completely different learning fields. Let's say that you are learning a language, and I obviously use this example all the time, but for the very beginning of learning the language, what you should do is you should focus on the most frequent vocabulary because they give you immense results for what you do. You can learn about 50% of the content of almost any language with just about the top one or 200 words in that language.

So that's big wins, just a couple of hundred words that you learn and master, and you really know half of the language already. Now, frequency vocabulary is a good place to start, although a language is much more than just learning the word definitions so after you learn those top 1 to 200 words you'll be able to start figuring out how the language actually works using those words which is where the real value is then from there you can

start figuring out the idioms and the sentence structures that make up the language as another example let's say you're taking a history class and you need to figure out what information is the most important for you to learn in order to master your exams and really just know the most that you want to know about this subject. I mean, ideally, you're not just doing it for exams, but you really want to know a lot. But you can get better results by learning certain things first because they'll help you learn the other stuff more quickly. That's part of the exclusivity principle. And something that I recommend doing is using the index of your textbook, if you're using a textbook,

to determine what terms or ideas are nominally referenced most frequently in the textbook. So you can just look back there and see which things say they're on the most pages. And then you want to learn those terms first. Now, while that's a great place to start, you don't really know that those are actually the most important. You just know that they're referenced the most. But at least it gives you a good strong place to start. You have a concrete reason for starting there. And then you can start going through the book afterwards and find a more reasonable 80-20 or a more reasonable exclusive set of principles or set of facts and things like that to focus on once you've figured that out.

Thanks for the question, Jonathan, and I'd love to get an iTunes review from you for the Master of Memory podcast. For anyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.