Hello Reader,

It's me, Al Khan.

If you want to make the BEST use of all your newfound motivation this year, this email is for you.

Random question:

Why in the world do all motivation only appear in January, and 2 days before the exam?

Pretty bizarre, and makes you wanna sigh when you realize it. In psychology, there is something called the "fresh start effect" where it's most likely to have high motivation during fresh beginnings — start of year, month, or week.

I find this to be true even at the daily level. I have really high motivation when I wake up early, and when I wake up at 10am, I feel like a sore loser who messed up his entire day already.

But more importantly, these moments of high motivation is the BEST time to set up systems and routines that work for you.

The purpose of motivation is to help us do hard things a few times.

And it's just like winning the lottery — if you spend everything upfront 100% and there's nothing left, well, you're still a broke individual by the end of it.

You know what smart investors would do if they won the lottery? They'd put them all in assets that work for them.

Likewise, you should invest your motivation in assets that work for you.

Your priority for this new year should NOT be to use up all your motivation to study 12 hours per day and then end up getting burnt out 7 days later...

Instead, you should prioritize 3 things:

1. Designing your study workspace — make it as boring as possible, to the point that studying is the ONLY option to do there
2. Learning how to learn — if you feel like you haven't studied properly your whole life, you can't really afford to just use your motivation taking endless amounts of notes that takes TONS of your time but give you nothing in return. You can start with the book "Make it Stick", Chapter 8 for a detailed summary.
3. Creating an "Autodidact Curriculum" — a clear goal with a clear path creates an inherent source of motivation for you. What you want to do is create a breakdown of ALL materials you need to self-study. There are only two things you need to remember: 1) you do this for your fundamental subjects, and 2) you list down textbook chapters.

For #2, here's a quick note...

Don't just learn to do active recall, learn how to take LEANER notes.

If you're serious about reducing your study time for lectures, you better have the mindset of "30% notes, 70% understanding" instead of taking "100% complete, detailed notes but 0% understanding." [1]

The latter is a WASTE of time. What do you think is the purpose of your attendance, anyway?

The act of compressing and connecting information into a single personal representation (or "chunk representation") is crucial for encoding the information into memory. Prior knowledge is also a huge factor here!

That's it. This will set up 80% of the groundwork for consistent studying, learning new things quickly, and remembering what you learn.

You'll learn the majority with experience, but of course, I'll send more emails like this in the future if you liked it :)

Anyways, happy new year! 🎉

As for me, I was extremely busy updating the SSS course last month, and the great news is that it's almost done! Here's a preview:

It's gonna be the best one ever, because it's even shorter and more focused on implementation.

Instead of endless theory that I had in the previous versions, I designed it in a way that gives you an entire gameplan even after finishing Module 1.

I'll skip on the details for now because I have to go to our family gathering this 1PM...(and it's 12:46PM as I'm writing this lol)

Hope you enjoyed the holidays!

To smarter studying,
Al Khan

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[1] You obviously can't quantify that, but it's still a great mindset to have when taking notes so you don't feel like you're "getting behind" or you "won't remember if you don't take it down"